Unpopular Opinion

Sometimes we do it that way because it's easier than the other ways. Sometimes we do it that way because we like the power.

Sooner or later the person in charge starts acting, not to stop the bad guys, but the fulfill his own agenda.

Because you can't account for what you can't see.

I have been with Wal-Mart three times and I'm still working for one today. For the record, I am not here to defend the Waltons and I'm not here to defend the corporate side of the company. I know and understand, after watching the High Cost of Low Prices at least twice, that Wal-Mart has done damage.

However, I've noticed something with Wal-Mart and I have participated with the subreddit regarding the company and read as many disgruntled horror stories of associates who hate where they work. I've noticed that, when you work for an absolute shit store, you're always going to be in for a nightmare of a time.

And that can apply to almost any job in a company that has chain stores. It is just down to luck, really. I know the store I work for, has driven me to my edge multiple times, I've stress-ate so I've gained weight quite considerably, I've been suicidal a few times and I have been through the grind. But I also understand that I can't place all of the blame on the store too because I've yet to have time off that wasn't approved and I've been given a healthy work-life balanced schedule where I can have time and still cover my expenses.

Wal-Mart does offer quite a lot, a fair number of things for associates that are a little too sweet to go without. You just make what you can with them. I've always advised too with associates who hate wal-mart so bad, that they shouldn't quit because the company offers you education. Just go back to school, the company pays for it, you take whatever you need to and get degrees then find another job before ditching Wal-Mart.

It also doesn't hurt to bolster your certifications too by taking on operating machines, that's skills you could put down on your resume, even if you can't carry the certifications out from Wal-Mart.

So yeah, I know the customers are entitled fuckwads, I know some managers are power-tripping pieces of shit, I know that you have a bone to pick with them over this and that. But, I can tell you that I've worked shittier jobs than Wal-Mart. Like, I almost became a call-center employee and I would rather be on the streets than work at those places.

I was looking at a couple of posts that express feelings of exhaustion and isolation that are extremely prevalent in modern life. And in the comments are people talking about how they're able to deal with those pressures. I don't think that's a real solution to the stated problems. The real solution is replacing the system that demands an exhausting and isolating existence for so many in order to maintain itself.

When someone says he feels alone, it's not helpful to recommend social clubs because the real problem is all the ways modern society inhibits community building and a lot of minor social interaction. When someone says he doesn't feel like he has time to take care of her physical health, it's not helpful to show your schedule to fit it into the busy day because the real solution is having more time available which is only possible if we change modern work culture.

Yes, it's possible for individuals within almost any system to find a stasis where you're able to fulfill your basic mental, social, and physical needs. It's even possible for individuals to thrive. But your solutions only work for you and maybe those with similar material conditions AND cognitive predispositions. Otherwise you're just making excuses for the level of harm modern capitalism places on people everyday.

Take care of yourself and resist where you can.

There is no debating that feminism was necessary back then. Socially and legally women were at a severe disadvantage and something had to be done. Of course it's a never-ending process as injustice will exist as long as humans exist, but the levels are very different nowadays in western countries compared to developing and exploited countries (no they aren't "developing" they are being held back, but that's a different topic).

At the same time, there was a lot of movement for social awareness and things like free love, queer acceptance, bodily autonomy, anti-racism movements, and a lot more were happening world-wide. France had massive left-wing protests and so did Germany. Many know of the movements in the US Black Panthers, MLK, Woodstock, Free Love, Flower Power, and turmoil that took place after Kennedy was shot in 1963. In Congo Patrice Lumumba was assassinated for his role in the independence of the country (leading to the Congo Crisis), Nigeria had its very own Nnamdi Azikiwe promoting an African Union (which came to be for a short while), and a lot more was happening.

One would have thought the world was going to radically change forever in the 60s, but then, very quickly, the biggest topic became feminism. It was on TVs, talkshows, streets, and much more. While other civil rights movements were being brutally stamped out, somehow feminism got bigger and had major support in the US by the Johnson administration (after Kennedy was shot) and (suprisingly) even the following president: Nixon (although he was still a fucking sleeze).

And thought by the 70s the social movements in the US were declining and still strong in Europe, feminism gained force.

Things have now changed significantly as feminism is now "evil" to right-wingers and religious types (with a return to rhetoric from their antagonists in the 60s) and still serves as a major distraction, but mostly because it is seen as a danger to the elite themselves. For a while, it served its purpose of distracting and also bringing more people into the workforce while successfully forcing the pay of single bread-winner to be insufficient and requiring two. The economical output doubled while remuneration halved (with inflation considered).

The bigger distraction now is "immigration". The elite and uberrich have now successfully shifted the focus away from themselves. Again.

(Basically a response I made on a community, feel like it belongs here too)

I think toxic podcasts have a big influence on young men, especially those who grew up without strong father figures. My own dad wasn’t perfect (I joke a bit about it on my profile), and many of us went through that risky “2015 phase” of consuming unhealthy online content.

What many politicians and advocates on the left often overlook is that toxic masculinity isn’t solved by telling men to be “less masculine.” You can actually counter unhealthy masculinity with healthy masculinity. Instead of shaming men, we should be teaching a better version of manhood one that includes therapy, emotional intelligence, and being able to talk honestly about what’s going on inside.

As corny as it sounds there’s a reason when there’s a bad take by a misinformed feminist calling all men evil on twitter ganders a response like “This is why men turn right” and sure while that stuff doesn’t work on me anymore, It’s not 2015-2016 there’s still some vulnerable people that unfortunately fall for it, does that mean though that the feminist is wrong in her views? Not really, but I’m not talking about myself I’m talking about a lot of men that do fall for it.

Most working-class men who grind through 9–5 jobs, going from shift to shift, are worried about affordability and stability. If someone comes along and says “I’m going to make your life easier,” that’s who they’ll vote for even if it’s Trump. You can call them naïve or say the leopards ate their face or whatever , but the reality is that many of these men are desperate for change. And they’ll keep voting for whoever promises that change. When society pushes these men aside or dismisses them, some end up looking for someone to blame. That’s when you get people saying, “Women are the reason my life is hard,” or “Jews control everything.”

Of course, some people are genuinely racist or sexist, and there will always be trolls who just want attention. But why do those trolls exist in the first place? Often it’s because they feel insignificant, and attaching themselves to extreme movements gives them a sense of identity and purpose they don’t have otherwise.

First, so I'm not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:

• Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
• Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don't have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn't mean you know anything about psychology.
• Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
• This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
• This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
• These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it's just straight-up made up by some religious leader.

There's thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people's world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.

(Again, just to make sure I'm not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)

I am not saying that more people using Linux is bad or that people shouldn’t use it (I mean, check my own post history; I am a recent convert myself), but if it reached the kind of saturation that Windows or Apple enjoys, it would bring not liberation but enshittification.

Nor am I trying to be some kind of elitist “the plebs don’t deserrrrrrve it” schlub; hell, I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and have to have a guide to handhold me through all but the most rudimentary, familiar-to-me-as-a-Windows-user tasks.

However.

A bar to entry (even such an ankle-high one as there is now) keeps Linux relatively off the radar of large, moneyed interests that would otherwise descend onto Linux distros and enshittify them in a heartbeat.

In other words, rather than “everyone who uses Linux will then see how bad they’ve had it under Windows and how anti-consumer certain software companies (let’s say Adobe for example) have been treating them!”, the more likely outcome would be “now there is Adobe Photoshop Linux Edition that is exclusive to the paid Adobe Linux distro” or other similar shackles and lockdowns and limitations (for which your credit card is the key), and the alternatives, not having ad money or corporate backing to prop them up, would be left by the wayside as other such enshittified distros/softwares gained users and traction.

Hell, just because a non-enshittified alternative to an enshittified software exists doesn’t mean people will know about or use it. To use an example, Excel is hardly the only way to make a spreadsheet. But it’s the one that is used, taught, known, documented, and widespread. It doesn’t matter that [some other software] is superior in every way if no one knows or cares about it.

Admittedly this is kind of my shower-thought guess and it’s not as if I have sat and thought through this thoroughly, but heck, here we are. Lay it on me.

The more I think about things, and how well stuff works in other countries, i believe it’s due to the sheer size and demographic makeup of the country. I often times wonder if it would be better managed with more of an EU style system where certain standards are core across all states and then leave each country to truly govern themselves.

I’m fairly certain this was the original goal when the country was founded and the idea of states rights, but at some it feels like things got flipped on their heads.

(Note, this is probably more of a rant and I know there are definitely things that would not work as well in that situation, but part of me wonders if it’d be a better solution than what we’re stuck with right now)

I always hear about the benefits of forgiveness, but that almost seems always like the worst choice.

I had a shitty family with mother that was manipulative which led me to being depressed for more than 4 years, while trying to forgive her and my sisters.

I finally took the decision to stop trying to forgive them and stopped talking and contacting them(since more than a month ago) and my mood and mind had never been better. I was even surprised about the speed depression left me since then.

My point is, forgiveness is a very bad choice.

Even Tit for Tat would agree with my opinion here.

There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.

There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.

In all three cases all they are doing is providing a platform. The issue with the size of the outages that we’ve seen should be placed on all of the companies that are opting to use them and only them without any regards to redundancy or design.

CloudFlare - There are other CDNs out there such as Akami and CloudFront

AWS - they have multiple regions, not just us-east-1. Also there is GCP and Azure, each with multiple regions

CrowdStrike - Okay there aren’t as many EDRs that do what they do, but it’s still the SPOF basket as the others

In every case I would argue it’s the inexperience, greed and path of least resistance to use these large companies and then blame the providers when something goes wrong, rather than the companies that have chosen to use these platforms. I understand that it’s easier to blame a single entity, but that shouldn’t absolve the companies that use them from being at fault.

I was watching the Movie The Substance and that film was basically softcore porn with an interesting message to say, who's to say Porn can't be art?

Sure professional studios don't care, They just want to show you the goods and that's it, but even with such studios they sometimes put the effort in, I remember watching a scene of Nikki Benz with Brazzers where she popped off a champaigne and you could see it in slow mo and I thought "Wait, so y'all are capable of actually having interesting shots"

Porn can be art, It's just most directors are lazy.

I've said 1,000 times (probably literally), on here and reddit, for nearly a decade, that Trump is easily understood and predictable if one understands malignant narcissistic personality disorder. Trump's picture will be in the DSM-6 one day, right next to the definition. If you aren't familiar with the diagnosis, please have a look for yourself. Not some pop-sci shit, look at medical definitions, the traits required for such a diagnosis.

Think a guy like that is putting himself in a subservient sexual position? For any sort of personal gain?!

But let's say you have some angle you find plausible from Trump's POV. What in the hell makes you think Clinton would want an old white guy to blow him? He's the poster boy for hetero horndog.

"But what about the text of the email?!"

Who knows? We need the preceding context. Ever joked around about the kompromat the Russians must have on Trump? Maybe it was that sort of reference? Ever joked that so-and-so must be sucking dick to get favors you couldn't otherwise understand? Also, notice they dropped it, zero further discussion?

This is a picture perfect case of social media taking a thing at face value because it's just too juicy not to believe. Don't know what the take is on other social media, but I find you guys taking way too much at face value because you want to believe. Be better, think critically.

tl;dr: Trump wouldn't do it. Clinton wouldn't want it. Makes for great memes, but it's absurd on it's face.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like the premise of GrapheneOS. The security features it offers are great. However, you're sacrificing useful hardware features by using it.

Currently, the only phones that support GrapheneOS are Pixels, which lack the microSD card slot, dual sims, and a HEADPHONE JACK! To me, those features are not worth sacrificing for a little extra privacy.

Compared to LineageOS, however, they support a broad range of devices, even pixels. I can look through their supported devices and find one that has a headphone jack, microSD card slot, dual sims, etc. Yes, it's less private than GrapheneOS, but it's still more private than stock android or any of those other OEM roms (OneUI for example).

You can still keep some privacy using LineageOS while preserving functionality with projects like MicroG.

Overall, I think for the time being, unless you are really paranoid or live in a anti-privacy area, LineageOS is the better OS to use than GrapheneOS due to still gaining some level of privacy while preserving useful hardware festures. Once GrapheneOS branches out from Pixel phones, I might change my opinion.

I know this is unpopular as hell, but I believe that LLMs have potential to do more good than bad for learning, a long as you don't use it for critical things. So no health related questions, or questions that is totally unacceptable to have wrong.

The ability to learn about most subjects in a really short time from a "private tutor", makes it an effective, but flawed tool.

Let's say that it gets historical facts wrong 10% of the time, is the world more well off if people learn a lot more, but it has some errors here and there? Most people don't seem to know almost no history at all.

Currently people know very little about critical topics that is important to a society. This ignorance is politically and societally very damaging, maybe a lot more than the source being 10% wrong. If you ask it about social issues, there is a more empathetic answers and views than in the main political discourse. "Criminals are criminals for societal reasons", "Human rights are important" etc.

Yes, I know manipulation of truth can be done, so it has to be neutral, which some LLMs probably aren't or will not be.

Am I totally crazy for thinking this?

Whenever I'm driving, I appreciate a good traffic delay, as long as it doesn't make me late. I tend to leave at a time where I'll be 20 minutes early if I need to be somewhere, so a modest delay for traffic just adds some extra excitement to my day. I love examining the traffic shockwaves caused by road work and such as well. I look forward to my morning traffic now that a road I drive on is a work zone.

Additionally, traffic is just super cool and human. Its the perfect balance between predictable and unpredictable. Also when I'm in really dense traffic I enjoy hanging out with all the other cars too, like I have some (very temporary) friends. and when I exit the highway, I always tell the traffic still on it "goodbye, have a nice day!" even though they can't hear me

lastly, when I get somewhere on time despite the traffic, it feels so good. It energizes me and makes me feel like I've gone on a grand adventure. Sometimes I'll even take detours through the gravel county roads and such and that makes for quite a wild adventure as these often get backed up as well when others have the same idea as me.

edit: by within reason I mean like a 10-30 minute delay. Additionally, I'm not a huge fan of congestion on roads with traffic signals, but on the motorway where we're all going 5-20 mph consistently its fun

I see it every year. People overspending just to celebrate Turkey Day. They don't even know what it is about. What it really is is over customerism for the food industry combined with something irrational gluttony

It's not the owner (although pretty often the owner doesn't help matters), it's the breed. I sincerely don't know how many children have to be eaten by these monsters before everyone wakes up to the reality of these dogs. They have bloodsport fighting genetics hard wired into their brains, the same way you can't stop a pointer from pointing or a herding dog from herding. They are the most impulsive breed, and they turn even on kind and loving owners all the time. Pit bull owners will flock to the comments to gaslight everyone about what wonderful dogs they are and how they must have been triggered by the child breathing or blinking and it's not the dog's fault. I'm attaching an image of such an argument I saw today.

I think many pit bull owners secretly like owning a killer dog, and just have some sort of oppositional defiance that makes them want to prove to everyone how wonderful their dog is, and until the dog turns on them will defend them to insane degrees. I think they like seeing people and pets and livestock get hurt or killed. I understand some people get caught up in romantic thoughts shaped by publications like The Dodo of helping a poor abused dog become a wonderful pet, and I totally understand wanting to help, and this isn't their fault, but stark reality sets in quickly when they bring the dog home and it promptly tears apart their cat.

The Bennard family is a prime example, they are middle class people who lovingly raised their pits from puppies, and when they were 8 years old one day the dogs killed their baby and toddler and hospitalized the mom in the ICU. Pieces of that baby were everywhere. Apparently the reason was because the toddler picked up the ball the mom was throwing for the dogs, but she had had to break up a very vicious fight between the dogs shortly before. For that two innocent children lost their lives, from family pets who were lovingly raised.

I know what many of the comments here will be like, but I stand convinced that not one of these dogs is safe simply because of genetics. They are doing what they are bred for, and it's high past time people get realistic about them.