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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

    While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

    There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

    Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.




  • I think legalizing weed didn’t make that much of a difference because the whole claim that buying random weed from a random dealer put money in cartel or terrorist pockets was a lie.

    Not that there weren’t any large weed organizations, they just weren’t murdering people at the scale the cartels are or doing it to fund violence.

    They’d also rely a lot on temporary workers since trimming was really the only labour intensive step, and then it would be sent out into a distribution network that wasn’t so much an organization as it was a collection of independent or small scale distributors. Which in some locations might have been gangs, but I’d guess was mostly normal people looking to make some extra money.







  • It’s also a tactic of bullshitters to say a whole bunch of stuff in series, just put something out there and quickly move on to the next thing, making it sound like they have a lot of substance but hoping the quick change doesn’t give anyone much of a chance to pull on any of the threads of what they said or look close enough to realize that there is little to no substance behind any of it.

    Ancient Aliens and Alex Jones both also use that.

    And it’s a pain in the ass to unravel because people who don’t want to look more closely and just want to believe think there’s a list of things that need to be disproven if you wait and let the speaker finish or don’t question him about it directly because the believers don’t feel like they have the expertise to rebut counterpoints (so shelve them instead of discarding) and instead just want to go down the list. Which is fair, though it would be nice if they applied that same skepticism to that list of points in the first place.

    But this seems like an effective counter for that strategy. Just pick an item on the list that doesn’t sound right and keep pulling on that thread with the person that said it on the first place rather than the disciples blindly following. Then they’ll see it’s not just their lack of expertise getting in the way of arguing back against counterpoints, it’s the whole thing lacking any real substance at all.







  • From my perspective, things have shifted in recent years. In the past, there seemed to be a general consensus that both the right and left were interested in building a system that benefited society at large, they just disagreed on what that looked like. Seems like more and more people are realizing that all conservatives want to conserve is their power and access to wealth.

    It’s also becoming more apparent that even conservative social issues aren’t intended to improve anything for anyone but are just about controlling people and making them more vulnerable. Like it’s no longer a secret that the drug war was more about racism than public health. The abortion ban and their plans for divorce laws are clearly about making women either more dependent on men or unable to leave them if they can’t prove fault.

    All that plus the red wave that was supposed to take over Europe didn’t.

    It’s too early to tell for sure and it might just be the pendulum swinging this way before it swings back that way. It could also be more of a reaction to the far right than conservatism in general, since the far right has seized so much control over conservative political groups. But I do hope that this sentiment sticks.