I don’t attribute a lot of positive things to social media, but I will give it credit for turning me around on spiders. Arachnophobia scared the crap out of me as a kid. For years afterward, I’d never sit down on a toilet without first getting down on my hands and knees to make sure there weren’t any spiders lurking underneath the bowl. Thanks to years of spiderbro memes, now I generally view them as comrades.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services!
I have a really hard time staying cool and collected when I discuss politics with people who hold right-wing positions. As a result, I never do volunteer work for political campaigns, because it seems like the only positions available are phone-banking and door-knocking. It’s frustrating; I want to help, but I feel strongly that I’d do more harm than good, doing either of those things.
You’re much better off not knowing, imo. Influencers are like Tinker Bell, in that they disappear if there aren’t enough people who believe they exist.
How about Anthropogenic Catastrophic Kindling (ACK)? Then we can at least get Cathy on board.
Hey, if we can make a pencil out of leaves, cephalopods can swim through our GI tract like species 8472 through fluidic space.
While this is true, people still bear responsibility for the media they choose to consume. People wake up every day and decide to get their information from liars and grifters, because they prefer the way lies feel. It isn’t as if they don’t have options. Now, media literacy is definitely a problem. But the only solution is education, and that’s a silver bullet too slow to save us from all the extant ill-educated mooks.
When people tell me that their stubborn ignorance has reached levels so acute as to endanger the lives of everyone on Earth, I find it prudent to believe them.
Alan Alda’s got a pretty good podcast now. I watched a lot of MASH reruns growing up. Feels strange that kids now don’t have the experience of watching a bunch of stuff that’s not made for them at all, just because that’s what’s on TV.
I really appreciate this take. It’s good-hearted and makes good sense. I’ll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.
Oh, crumb! I’ve gotten here way too late to make a joke about it not being a zero cum game. Ah, well. Next time!
Yeah, I think there’s also a lot of tone-deafness among economists, that seems to reflect a lack of understanding (or at least acknowledgment) that the economy is built on—and designed to perpetuate—massive inequality. The average person derives comparatively little benefit from an economy which is—on paper—booming, because the profits are overwhelmingly siphoned off by the wealthy. This is probably mostly a problem with the way the economy is reported on by the media, but economists are the face of that.
Economics is a soft science. Economics is not about describing how things should work, economics is about describing how things do work.
I mean, tell that to economists? In my experience, they are extremely dogmatic. With vanishingly few exceptions, every economist I’ve ever heard, seen, or read in any media acts as though whatever model they subscribe to is gospel, and that any issues you might have with it must therefore stem from a lack of understanding, rather than from the faulty assumptions underlying it.
ETA a recent example: Harvard economics professor and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman on Jon Stewart’s podcast.
Thanks for the write-up! Am also ex-11B, and this really takes me back. A lot of things I don’t miss about the army. Having a new officer come in and make some shitty changes, seemingly just to stroke their ego and put a bullet on their OER—that’s definitely on the list.
That’s too bad. No autosave you can load from before it started? I love KC:D; it’s one of very few story-based games that I was motivated to play through more than once. I had a quick look, but I couldn’t find any mods that let you pause that section and come back to it later.
I really enjoyed Theresa’s DLC, but it can be an unwelcome change of pace if you’re not ready for it. There’s certainly no shortage of people that have had this issue, but it looks like the only fix is to power through it or load an earlier save. You do get a nice Skalitz shield from Theresa when you finish it, at least.
Literally nobody is saying this. You’re full of shit.
Every single article about “gen x” this or “gen z” that is 100% bullshit. Stop reposting this garbage.
Yeah, it’s too bad it’s only 200 million, and only “X”. All the billionaire-controlled, black-box content algorithm social media sites are a cancer on humanity. Nobody’s freedom is being impinged upon by banning them; they’re the private fiefdoms of oligarchs, who blatantly wield them in service of their own agendas. Banning them is the sensible thing to do, and I can only hope that other governments follow suit.
H.E.B. store brand toilet paper is like that. Haven’t seen any other companies do it.
You ain’t the only one! I gotta stop scrolling.