phantasmish

8 ms·

91.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Enormous amounts of money and 30ish years (about 1980 or a bit after, to 2016) were spent building the largest web of propaganda distribution probably ever , to make this happen. Plus pioneering PR and crisis management strategies and test
92.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Most people have very little idea how anything works. Especially in the government, but it’s fairly true in general. Something like half of US adults don’t know how marginal income tax rates work, which is one of the very most-relevant-to-t
93.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
I’d bet this whole initiative exists only as an interface to issue fat “AI” contracts to pals.
94.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
3 dollars for every 2 up to 6% of pay? So you could get up to 15% of pay into the 401k (or the annual limit, whichever comes first)? That’s by far the best I’ve ever heard of. Usually employers screw us by keeping the majority of the max
95.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Crunched.
96.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" [edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!
97.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
My best guess is they lean so hard on “strode” because they are trying to convey “this character is confident” and aren’t very good at it. So you’ll get like ten “strodes” in a short novel. Everyone’s “strode”ing into every room they enter.
98.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Ah, I have no recent insight into that world. I’ll defer to you on this, maybe the “vibe”, as it were, has shifted even there.
99.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Understanding these might not be enough, even. IDK about the last entry but IIRC the first two works are basically in the “pop-science/self-help woo” category that hustle-culture people reliably fall for.
100.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking. Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is
101.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
I entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist . I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up
102.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible because most people aren’t aided by such guidance (most are) but because the sa
103.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Ah, there’s always zero-sum competition for housing to eat up any excess that might otherwise go to savings. That’s true. Money gets freed up across the board, you spend it on housing or lose ground in the housing competition. Good ol’ red
104.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
They’ll be fine in the “defense” industry.
105.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
I was super-interested in this years ago. My interest vanished when I encountered the “tour of duty” concept. I don’t make FAANG money so the pay was roughly a lateral move for me if it’d included retirement, but having it be time-bound r
106.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Our GDP would drop several percent if we fixed our healthcare system. Part of why we look richer on paper is that we light a lot of money on fire for exactly nothing.
107.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
In many parts of the country whole counties smell of pesticide for a few days every year (and pig-shit another few days, but that’s a different issue) I’ve lived in some of them, and my mom did a lot of by-hand weed-killer spraying (big p
108.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
The difference wasn’t subtle, and they cooked differently after the switch, too. Plenty of folks had the experience of noticing that they’d had a run of bad batches of fries before finding out the recipe had change (so now all batches wer
109.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
My grandpa’s greatest gaming achievement was beating Top Gun: The Second Mission on the NES, in the ‘90s. Perhaps his training as a B-17 tail gunner gave him an advantage, lol (he never fought, war ended after he finished training but befor
110.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
My recollection is that if you missed it you kept playing but were doomed to crash maybe 30 seconds later from low fuel. Talk about punishing.
111.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions. I had the game and the manual, but I can’t recall if I ever read the manual. I played the game a ton and was maybe 50/50 at the landings, but just followed t
112.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
The book’s outstanding and different enough to be worth reading even (especially?) if you’ve seen the movie a hundred times. It’s got a framing and woven-in narrative of the author stand-in tracking down this book his dad read him, discover
113.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
I definitely still notice the (inconsistent? Only occasional? Which makes it even worse) parts of my UI that now look like something from a circa 2001 Java (specifically—not flash, it’s the “cool” Java aesthetic of the time with its image b
114.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
I think the core trouble is that it's rather difficult to simulate anything at all without requiring a human in the loop before it "works". The simulation isn't anything (well, it's something, but it's definite
115.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Thinking that making scribbles that we interpret (!!!) as perfectly describing a functioning consciousness and its operation, on a huge stack of paper, would manifest consciousness in any way whatsoever (hell, let's say we make it an
116.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
> You're arguing for the existence of a soul, for dualism. I'm not. You might want me to be, but I'm very, very much not.
117.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Our brains actually do something , may be the difference. They're a thing happening, not a description of a thing happening. Whatever that something that it actually does in the real, physical world is produces the cogito in cogi
118.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
The simulation isn't an operating brain. It's a description of one. What it "means" is imposed by us, what it actually is, is a shitload of graphite marks on paper or relays flipping around or rocks on sand or (pick your
119.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced
120.
by phantasmish 10mo ago
Like social media, there’s a whole nasty well-funded world of businesses behind it doing everything they can to harm people if it means an extra buck. A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does

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