Look. I’m an apatheist. I don’t really care. It’s one kind of BS or another to me.
But on one hand, you have a someone who has decades of experience and study in the traditions, text, and history of their religion, and on the other hand, you have an asshole who fucked a couch and is a useful puppet for Peter Thiel and a bunch of other billionaire sociopath fucksticks.
Pretty easy to figure out who I’d respectfully disagree with and who I’d just call a goddamned idiot.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
Daily: Wallet, phone, house key with folding reading glasses and pill container on the chain, car key (separate because I don’t like the way the key chain brushes my knee while I drive with everything attached), a couple of those plastic flossers in a baggy, lens wipes.
Often but not quite daily: “AAA” sized penlight, small pocket knife w/ screwdriver and scissors, and multipliers.
What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Nothing can be maintained without at least some of the skills and knowledge that built it. Even something like generative AI like LLMs will eventually break down in some manner. Its just what happens with complex systems, be they physical or digital.
After that happens, we’ll be forced to learn either to fix the thing, or how to do without the thing. How painful that learning process is will depend upon how essential that thing is to our lives.
If AI goes away in a few years, barely a blip.
If AI goes away after a few decades, and we’ve allowed much of our accumulated knowledge to atrophy… It’s a crisis.
Excluding a few examples like frequently used gym weights, common fastener sizes, and short distances, I still have to do rough conversions in my head to have an idea of what a metric measurement is, so I guess I’d say imperial.
But I wouldn’t be upset if the US converted to metric.
Sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.
Neil Postman was right.
Our educational models and methods are changing for the worse.
TV and the internet are terrible mediums for public or political discourse and this has exacerbated many of our existing issues.
Our culture has become more shallow and has started to lack something profound because of how we utilize technology for education, business, and entertainment.
Things will not improve until we change our relationship with these technologies.
EDIT: several words.
Precisely, but you’re giving them too much credit by expecting them to figure it out from reading the lyrics alone.
Prejudice tends to lack a capacity for self reflection and an understanding of irony.
It’s the same with nazi punks and MAGAs who like Rage Against The Machine, they just want something that sounds loud, aggressive, and violent and rarely understand what they’re listening to or how it came about until it’s shoved right in their face. Then they get all offended about it.
Most of the time, the best they can make themselves is a cheap, talent-less imitation that lacks any sense of authenticity, and to try and overcome that they’ve resorted to something that can produce a finely polished turd that still lacks any sense of authenticity.
Locksmithing/access control is an industry that is sorely lacking new people…
Interesting. I was considering locksmithing as a way to get some supplemental income later in life. I’ve done skilled labor and light IT work most of my life and it seemed like a good fit for my skill set. I’ll have to move that to the top of the pile of possibilities.
If you want to get into how this happens, and the way it happens with other technologies, I’d suggest Neil Postman’s Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death as a good start.
I drank and smoke occasional cigarettes starting around age 16.
However, this was the 90s, and that sort of thing seems to have been tolerated a lot more back then, at least in my area. I can remember getting busted with tequila at age 19 and the main complaint being that we were cutting limes on an antique table without using a cutting board.
And many of the things that are seen as huge problems with both alcohol and tobacco were just starting to get widespread attention at that time.
You don’t have to tell people you use Linux or talk to them about it. I know that because I use Zorin OS, which is a really modern feeling Linux distro with a slick user interface, that’s perfect for people like you and I, who don’t want to be bombarded with opinions on the “right” operating system and just want to use their computers in peace. You should totally switch!
I’m not even certain that we even disagree on the fundamental principle, just the details of the example I gave.
One more time: We aren’t examining how the average English speaker would interpret this, only the reasons why the priest’s answer might change.
This has been interesting. Good luck to you. =)
The question, in both cases, involves smoking while praying. The priest never looks at, or gives a judgement on smoking in general, there’s no reason to assume the priest would forbid smoking in other circumstances.
The question does change, but not as fundamentally as you’re claiming it does. The information presented in both questions remains the same, only the word order changes, which changes how the priest perceives that information.
Anyway, good luck out there. =)
Why would the answer be no? Who cares if you smoke while doing a cartwheel? Who said the priest would forbid such a thing?
In both situations, a man is asking about the propriety of praying while inhaling the smoke from a cigarette. That’s vital information.
The information does matter to the smoker and the priest. We’re not teasting these statements for validity and we’re not making our own judgements. We’re examining why the priest’s answer might have changed. That’s all.
Those aren’t the same questions from the original post. You’ve omitted half the information given to the priest in each question.
Both questions, in their entirety, deal with smoking and praying. The subject is smoking and praying. You’ve reframed this as a question about smoking and a separate question about praying. That was never the case.
EDIT: minor clarification.
Even characters that are presented as poor or middle class have homes, cars, and clothing that would well exceed their means in the real world.
You’ll have a show with a 20 something couple that are “just staring out”, he’s a mechanic at a small independent garage and she’s a struggling singer-songwriter. Without support from their parents they somehow have a 1200 square foot loft in a major city, brand new MacBooks, a top of the line TV, coordinated decor with no flatpack furniture, brand name clothing, and a late model crossover with all the options.
I know product placement is part of it, but it’s still bullshit and unrealistic.