volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the situation.
Traffic is not just a pure, laminar flow. Interactions between vehicles means there is friction all along the route, and that contributes to congestion. Effectively, a crowded street is its own bottleneck.
Just like a pipe carrying water, there is a pressure drop along the length even if there's no one bottleneck at the end. And just like that pipe, there is more capacity with a wider pipe even though the pressure drop remains.
@Vaniaji@toad.social @Lady_Star_Gem
From the sound of his speech is more like Idiocracy over democracy.
I seriously don't understand how anybody could have thought that speech was a good one. His climax was literally just throwing out words that had the same first letter and making jokes that took the low road.
It was like a bad SNL character who wanted to perform beat poetry at weird moments.
So when I watched #Jeffries's speech as #McCarthy was elected Speaker I thought he sounded dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb, like a bad SNL character.
I've been saying he sounded unserious, especially with the amount of pride he seemed to take in finding a bunch of words that all began with the same letter. Good job, buddy.
But one of the funnier things I've seen on this platform is somebody responding to that notion saying, what do you mean he was unserious? Didn't you see how he trolled McCarthy?
Oh gosh. When we're at the point that trolling from the Speaker's chair is considered serious, well
I think we've gone full #Idiocracy.
Wow, this article is amazingly myopic, focusing entirely on the entirely superficial without any understanding of what has actually happened here, of House rules and procedures, any acknowledgment of how the Congress actually operates.
The Democrats voted in ways that pushed the majority to adopt rules that will stymie democratic efforts to shape law. It was extremely short-sighted, and it will come back to bite them pretty much immediately.
In simple terms the Democrats enabled anti-Democrat representatives to take power.
But this article would have you ignore all of the practical results of their strategy just to enjoy a little superficial smugness. It is horribly misleading.
Democrats gave up the rules of the House. They actively gave up the ability to make law here. That really sucks, and they really need to be called out on it.
@shansterable@c.im
I just want to chime in with that many of us, myself included, lost our doctors and even health insurance policies that we were pretty happy with thanks to the ACA.
I know more than one family member now that has had less access to health care after that law was passed, and the worst part is that experts were warning that it would be the outcome before passage, but they passed it anyway.
So many people in the US were made worse off by the law, and there's the feeling that we were kind of left behind, that the press didn't cover our stories, and that we were really let down by our government.
Well no, not let down, kind of actually attacked.
Probably the drama surrounding choosing the Speaker of the House.
Who was impeached for stealing from Ukraine?
Sounds like you have a nice conspiracy theory there, but I would counter that maybe people simply think that the US is too far into debt?
@alfredo_liberal@universeodon.com
I think you pretty much illustrate my point here when you talk about trolling from the Speaker's chair of the House of Representatives.
How is it unserious to be a troll? Well there you go.
It also pretty well illustrates my point about the guy sounding like he was taking the low road over and over in his diatribe.
He did not come off as anyone with anything worthwhile to offer. Just a troll, a bad SNL character.
I suppose it's hard to tell the difference from the outside, not being able to read somebody's mind.
A person who says they are trying but doesn't seem to be making any progress, well I guess there's really no way to tell the difference without being able to be a mind reader.
But if you have any input on that I am all ears because a whole lot of us are a bit frustrated with certain people and not sure what to do about it.
Well you're generally talking about forcing one person to work for another person against their will, which the US has dabbled in in the past and decided we probably shouldn't.
If the rest of the world is still into that, well
@alfredo_liberal@universeodon.com
What exactly did you find amazing about it?
To me it sounded just really unserious.
volkris
boosted
RT twitter.com/@MuseZack: I like Twitter's view count feature because it lets you see things like how @hradzka's epic deep dive thread about a minor yet pivotal character in Conan the Barbarian is getting more eyeballs than, say, The Daily Show and the entire CW network. https://twitter.com/MuseZack/status/1611895965476323329
mentions three other social media sites
It does have video content. I just watched a couple of videos on Mastodon.
Well I can't read the article behind the paywall, but generally this argument comes down to an issue of unclear goals.
Generally people complain that wider highways are still congested but they miss that those congested highways are delivering more transportation from one point to the other.
The goal of a highway is not (generally) to be congestion-free. It's to get transportation from one point to the other, so the congestion is actually a sign of more use of the highway to get there, the wider highway being congested being a sign of success in that goal.
"Fix traffic" is a silly phrase since traffic itself is a fix to the problem of people wanting to get from one place to the other. We keep widening highways because it does contribute to that goal, though.
Oh I definitely know some self-described autistic people who have had no sign of adapting over the course of years!
It was an excellent list of words that he found that managed to start with the same letters. He sounded pretty proud of that list he made.
But there was no meat to any of it. There were some jokes where he took the low road, at least I think they were jokes, but there was nothing that was particularly substantial in terms of a legislator addressing a legislative body.
@TwistedEagle The problem isn't the numbers reported by the government.
The problem is people misunderstanding or outright lying about what the numbers are.
For example, yes, the unemployment rate probably really is 3.5%, but that rate is clearly defined "as a percent of the civilian labor force", and anybody not understanding that misunderstands the number.
It's not a lie. People are just mislead about what the number means.
@snookerarmchair 's comment is exactly kind of thing I'm referring to when I say I see people surprised by the amount of resources it takes to run a #Mastodon / #ActivityPub instance.
This thread highlights comparing against different levels of expectation.
Someone starting from a place where they expect it to take those resources doesn't change that someone else is surprised that it does.
Personally, I suspect we set the bar too low and waste resources because we tolerate systems that don't operate efficiently.
And thus we get ActivityPub, which seems to live down to those expectations.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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