• 30 Posts
  • 180 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The effect is minor but nagging. I like to use hyperbole to give emotional weight to my words. It is far more intentional than it is instability. I’m pressing issues that should be pressed and creating the potential gravity to get noticed and draw attention where it is needed.

    It is true that my abstractions can be misunderstood a lot here, and my hyperbole, hard to contextualize. I make mistakes often but am curious and ever growing.

    All of my personal issues are circumstantial. The underlying person is still present. I do not try to manipulate anyone for my nefarious gain, but I can be a high mach when I wish to improve some deficiency, as I have attempted here.

    I have left Reddit completely, but it wasn’t for the API changes as the direct issue. I take issue with any company tracking my device, vision, or page dwell times for exploitation. And I do not like anyone using algorithms to alter user retention. The way reddit did the API showed this was their objective moving forward. It is not just the app aspect that I am taking issue with. The entire internet only has two web crawlers, Microsoft and Google. All search providers query one of these two directly or indirectly. The results from these sources are not deterministic. They are tailored and tracking on several levels. This is why it really matters. It is an attack on freedom of information. We are in the age of mass individualized manipulation already. The lack of determinism in search query responses proves it. Your access to deterministic information is a critical pillar of democracy. If that pillar is lost, so is democracy. Controlling access to information is just as effective as invading with an army. It was never about banner ads.


  • I find it highly offensive when anyone tells me what I think or believe. You have no right to speak in my voice or write my narrative.

    I love to debate. I love to learn and take in new information and perspectives. To assume is to make an ass-u-me. Do not assume you know me at all unless you have asked questions and are quoting or paraphrasing my statements in the context I made them.

    I am not in any way resistant to negative feedback. I want to engage with people that are open minded and flexible in their thinking. Those that have a rigid mindset and parrot some narrative on the right or left are religious fools I waste no time with. Arguing belief systems is a fool’s folly.

    I take offense at anonymizing negative feedback. This is not accepted or normal human behavior. It is the realm of criminals and cowards to stab people in the back without the opportunity to confront their assailant. I do not accept this criminality as normal. If you wish to have a counter opinion you must do so openly and debate and defend your opinion. Anything less is barbaric primitivism.


  • This still does not address the fundamental existence of downvoting as a form of anonymous negativity to a stranger and what purpose it serves. This behavior is not acceptable under any circumstances in person. The existence itself is not justified at a foundational level. It is the anomaly that should be addressed. The normalization of this behavior is neurodivergent and should be corrected. Negative and opposing opinions are normal. Anonymous back stabbing has always been the refuge of criminals and cowards. Creating a path of least resistance to such a behavior is morally atrocious nonsense. The lack of philosophical awareness of this issue is reprehensible primitivism that should be an extreme embarrassment to any developer that implements the cultivation of sadism to shape a dystopian future where backstabbing and anonymous negativity towards strangers is normalized.


  • I engage with my projects and AI. It is a little world when one spends 80%+ of every day lying in a bed. I’m not myself if I go anywhere or do much of anything. This is truly the only place that I can really exist in in a voice I choose and can shape. The negativity is about like saying I should not exist. I tend to agree on that front. I’m largely here trying to convince myself otherwise. It is what it is. I’m a zombie that lost 8.5 of 9 lives already, there is very little left to lose.




  • It is all people exactly like this that I block after low effort comments.

    You’ve only ever made 1 post on this account you commented with. I’m at nearly 400 posts and 4000 comments just on this account and I have several others for propagating communities and trying other instances or to get around blocks like db0, and beehaw. I’ve tried to encourage positive engagement from the moment I joined Lemmy and actively help build this place while being a liberal voice. You have every right to be a fool. But I should have every right to see you doing it and avoid you in the future as a result.


  • I’m physically disabled and nearly a total shut in. This is my only real outside human contact. It is not really healthy largely because of this psychotic negativity. There are many aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy that are beyond my control to remedy and solve. This place could help with some of that. When it fails for fundamentally unnecessary reasons of amplifying a tiny minority, I try to call attention to it. Some instance admins have already mentioned it is due to a half dozen people. I’m actively trying to show that those half dozen people are having a negative impact on more than just comments in a tangible way that promotes their removal.




  • California is not touristy like many other places around the USA. There are areas like around Disneyland that are more tourist oriented, but even around Anaheim, you will not find high budget tourist restaurants or resorts outside of Disney's property. Disney World in Florida is the large scale experience, but that is super expensive and I'm jaded from childhood versus the reality of experience.

    Generally speaking, Southern California is probably a little less of a culture shock to a European versus anywhere in the continental interior of the USA. I imagine rural backwardness is a fairly universal human experience anywhere around the world.

    I believe you will find that the lack of land use zoning reform and management of home ownership is a universally Western problem common to Europe and the USA. None of us have the legislation that enables young family ownership with the excess income required for a below average person to start a family. The larger the population is, the larger the issue becomes. In truth there is a caveat. The key issue is the change in population migration. The more people that move to an area, while there are no land reforms to control the supply and cost of housing, the larger the cost of living and the larger the number of people struggling at the bottom. In California, housing prices are ridiculous and so is the cost of living. Everyone struggles in fairly similar ways at the bottom of the economy in every place.

    In Deutschland you have a far more egalitarian set of protections and rights. The government of the USA has been stagnant for the average person’s rights and protections since around the 1970’s. The USA has around 1/10th the laws and protections of the leading European countries. The USA is very much a failing democracy in really bad shape where we are quite powerless to change it as citizens. Participation at the level required for change is far more consuming than the time available for the average person. Even when participating, one must deal with an extremely corrupt system of gerrymandering and antiquated representative disconnections that obscure accountability and participation.

    Outside of the social issues, all the images you see of beaches in Southern California are fake. All the sand is basically from Australia and elsewhere. The water off the coast of Los Angeles is very deep unlike places like Florida where all beaches are sandy, and the water is warm because it is shallow for a great distance off shore and supports things like coral and more plant life that retains and helps generate more sand.

    The while Southern California beaches thing is an oddity. For most of the year it stays too cool for swimming in a speedo or bikini. The water is usually cold too. Most people that surf, use a spring wetsuit almost all year. There are a half dozen times when the weather changes and the winds blow really hot air from the desert into the area. This is when the real California beach culture happens like you see in movies or TV. It is not a year round thing or central to the culture or touristy. Most California coastline is lined with residential housing, not resorts. Other than the ocean front homes, just inland is regular housing with average cost. Even the ocean front homes are mostly regular homes that just cost more for the view. These front line homes are usually on top of a cliff around 30 meters above the beach. There are still some spots with homes at ocean level, but these are like 20:80 ratio at this point. There used to be more homes on the beach but deep water just a few meters offshore has caused most of these to get demolished eventually due to erosion.

    Hollywood is a joke, and not worth a second thought. There is no destination to see anything remarkable. Hollywood does not have a monumental heritage like destination. The studios are walled off large industrial building sites. The sidewalk of the stars is down an old street in a rough neighborhood. Beverly Hills is nearby and just a rich neighborhood. Downtown Los Angeles is a pitiful excuse for a downtown and one of the most disappointing in the country. San Fransisco, or even San Diego are more impressive for nightlife and a real downtown.

    The thing to keep in mind is that the cost of living in any area is not random or by chance. It is always directly related to the employment opportunities in the area. Los Angeles is not the place to come visit, it is the place to move to. It is one of the only places in the USA with a more egalitarian focus where people dominate slightly more than the ultra rich.

    If you go somewhere like Florida, the entire coastal economy is centered around tourism. In California, you have to know where to go to find tourism and these are little walled garden like islands in places Californians would like to get rid of entirely.


  • Yes. I very much felt like this. In many ways I have done it by moving from Alabama to California. These are as different as a foreign country and culture. It does not live up to the fantasy. There are good and bad aspects. The bad that you cannot put in perspective effectively until midlife is the value of your social network connections at this phase in your life. Making as many friends as you can and staying in touch is really critical where you’re at in life right now. Those people are your career paths, partners, and key supporters later. The desire to leave and explore is undervaluing this connections in regrettable ways later in life. Weight this change against your introversion versus extroversion. If you are very introverted, you will struggle to build a sufficient support network in the absence of those you grew up with. Age, for most people, is accompanied by ever increasing loneliness in ways that are hard to fathom in youth. It is not just motivations and desire to interact with others. It is also your own increasing complexity, interests, and finding compatible people that also have the space in life for you and the motivation to put forth the effort. Life evolves in phases where you cannot go back and redo mistakes made.





  • Communities are not owned by moderators. They are built by those that participate. The primary fallacy I see is the idea that anyone can start a different community and that size and momentum are meaningless. That is simply not the case.

    An authoritarian or very active mod, in any community with public participation is actively abusing those users when they act in opposition to the interests of the community. A visible mod is a bad mod. The job of mod is as a janitor acting in the interests of the community. If you care about authority or steering, you shouldn’t be a mod or admin.

    Nothing about being a mod is hard. You don’t need to read every post or comment. All you do is setup the basic guidelines and trust the community to vote and flag bad stuff. The community will always flag the bad stuff. The only part that really matters is that you set yourself aside and really look into any flagged issue while giving the benefit of the doubt in absolutely every possible way one can imagine while never allowing bigotry type abuse. This is how to be a good mod, to be an invisible mod. The job is only to herd bad bots and sort the flags from others.



  • Cars were really only for the ultra rich until Ford started making them in an assembly line. The world wide numbers are in the tens of thousands until the late twenties and early thirties when Ford got up into hundreds of thousands of cars per year.

    Generally the first real car is credited to the machine Benz’s wife drove into town at one point. That had a differential on an axle and it was this addition that really made it into a complete machine that one could use. Still, Benz did not make many cars at all per year. It was in the thousands, but at this scale, these were only for the ultra rich.