But how many bookstores do you know the location of in your state, just for reference? Because my guess is it’s still too big to know even a quarter of them, which I think op’s post was about.
If the conversation happened at all, the poor possibly-fictional American was probably just trying to talk about Hay-on-Wye. Hay-on-Wye is the most famous book town in the world, with a prestigious literary festival and so many “shops with all the books in” that the streets are literally full of open-air bookshelves. It’s like Pinterest and Diagon Alley and Waterstones all created some kind of massive hashtag-book-life village for the sole purpose of trying to attract Americans. It’s on the Wales/England border and a tourist would have approached it from Bristol.
This is hardly an unreasonable conversation starter, not like how British people are always demanding to know where I’m from, and then, when I release the information, say chirpily “I have a brother in San Diego!” as if that isn’t on the other side of a continent. And then! ! the only thing for it! is to say “Oh, I don’t believe in San Diego”! and turn away!
In general, the premise of the OP surprises me a bit, because I bet that I could put a photo of a single tree from somewhere in the UK on my Tumblr with a slightly incorrect caption, and three people would immediately correct me, because they would know that specific tree with an uncomfortable intimacy. I know because you have done this to me. It’s like a national pastime for you all. I’m shaken by OP, I am shaken to my fucking core and I respect them so much for having this terrifyingly novel attitude. I bet they’d look me dead in the eyes and tell me they had never heard of London. This is some kind of Gen Z shit that I’m not prepared for.
Because I know, I KNOW that I could spout a bunch of gibberish CAPTCHA word salads that are much more obscure directions than this, and y’all will IMMEDIATELy know exactly where in the British Isles I was talking about to a fuckin’ five foot radius, like some kind of wild scavenger hunt, you’ll all be like “oh did you enjoy it Elodie? did you go to the tea shop”
I swear to God I’ll do it. how do we place bets. how does that work exactly, does anyone know
Tags:
#UK #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #home of the brave #geography #discourse cw? #embarrassment squick? #(I actually kind of find it weirdly gratifying when people ask me questions about where I’m from with bad geographical assumptions encoded) #(I know that sounds unlike me but) #(I tend to suck at foreign geography and I find it reassuring that foreigners also suck at my geography) #(like it’s fair you know? it’s not just me‚ means I don’t feel as guilty about Shouldn’t I Know This) #((I’ve had multiple people at work express concern about my relatives dealing with hurricanes)) #((and I’ve had to explain that we’re from the *north*east and hurricanes are just big thunderstorms by the time they reach us)) #(((unless they’re named Sandy))) #(((but Sandy was a pain in Ontario too))) #((one time I told a Brit I was travelling to Massachusetts and he wished me luck with the jet lag)) #(((it’s in the same time zone))) #tag rambles
That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.
I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.
Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.
cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.
why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.
the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.
in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours
the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).
there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.
how did productivity get so high since then anyway
You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?
Yeah, we already did that.
We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.
So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.
would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week
No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.
Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.
As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.
Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)
But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.
—
(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)
—
†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.
Namely, the budget in your link uses a lot on things like subsidies and cross border arbatrage (ie. buying food in New York, and driving to Canada).
These things work out for individuals, but do not work on the scale of large chunks of society.
Under conditions where things are bought at market rate cost, that would not work.
11-20 hrs on the average wage is probably realistic (I currently spend a little over about ½ of income, and I earn close to the us median household income) But not on the min wage.
Let’s see:
Electricity subsidy: 0.23 hours/person/week
Medication subsidy: I don’t have the exact figures on hand, but judging from the way overall medication expenses dropped when we got into the program, maybe 0.3 hours/person/week
Cross-border arbitrage: an optimistic estimate gives 0.8 hours/person/week, it’s probably much less
Tax ineligibility (has health insurance as sub-component): I’m not sure what the appropriate measure would be here. A bit of googling suggests the income tax burden on a household making the median income is slightly under 24 minimum-wage-hours/*household*/week, but I’m not sure how to apply this information properly, and this might not even be the right approach for the question.
—
Anyway, and more importantly, I already said I don’t expect it to scale. (I’m actually surprised that the things you latched onto are the subsidies and arbitrage rather than the lack of children, something I expect has a much larger effect and *also* doesn’t work at all if you try to apply it across a large chunk of society.) I’m mostly reacting here to the idea that *nobody* could pull it off, that it’s laughable to think that anyone could get close. (”You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???” I think there were others in other branches, but I’m not sure where.)
(Well, let’s be real, I’m *mostly* reacting to the many, many other arguments I’ve encountered over the years that rely on an assumption that People Like Me do not exist, for a variety of aspects of Like Me. I am very tired of this sort of thing.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post
That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.
I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.
Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.
cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.
why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.
the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.
in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours
the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).
there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.
how did productivity get so high since then anyway
You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?
Yeah, we already did that.
We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.
So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.
would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week
No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.
Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.
The fair comparison probably isn’t 1:1 with 1950s U.S because of technology improvements.
A more apt comparison would be 21st century countries with similar per capita rGDP as 1950s U.S.
But still having the same standard of living as the typical South African probably isn’t much more aspirational.
As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.
Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)
But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.
—
(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)
—
†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post
I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).
Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:
If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for.
They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
Posts in chronological order like they should be!
A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.
So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.
If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.
If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can.
This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!
Um.
Look, I understand why people would think having veto power over your OPs is a good thing, but also I really don’t want a site where bits and pieces of *my blog* are rotting out of existence because the thread originators unilaterally decided to delete them. Especially if–and I can’t find anything in the site’s about section that says for sure whether or not they do this, but it seems like the most obvious way to handle it–deactivating your account deletes all of your posts. You ever look at a years-old section of someone’s Tumblr and see how many of the OPs are deactivated? I want my blog to be an archive, not just an ephemeral stream†.
And I don’t want comments to be sequestered away within their associated posts, so that it’s not a standard action to say “hey, Brin often has interesting things to say and good taste in things to say them about, I want to be shown every thread where she comments”.
(having the *option* to make a particular comment sequestered rather than shown to your followers is good (perhaps a more robust version of the Tumblr “reply” function), but it should not be the default)
(likewise, occasionally you want a post to be sequestered, and I do agree that a better version of Tumblr would have a friends-locking system)
Pillowfort doesn’t have the best parts of Tumblr. It has the parts of LiveJournal that make LJ inferior to Tumblr, the parts that exalt posters over commenters, force you to make primarily OPs or be a second-class citizen.
Each blog being a combined feed of the user’s posts and comments *is* what makes Tumblr great, and no “”new and improved”” Tumblr-inspired social-media site is ever going to have a hope of attracting me and others like me until they understand that.
††Notice how the OP on that post deactivated two years ago? And I’m still able to show you what my comment was?
Tags:
#reply via reblog #<– my favourite thing about having a Tumblr #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #amnesia cw #discourse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Pillowfort
Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.
It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.
But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced” operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students.
Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests.
When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?
My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.
(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)
(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)
—
I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…
One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.
A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.
The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in University Land #proud citizen of The Future
Oh god, I’m seriously tempted to get into a fight with these smug idiots.
Somebody please stop me.
(*chants* “they’re the ones with all the power here, you can tell by how strenuously they insist that they’re powerless, they will beat you to an even bloodier pulp than they’ve already done and walk away without a scratch no matter *what* you do to them”)
Tags:
#just once I want somebody to look at me the way that I look at them #with paralytic terror #just once I want to win a fight #just once I want someone to grovel at my feet and beg me to stop hurting them #too broken even to fight back #I want the interactions I always have sooner or later with everyone #but I want to be on the *other* side of it this time #I’ll even be merciful enough to let them grovel openly rather than couching it in euphemisms #that’s more mercy than they show me #venting #vagueblogging #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #abuse cw #oh look an original post
There is something really wonderful about the word “chill.”
Long long ago, I was telling a friend that I didn’t like certain of my parents’ behavior patterns, and doing so in very formal nerdy language full of phrases like “behavior patterns,” and after a lot of verbiage he just replied, “you wish they were more chill.” And I said, “huh, yeah,” and he said something about how it’s great that colloquial language can be so efficiently expressive, and I nodded along, and it seemed like one of those feel-good sentiments that’s true but not all that deep, and that was that. But maybe it was deeper than I gave it credit for?
So, a few things about “chill.” First, the boring one: it’s a positive thing. Describing someone as “chill” is almost always praise, and when someone tells someone else to “chill out,” they are telling them “do this good thing you aren’t currently doing.” So far, so obvious.
But “chill” is unusual as terms of praise go. It has a certain contextless quality; it doesn’t feel like something you can discard the moment some other value becomes more important. Sure, you can have arguments about whether being chill is appropriate – if your house is on fire and someone tells you to chill out, you’ll probably say this isn’t the time for that. But the very concept of “chilling out” contains the notion that we are frequently less chill than we should be – that there are lots of times when our minds are telling us our houses are metaphorically on fire, and we need to see them for the liars they are.
I’m not just talking about anxiety here, although it’s a clear-cut example of the dynamic. The bigger point is that by treating “chill” as a generically good thing – by taking “they’re chill” as praise even if nothing else is said about “them” – we’re acknowledging that stepping back, taking a wider perspective, asking whether you maybe should chill out, is a good thing to do in virtually any situation. Sure, sometimes you ask the question and the answer is “nope, my house is on fire.” But you don’t get to circumvent the question entirely because the matter at hand is just so serious; that itself is un-chill.
Compare this to something like “kindness.” Kindness is also a “generically good thing.” But while we have the concept of kindness as generally good, we don’t have the concept of “making sure to ask whether you ought to be kind, even if it seems like you shouldn’t” as generically good. (We could have a word like “chill” for this, but I don’t think we do.) Chill isn’t just a state of relaxation, it’s the trait of being able to notice when relaxation is called for, even though we didn’t realize it at first. Hence “chilling out”: if it were just a matter of having a high average level of relaxation, we wouldn’t have this special associated verb for becoming more relaxed, because there would just be relaxed people (who never have to “chill out”) and non-relaxed people. (Back in the kindness comparison, there’s no analogous term like “kinding out.”)
This is all pretty abstract, so I should give you the concrete example that got me thinking about it, which was this @porpentine post:
the most important advice i give to people who write me about being in abusive activist cults / hot allostatic load situations is to dis-identify with their language and leave their universe …getting invested in that po-faced neo-1950′s pious language and the culture makes you a huge target…i don’t know if i made that clear enough in the original but yeah…then resist the urge to join some polarized faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt you but for different stupid reasons, and make friends who are real people and know how to chill the fuck out lol
And like, I can imagine a version of this post that ends with some theoretical language about why it’s important to value a certain kind of “asking whether one should relax” in all contexts even highly fraught contexts because you see etc etc, and ends up sounding like it’s taking some “political” “position” … but porpentine just says “know how to chill the fuck out,” and we all know what that means.
…I don’t think I’m familiar with this usage of “chill”.
Or, I mean, I *am*, but I associate it strongly with trolls, the kind of people who think that people who have ~opinions~ or ~emotions~ about things deserve only contempt. In my own experience, “chill” has a positive connotation mostly among assholes (and even then, only a certain subtype of asshole).
Like, I was kind of nodding along with the advice in that quote *until I got to the part about chilling the fuck out*, at which point I recoiled, went on my guard, thought “this is likely not a person I want to be taking advice from, I ought to be more suspicious of what they said”.
I guess if starting from high levels of anxiety, it could be *useful* to try to inhabit the mindset of a “lol who cares” troll in an attempt to counterbalance that. But I’d want to be cautious about doing so.
(To me, “they’re chill” doesn’t connote pure praise, but rather a mixed bag: they’re good as a casual conversation partner, because they won’t drag you into a political debate or anything like that, but don’t let them see you upset or passionate, because they will respond with at best incomprehension and at worst contempt.)
—
(This was originally a tag ramble, but I think it should remain part of the thread if reblogged, so I will convert it to a suitable format.)
I suspect it’s relevant that I hail from a culture that generally errs *heavily* on the side of giving too many fucks. But like, IME “people who use phrases like ‘chill the fuck out lol’” are *themselves* a polarised faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt me but for stupid reasons. I’m not gonna backlash straight to the other end of the fuck-giving spectrum: the goal here is to allow my own choices and/or inclinations to determine what I care (and don’t care) about rather than forcing myself to care about things because I was ordered to, not to ~chill the fuck out lol~.
(although I suppose it might be *mistaken* for ~chilling the fuck out lol~ by an outside observer, given how many passionate subjects I’ve had to fake over the years)
Tags:
#our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #language #I’m not sure this *exactly* fits but it feels close enough that I’m going to include it: #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #(I’m not trying to Start An Argument here) #(but I worry it might turn out that way) #([wryly] possibly I should chill)
I reblogged a post earlier today talking about how some movies are actually much better than the books they are derived from, and it got me thinking about this infamous moment from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Now, I really love thinking about media, and one of my pet projects is the translation of stories from one medium to another.
One of my pet peeves is when people sink into that “the books are better” mentality, often condemning the movies simply because they changed things from the books
This line is a great example of this mentality in action. It’s one of those things that bothers people immensely about the Goblet of Fire movie. People don’t like this particular line for one simple reason. In the book, the scene goes like this:
“Did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire, Harry?” Dumbledore asked calmly.” (pg 242, GoF)
Fans like to hold this moment up as emblematic of how the Harry Potter movies don’t understand the characters – e.g., they think Dumbledore is angry and panicky while he’s much calmer in the books. I think this moment is emblematic of how people don’t understand how adaptations work.
#Harry Potter #meta #I have no strong opinions regarding the actual argument here but #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #discourse cw?
I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.
As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.
It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.
—
…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.
(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)
Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.
I see you completely ignored the second, larger half of the post, in which I frame the first half as an at best semi-endorsed knee-jerk response and give what my views are when looking past my anger.
(I left the first half in to give the reader enough of a glimpse into what’s going on in my head for an idea of just how much anger I’m suppressing later on in the hopes of a decent conversation. The rest of this thread is me trying to be civil, and if I fail, please understand it as “failed attempt to be civil” rather than “open hostility”.)
There is no established term for “non-prosopagnosic”. If you are typical in this particular aspect of your neurology, then my language was merely imprecise (as language inwriting marked as knee-jerk anger tends to be) in a way not affecting the point. If you are prosopagnosic, then I am curious why assistive tech for yourself did not occur to you as a possible ethical use of facial-recognition software.
I’d like to be clear here:
I am not arguing that developing facial-recognition tech is a good idea. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not. What I do know is that it is not true that there is “no possible ethical use” for this technology, and that if we do champion the cause of privacy against those who seek to introduce this technology, we should go into it aware of the price we are paying for a more private world, rather than believing there are no downsides to doing the right thing. We can only determine whether the price is worth paying when we know what the price is.
I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.
As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.
Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).
It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.
—
…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.
(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)
Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.
Tags:
#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #raw nerves #discourse cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future
Brinens and Things 