frmersdog

Somewhere, there's a dude in spandex and legwarmers muttering to himself, "It's my time." [Maniac plays softly in the distance]

Lift weights and play tennis or baseball.

...You realize that we're talking about banks, right? Institutions operating on a fractional reserve? Take your money, use it as collateral to print 10x their holdings in interest-bearing debt? Free to restrict your withdrawals and bail-in funds from your account to save their own hides? Those banks.

The Occupy Wall Street and Bitcoin dudes and dudettes had it right, which is why they were carefully marginalized and appropriated, respectively.

Specifics: Alexandria is basically DC, and probably shouldn't be included without several places that are missing in Maryland. I have no idea what Baltimore's icon is supposed to be (edit: wait, is that supposed to be the Domino Sugar sign?), and while the Capitol dome is a decent choice, the Washington Monument would probably work better as a symbol of Washington.

This could really be a launching point for crowdsourcing a more handcrafted set, though.

Would be curious to read about an actual PhD student who was actually on their feet for 80 hours a week, average, across a whole year, though.

And to expound, in my defense: as a longtime Android device user, I recall often feeling stigmatized by the app developer community's treatment of things outside the Apple ecosystem as second-class. Arc's overly-enthusiastic media coverage, barely disclaiming or discounting that it was initially MacOS exclusive, reminded me of the worst of that from the mid-2010s. "Here is a product that is going to change the world, and give everyone superpowers, also you can't use it. :)"

I'd thought we'd left that behind.

So if this approach turned out to be a misstep that helped lead to the product's demise (alongside, bafflingly, and perhaps ultimately a bullet-dodge, the mere fact that a local browser can be sunset and locked at all), I'm not allowed to give my feelings on that? Is there really no productive conversation to be had about how a failed product rubbed potential users the wrong way?

And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)

Rationalization (bargaining).

In other news, Gamestop (yes, that Gamestop) is up almost 50% over the past 2 months, for seemingly no reason. Pokemon cards have a better return YoY than GPUs (and they sell both).

>But that would be incredibly difficult, and possibly so expensive as to bankrupt the companies responsible!

feigned gasp

Oh no.

Not beating the "out-of-touch" allegations. And no PhD student genuinely works 80 hours a week. Certainly not 80 retail/food service hours.

Personally, I've been paid more than 35k/yr (before taxes) for only about 1/12th of my working life.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57573604-naked-short-and...

https://www.dtcc.com/products-and-services/clearing-settleme...

And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."

If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.

Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.

Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.

I don't think people really understand how bad it is out here. I imagine that if a dignified line on the base standard were held, there would be less of a need for this kind of middle-class pearl-clutching.

And I feel fine~

Sounds racist. And exactly the way people want it.

I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up.

Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.