barganzo
Literally zero of my Discord contacts would ever respond to a video call let alone a voice call let alone an invite to a common voice chat. Nobody uses Skype anymore. I don’t know what age group you’re in, but it sure sounds like the “happy go lucky, internet has only ever been socially profitable for me” 35-50 yo range.
> Fucking social media swamps you in the presence of others.
Fucking social media swamps you in the “impression” you are in the presence of others while leaving you in a tiny little jail cell where you can’t interact with any of the pretty pictures hurrying across the barred window of your cell.
1. An undergraduate degree now costs $80,000-300,000 a pop, and you have to sign up at age 18, because your experience will be utterly horrible if you delay even one year.
2. Everything is amplified. Have a seizure at McDonalds? You’re going to be the next meme on TikTok.
3. Nothing seems to have any value anymore. If you can’t beat or bang your wife whenever you want, because you don’t own her anymore, why marry her? [0] If you can’t whip your children, why have them? [0] If all your age-eligible potential dates are the traumatized children of divorce, what are you going to do, ghost them?
If you can’t put Christmas decorations on your house because of the HOA, why buy it? If any fictional story, joke or scenario you write up online can be used to tar and feather you years down the line when politics has shifted, why have an online presence at all? If you can’t post art online without being accused of using an AI art generator, or having it scraped to fluff up some creep’s training set, why share it with anyone? If consuming art or food or video games is now a social misdemeanor, why not just eat Soylent for every meal?
4. Nobody hangs out with anybody new anymore. The exponential growth in smartphone sales and online games/networks/toys/chats has a direct correspondence to an exponential decline in new face-to-face meetings among anyone outside of college or high school. Great work, Silicon Valley! You liquidated everyone’s intimacy and covered it into shitty McMansions in Woodside and Model X Plaids for your ex-trophy wives and 12 children who all hate your guts.
5. Nothing that is actually risky is priced properly:
(a) Gay people can’t donate blood because of the AIDS panic 40 years ago. Trans and gay people have had their identities (a pretty low-cost aspect of society) transformed into the equivalent of a societal war crime or some kind of pedophilia status indicator.
(b) If you have sex out of wedlock, and you get unlucky, you could lose 25-50% of your income for the next 20 years, without ever getting to see your child.
(c) If you have sex IN wedlock, and your partner at any point decides they don’t like you anymore, or like someone else a whole lot more, they are entitled to take 50% of your present net worth, plus 25-70% of your theoretical maximum attainable income for the next 20-30 years, and you may never see your child again.
(d) Any moronic child with $500, a Twitter account and a driver’s license can buy an AR-15 and murder your entire friend/family/church group, and Fox News will celebrate them, as long as they’re white-passing.
6. There is nothing to look forward to. Hooray, cars in 20 years will all be EVs. Russia and China will still be autocracies. Drugs will mostly still be pointlessly and profitably criminalized. Technology will get better and better, the Applesung M32 will be a full AR/VR replacement for your eyeball that lets you escape to a VR Turks and Caicos or a VR porn set anytime you want. Flying cars will arrive, and they will only be available to billionaires. Some clown will fly to Mars with a colonist crew and start an interplanetary war. We’ll figure out more about our history as apes, and more and more countries will make up stories that they were the “cradle of mankind” for nationalistic clout. No individual will have the power to improve the world on their own, no artist’s style will truly be their own anymore.
If you’re looking forward to the future, you probably should take less Adderall and divest from GME.
Source: boomers, millenials and Gen X don’t need to be spoonfed context for the world they created.
[0] I don’t think either of these activities are “good” or worthwhile but there are doubtless some double-digit % of the population that is mad they’re no longer legal.
> Based on the available evidence, the agency does not plan to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope. However, the report illuminates that this period in federal policy – and in American history more broadly – was a dark chapter that does not reflect the agency’s values today. Understanding this history will help to guide NASA in its work to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, and equal opportunities for LGBTQI+ NASA employees. By sharing these findings, we also hope to promote public understanding of the history of discrimination against LGBTQI+ employees throughout the federal government and strengthen our efforts to confront the barriers that LGBTQI+ Americans continue to face.
It is disappointing that most of the pro-change activists continue to waste their breath arguing semantics instead of letting it go. It must sting for the engineers and scientists working on JWST to see so many non-stakeholders still complaining about the name.
It is more disappointing that so many new members of the conversation seem happiest to tear down and bully the individuals who asked for change. Eternal September, yet again.
[0] If you are trying to decipher the intimidating username, it is explained here: https://medium.com/@chanda/why-i-took-a-break-from-twitter-e...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_hi...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-shares-james-webb-history-...
Everyone sucks here. The people willing to spend 100x the effort they spend on their students on trying to change the irrelevant name of a space telescope suck the most. Twitter is the worst thing that ever happened to science after the Spanish Inquisition.
No doubt they’ll be burning their tenured professorship time trying to take down “The Orange Site” or dox barganzo now.
This is exactly what happens on Mastodon. Some servers get added to a blocklist because of one user’s/admin’s vendetta against another group of users, for their politics or other characteristics.
As you might expect, there’s a basic stratification between people who run Mastodon servers on their own: there are the highly politically active, socially brutalist sysadmin hackers, and there are the fresh-off-the-boat Twitter users who sign up for a turnkey hosted Mastodon experience.
Guess who ends up dictating who gets to play in the sandbox?
Some servers then make subscribing to those blocklists mandatory for other servers, meaning your server gets auto-hellbanned if it doesn’t block all the same sets.
The whole concept of globally namespaced public toots is pointless (imo). The only reason these social networks exist is because email solved the spam problem.