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MisterBastahrd

2,622 karma · joined May 1, 2012

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MisterBastahrd··on Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents
All of them spent significant time outdoors every year and none of them are obese.
MisterBastahrd··on Gen Z has rediscovered the joy of going to the movies
Gen Z is about as good at discovering new things as Columbus was.
MisterBastahrd··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Welcome to American conservatism.
MisterBastahrd··on Who Is America's Homer?
Brandon Sanderson writes forgettable stories for pubescent children. His characters fill very specific plot roles and those plots don't really deviate in any interesting way. Saying he's Temu Terry Pratchett is doing a giant disservice to Pratchett.
MisterBastahrd··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
I have a friend who is a teacher and spends that much yearly for ChatGPT and Claude. It saves him many hours a year in time assembling documents and creating posters, flyers, and personalized learning materials for his students.
MisterBastahrd··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
It's an extra hour of potential outdoors activity before nightfall. Yes.
MisterBastahrd··on US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites
There's something particularly pathetic about lauding a guy for not taking a $400K yearly salary when he spends $4M a weekend on taxpayer money playing golf, but that's what you get when we've spent the better part of the past 50 years demonizing social programs and the people who have been forced to rely on them.
MisterBastahrd··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
Did you know that mainstream articles aren't actual research and are made for mass-consumption rather than reporting factual information?

Might want to actually learn something.

MisterBastahrd··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
It isn't okay for anyone to die from gun violence, but if we're gonna have to expect people to be sacrificed on the altar of the gun nut lobby, then it makes the most sense that the gun nuts should be the ones to suffer the consequences of the policies they support. The tree of liberty and blood blah blah blah.
MisterBastahrd··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
His position was idiotic in his broader philosophical framework because his economic stance is that the poor should struggle and the rich should reap the benefits of their investments. It literally isn't possible to have a 1950s style familial relationship given his economic stances.
MisterBastahrd··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
It isn't subjective. Those corporations aren't far-left even by US standards, where Bernie Sanders would be considered center-right in a global context.

Get an education for your own sake.

MisterBastahrd··on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law
When you consistently shoot yourself in the face despite all evidence because you believe it'll make you wiser, at some point rational people just need to point out that maybe you've blown your own head off too many times to make intelligent decisions and accept your agency for your actions. Mississippi is governed by fear, full stop. Specifically, a fear that their individual mediocrity will trickle down to their children and so they will vote to make life as difficult as possible just to make it harder for people in even lower social strata to compete with them. I've lived through decades of this stuff and watched it up close and personal.

They're SO racist that when you give them statistics about their state and their communities, the first thing they'll do is handwave them away because to them, statistics are irrelevant if they contain data regarding minorities UNLESS said statistics are there to condemn minorities. Same thing with people in different economic classes. Generalizations are there for them to make about other people, not the other way around.

Mississippi has one of the higher murder rates? Irrelevant to them because they have a higher number of black folks. Murder rates among whites in the state are high? Irrelevant because it's the poor whites who are murdering each other. At some point, you just have to accept that the conditions they're living in are the conditions they're choosing to live in and treat them accordingly.

MisterBastahrd··on Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply
As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.
MisterBastahrd··on Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations
This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.
MisterBastahrd··on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.
MisterBastahrd··on The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.
MisterBastahrd··on The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia
And I'm fine with it. We've got trillions of dollars worth of companies that do very little but leech off of the rest of us and utilize the vast wealth they've accumulated to degrade our society in order to perpetuate their own existence.
MisterBastahrd··on After millions of years, why are carnivorous plants still so small?
Because a fly can spit on your food, but a mouse can eat a hole in your baseboards.
MisterBastahrd··on It’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting (2021)
If he didn't want them sold, he should have destroyed them. Because even if his current heirs decide to keep them locked up, eventually someone is going to come to the realization that they don't need to work anymore if they sell a few of them, and why would you spend your life working for someone else when you could just get rid of something that only takes up space to begin with?
MisterBastahrd··on Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway
Given that they track you every inch of your route, it'd be a pain in the butt to attempt to fake it.

I've gotten a refund on food before because my driver picked up my food and then went spend a half hour in a gas station before returning to their route even though my home was 2 minutes away.

MisterBastahrd··on Endometriosis is an interesting disease
I've had three doctors in the past year tell me that either I wasn't a candidate for cancer treatment because I was gonna die in the next 3 years anyway, or that my best bet was a liver and heart transplant.

All of them read the first page of my medical records upon being admitted to a hospital in January. Not a single one of them read anything after that and it shows. One of them was stricken and amazed that I was walking into his office without aid or an oxygen mask.

Gives me great confidence in their ability to pay attention to detail.

MisterBastahrd··on Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.
MisterBastahrd··on Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study
Just look at Louisiana for a second.

There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.

So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.

And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.

Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.

You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.

And so on, and so on...

I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.

Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.

MisterBastahrd··on Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
For me it was MERC flavored DikuMUDs. When you're fighting a strong boss and you need to communicate with your team, you gotta be able to issue commands to the server as well as carry a conversation with your teammates.
MisterBastahrd··on The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
My freedom to believe or reject the existence of god has nothing to do with revelation. People deny what they plainly see and what can be proven to them all the time. You are making an argument that does not exist in any scripture, and is frankly an apologist's argument regarding the failure of Christendom to reach its prophesized conclusion.
MisterBastahrd··on Caffeine induces age-dependent brain complexity and criticality during sleep
Have ADHD. Caffeine slows my brain down and I can fall asleep directly after having consumed a half-pot of coffee.
MisterBastahrd··on The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
Whether or not something exists has zero to do with whether someone accepts that it does. Your free will argument makes absolutely no sense to anyone who actually thinks it through.
MisterBastahrd··on The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
That's not a reason. That's an excuse for why the vigorous handwaving of the religious is insufficient. We have people who are catching measles because they don't believe in measles vaccines, like right freaking now even though we know that the vaccines are safe, effective, and work. Every dimwit who is against their children getting those vaccines was once a child whose parents were intelligent enough to get the vaccinations for them.

So no, try again, because that argument is silly.

MisterBastahrd··on Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life
No, they won't. We already have devices that we carry with us that can do anything that their gadget will ever be able to do. This is design in search of a problem that (a) most people don't want to solve, and (b) doesn't do anything better than a cheaper alternative.
MisterBastahrd··on By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall
On the metric that people see PCs as disposable appliances and don't consider a small format box like a Mac Mini to be a real computing device. They don't give a crap about "compute," they care if they can open their web browser, outlook, and play their little slot machine game. You're not gonna get Meemaw who spent her entire career as a secretary working with Windows machines to go to Mac just because you like the specs. Hell, my mom has owned the same PC for 15 years now and I can't get her to move away from THAT.
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