A lot of younger people are legit shit at applying for jobs, like they don’t even read the job description and put the the position title… they just throw up a wall of buzzwords and copy-paste it and call it a day, showing the application reviewers they have no legit interest in the job.

Often the jobs being offered are opaque, confusing, or outright scammy. Often the people doing the applications are just bots testing the HR system for vulnerabilities or marketing reps looking to sell independent contractors.

I’ve lived on both sides of the hiring game, and in my experience just about the only way to get a job (outside of a job fair at a college or other meet-and-greet event) is via referral. The process of searching for and apply for jobs has become such a disorienting mess that simply spamming responses without bothering to read the job offer seems as reasonable a response as the HR method of throwing out hiring requests that nobody intended to read or respond to.

Just having basic social skills to like, demonstrate that you know what the company does and that you’d be interested in it’s mission, as basic as that is, sets your application above like 95% of the rest of them.

In a face-to-face interview, sure.

But in an entirely digital marketplace for labor, you’re legit better off just throwing shit at the wall until you actually make contact with another human being.

we are all under assault by a class war from the super rich

It isn’t strictly from the super rich. There’s layers to the class conflict. It’s like an onion.

You have a large and entrenched class of pensioners who do actively resist any form of liberal economic reforms. You have an incredibly lucrative tech sector that rent-seeks off the political paranoia of the internet age. You have a bloated leviathan of police state, upon which tens of thousands of parasitic Kandy Krush Kops subsist. You have legions of ex-military mercenaries, security guards, consultants, D-list celebrity personalities, and bouncers. Then you’ve got sheriff’s offices and prison companies and home security sellers and media propagandists and outright scammers, all drawing their incomes off a social fear of the underclass.

Plutocracy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A sizable chunk of the consumer economy is predicated on the process of violently suppressing the tier of labor below your own. We are not all under assault. Many of us are doing the assaulting.

I don’t believe you could make this as a terrestrial broadcast show on the Big Three Networks, but I absolutely believe you could make it as a series of YouTube Shorts or Mr. Beast style exploitation videos.

Imagine this with a soyjack next to it.

You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.

All things that are a pain in the ass.

Meat is the food of privilege, fascism, etc.

It’s the food of agricultural surplus relative to total population. Hunting and gathering cultures had plenty of meat, while beans had to be cultivated as part of the agricultural lifestyle to meet the demands of highly dense populations.

Modern vegetarianism is built on the backs of millennia of selective breading, agricultural engineering, and industrialization. There’s no shortage of privilege and fascism involved in that process in the aggregate. But it is a transitional process that yields a more utopian end point than the tribal libertarianism of primitive cultures.

I get not wanting to listen to right-wing misinformation like “it’s impossible for vegans/vegetarians to meet all their nutritional requirements,” because that’s bullshit. It’s absolutely possible, and not even difficult. It just requires some intelligent planning.

I do think that Americans have been trained to believe “Vegetarian” is eating a salad or a bunch of crunchy hors d’oeuvre.

There’s a famous story of a community in Mississippi plagued by health issues, specific to the white population. The workers in this town were subsisting on cornbread, molasses, and a scant ration of salted meat. But only the colored communities were eating beans, because it was considered a “low class” food. Consequently, the meager ration of meat wasn’t enough to fulfill nutritional needs for the white population, while the colored folks thrived.

Almost as though they’ve been refining their craft for 3000 years.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

What if I’m a slave by nature and incapable of doing anything to help my fellow man?

Enlist in the US military, I guess.

Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail?

No, because I don’t have them. I have a fake rock with a key in it and generally don’t bother locking my front door anyway. But I’m lazy and cheap, not terribly interested in changing out all my locks myself or paying someone else to do it for a marginal quality of life improvement.

Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys.

Sure. And if you’re setting up a security perimeter from first principles, that’s fine. But then you add an interior gate or you need to replace a lock that’s rusted through or yadda yadda life happens, and you can lose the single key design.

Case in point, my front door lock did foul a few years ago. My wife changed out the front door but didn’t bother to sync it with the back door. She didn’t want to bother with an electronic lock because she thought they were too expensive. So now we’ve got a front door that doesn’t match the side door or the garage door. And we only have two keys to the new lock, one of which has been lost almost immediately.

A digital system that I can just sync from my phone would be far more appealing than juggling keys. Or staring at a key dish and trying to remember which ones actually link to which doors.

Easy to forget that pre-AI Google was so full of link bombs and SEO-tuned crap that the front page was largely bullshit click-bait anyway.

I don’t need a link to EasterDatesLookup.biz to tell me when Easter is in 2026. I don’t need a link to PresidentalHistoriesNotebookExtreme.org to tell me Lincoln’s birthday. I don’t need MedicalWebPlus.md to tell me the symptoms for chickenpox. I don’t fucking need sixteen YouTube videos in TikTok voice to explain it all to me, either.

I’ll admit at some point 90% of my internet experience is just going to Wikipedia, so maybe my real mistake is going to Google at all. But if Google AI is just reposting text from Wikipedia anyway, that’s fine.

If you go online and criticize Democrats in any capacity, you are a secret fifth columnist MAGA saboteur.

You still need an interface. Bunch of ways to do it.

You help Trump come to power

More than likely no, you didn’t. The election was on rails when Biden decided to drag his moldy ass into a race he couldn’t win, rather than stepping aside after a single term and opening up the primary. Trump came to power because Merrick Garland refused to prosecute him for his many crimes and Silicon Valley swept in to money bomb him.

Individual voters had no say in any of that. The EC guaranteed they had only the most marginal say in which way their state went. And even the on-the-ground campaigns were dwarfed by the degree of corporate, industrial, and overseas manipulation of public opinion.

To say any given voter is “responsible” for Trump is like blaming any given butterfly for the next hurricane.

I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.

Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.

I work in IT and I’ve got most of those things.

But it is largely due to the inconvenience of installation relative to just coasting on existing home infrastructure. I also don’t bother with roof solar and home battery backups, a household wide firewall, or anything connected to a raspberry pi. Just implemented Jellyfin over Christmas and my wife regularly throws up her hands at it, preferring Amazon Prime or HBO Max at every opportunity.

For the most part, the cost of an individualized IT component isn’t worth the pain of support. If I was looking for an apartment or a condo, I would absolutely be interested in their building wide IT setup. But the whole point of IT is to deliver at scale. Homelabing can be a fun hobby but it’s a shit-pay second job.

Idk about the valiance of a bunch of those. A couple - banning bump stocks, rescheduling cannabis, psychedelics - were on rails from prior admins. I really don’t know about Project Warp Speed, given how he immediately tore the wiring of the program out in his second term. I guess I’ll spot you the penny.

If I was going to point to anything during his time in office, it was the Afghanistan withdrawal. Except that… glances at the half dozen other wars he started… idk if that gets to count on the balance.

glances at the traffic that’s been driven away

shrugs

It’s more often the reverse. You’ll see accounts in hexbear-adjacent servers posting “Why Stalin Was Worse Than Hitler” tier content, getting banned, and then coming over to .world to scream and cry about how they’ve been censored by the mean Tankies.