You need a level checking level.
In all seriousness, they make levels like this, they’re just a more high-dollar, specialty item. At work we have a “true table”, a tested flat and level metal surface, to check and adjust them.
Edit: Here are some examples
So that’s where we draw the line?
We wait until he’s completely fucked overseas relations, destroyed NATO, and handed the world to China on a silver platter. Then we impeach him and say “Oops, our bad! Who knew he’d be that crazy guys? Boy, do we have egg on our face! We’re all gonna laugh about this later, I promise…”
Class act. Five of five stars. Best legislature ever.
The trouble I’d have to go through to build a dumb fridge would bother me more than people talking shit about me building or owning one.
People can talk shit all they want, don’t mean I’m gonna listen.
Not completely, but more and more I find peace of mind in analog and offline spaces. Physical books feel better than e-books, a real bike is more fun than a Peleton (cheaper too), and cooking my own food is better than GrubHub.
I have an educational background in IT, but I’ve worked as a mechanic for most of my adult life. I’m a tool using primate. Tech is a tool. If a new tool improves on the old and makes life easier, I use it. If it doesn’t, it’s not worth having around. When your job is fixing things, “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” makes a lot of sense.
I’m not going to bend over backwards for tech that I don’t need just because a rich CEO tells me it’s revolutionary. I can flip a light switch, lock my doors, make a grocery list without the help of an AI fridge, and write my own emails.
The Satanic Panic was around long before D&D and heavy metal music and it never really left. It just moved on to new targets. Someone, somewhere has always been doing something satanic as a plot, it’s just easier to find people talking about it in the age of social media.
Same with conspiracy theories. The alt-right never invented anything new, they just recycled things that wingnuts and cranks have been spouting for centuries and adapted them to modern settings. Look at the parallels between “Hillary tortures children and drinks their blood to stay young” and the old Blood Libel conspiracy for example.
I go back and forth as to why I think this kind of thing is so enduring. Either people need to believe in some kind of evil because it allows them to feel good about being on the “right” side of something. It could make them feel smart to find “secrets” that people won’t openly admit (because they aren’t true). Or they feel some kind of cognitive dissonance if they don’t have an enemy and invent one to quiet it. Or maybe it’s just a convoluted effort to take control over something they aren’t comfortable with in a “he who can destroy a thing, controls the thing” sort of way. Maybe all of them even.
I dunno, like you said, people are goddamn stupid and fucking nuts sometimes. Shame they’re so often dangerous because of it.
One thing that gives me hope is that these chucklefucks will happily eat each other alive over the smallest imagined things. If they don’t have a “big evil thing” to organize against they’re just one giant fucking bucket of crabs, man.
These two have a chance to do something right, to show real leadership and responsibility, and to kick the fucking doors open and shine the light of day on the whole damn mess.
How many working years do they have left? How viable are they as politicians? What purpose does trying to save their own image serve? Do they really think people give a shit about them anymore? Do they really think they’re relevant as anything other than a symbol of why their party has failed the nation?
Fucking spineless.
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It’s not shame. It’s insurance. It’s to make it difficult/impossible to file a complaint or win a criminal case in the event that the administration crumbles and someone tries to hold them accountable.
Got pissed at corporate social media for the way they’ve accelerated the damage being done to our already degraded public discourse but I still needed somewhere to doomscroll and find… gifs… of… nothing in particular…
I’d even take crappy photo edits over this.
Not exactly sure what you missed or what your point is supposed to be.
The same would be true of any ad platform. I hate Facebook for all the ills it’s caused society and it pisses me off that my breakfast cereal is slightly more expensive because of Zuckerberg’s compensation package too.
But Facebook, et al. aren’t being discussed here. Reddit is.
Even if I stay off the internet completely, a portion of the money I spend STILL goes in their pocket, and the only way to prevent it is to spend hours exhaustively researching every product I buy to find the one or two alternatives out of hundreds of others that don’t feed into the system somehow. And even if product A doesn’t buy ads on these platforms, the place I shop for it probably does. If I can’t buy direct, as is the case with so many purchases, all that time and research are robbed of any real impact by the fact that my closest retail outlet spends millions on targeted Internet ads.
But it’s not really about the money though, it’s about where it’s going.
In an alternate timeline, Spez, Zuck, and the rest are decent human beings with a functioning conscience and use their platforms for the common good. I don’t mind those versions of them getting a piece of my alternate self’s dollar. But I don’t live in that universe.
So, because I’m stuck here, every single one of these modern-day Prometheus wannabe, god-complex, techbro shitheads can kiss my hairy ass.
Don’t they teach them anything before they let them out on the street.
Possibly not. If feel like that’s been brought up in the news before.
Or maybe it’s just a one time class or a video, and people do get complacent. Or maybe he’s just a fucking dumbass and a bully. There’s a clear pattern of highschool bully-style confrontation and escalation in many of the videos we’re seeing, and standing there is as good a way as any to do just that.
These goons want people to be afraid of them, and act as if they believe that intimidation is a forcefield of some sort, like if they’re enough of a threatening asshole that it’ll mean they never get hurt.
The whole “act like a scary hardass and people will comply” strategy relies on shock and the tendency for people to freeze up and get rattled when suddenly confronted with a threat from authority or power. They want people to go all deer in the headlights when they get in their face and comply without a fight, or if you fight you’re off guard and rattled and there’s less of risk to them so they just get to wail on you for a while. It’s gratifying for bullies when things are one-sided like that, it makes them feel powerful and righteous. In terms of getting what you want from people, it works well… up to the point that it doesn’t.
After that point it’s one type of catastrophe or another.
I gotta unpack this a little…
Reddit’s main source of revenue is advertising. Other companies pay Reddit to shove ads in your face. You probably buy products from at least some of those companies, and while market forces and consumer perceptions have large influence, operating costs are still a factor in setting those prices. Just like everyone else, Reddit sets the prices of its advertising services based in part on its operating costs, which includes Spez’s salary.
Even if you avoid Reddit, things you buy are more expensive because this fucking toolshed gets paid $193 million a year just to be a sociopathic jackoff with a popular website.
I quit Reddit years ago, but I’m still fucking pissed about this shit and I have every right to be.
Some people need an enemy or they can’t make sense of the world. I’m not talking about a run of the mill competitive streak, they simply can’t understand society as anything other than a struggle for dominance. If they don’t have some sort of conflict to focus on, they make one just to quiet the cognitive dissonance they’re feeling.
I don’t know if it’s learned or innate, but it makes people easy fodder for conspiracy theories and the sort of high-functioning sociopaths we’ve been electing recently.
For advanced STEM degrees, there are people who just enjoy learning that sort of thing and applying their knowledge.
In the same vein, some folks are just attracted to dangerous and difficult jobs because they get a sense of purpose or identity from it.
Others it’s community. I knew a guy who did 20 years active duty military, then joined the national guard, then took a job for the same national guard unit as a DoD civilian and stayed on until they forced him to retire. They had practically drag the guy out. He never did anything but bitch and complain about the work he spent more than 40 years doing, he sounded like kinda hated his job, but he liked being a part of the military.
Fuck every single thing about this.
IPA: If Pinecones were Alcohol.
I think I know what you’re talking about, but it was from the TV series Monk. See my other comment in this thread.