SatanicNotMessianic

Bellingcat is among the best investigative journalism sources out there.

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.

If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.

Understood and I apologize if I violated protocol. This came up in /all and I am both an MCM owner and enthusiast, so I felt the need to say something. I’ll still stand by my observations - we tend to be Eichler folks out here but I love everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to the Starship Enterprise. I categorically withdraw the comment about it not being a McMansion, though, since that was not its intent.

Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

You’re absolutely right. In my memory, though, the ones that stick out the most are the ones where the hero is pro-corporate but in an anti-corporate way. I’m thinking about movies like Working Girl, 9 to 5, and Secret of My Success, and even Other People’s Money. The villains were the very straight and square boss types and the heroes were the young(er) upstarts who could out-business them. OPM was a little different but I think it fits the theme.

The main difference I’m seeing is that even in the pro-capitalism shows, it was still all about sticking it to the man. If the good guys were cops, the man was the chief of police. If the good guys were businessmen, the man was their boss. If the good guys were soldiers, the man was their CO, or the generals or politicians back in Washington.

Maybe it’s purely subjective on my part, but it seems like there’s a lot more pro-authority movies being made now. You can’t take a movie like Top Gun (which still had the shaggy haired rebel as well as one of the most homoerotic themes in mainstream cinema at the time) with something like Bill Murray in Stripes. Stripes is great comedy that I’d place almost at the level of Caddyshack, but even though both movies could have been shown by recruiters to get people to enlist, Stripes was still a goofball comedy of the slobs against the snobs (with the snobs in this case being their leadership).

I’d really like to get back into that kind of default cultural image. Cops were mostly corrupt (Serpico) or idiots (Cannonball Run), or else inept (Escape from New York, or all of those stupid Charles Bronson movies).

It just feels like we hit that point where the default is to love Big Brother.

Wasn’t there also a report today (I think) about an unusual level of sunspot activity? Without digging into it, I think I sort of just assumed they were related.

I have AT&T fiber and a Verizon iPhone and I didn’t notice disruptions on either. My partner has an AT&T iPhone and didn’t notice any issues.

I mean, okay, I do get that. Just to set expectations, I am a gnostic atheist, meaning i actively and positively disbelieve in any and all gods. I’m not saying that we can’t know that no gods exist, I’m taking the position that it’s intellectually honest to stake the claim that no gods exist. I was raised a conservative Catholic with a full Catholic education and family members who entered the clergy, and I also did an in depth study of Theravada Buddhism including a two year sabbatical where I studied and meditated six to eight hours a day.

I’m contrasting this approach with the “hell is other people” afterlife story of Sartre where we spend eternity surrounded by other people who are as miserable as we are, and the reason we find them miserable is because we are ourselves so miserable. Obviously, he takes a few more words to get there, but that’s the basic point. The horror he portrays is core to the existential threat of The Other - the person who we define ourselves through their definitions of us, but whom we can never know just as they can never really know us. That’s one that can take a lot of time to get through.

Someone else mentioned the story The Egg. I can’t remember the author of that one, but I randomly ran across it years ago from a random internet mention, and it struck me as one of the most kind and human afterlife stories I’ve ever read.

I read this story as being very much in line with very many of the well established religions in the old world. I could see it as a Buddhist story (which is how I interpreted The Egg), but I see it as being entirely compatible, at least as metaphor, with most eastern religions and philosophies. I think you might be over-generalizing from a particularly American approach to fundamentalist sects of Protestant Christianity to how people throughout history and around the world have approached religion.

I have to tell you that Jews will generally refrain from using the term “Judeo-Christian.” It basically comes off as if someone were referring to “Christo-Islamism.” Where Christians see continuity, Jews see at best a retcon that’s appropriating the literal god of the Jews. Of course, the religion of historical Israel lead to what we call Judaism today, but was polytheistic and generally the same as other local regional religions. I’d still argue that the Abrahamic religions (which I think is a better catch-all term) are not in general monotheistic, except for some sects like some types of Unitarians.

In any case, I think this is an interesting core, but I see the message as redemptive. I see it as far more redemptive than the one shot and then eternal and infinite torture that some Abrahamic religions hypothesize.

Again, I’m a hardcore atheist and materialist. I think that when I do breathe my last breath - which could happen tonight or in 20 years - what will survive of me is the “me” that I’ve left in other people. It might be because I helped them, or I’ve hurt them. It might be because I’ve saved their lives or because I’ve indirectly caused the death of their friends and family. It might be students and colleagues I’ve inspired or ones who would burn me in effigy if they cared that much. That, plus the money and crap, is what I will be when my consciousness ceases.

Another (I believe again that this is French) existentialist koan (if you will) is that a spirit appears to you on your deathbed and tells to that you will relive your entire life exactly the same as your last one, and does that make the spirit an angel or a devil.

In any case, what I’m saying is that it’s a good idea that would probably benefit from being expanded (but read The Egg first so you don’t just accidentally repeat it). I just don’t see it as disturbing, as the people to whom it finds resonance will feel comforted and to those who have more fundamentalist positions would take the dismissive point of view that I have when I read a Chick Tract.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

Not to scale.

I mean, it’s pretty far from the best MCM I’ve ever seen, but the great room is pretty nice. The bedrooms really would have benefitted from floor to ceiling windows and the bathrooms are actively hideous. Not sure I’d want to live in Peoria either, but the price is reasonable.

Also as an aside, I don’t think you can count 1960s MCMs as McMansions. I associate the term with those houses built in the mid-2000s that are 6500 sq ft with four car garages but are built so cheaply that the walls shake if someone slams the front door.