Asklemmy

I refuse to watch cable news, don’t have regular tv, and not a fan of visual media for news anyways. I would love something like a Lemmy/reddit mega thread where I can refresh and get up to the minute updates, but from professional news/journalists. But without the faux drama reality tv stuff that the cable news networks always do. I also love podcasts so if there’s a listening medium that isn’t overly dramatic that works too. Any suggestions?

The subjects that you can't even bring up without getting downvoted, banned, fired, expelled, cancelled etc.

Consider this installment three of my previous question which is the second installment. For Election Day, I was researching the history of voting which has taken many forms. At one time in history, people voted by dropping rocks in holes corresponding to their candidate, with the one with most rocks being the candidate who won. We've had many forms "of voting", from rocks in a well to paper ballots to voting machines to whatever this anime concept with glowy lights is. Each method has had supporters and critics, for example critics of voting machines will say it can be rigged, critics of paper ballots will say papers can be mismanaged, and critics of counting yard flags as a method will say it's too tedious to do it all.

Suppose we discovered dolphins could understand democracy. So here you are coming up with a way to "express a vote". Underwater, paper shrivels, tech may short-circuit, it's hard to dig a hole with classic equipment, etc. unless you have a way to make something work. How would you teach dolphins to manifest voting in a non-rigged yet massively usable way?

Here’s my 100 most listened to albums on last.fm for reference of what my taste is like, don’t let that stop you from recommending me things you think I won’t like though I’m trying to expand my horizons.

I also like listening to small artists, I write a series of artist features all about people less than a million Spotify listeners so if you have any recommendations for that lmk.

So here's mine. At the time, I didn't find it funny, but as an adult, I can understand how this is hilarious.

So I'm a pretty smart guy. I was a smart kid who had(s/d) a pretty good memory. I remember things from when I was about 2 1/2 to now. Some are blurry, but there's this one that sticks out to me because of the monster I saw.

Disclaimer: Most of what is typed is dramatization for entertainment purposes, but the actual situation is real

My parents and grandparents were big on camping. I spent a lot of time in the woods from when I was a baby. And we weren't a family that did "glamping." We slept in tents, we'd go fishing for food, bathe in a lake or a creek, so on and so forth... and we would do this for a week in the summer every year.

We'd have roasted fish filets over an open fire, my grandfather would catch the fish in the morning (he was the best fisherman I've ever seen personally) and then would take the kids to go pick blackberries so my grandma could make a cobbler for desert for lunch and dinner.

So we did spend a lot of time out in the woods. So when I was about 3 was when memories started. My grandma likes to remind me about the time I would "preach" at chickens, and she loves the story. She embellishes a different way every time to try and get me embarrassed and I have to fake embarrassment because I remember talking to the chickens and I remember in brain what I was trying to tell them. It was that they needed to share. One hen kept getting pushed aside and wasn't able to feed. She was the skinniest and was standing in the back of the group. So I started lecturing the other hens that the last hen couldn't eat. I was a fat kid and I guess even then, food was good for everyone (my hobby is cooking now).

So i digress... I've bragged enough about my fantastic memory (humble brag).

So the family was camping one week, and I decide, while no one's looking, to go and check the woods out on my own (about 3 yrs old). I'm having a great time exploring the new world around me. I was a genuine forest dweller.

Until I heard a rustle below my feet. A strange stunning shock filled my body. There was a creature ready to crawl up my leg to finished my eldered 3 years of life on this planet. I thought I had fought my last battle and that a memorial would be raised for me. I withdrew the rest of my heavy amount of courage and looked down only to see the monster for what it was. A grotesque beast the craved nothing but blood.

I quickly made the choice to preserve my life and make a tactical retreat. I ran as fast as I could to receive strength from my superiors in support of combating this creature from hell.

Just kidding. I wondered off in the woods and encountered an armadillo. My 3 year old brain saw this crazy creature and immediately knew it was a monster.

To this day, I'm 40 years old and I hear this story every family gathering. Never fails. The time I was 3 and saw a "monster."

Perfectionists tend to wonder this, now I'm asking.

Here is what I mean by this. Out of all the times I've been to a doctor, been visited by a cop, called the cops, been to court, went to school, and so on, I've realized lately that I haven't had a single good experience with any of them.

Doctors either always tell me nothing is wrong when something is wrong or said something was wrong when something wasn't. Got traumatic brain injury? Oh it's just a bonk on the head. Got blue balls? Bring em in, doc needs money. The presence of doctors here is so inconsistent with recovery from things like illnesses that the place resembles the stereotypical Sparta-obsessed fascist nation where hospitals don't exist by design.

Police and courts will give you no luck at all stemming from having absolutely no consistency with how they deal with things whatsoever. I've seen child abuse cases where babies are left with behavioral issues that mirror those child rehoming documentaries and the abuser gets two months, while also seeing small cases of assault that lead to two years. I've had instances where I ask police about something they can do. "We'll look into it" they say. Nothing happens. The next thing that happens, they're blaming me for a dead tree from my yard with a branch that snapped off and fell on a neighbor's fence, and I go to get sentenced.

My teachers were like these examples too. Did I benefit even once from my teachers? No. Did I benefit from the social environment? No. Did they treat me like Mr. Burns treats Homer? All the time. They didn't see me as a person, they saw me as a goal. And they would never mind cheating their own rules to achieve it.

And the moment they don't think they have a job to do regarding you, the same jobs they half-ass anyways, they treat you less like an individual to remember and from time to time treat as an equal human and more like a bird you pushed out of a nest without intent to hear from them again. And I didn't realize this until recently, that I have no positive experiences with public servants. Makes me almost not want to work.

Anyone else?

During world war two there was quite a rise of xenophobia against Japonese because of the acts of the Japonese empire, do you feel like xenophobia against you has increased in the past years?

You you are also from a ""enemy"" country from the US, you may also give away your experience.

You can take the sweater off when you're not sleeping, but it has to be on at night no matter the temperature.

I think I would demand like 200k, just for the discomfort from the scratchiness. I already sleep with a winter blanket all year round so I wouldn't mind how warm it would get.

I like wearing my thick jogger trousers as they are soft and comfy to go with socks, sometimes I'll even sleep with them on as they have a thicker fabric than most of my pyjamas.

Plus I when going for a grocery run I can wear them out with no fear of being the crazy outdoors pyjama man.

What are your favorite clothes to wear as winter creeps in indoors?

You're a prison abolitionist. You're in a high stakes discussion where you have to answer seriously and be convincing.

Someone asks you : "yeah, but what are we to do with people breaking the law, then? What will you replace prisons with ?"

What will you answer?

Edit : Thanks a lot for your answer, they were very interesting and reflecting different ways to frame a world without prisons.

Except from one or two edgelord hot takes, of course.

I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.

Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?

And dumb it down for me, because apparently I'm an idiot.

My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s, totally broke, living with my parents, no job, no career, no future, living in cambodia with no opportunities and no way to claw my way out. I’ve looked on Indeed, there’s nothing. Zero. Zilch. My college degree(computer engineering) got me nowhere. Besides that, my country is a toilet now and rapidly becoming worse with an insane cost of living. Everything is going down the tubes and I am powerless to even cushion myself against the imminent impact. I think if nothing else I just want to kms .

I don’t think I’ve ever felt this awful in my life. Thanks. Sorry for this mess and I know I’ll invite a lot of ridicule. I’m sitting in the dark doing nothing right now.

Remember that instance? I don't seem to remember if we ever got a reason as to why it just vanished. Anybody remember what happened?

In my country it has been made easier to change the gender in your passport. I think it's a good step forward. But since this has officially been decided, multiple times people used the sentence above for any gender related issue, with derogatory attitude. For example when talking about quota of women at work or pay gaps. When I just look at them, because I'm missing a good response, they add something like "now it's easy, everyone can change it just as they like". I don't know how to concisely respond to this. There are multiple things wrong - as if discrimination would disappear by "changing" gender and the obvious dissent about it being a progressive step that everyone can decide for themselves now what the gender entry in their ID is. What would be a good short response in a situation like this?

Good morning, Lemmy. I come to you with a request for help. We want to crowd-map some communities on Lemmy.

Since we are on lemmy.ml, I'm taking for granted a degree of political alignment, which probably is not worth discussing in this thread.

Within the broader context of the Tech Workers Movement, we are building a database of communities, hashtags, influencers, or generally friendly digital spaces in which tech workers, or people generally interested in tech politics and tech unionization, congregate and produce/consume content. The goal is simply to help union organizers, movement builders, theorists, agitators, and really anybody involved in the tech workers movement to discover where to find online tech workers receptive to political content.

To do so, we have a quickly growing public database that accepts submissions through a form. We also explain the methodology used to curate the database and give hints on how to submit an entry.

Database

Form

We want to focus a bit on expanding the Lemmy section, so feel free to submit your favorite techno-political communities. Communities generally about technology are also fine as long as they accept a degree of mild political content. If you just want to reply to this thread instead of submitting the form, it is also fine and we can have a discussion going and you can directly share your relevant communities with the other users.

Thanks in advance for your answers ^^

I know, I know, mostly just undergrads care about undergrad prestige (except resumé bots on LinkedIn scanning for "MIT") but I'm curious about the average Lemming, who might lie less often than Redditors and probably isn't a hyper outlier. Though I still expect selection and response bias :3

Let me start with my own wall of anecdotes.

1. An old American embedded systems mentor I once had had had like two master's degrees, but in his words,

Just get a Bachelor's and a good internship. If the company will let you do it on their dime, then get the Master's.

So the college-then-job thing wasn't quite cause-then-effect.

2. Another friend I had said "All of the higher-ups in the chip engineering dept I'm gunning for have a PhD. Wanna contribute meaningfully? Probably gotta have one too" (Somewhere in the entirety of Asia, exacts hidden for privacy). So grad school matters more in that case.

3. My old econ teacher told me that, if you want a job where undergrad is just a stepping stone, then your undergrad "prestige" mostly doesn't matter (e.g. pre-law, pre-med). And saving 50k in undergrad student loans to then dump into matching the S&P is a cheat code at age 18, worth far more than "initial salary". ~not~ ~financial~ ~advice~ ~lol~ In this case, the "get your job" isn't even that important.

4. An acquaintance I once had pipelined from Cornell to DeepMind. There, prestige and its opportunities probably/definitely/maybe had an effect.

5. A second acquaintance says his Canadian public school (iirc) only mildly helped him, so he went all-in on making his own networks outside of school to get into AI (Is he a hustler bro or something?). So he dodged the idea of college choice mattering.

6. A Harvard acquaintance I knew says both their dad and granddad agreed that going to Harvard played into getting their positions. (No need to believe me. I forgot what position tho -- finance/big business probably)

7. The managers and manager managers my parents knew often only had community/state school undergrads, sometimes with MBAs.

8. I don't care about CEOs. All outliers anyway.

So what have you empirically found? And where? (inb4 "American elite school obsession bad" and "CS is skill-based, not school-based, thread over" -- heard all of that already)

You can be vague if needed c:

It can be a small skill.

The last thing I learned to do was whistle. Never could whistle my whole life, and tutorials and friends never could help me.

So, for the last month or two, I just sort of made the blow shape then spam-tried different "tongue configurations" so to speak -- whenever I had free time. Monkey-at-a-typewriter type shit. It was more an absentminded thing than a practice investment.

Probably looked dumb as hell making blow noises. Felt dumb too ("what? you can't whistle? just watch"), but I kept at it like a really really low-investment... dare I attract self-help gurus... habit.

Eventually I made a pitch, then I could shift the pitch up a little, then five pitches, then Liebestraum, then the range of a tenth or so. Skadoosh. Still doing it now lol.

(Make of this what you will: If I went the musician route my brain told me to, then I would've gotten bored after 1 minute of major scales. When I was stuck at only having five pitches, I had way more longevity whistle-blowing cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-running-around chromaticisms than failing the "fa" in "do re mi fa".)

So, Lemmings: What was the last skill you learned? And further, what was the context/way in which you learned it?