Lately, whenever anyone draws the obvious parallels to 1984, posters seem to jump to say that Orwell had unsavoury beliefs and therefore it negates any correct thing he ever said.
It’s such a weird world where we decide someone must be 100% correct by today’s standards or else everything they ever said must be complete bunk.
All of our historical heroes were assholes by today’s standards, and we will be assholes in the eyes of our descendants.
When I was 16, I took the city bus to school and we had bus tickets that you could buy at the local corner store. The corner store was a 3 block walk from my house, and I was going there one day to buy a sheet of tickets. As I set out walking, a man in a white van slowed down to whistle/shout sexual things, which is sadly something that teen girls experience regularly - that occurrence was just another usual day.
But then, the man started circling the block over and over as a method to follow me. When I hit the Main Street he pulled into a gas station to pause and see which business would go into. And when I entered the convenience store, he parked the white van in front and stood on the front steps smoking and blocking all exit points.
I asked the convenience store clerk if he had a back exit I could run away through. He did not, but the man went to the front steps and yelled at the man and got him to leave. He parked across the street still watching, so I waited in the store until I saw ANY bus coming to the nearby stop and immediately got on. I took that to a crowded shopping mall and passed enough time until I felt that I could get back to what I was planning to do that day.
Life is disgusting for teen girls.
I’m not sure that’s true. In day to day life, I find the majority of people will accept whatever the media tells them to accept.
The normalization of AI in the past couple of years has been rapid. Even my 70 year old aunts are delighting at AI-photoshopping themselves into flowers and revealing outfits. Prospective employees hand in chatbot-created resumes and cover letters, masking the fact that their spelling and grammar is godawful.
The media will tell us to celebrate the end of overpaid actors and influencers, and many people will be pleased to see them knocked down a peg.
And then forced to battle in a dogfighting ring because we interpret them repeating their name as a sign that they love it
MAGA is itself a religion. They are Christian because it gives them an excuse to treat women and dark skinned people badly, not because they believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
If they have to choose, MAGA aligns with their beliefs more than a segment of Christianity that many Evangelicals already dislike.
I can see how it looks that way. The cheese curds don’t melt the way regular cheese would. If the cheese curds don’t squeak, it’s not done right!
Poutine tastes a lot better than it looks
It wouldn’t make much of a comic strip. Before the critters finished asking for a ride the Canada goose would have been in a flapping, violent rage and attempting to peck their faces off.
It’s a cartoon series that does nursery rhyme songs, largely to the same 4 melodies with different words. Kids get mesmerized by it for whatever reason, very little to be learned from it. It’s what you use to park your kid so you can get dinner out of the oven without your child burning themself.
I have no doubt that he is too lazy to read the religious book that he purports to champion
Pivot seems inadequate as a term here. You could pivot from making shoes to work gloves.
But from shoes to AI infrastructure? That’s more “my company failed, and using the same name and corporate structure is a way to save money on my unrelated business idea”.
Sometimes I think that if there was an anti-Christ, they wouldn’t be aware that they were the anti-Christ. If that’s the case, JD Vance would be the perfect candidate.
One challenge is that the lifestyle that people have come to expect is only affordable by outsourcing production to other countries for slave labour prices.
People want 7 pairs of running shoes, to own every kitchen and garage gadget possible, and to buy little items as pick-me-ups every few weeks. There would be an outcry at children picking our food for 3 cents a day or indentured servants making our clothes if it were visible, but these services are shipped far enough away that most people can just smile and enjoy their new $30 shoes without seeing the abuse. And if you tell them about it, they say they are poor too, which is the equivalent of covering your ears and screaming “la la la la la” to avoid processing it.
Same here! I don’t like the idea of my money funding their abhorrent administration
My kids accidentally stopped a shoplifter. We stopped at a Walmart on a road trip to use the bathroom. As we were leaving, for some reason all three of them decided to tie their shoes in the vestibule, blocking most of the doorway. There was a very agitated lady behind them, and I tried to move my kids given that I was aware how obnoxious a place they had chosen for shoe tying — I assumed she just wanted to leave the store. But as she tried to get around them, she dropped a pile of phone charging cables and cases and was caught by a security guard chasing her
But she needs a picture for her instagram - if she doesn’t post about it, it didn’t really happen!
A few years ago, I set my mind to understanding stock market investing. It had always looked intimidating, but I have a couple of degrees that required me to pass chemistry, physics, and engineering courses - I figured I could learn if I put my mind to it.
What I discovered was that the stock market is mainly hype. For all the formulae and Greek letters that look complex and deter the general public, the emperor is really wearing no clothes.
Stock prices rarely follow fundamental analysis of value, and rather mostly pre-empt news cycles due to insider trading. And technical analysis seems to be a bunch of fortune tellers who think they have discovered Newtonian calculus by drawing tangent lines off cherry picked data.
Furthermore, the entire system supports the enshittification of our economy. When a company is supposed to make MORE profit every quarter rather than just maintain profitability, it leads to lower quality goods and services and worsening work conditions.
I’m a dentist and we get summaries of the disciplinary actions taken by our board. A few years ago, there was a male dentist who finally lost his licence for grabbing patients’ and staff’s breasts. The summary read that he had been disciplined for this five times already and they were only just waking up to the fact that he should no longer be licensed to practice.
Do yourself a favour and try some real cocoa hazelnut butter from Quebec’s Allo Simonne or from Toronto’s Roasted Nut Company. Decadent, lightly sweet, and without the peculiar greasy texture from the palm oil.
Bullshit factory is very apt. I was using it for an open book exam and it gave answers entirely skewed to the way the question was asked.
For example, if I asked “is X bacteria a pathogen in Y disease”, it would say yes, it was a very bad pathogen.
If I asked “what effects does X bacteria have in this body system”, it said it was a beneficial bacteria.
Never trust the AI summary, you have to fully read the studies.