… A folder of bookmarks on their web browser labelled either ‘Definitely Not Porn’ or ‘Research Project’, buried in 8 nested layers of other folders and bookmarks.

You are thinking of this:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

American here:

About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

And this will get worse.

Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.

Fellow autist here, here’s my funniest Elon moment:

The cybertruck reveal, softball pitch into the window.

Musk audibly gasps and says ‘O-oh myfuckinggod.’

Comedy gold.

That moment, right there, that was the high water mark.

Then, the window cracks, and shortly afterward, his entire general public facade and reputation begin to crack and shattet as well.

I do appreciate a visual metaphor.

Well, the ‘listening to their constituents’ thing certainly hasn’t been going well lately… what with all the screaming matches, arrests, barely contained open revolts and what not.

They just kinda said those were all fake news and then stopped doing them.

Median one bed apartment rent, across the entire US, is $1550 as of Feb 2025.

Lets knock 20% of that off, to approximate a median studio apartment instead, give some leeway to poorer parts of the country.

(there are not as good or reliable general stats counted for studio apartments, but a studio being 20% less than a one bed is… hopefully a reasonable, napkin math aporoximation)

Ok, that’s $1240.

Alright, now we use the ‘rent should be 30% of your income’ rule.

Thats $4135 a month, rounded up very slightly to the nearest 5.

Ok, 40 hours a week, roughly 4 weeks a month = 160 hours.

4135 / 160 = $25.85, again rounded up to the closet 5 cents for simplicity, so thats your actual minimum ‘living wage’.

If you wanna say a studio should be 30% off a one bedroom?

Math works out to roughly $22.60

If you wanna say an actual one bedroom should be the standard, works out to about $32.60

Any way you look at this, $17 an hour is too low, that’s still… you can’t even afford a studio (as in, you cannot pass the rent to income threshold without a cosigner or double deposit or somethingnon your lease) you need roommates, you’re still living with your parents.

If I were to pronounce it outloud, I would say:

D. B. Zero.

Like D. B. Cooper, lol.

the… zer(o), 0 swap is… basically old school l33tsp34k… like uh… l00tb0x, pr0n, type of … dialect? syntax?

Huh.

Well, I appreciate the info and shrugging magic, but uh… hrm.

I dunno then.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ok whew, we are truly almost back to the 1890’s, Trumpublicans apparently favored era of America.

19th Ammendment was passed back in… 1920.

Basically this undoes women’s suffrage, so married women either just can’t vote, or will face massive uneccesarry hurdles voting.

And of course transfolk as well, they’re now pretty much formerly formally (ducking autocorrect) disenfranchised.

I wonder, do we have bootleggers (smugglers) for abortifacients, birth control, horomone therapy drugs yet?

I guess that’ll be the ‘growth market’.

Framing the Overton Window.

A feature for some, an anti-feature for others.

i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

1:

Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

2:

There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

3:

If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

…

I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.

https://lemmy.zip/post/35999238

Here’s the post.

Evidently, Demigodrick has since fixed the problems and successfully upgraded to 0.19.11

https://lemmy.zip/post/36177918

EDIT: Alternate explanation: The fediverse tracker has fallen victim to Trump Tariffs as well rofl.

It may have been lemmy.zip

It did in fact go down for about 48 hours… prompting me to make this new account on dbzer0.

Basically, the admin attempted to update to a newer lemmy version… and it failed, multiple times, and they just rolled back, restored the old version, posted an explanation and apology, and they’ll be further looking into … exactly what went wrong.

It doesn’t come off as snarky at all, no worries!

Genuienly… Like, I myself am autistic, and I’m willing to bet a whole lot of other data scientist type technical data sets type careerists either are as well, or are close.

What I’m trying to say is: It is genuienly difficult to be both well versed enough in the math and data… and at the same time have the requisite communication skills to present a whole lot of complex data in a way that people with less expertise can understand easily… while also at the same time not over generalizing so much that you are actually giving a just flat out false description or misleading metaphor.

I appreciate your summary of what I wrote in the last post.

It is not a measure of public sentiment.

That’d be like a consumer confidence measure, something that just polls the general public.

The fear and greed index is based off of technical measurements of various active markets.

Very broadly, it is telling you whether or not the financial class, investors, stock traders, corporations significantly involved in that, your 401k managers… are acting fearful or greedy.

A middling score close to 50 basically represents ‘reasonable, stable growth’.

Extreme fear means market participants are acting like a significant stock/bond downturn either is occuring or about to occur.

Extreme greed means market participants are acting like a huge upswing in stocks and bonds are occuring and will be maintained in the future.

You’re right that extreme greed isn’t a good thing, as it usually means a whole bunch of irresponsible financial bets are being made, that will later pop, and crash.

At the same time, extreme fear is also bad… because it basically is that crash occuring.

Maybe think of it kind of like some value you get back from your blood work.

There’s a generally accepted ‘average’ value that means you are stable, healthy.

Then, there is a range of higher and lower values that are… relatively normal, within reasonable, expected variations.

Then, there are extreme values, way outside the acceptable range, either way too high or way to low, and now its time for your doctor to start looking at treatment options.

I am still convinced ‘Drag’ legitimately has dissociative identity disorder and isn’t a troll in the sense of … ‘i am in full control of my faculties and choose to act as caricature to sew sow chaos’…

But yeah, that whole… thing… was fucking bonkers.

In what way do you have to ‘go out of your way’ to interact with ml or hex?

Are… they not federated with your instance?

If yes, they’re not federated, then you did that to yourself, by joining an instance that doesn’t show their posts and communities to you.

If no, they are federated… then just sort set your feed from local to global, and you’ll see their posts in their communities pop up.

… The entire point of the federation model is to allow each user to determine … basically how much of a bubble they want to be in.

You may determine a whole instance is full of nutcases in a bubble, and avoid them… or you may not think that, and retain the ability to interact with them.

Generally speaking… you can pretty much join whatever instance you want, and in so doing, you are accepting the instances that are federated with your own instance, and rejecting the instances your instance admins have defederated from.

You realize that is a textbook ‘whataboutism’, right?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fear-and-greed-index.asp

The Fear & Greed Index is not just some bullshit chart, with arbitrary values, it is an index of 7 different indicators, all based on real data, all indexed together, that is to say, blended by a another formula that determines how much weight to give to each of the 7 constituent indicators.

It is presented as a speedometer… because 95% of people’s eyes glaze over when they see complicated but very technically information dense graphs and graphics.

I have a decade of work experience in data analysis and reporting, making things like quarterly and annual reports for a department or entire corp or non profit, making realtime views that update based on realtime or regularly reported data…

You have to dumb things down and simplify things … and often present data in a narrative structure, as a story, even for C Suite, upper management, the Board… because they almost always have a very low attention span.

I cannot tell you the number of times a younger, brighter eyed, bushier tailed me was… fairly politely and earnestly told by VPs or Board members that… its clear that I have a broad and deep understanding of statistics and data… but you’ve got to dumb these reports down to the point someone with a hangover can understand the most important information in 30 seconds.

Only other data nerds, stats nerds and accounting tend to possess the actual ability to read more complex charts without their eyes glazing over.

This speedometer presentation by CNN is pretty much the same logic used in good UI or video game design:

If some complex measurement is important and should be easily understood by the user at a glance, present that info in a simplified way that makes use of a visual metaphor or motif is rooted in something most people would have tangible experience with.

They are presenting this for the average American reader.

The average American has the literacy level of a 5th or 6th grader.

Also, it would be innacurate to describe this index as just measuring volatility.

Volatility is a component of the measurement, but there are many other components as well… that is what an indexed metric is, a single overall ‘score’ produced by combining a bunch of indicators according to a set formula for how to do that.

I can only hope I live long enough to see a ‘The Death of Stalin’ type movie about the Trump admin.