derfunkatron

Thankfully I must have avoided whatever business were doing this.

However, I have had the experience of attending schools that had weird urinal designs.

There was one where the urinals looked like regular toilets but without tanks or lids. They also didn’t have dividers and were placed in a position where anyone walking in the bathroom or using the sink got a full view.

There were other schools that had the “trough.” Just a six foot long piss bucket.

Doge.js is required to audit imports across interpreters.

May I interest you in renting this fine pineapple?

Intellectually I know that all currency systems are constructs and are volatile. That said, what bothers me so much about crypto is how it’s either an obvious scam or it appears to behave like company scrip requiring various exchanges or participating vendors, etc. It’s annoying enough using credit cards or systems like PayPal cash app, and crypto reads like a more annoying PayPal with all of the instability of a stock.

I rarely place much value on authority, but I trust a central bank or national treasury much more than three dudes at a startup promising to disrupt how we think of money.

“It was back it the early 2000s, around 2013 or so….”

The “2000s” also has no meaning for defining a specific time period. It should mean 2001-2010, but I’ve also never heard anyone seriously refer to 2011-2020 as the “teens” and 2021-2025 as the “twenties.” Those words are already associated with decades that we still culturally reference.

We’re a quarter of a century in and I still don’t know how to precisely refer to a 21st-century decade.

As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.

I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.

What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

The best retail job I ever worked was at a high volume liquor store. Sure, it was soul crushing to see teachers buying pints of vodka on their lunch breaks or to load the old widower’s truck with his weekly case of Carlo Rossi, but there were some upsides.

We were legally obligated to refuse a sale to anyone acting suspicious since our jobs were literally on the line - selling to a minor or selling to someone you knew was buying for a minor meant that you could get fined, jailed, fired, or some combo of all three. That gave us a lot of power to control the point of sale interaction. Liquor stores and check cashing business are heavily regulated so there are frequent sting operations to ensure stores follow the various laws and regulations; this made for a wonderful way to disarm cranky customers.

We also were told to not sell to unruly or obviously inebriated people. We had a “banned customers” binder with people’s pictures from the security cameras sitting on the desk at one of the registers.

We had strict hours because it was illegal to sell outside of the hours of 8am to 11:59pm on week days, or 8am to 8pm on Sundays. If you’ve never worked retail, you don’t know the absolute joy of being able to say, “make a purchase or leave; no customers in the store after midnight,” especially if you’ve worked at restaurant. I remember dealing with someone who was banging on the door at 7:50-something in the morning demanding to be let in and calmly telling them through the locked door, “it’s not 8am on our clock and that’s the only clock that matters.”

While I’m not a fan of the police or calling them unnecessarily, the passive threat of the police occasionally being in the parking lot for DUI enforcement regulated a lot of people’s behavior without us having to say anything or make a phone call.

I’d never work at a liquor store again, though.

It’s also part of the antagonism towards the federal workforce and an extension of the “deep state” conspiracy theory.

I can’t remember what this specific rhetorical device is called, but he’s luring people in with something that appears true at face value so that they arrive at a conclusion they wouldn’t logically arrive at otherwise: Hitler personally didn’t kill millions of people, but the Nazi bureaucracy and military did. Therefore, Hitler isn’t to blame for all the Nazi atrocities, the bureaucracy was.

Musk is redirecting blame, like you pointed out, away from leadership and instead leading people to the conclusion that if government were smaller, then evil wouldn’t have happened. What is especially stupid about this line of reasoning is that it will eventually lead to ideas like, “if we give the president more power and consolidate all decision making to a small group, then public servants won’t mindlessly perpetuate evil,” as if this isn’t exactly what happened in every authoritarian regime right before they started doing real evil.

Pause a moment and consider what are trying to accomplish with this argument.

Black Metal is not a Nazi genre and I don’t think anyone was actually making that claim. However, white supremacism and Nazi sympathies are common enough in the genre that it has its own scene to the point where it could even be considered a subgenre. It’s even known as National Socialist Black Metal.

The line is definitely blurry when it comes to some bands being labeled as NSBM when the band itself appears to be or even asserts they are apolitical. This makes it difficult to confidently make statements like “this is a Nazi band” or “10% of Black Metal bands are Nazis.”

But that isn’t the point of this thread; the point was “Nazis are overrepresented in Black Metal, so listener beware because you might find yourself sporting a t-shirt that advocates whites supremacy and cruising around town blasting neo-Nazi anthems.”

This isn’t about how many Nazis it takes to make a Nazi music genre or if people from opposite ends of the political spectrum are allowed to enjoy the same music. It’s about being aware that musical tastes can be hijacked to get people to listen to, or even defend, ideas they wouldn’t normally.

I had an atomic purple gameboy at one point and I miss that thing dearly.

I really enjoy seeing the components of a thing and most of my mechanical keyboards have translucent or semi-translucent cases.

They’re not high-tech, but “demonstrator” editions of fountain pens also hit this vibe.

And if anyone is curious, I’m pretty sure the watch in this image is a Swatch JellyFish (or an imitation). Swatch still makes watches like this, but this style is called Clearly Gent now.

I’ll help you on your quest for downvotes because this seems fun.

American religious anti-intellectualism as we know it really started with the rise of evangelism and fundamentalism in the 1890s-1900s. But it goes in phases: Pentecostalism emerges in the 1900s, fundamentalism and the rejection of modernity and science in the 1930s, anti-liberalism and various “youth” movements in the 1950s, television ministries and mega churches in the 1970s, religious political conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of the non-denominational “bible follower” churches in the 2000s.

But America also experienced several “awakenings” in the 1800s, which gave rise to all sorts of new flavors of spiritualism and Christianity ranging from Mormons to abolitionists. And there’s the rise of the (literal) Salvation Army in the US in the 1880s (but we really have the UK to thank for them).

It’s been incubating here for a long, long time.