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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • My take is that they vote for him because he is angry. These young men are largely angry and have had media of all sorts telling them that they should be. They don’t want someone telling them how they will boost the middle class and have equitable tax. They want someone who says they will burn every problem to the ground and break things. They want someone screaming at someone to blame.

    Why we have a huge chunk of young men desperatly angry is a choose your own adventure of societal issues where we have provided almost no healthy outlet for healthy aggression or the physicality that comes with being a young man. Everyone is free to come up with their own reasons, but for me it is the lack of outlet or the feeling of societial participation for young men.

    Whatever the reason, a culture who sweeps the problems of frustrated young men under the rug for long enough I feel will live to regret it.


  • We also have the freedom to self govern. Laws are on the books to prevent firework usage in my state, it is simply ignored one night a year because it turns out mass lawbreaking is hard to handle. I don’t have the right to conduct a parade in the middle of whichever street I want whenever I want. I participate in the social contract of sacrificing absolute freedom for mutual gain because I live in a country and am not a sovereign citizen claiming complete supremacy over all others. My taxes pay for a small and well moderated fireworks show at a designated location conducted by a local government for which I had a hand in voting for. My freedom is louder, collective, voted for, and more sensible. Not all freedom must be focused soley on the individual.





  • I mean, graded on a wide curve of history right now isn’t complete shit. WW1 saw entire generations of young men slaughtered uselessly at the hands of unelected kings. It was so horrific we actually still try not to use chemical warfare. Absolutely brutal combat with casualties that have hardly been seen since. Absolutely nightmare conditions. We baulk at the deaths of 25,000 over a few months of conflict where WW1 regularly saw those numbers in as little as a day. I do not want to minimize the absolutely brutal conflicts going on now. A newly orphaned child is not comforted by history, but your question seeks context and what else is history for but to contextualize the present?

    To me, history shows we have not even begun to experience the the depths of the horror people are capable of. At least in the states decenting voices are not carted away into slavery camps, actively trying to wipe out whole populations with starvation at least has some voices calling out the brutality, I do not see people trying to sell their children to survive like in the depression. These are not far away times where these things happened on a scale they do not now.

    Long story short, history has shown the measure of brutality and uncaring to be significantly worse at times. Raw and unquestioned genocide, slavery, persecution, war, child beating, women opressing, and all manner of the lowest acts of evil are the norm of humanity, not the relative peace we have known over the last 80 years. This fact does not make life suck less, but can at least act as a measure for how horrid is has been.





  • Still waiting for my check for paying for extra heat, road salt, and significantly more road maintenance for living in Minnesota. Oh wait, we only bail out the wealthy who build condos in the likely path of increasingly frequent hurricanes? It’s a good thing we contribute more dollars to the feds than we get back, otherwise Floridians might actually need to pay for living where they live like the rest of us.

    PS: Not advocating we abandon all who get hit by a disaster, but their has to be a way to balance federal contribution given these “once in a generation freak occurrences” are likely to happen a hell of a lot more. Don’t build in high risk areas and expect a handout.




  • It’s all fun and games till well intentioned laws get abused by a new administration. Be careful what you wish for. My personal take is that any organization that is even reasonably similar to a news site must conform to fairness in reporting standards much like broadcast TV once had. If you don’t, but an argument could be made that you present as a new site, you just slap a sizeable banner on every page that you are an entertainment site. Drawing distinctions on what is news and what is entertainment would theoretically work better than an outright ban of misleading content.

    At the end of the day it won’t matter what is written unless the regulations have actual teeth. “Fines” mean so little given the billion dollar backers could care less and retractions are too little too late. I want these wannabe Nazi “News Infotainment” people to go to jail for their speech that causes harm to people and the nation. Destroying democracy should be painful for the agitators.




  • Analytics? Customer empathy gathering? Market research? Why bother? They just saw a post on LinkedIn about a Blockchain ChatGPT AI Machine Learning NFT. You really need to keep your eye on the ball on how we can work together to shoehorn any of that in the product so I can seem smart posting it on LinkedIn too. I’m never gonna hit CEO gaining market insight. Gotta fleece everyone with the most fancy sounding thing I have no clue about today. Don’t worry. I’ll forget by the time you have it released and complain about the new maintenance burden though. We need more features!!!


  • I’ll do you one better. The hardest part of making crap people like is the damn people. I have been a product manager for a decade and I can confidently say if I deliver exactly what the customer asks for I would be an utter failure. Requirements and software that fulfill what a customer says they want will ultimately lead to them asking for something they previously didn’t realize because it actually turns out they have no idea what they want, have an agenda, or the conditions have shifted from under you and what they said no longer holds water.

    I could go on a tirade about this but my two cents is you gotta listen to what everyone says, but assume they are a human at the end of the day. It’s too damn easy for me to suck up dev time with what people want. Hell, just one word can keep a dev team busy for a long time. Internationalization! Boo!

    I also need to build an environment where the dev team doesn’t despise the business due to a history of constantly shifting goalposts, borderline abusive metrics, and expectations that just create a battered development team. For some reason hiring a PM aligns with an org hitting the point where the original dev team has lost critical members because of terrible burnout and a culture of blaming people and not process. Takes a lot of therapeutic communication to remedy that.

    TLDR; People. People are the reason all things are difficult.