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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
ranma-official
willtherealmadridpleasestandup

you know how if you ask someone where they are from, they’ll tell you their country of origin like “Norway” or “India” or whatever but Americans are all “my parents are originally from ohio but i’ve lived in utah forever until i moved to houston- NY not TX haha” 

okay ashleigh you could’ve just said usa, but no you expect the whole world to know every state in your country when your 23 year old ass can’t point to china on a map. so now i’m on urban dictionary bc i thought SoCal is an artificial sweetener

aphilologicalbatman

THIS IS MY FAVORITE DUMB AMERICAN THING??? it captures the entire experience of being an American. it seems super dumb and self-centered to anyone who isn’t from here but it is completely comprehensible to any other American and also NECESSARY because most states are size of European nations and we have the same weird hateful feelings towards one another??? so I need to explain to you why you shouldn’t hate me like, bitch, you better not think I live in Texas bc fuck those guys MY STATE DIDN’T VOTE FOR GEORGE BUSH

yesterday, @freekicks accidentally referred to California as a country and I launched into a spiel about how we’re big enough and have the fifth largest economy in the world (SUCK OUR DICK) and she told me to go fuck myself and that’s how you know I’m a Californian (and she is a New Yorker)

but ALSO we are intensely competitive about how authentically whatever we are so you can’t just say you’re from New York when you really grew up in MINNESOTA and just moved to New York as an adult so I need to tell you that my FAMily is from SoCal and I spent a bunch of my childhood there bc I can’t say I’m Californian just bc I’ve lived here for four years DOESN’T COUNT

but I am Californian bc I’m a snotty asshole and also I say “the 5” when I’m talking about freeways and I eat too many avocados and I know how to pronounce Vallejo and La Jolla

eatingcroutons

Other Americans may find the distinctions important, but it still absolutely comes across as dumb and self-centred to the rest of us xD

I mean, it’s been over six years since it happened, but I still distinctly remember the first time I heard an American answer that question with “the USA”. It was his first time hanging out with my friendship group, and there were maybe a dozen of us there from as many different countries – and every single one of us was like wait, what??!?

Literally before any more introductions could happen, the entire conversation devolved into the rest of us bitching about how Americans always expect the rest of the world to know and care about the differences between their states and cities. (As if other countries don’t have deeply entrenched local identities and rivalries. And the size argument falls a bit flat when you’ve got people from China, Australia and Brazil in the room.)

In this case it turned out our new American friend had spent quite a few years living in Europe, where he’d picked up on the fact that this is something that the rest of the world finds slightly exasperating.

littlethingwithfeathers

This is good to know as an American. Like seriously. I had no idea it came across as arrogant. 

But for the record… it is actually important to us. So that’s why we tell you. I’m not from the United States. The state/city I’m from happens to be in the United States. That’s literally how we think about it, because to us saying we’re from the US is totally unhelpful. And because the vast majority of us don’t/can’t get off this contintent very often, we don’t really have practice answering the question, “where are you from?” with “The United States.” Also… I would figure the accent would give it away.

Also, it does control which American stereotype inevitably gets pulled out. The number of times I got asked if I played the banjo because I’m from the American South… I swear. But at least they weren’t saying, “Fuggetabbatit!” or “Surf’s up!”

alphariusthecontrarian

The Entirety of Europe is 3.931 million square miles in area (About 10 million Square kilometers)

The United States is 3.797 million million square miles in area.

Saying “Im from the USA” is, geographically similar to saying “I am from Europe.”

We are the third largest country in the world. The difference, geographically, between California and New York is about 1000km larger than the difference from France and Russia, and you pass 3 or 4 fucking countries between France and Russia depending on route.

So how is it self centered to give more detailed information? Like if someone said they were from the UK I would ask what part, because a Scotsman and an Englishman are very different, and they fucking border each other.

So fuck off.

ranma-official

Russia is significantly larger than the USA, yet I feel the need to elaborate exactly what part I’m from, neither do I lie that my country is literally more culturally diverse than the entirety of a continent because you cook mildly different burgers. You fuck off.

mitigatedchaos

Irony: Europe is pursuing internal open borders, unified currency, and a federal state, moves that will promote Europe becoming more culturally uniform over geography and less culturally diverse at the continental level, like the United States. People will claim that won’t be the outcome, but we already have a United States for comparison. (Likewise with global open borders and culture.)

Source: willtherealmadridpleasestandup politics
xhxhxhx

mitigatedchaos asked:

What is your opinion of me? And what do you think of my plot to replace congress with a new legislature of political party/think tank hybrids that bet on outcomes of legislation (as outlined in my "The National Delegation" posts, where I still owe squid another post but I won't have sit down access to a computer for a while)?

xhxhxhx answered:

on The National Delegation:

  • I think it’d be hard to legitimate such a goofy system ex nihilo and I don’t think its performance would be enough to legitimate it in action
  • I have a bunch of cavils about specification: I don’t think you could define policy outcomes or contract conditions with sufficient precision to make the market deep or efficient under most outcomes, and I don’t think you can define values with sufficient precision to make that constraint binding 
  • I don’t think the policy outcomes would be much better, except to the extent that you might fix the system by excluding ‘incoherent’ or ‘imprecise’ values – which would mean the system wouldn’t really be doing what it promises
  • I’m deeply skeptical of any regulatory system that’s this hard and finicky – it’s like you’re putting the FDA or the FTC in charge of the whole system of government, and I don’t think market discipline is enough to get federal agencies to behave themselves
  • I think its worse than electoral democracy, although that’s not an especially strong belief, and I think it’d underperform purer technocracies or a purer liberal states

on you:

  • you put effort and thoughtfulness into your work – that’s good and that’s rare
  • I’m too much of a liberal to appreciate your commentary
  • you’re very kind and thoughtful, and I haven’t done enough to return the favor
mitigatedchaos

Oh, there appears to be a point of confusion - values are informal, not rigidly specified. And values are not explicitly what is bet on. It’s more along the lines of both parties claiming their legislation would reduce gun crime, as they often do, and betting against each other and with amounts, and “gun crime” is defined as a bundle of metrics to prevent min-maxing. It occurs to me that because so much policy is just flat out wrong at achieving its supposed aims, some fairly large improvements should be possible with even that much of a check on whether it works.

Ofc, there is also the question of what a purer technocracy would look like.

politics policy national technocracy the national delegation
garmbreak1
nuclearspaceheater

Just saying, neither Google nor any tech company would be in the spotlite rite now for their gender balance if they dealt with their programmers only as faceless public keys recruited from the darkweb and paid in untraceable cryptocurrency.

mitigatedchaos

I’m sorry but no. Gender activists would not give up that easily, even if it were literally forbidden to admit one’s gender and all transactions took place through text. After all, what’s the gender ratio of the dark web?

garmbreak1

no data:no data

mitigatedchaos

That’s just another way of writing dudebro:dudebro, as the thinkpiecers have informed me that tech is male-dominated, and therefore we can safely assume the darkweb is misogynist. Otherwise, why are they hiding?

Source: nuclearspaceheater shtpost gendpol :l
nuclearspaceheater
nuclearspaceheater

Just saying, neither Google nor any tech company would be in the spotlite rite now for their gender balance if they dealt with their programmers only as faceless public keys recruited from the darkweb and paid in untraceable cryptocurrency.

mitigatedchaos

I’m sorry but no. Gender activists would not give up that easily, even if it were literally forbidden to admit one’s gender and all transactions took place through text. After all, what’s the gender ratio of the dark web?

gendpol
argumate
argumate

@reasonandempathy: Shockingly enough, what he expressed weren’t political views.  They were views as to why his coworkers were inherently inferior to him at their job.

everyone is saying that, and Manifestbro may have believed that, but it seemed like the memo itself was mostly focused on the lack of applicants and the salary negotiation issue, both of which are already widely acknowledged in the industry, I didn’t see it as saying anything about the quality of engineers already hired.

discoursedrome

(It’s been long enough that I should probably reread the damn thing before wading back into this, but I’m lazy so I’ll skip it and accept the increased risk of ownage.)

The Mainstream Media™ takedowns of the memo have been predictably bad, but this counter-take I keep seeing that he didn’t say anything to justify much offense on the part of his coworkers also seems kind of silly to me.

His thesis was, in essence, that Google’s gender diversity initiatives were a mistake, and that attempting to increase the proportion of women in Google was a bad idea. My impression was that the programs he criticized had been going on for long enough to impact the workforce, so this is tantamount to telling anyone who worked there because of them that they shouldn’t be there in the first place. I would certainly expect people to take offense at that.

The other issue is that he attempts to distill the question of systemic oppression – and feel free to substitute something like “inappropriate structural discrimination” if that’s too buzzwordy – down to “does systemic oppression cause all the gender imbalance in tech, or none of it?” That is pretty much flipping the bird to people who think they faced an above-average amount of systemic oppression due to their gender, or would have in the absence of the programs he’s criticizing.

It’s worth noting that all his arguments about natural disparities existing, and of the futility of trying to push against them, could have been made without running into either of these problems. These weren’t, like, bitter pills one had to swallow to believe that sex explains some variability in traits that influence choice of profession and that this might have implications for proponents of Absolute Gender Parity Everywhere. So I think it’s fair to say that he comes off as appreciably more hostile to coworkers than the stronger elements of his argument can justify.

argumate

I suspect one could write a hypothetical Memo Prime which does not cause offense, and I suspect that no one would be interested in reading it; maybe someone can whip up a graph showing probability of something being accurate and useful and relevant vs. probability of something being interesting and widely read and discussed.

mitigatedchaos

brazenautomaton

Anonymous asked:

why now? why didnt the social heat death of humanity happen ten years ago, or fifty, or two hundred?

brazenautomaton answered:

Increased communication technology increases the speed at which entropy devours new things, and increases the baseline level of entropy new things begin at.

The heat death of civilization couldn’t happen before Twitter, but Twitter can’t be un-invented.

mitigatedchaos

Twitter can’t be un-invented, but it can go bankrupt and from what I hear, may do just that. And the backlash is still brewing everywhere. Deconversions are generally permanent.

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