Sigh. Todays word of the day is kakistocracy.

Anecdotal, but I’ve been tracking a package for over a week as it made its way across the globe. This evening the USPS site is throwing an error.

Morning edit: back to functioning. But you really never know with the clowns in charge.

For now, as of this moment, that’s not likely the case for the vast majority of folks in the U.S. There are no guarantees that will be true in the future, or even 8 minutes from now. (Which, I note, is also in the future, but it establishes the scale of my expectations for the collapse of pro-social mores in the U.S.) No word on folks who have broken healthcare systems in other parts of the world, however.

Yeah. No. I get that.

But the thing is - if they actually view your work as good, both in terms of quality and quantity, then the disjoint is the result of a comparison between your real self and some iteration of your ideal self.

Feeling bad about that is just an exercise in self-abuse. Minimally, you do enough that they see your value, and that’s enough, innit? Although, ideally, it shouldn’t matter at all what they think, but that’s easier said than done.

Nota good fit for the sub. They’d have to share it elsewhere, I’m afraid.

The rules are that they can’t take off or land unless everyone is properly seated.

The pooper was forcing the entire plane to remain in the air.

Many years ago I was on a plane that hadn’t taken off yet, and someone was in the bathroom. They couldn’t taxi until the person returned to their seat, and after several announcements, flight attendants wind up having to knock on the door so the person (who I assume at that point was hiding due to embarrassment) would return to their seat. We missed our takeoff window with ground control and had to wait an additional half hour to find another window. All of my flights connecting flights were delayed until it could land, but a severe storm blew through, grounding most of them for about an hour more.
In the world of flying, these sorts of small delays have unintended consequences with system-wide effects.

But the pilot featured here was beyond the pale. That was a grotesque and inappropriate response.

I sincerely hope they’re smart enough not to trigger that.

Someone posted an article elsewhere on the thread about China practicing “dogfighting” in space - which, after you remove the fear-mongering, is just them figuring out how to do satellite-satellite maneuvering. Still immense opportunity for runaway collisions, but it seems like the military applicability is more toward sabotage than blowing things up. I could definitely see a scenario where high value satellites have had small boosters affixed to them, their electronics tampered, or some other way of commandeering or de-orbiting them to deprive their owners of them. A microwave + laser could disable smaller sats from above, then ablate some of their exterior to sap momentum so gravity drops them in short order. (Maybe. That’s idle speculation, but generating the power and dissipating the heat in space could make that idea impossible.)

That seems less concerning to me after reading the article.

Russia and the US are also known to conduct proximity operations to their own and other satellites, she added.
[…]
Referring to China’s operations as “dogfighting” in space is “not helpful” because it “automatically ascribes hostile intentions to activities that frankly the US also undertakes,” Samson added.

It’s concerning that they are developing the capability (which can be used in multiple ways) in the same way that any geopolitical rival developing capacity that competes is concerning, but “dogfighting” evokes the idea that China is planning to fly around and blow stuff up, in an irresponsible, Kessler syndrome-inducing way.

The same people who regularly give us uninspiring and insipid candidates to run against demagogues and repeatedly act surprised when they lose ground expect to gain control of a White House where the current president is treating democracy as if it’s an optional hindrance – expect to take power?

If nothing else, I admire their optimism.

This is that “when they came for ____” moment when the people of the U.S. need to do something.

I hope they do. On purpose.

This might make me sound kind of shitty, and I don’t care, but I lie about my productivity.

Can’t harness the ADHD superpowers for a project that has a 4-month timeline until the last two weeks, then bang it all out to perfection in a frenzied mania?
Every status update is ‘I’m making steady progress. I have x, y and x done, but I’m having struggles with this part of it, etc.” I don’t lie or misrepresent the actual state of my progress, but I do downplay how much work I get done while riding the rocket of ADHD productivity. And I also play up how much work I do while I’m stuck trying to squeeze some dopamine from the rocks in my head.

If I bang out a project early, I guesstimate what should be done when, and reveal those parts at status updates along the way.

Sure - I still know that I’m inconsistent, and perhaps not living up to my actual potential in every situation, but I also know that I can outperform everyone I work with when the fire has me. So rather than show the gaps, I mask and don’t deal with the guilt.
Personal belief - work is about value extraction from you. If you show that you’re not maximally providing value at all times, you could be subject to judgement. So, show that you’re working steadily and avoid the judgement.

In other words: Set the expectation and roll with that expectation. But let the ADHDemon loose a month before evaluations come due. Your boss forgets too, but the demon likes raises and will definitely give you dopamine for that prospect.

I had this happen to me in my 30’s. (Sorta.)

Polyamory - a woman who hadn’t been taking on new partners started dating me. My other girlfriend’s husband began awkwardly pursuing her with no grace or finesse. It got awkward. An acquaintance learned that I was dating the second woman (who had also only recently gotten back into the scene), and began pursuing her.

It’s like some guys think that because a woman is available to one (well, two or three), she’s available to all. It felt very much like blood in the water to a shark.

I had not considered that as a possibility/did not know.

That definitely throws a wrench into the subscriber only idea - at least not without admin support.

I assume that most instances have some rule against vote manipulation. A complementary idea I had was to - for a set period, make a post restating the change and request that community members upvote it for visibility. Such as 1x post a week or what-have-you - varying the day to accommodate for folks on different schedules. (Workday folks, vs weekend folks, etc)
Definitely an option without the request for upvotes, regardless of instance rules, but perhaps without as much reach.

The difference is that I’ve only ever received notifications from automod as a reaction to something I did, and those notifications came in either as a comment reply or as a direct message.

I looked it up - the last time I interacted with this community was 5 months ago. I’m not a subscriber, either.

I can understand the importance of casting a wide net for awareness, but I think your scoping and your approach was wrong.

If I may offer a few suggestions - I don’t think the idea is wrong, but I think that the messages should have been direct messages to users that clearly explained why that individual user was receiving the message, plus whatever else you needed/wanted to say.
I would have had more rigid criterion for inclusion, too. Subscribers, certainly, and perhaps people who have interacted with the community a minimum number of times within a limited time period. For me, 3 times in 3 months seems generous enough to cast that wide net while also not being overly-broad.
So if I were executing this, I would have had the bot direct message people, and say “Hello, I’m a bot acting on the behalf of X community. You are receiving this message because you are a subscriber or have recently interacted with the community. We wanted to let you know that the community is moving! It can be found at Y.”

The bulk tagging action was, I think, especially egregious. Posts with massive amounts of tags are a very common spam technique and people automatically have a negative association with them. Pair that with non-specific criteria and relatively non-descriptive explanations, and I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for folks to have adverse reactions.

I hope that you consider the above as fair, and not overly critical. I’m not trying to throw stones. Everyone is human here. Well, except for the bot. But even it makes mistakes.

Ooooh, so scary!
They hide their work behind public websites, and make their decisions in shadowy public meetings that (mostly) can be joined and participated in online. All their secretive work is hidden behind publicly accessible docket systems, hearings that anyone can attend or join as an intervenor, and open workgroups. If that’s not enough evidence of a clear conspiracy, consider this: Anyone can use the deep state’s FOIA laws to file a freedom of information act request to get more information about any topic. OoOoOoOoO

I’m not a subscriber, but I probably have commented in the community before. This feels gross and spammy.

They’d threaten legal action for defamation and bury it before it was published.

That’s sort of the funny thing - I think my experience/exposure to muriatic acid sort of colored how cavalier I am about it. I didn’t check precise concentrations, but a gallon can be had for $10 from a hardware store. I’ve seen guys just pour it on the floor, slosh it around with a mop, and seem to have no care whatsoever about incidental skin contact or getting it on their shoes. (They did wash their hands after, but seemed unhurried to do so.)

Not that I’m advising cavalier behavior with hydrochoric acid, but perhaps I have a shifted baseline for understanding the caution one should take. (I mean - I’ve never worked directly with it myself, so…iunno.) Also very possible the products I’ve seen are a lower concentration than the ‘bubbling, foaming, melting your face’ concentrations of HCL we might otherwise expect.

It does come in a plastic bottle - HDPE, I believe, so I think a standard paint pen would work for it. Provided the wicking material was not organic, it would probably survive just fine.

No, that’s bullshit.

As a pretense: You have boundaries and you understand that others have agency.

If someone tries to guilt you into doing something, you enforce your boundaries. If you feel someone you know is being forced into doing something, you make your case and you back the fuck off. Their agency guides the choices they make, up to and including making choices that you, yourself, would not make.

Claiming that civilization is being manipulated by ‘weaponized empathy’ is horse shit designed to dismiss the agency of the people who made choices to help others. It’s sociopathy wrapped up in reasonable enough sounding psychobabble.

Musk is a sociopath so convinced of his own greatness and so desperate for a tax cut that he’s willing to let people starve and say it’s because he knows better.