There is a political analyst I listen to and he mentioned that before the war in Ukraine and anyone could travel to Russia before the sanctions, he mentioned that Russians told him in hush hush manner that they secretly feared the Chinese more than the West. Siberia is still a contentious issue between the two countries.

I wasn’t ready for this level of quantum level analysis of Jurassic Park.

I’M JUST HERE FOR THE DINOSAURS!!

According to the latest quarterly earnings, there has been increase in user engagement. However, I also read somewhere that 15% of engagements are from bots. My suspicion is that, in spite of the tiny minuscule amount of fake users posing as genuine, these bots create inflammatory comments to trigger and drive real users into responding more and thereby inflate user engagement and algorithms. These small amount of bots create a snowball effect of increasing user participation. So, in essence, the level of user engagement is fake and inflated.

Spez knows what he’s doing. He is talking to the tech bros to get ideas on how to amass power and now he’s one of them billionaires.

Did he type the furiously on to the keyboard? No? Then it’s not hacking.

If it was about God

The irony of this is that Allah literally means God.

They straight up said it was all expenses paid so it’s not stealing.

When I think of corporate corruption, I think of cooking the books, lobbying the government, bribing, or even straight up harassment and assassination. But in this case, I don’t think it’s corruption. If the company has enough cash for extra perks, why the hell not.

It depends on what commuy you are in. Others are better and more open minded.

It also depends on the time of the day whether you get upvote or downvote. You could express an opinion and it will get massive upvotes. But post the same opinion on another day and time and it will get downvoted to oblivion. You get different audience depending on the time and day.

Depends how lucky you are. There is a guy who works in upper management and he has the privilege to order new equipment for his office, which is all expenses paid by the company. He built a gaming computer complete with neon lights and four monitors right in his office.

“Honey, I will be late from work! I will be back at 3am!”

teabags scrumballs69 in Call of Duty

Some people–like tankies and fascists-- don’t deserve respect.

The initial purpose of karma is to serve as user reputation and indicate that the person with tons of downvotes as trolls. It used to be a good system until spez realised the importance of engagement in social media, and then karma became a dopamine-inducing instrument to keep users on the site.

When I was on reddit, some users would tell me my karma or comment is only going down for going against the grain. I hit back that they are the losers for caring about imaginary points. I also hate that if you are logged into new reddit, it would notify you of new upvotes on your comment. I don’t care! I’m not a kid anymore to revel on receiving participation trophies. The new reddit design is clearly for children who don’t know any better and this is why I think reddit will last longer than we would wish it not to be. If I want a dopamine hit, I’d prefer being notified of new responses, or I would look at some of my upvoted comments if I am feeling that shallow.

Thank fuck I neither desired nor ever used Kindle. I used either my library app to read e-books or getting my booty from the high seas!

There are also a couple of subreddits that are still good. But from what I can see, Reddit is probably only good now for visiting the subreddit of your country or town. I also still look at Reddit for occasional news, as long as I avoid mainstream news subreddits that go on the front-page.

Maybe the closest sane conservative politicians in America are in Alaska. They are Republican for a long time but they have ranked choice voting, and universal basic income coming from oil revenue. I can’t remember the details but it was before the pandemic that both Republicans and Democrats agreed on a progressive policy, thanks to ranked choice voting that force politicians to compromise.

There is a small conservative Texan town that embraced renewable energy, which contradicts the stereotype that they are not progressive.

There are exceptions of course but if you sit down with both conservatives and liberals, both would actually find agreement on many things. It’s mainly that politicians intentionally divide people.

John Stuart Mill has this to say:

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party… It may be said that if stupidity has a tendency to Conservatism, sciolism, or half-knowledge, has a tendency to Liberalism.

I have grown appreciation to respect some conservative ideas. As I grow older, I see why some look for stability. There is plenty of good debate when it comes fiscal responsibility and gradual reformism, but this doesn’t mean I would reject lgbt rights or support gutting welfare. But yes, generally stupid people seem to gravitate in the direction of conservatism or right.

PS. As a left leaning person, I also agree with Mill’s point about liberals but that is a different topic for another time.

Edit: autoco-wreck

I will play devil’s advocate. Media outlets are scared of being sued for defamation or scrutinised for what may turn out to be misleading news. That’s why there are always referring to “sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity” or adopt a mild language to refer to something. But if I am a news publisher, I would describe Musk’s gesture as “appears to be Nazi salute” or to that effect. It is still calling it out as it is, but I would still have plausible deniability.

It was good… when dating apps were considered socially taboo lol.

As soon as any community gets popular enough to hit the front page, it becomes hive-minded, predictable, and bland.

People participate in communities without really understanding the communities.

Not against you specifically but this is why I don’t tell people about communities anymore. The quality declines the more people participate.