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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.

    Except that’s not what’s happening if you read the article, on either count.

    Women aren’t resisting childbirth as an act of rebellion or as an exercise of their rights, there’s just too many competing pressures in their lives to table in having kids. Coupled with declining rates of attachment and a distraction-based economy, this isn’t a ‘win’ for anyone.

    And population decline is a crisis we don’t know how to deal with. Old people have little economic output, but use up a lot of resources. It means the kids who are still born end up carrying a huge burden paying for and caring for older generations, they end up tax serfs in an aged care-based economy, and if older generations aren’t cared for you end up with human atrocities on a massive scale.

    Most of these comments are problematic. You don’t have to have children, but for most people it has been a pretty consistent and natural inclination. Now a whole generation are convincing themselves they don’t want children when they really just can’t, and rather than holding those responsible to account and improving all our circumstances, they’re treating it as some personal victory.








  • Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

    Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

    And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

    And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

    Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.








  • At some point during his attempted coup, he realised it wasn’t going to work

    When was that, exactly? Putin fled, reserve forces were standing by and not fighting Wagner, and he was a day out from an undefended Moscow. Worst case scenario was a protracted civil war, but he still would’ve lived longer than this.

    Honestly, none of this makes sense. The fact that he aborted in the first place makes the idea that he was conspiring with Putin the whole time to flush out disloyal elements within the Russian armed forces seem credible… but then why kill him after? I’m not ruling out the possibility that either this was a genuine accident, or it was another false flag and he and his second in command just faked their own deaths.


  • A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

    Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

    Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

    A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.