To be frank:

If you tell a person named Josh that you are just joshing them after telling them something incredible, they want to kill you, but usually don’t.

There.

I was frank, but I’m not Frank.

Fucking English I hate this language sometimes.

Haha!

The youngest my ex was pretty sure they were forced to pierce was was 3.

For the record: It’s also child abuse to force a 2, 1, 0, or frozen zygote in an IVF lab to get it’s ears pierced unwillingly rofl.

Contextually this is a … board? Sublemmy?.. whatever, the context is obviously opinions, it completely makes sense that in an opinion … zone… someone would state their opinion frankly or cavalierly.

Firstly: wow, an actual unpopular opinion!

Secondly: I will go so far as to say absolutely tooooons of people wear earrings that I personally find extremely silly, unfashionable, or outright gross.

Sorry ear plug people. They look goofy when theyre in and they look horrifying when theyre out.

Probably this opinion of mine comes from knowing a person who managed to get their … ear loop? caught on something and tear apart.

Also: I think its child abuse to force a 3 to 9 year old to get their ears pierced.

I used to date a person who worked at a Claire’s… and they would tell me that they would often, as in multiple times a week, have a family of recent immigrants from… India? Bangladesh? … come into the store, and they would have to physically restrain a screaming obviously unwilling child to get their ears pierced.

Anyway: I think it is too far to agree that earrings in general are just bad all the time, but there are lots of cases where theyre done poorly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

No, it isn’t a traditional Chinese recipe, but many American Chinese restaurants have figured out a way to do an analog of it as I described, due to many Americans now expecting it as a basic staple of ‘Chinese food’.

Unless you go to basically a non franchise, non chain, actual asian/chinese restaurant/take out place… yeah basically if you dont do that, you are getting pretty much reconstituted chicken puree doused in… not really even real orange chicken sauce.

As with much modern food in America… its got waaaay more sugar and is missing other vital parts of the original way of making it.

Real orange chicken from a real chinese place tastes significantly different, and varies from place to place if they actually make the sauce on site. Usually a different medley of spices and oils… way more flavorful than extremely sweet orangeness.

Oh yeah, I watched the whole series at one point around 5 years ago. I could do with a refresh, love Adam Curtis!

Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

While the official mechanisms of government existed… people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

Overtime… yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin’s tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco’s tenets of fascism.

One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

But now, is it a dictatorship?

Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man… or if the entire economy/society collapses.

Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco’s tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator ‘if only for a day’. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.

No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.

Don’t Be Evil.

Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.

Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.

This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.

Yes. Its all over Insta as well, though far more common on TikTok.

Its astonishingly popular, and just barely altered, but promoted via extremely effective and enthusiastic social media influencers.

Wait wait.

Its… an incredibly powerful tool, but people don’t know how it works.

But also it works by triggering the placebo effect.

Ok so can you show me maybe something like a scientific study that shows that manifesting practitioners have a ‘powerful’, measurable, meaningfully different … any kind of outcome whatsoever, compared to non manifesters?

Is there evidence that manifesting actually triggers the placebo effect, as you claim it does?

You dont manifest a new car. You either make a plan to figure out how to acquire one, and it either works or it doesnt, or maybe you get lucky and you get gifted one by a friend, or you randomly encounter a scenario where you stumble across a great deal.

Compare the number of people who are manifesting that they want a car and end up with a car and the number of people who are manifesting a car and do not end up with a car vs non manifesters who do and do not end up with a car, in a given timeframe.

Im not aware of any studies on something like this because the notion is dubious on its face, not even having a proposed causal mechanism as you say.

But I would be very strongly inclined to believe that if a such a study were done, what you’d end up with is that manifesting has no statistically significant relationship to acquiring a car, and probably something like overall income or wealth and maybe number of fairly wealthy friends/family do actually have observable effects.

Look I totally am for a reasonable amount of positive self affirmation and self confidence.

But manifesting takes it to literally absurd lengths.

Myself never, but there probably … millions? tens of millions? of tiktok brained Americans that believe in ‘manifesting’, so being irrationally delusional is pretty trendy right now I guess.

Yep thats true never heard of it.

I have at least found that using DnD or other common RPG concepts can be useful in some regards. Dont take it too literally though, the real world obviously does not have a dungeon master.

You can to some extent view yourself as basically a character with stats, feats, skills and weaknesses.

It is possible to improve these over time, though how that works in the real world bears little resemblance to games.

But you can practice and learn new skills and they can end up being useful in niche situations.

Overall, Kenshi is closer than DnD to real life in that basically /everyone/ is playing by the same rules, you are not special, and trying to do something you are not prepared for can result in catastrophic failure.

Again: Do not take this hyper literally. There are similarities in some regards, but lots of stuff doesnt translate.

Theres a reason these worlds are generally designed to facilitate some kind of adventure and narrative creation: thats what many, probably most people desire.

There arent any roleplaying games I am aware of where the vast amount of /gameplay/ is doing a very boring and stressful job for low pay.

Because… that isnt fun. But thats the real world we live in.

So, yes, some concepts from roleplaying games can be beneficial to analogize to real life, but you have to be aware of the limitations.