tecknow.bsky.social
Gay, disabled, curmudgeon, nerd. 40+ (he/him)
98 posts
269 followers
685 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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It's a neat trick how you list a bunch of axes of exclusion and marginalization and then place all the agency for "straining relations" on liberals who won't accept them.
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Many other STEM fields have transitioned to MatLab which is just Fortran in a fancy hat.
They taught Fortran as a first language at my undergrad institution until '97 or '98.
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If someone interacts regularly with people who think that a good economy means cuts to SNAP and Medicaid then the most straightforward thing to say, if they know those cuts would be harmful is that the economy isn't good. And the people who argue that it is good appear to be supporting those cuts.
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I think many people who say that are responding to the definitions that people around them use or that have been used to hurt them.
Many people think that a good economy is one where people can meet their expectations without assistance.
This can be applied at personal and systemic scales.
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Similarly, Google offers to show website owners all sorts of info about who and where and when their pages are viewed, but this lets Google track users across participating sites even if they don't show any ads.
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It might be more helpful to think of it less as "Facebook followed me here" and more as "this website contains elements that report to Facebook". Embedded FB posts or events will do it for example.
The embed reports about everyone who loads it, and FB keeps that data.
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If they can do X then surely they can do Y if Y < X. Denying someone a passport is pretty huge, therefore many lesser things must also be permissible.
Then you have laws that restrict or punish people whose documents don't match their presentation. The EO didn't pass those laws but enabled them.
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To pick one pertinent example, the presidency almost certainly CAN issue EOs to make it harder/impossible for trans people to get/renew passports with correct gender markers.
Which IN EFFECT is control over their travel, and then you just apply what feels like straightforward logic.
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I think it's a combination of the number of places - including government websites - that just say an EO has the effect/force of law, the visibility of places where that's true, the dysfunction of any mechanism to push back, and trying to apply what feels like ordinary logic.
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All the reactionaries have to say is, "sure, it has been in force since 2020, so everything that has happened since then must be acceptable under it." And/or "We'll give it as much enforcement as it has had since it was ratified."
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Notational complaints aside, arrow functions have become ubiquitous because they have different, more straightforward bindings for the "this" keyword, which is a very common stumbling block in JS.
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Oh this gets much worse. If you want to return an object this way, you have to put parens around the curly braces so they don't get mistaken for a code block.
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If what someone wants is, say, for their adult child to buy a house in the suburbs and fill it with children, then external factors like constrained housing supply look like ways for the child to evade what feels like a reasonable expectation.
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It's very common for people to say that they're personally doing well but that the economy is bad, and I usually resolve this by saying that when people talk about "The economy" they mean what they can expect other people to have. Their own home? car? cellphone? master's degrees?
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There's not a separate wage economy and products economy. The value of money is in the opportunities it provides. If your wages don't provide the opportunities they did before, it's not unreasonable or inconsistent to take that as a sign that the economy is worse, no matter how explicable it is.
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The idea that 90% of casualties are civilians is a well-known myth. Wherever you read it, they were spreading lies and you did not check them, even just by glancing at Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilia...
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Knowing that I was, in fact, having a different experience from other people and not just a different reaction helped me find better ways of managing them.
Like letting go of the idea that I could train myself out of them. Which never worked and wasn't going to.
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Well, for one thing, autism and neurodivergence in general don't just reflect the way you think but also your experience of the world, like through sensory issues.
Not exactly the same but I was in my 30s before someone told me that lots of people with cerebral palsy have sensory issues.
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Which is to say, you and everyone deserve to interact with people who can own and express their attractions. I do hope that improved representation helps model that for them.
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I am sure you know this, but often people who aren't comfortable being attracted to a big guy or a disabled person etc. break their attraction into pieces. They love thick calves and big warm hugs but don't think of them as making the person more attractive.
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I want to be able to expect people to know what, say, the greater Israel movement is, but that means I need to be able to point to someone they'll recognize at least using, and ideally defining the term. But examples are next to non-existent.
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I didn't mean you or me or anyone else on social media. We do not have the ability to set expectations for what other people should know. Nobody is going to accept homework from us, nor necessarily should they.
My criticism is specifically about leadership.
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If we want people to be able to navigate this we have to be able to expect them to know in what way, for example, the Netanyahu administration is extreme. Which means we need to know where they have been told.
But most of the relevant terms don't occur in articles shorter than a novella.
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I don't disagree with you about the constraints the administration is operating under. However, I don't think it's surprising that people hold extreme views because where would they learn better?
We let extreme right wing framing and definitions go largely unopposed.
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I think part of it is that Vance finishes his sentences and recommits when challenged where Trump trails off and refuses to acknowledge saying anything specific.
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Janelle Monáe's short story collection, "The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer" was my favorite book of the year. There is a story that takes place in the setting for that video, and it's partially about trans exlusion.
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At one point Seven of Nine notices that (I think) Harry Kim's skin luminesced when he was taken over by alien energy or something, and I decided that her borg implants let her see the special effects, so that tracks.
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I think the overlap between taste and smell is a factor. If I say something smells delicious that's definitely positive but also implies you should think about licking it.
I don't need separate words for things that smell bad because you don't have a closely associated follow-up question.
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But when you try to imagine what doomers have to risk if they took a more positive attitude it's entirely reputational or ego harms and not, like, even the slightest bit about an incredibly common attack.
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It's really fascinating, the argument that we've done enough already appears almost immediately in response to even the risk of progress towards equality and this is well documented going back over a century now. Backlash against freedman's bureaus is the first to come to mind.
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Removing outdated jobs that no longer exist takes one tool out of their toolbox but doesn't change what they're trying to do. Other friends have been informed that they could work at McDonald's and lay down on the bathroom floor when they can no longer stand.
Jobs at McDonald's still exist.
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And I was informed that first, I had no right to speak, and second the responsibility of the opposition was to report the findings of the responsibility of the opposition did not require them to explain how it would work or give specific examples.
That level of irresponsibility is the problem.
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Removing outdated jobs is good. But the reason everyone's going to forget about it in two days is that it doesn't actually fix the problem. When the opposition said there were tens of thousands of jobs my mom could do and gave some impossible examples I blurted out, "how, where?"
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More specifically, IPC warnings were not that everyone in Gaza was starving or that it was evenly distributed across the area. The concerns are more specific so the answer should be also.
Concerns about famine are focused on Rafa. Answers about all of Gaza do not answer them.
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By the same token people love to argue that food is so cheap and plentiful in the US and the total amount of aid available is so large that there can't be real food insecurity here or that whatever aide already exists must be enough.
I don't accept it from them so I can't accept it at all.
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This argument is pretty disingenuous both generally and in the specific case. People have been trying to use the fact that there's enough food to prove that there's no hunger basically forever. You can't use the agricultural output of Ireland to argue there was no potato famine.
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And by like, the dozenth time I'm force to say "but not like that' or "but not that kind" a) everybody's tired and b) my position just seems less plausible.
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But it can also be genuinely harmful to use the term in a way that allows powerful people to think or act like you agree with their definition.
It's also exhausting, someone could spend all day holding up definitions of capitalism that I don't agree with.
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I was just writing about this recently. If it helps, I think people are responding to the definitions of capitalism that powerful people have used to do / justify harm. Capitalism as practiced / enacted basically.
Capitalism didn't always mean what it means now and it can change again.
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I don't know, but I can only imagine the situation was similar to The matrix movies. Saying the AI used humans, plus fusion, for power. It was considered easier for the audience to understand even though the writers also knew it didn't make any sense.
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And they sort of did this. Even after most of the dilithium in the universe was destroyed they still used transporters and replicators ever more casually, so they were getting their power from somewhere. But they still treated dilithium as fuel narratively.
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The reason I mention this is that dilithium, as a catalyst, sets the limit on the number of starships you can have. This presents them with an opportunity to explore class even in a society of abundance. Everyone still has fusion power but only the elite can travel.
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Consider DS9, the station ran off fusion power and they didn't have plots about antimatter containment breaches until they inserted the Defiant. I'm pretty sure part of the reason is that the writers, denied too long a favorite catchphrase, might explode.
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One of the things I hated about later seasons of Discovery was that it leaned into the idea that dilithium was the power source. If they could get power from dilithium they wouldn't need antimatter.
I'm generally pro criticizing Starfleet both in and out of universe. But this is writer laziness.