downerending

I've recently been told at my job that it's a firing offense.

> people assumed that anyone accidentally using those words had ill intent

That's becoming a thing at my current job. I'm just accepting that I will eventually slip (or even just fail to keep up with the trendy list of bad words) and get fired.

Guess it's better than being eaten by a bear.

I am troubled by your use of a problematic word.

(See how that works?)

> The thing with ZH is you need a good BS filter.

Sadly, these days that's as true with NYT, WaPo, etc. One of the reasons that sites like ZH have become more popular is that the "papers of record" have abandoned their historic standards.

That's probably true, from a legal perspective.

As a practical matter, though, being able to pick and choose only the most inflammatory and out-of-context audio/video pretty much ruins this as a real source of truth.

I was referring to personal recordings rather than those made by police bodycams.

Police body cams are somewhat widespread. But many on the left here, including BLM apparently, are against them. For example: https://fox17.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-nashville-re...

Given the choice between Reddit moderation and ZH, I'll take the latter. Really, though, I rarely read the comments on either platform anymore.

So, I can pay to have an email with a Hamming distance of one from 50+ other email addresses? Such a deal!

I think this is an outstanding idea. But if it's to be credible, the recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user, and immediately available to law enforcement.

Heads I win, tails you lose is not credible. It's just riot bait.

Before any of the studies came out, I was reading anecdotes specifically stating, "this only works with zinc". Which is not that hard to believe, from a biochemical perspective.

Apparently most or all of the studies do not include zinc. Hooray.

You must be new here. Head over to 4chan (and 8chan?).

Traders love it, and traders are rich. They don't need Russian money.

The reason is that they're one of the few sites that doesn't moderate comments into the dust.

I read ZH pretty regularly. It carries a wide variety of opinions, and they often have the scoop many hours before any MSM.

Yes, the comment section is useless. They don't do any real moderation, and it's filled with, well, a lot of inappropriate material. So, I don't read the comments. (They don't even show by default.)

Is this really a good reason to "cancel" the site, though? Yeah, unmoderated free speech isn't pretty, but how much do you really hate it?

It's true--I never do this. And on the odd occasion when I get a new browser without adblock, I recoil in horror.

Same with broadcast and cable TV. Who watches this shit anymore?

I miss those days. Maybe I'm just getting old, but it seems like a trend where time passing or more people getting involved in something causes its inherent quality/goodness/kindness to decrease.

I accept that that's an illusion, though. Things aren't really getting worse overall, nor better. Nothing new under the sun.

That strikes me as a neutral and accurate headline, relative to what I've read.

Flagged--this isn't the title.

Also, "false" isn't a correct description of what happened.

> People wouldnt procrastinate if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage...

The awful truth is that "doing nothing" or at least "waiting a bit" is quite often the right thing to do from a survival perspective.

I probably have that, but then what? The treatment seems to be doses of speed, essentially, and I worry that the cure would be as bad as the disease.

Those resonate with me as well. For (1), it seems to strike for tasks that I feel "should" be simple, but in fact simply are not. Accepting that seems to help.

For (2), I do indeed loathe retracing some task that's similar to something I've done in the past. One thing that sometimes helps is to find a way to put a new spin on it. Maybe use an unfamiliar language or data structure. Or optimize for something different. Or push 'git' to the max while working on it.

I suspect the phenomenon is different for each person. Myself, I have little problem procrastinating household chores--they feel easy and not particularly stressful. For whatever reason, it hits me hardest for tasks that I "like" to do, like programming. It's quite paradoxical.

It's certainly true for me that procrastination is essentially avoiding a form of anxiety. But I don't think there's some deeper, larger problem. It feels more like "choking", just a fairly specific learned, maladaptive response. At some times in my life, I've pushed it into the background and become more productive, but it always seems to creep back.

Drinking seems to reliably reduce it, but I can't very well program lit all day.

Having dealt with T-Mobile at length regarding local tower problems, I doubt we'll see anything but a blanket denial. And perhaps a map showing that we all have "excellent" coverage.

My run-of-the-mill state school had quite lax admission standards. It was understood that most of the freshman class each year would just party and flunk out after one or two semesters. As long as grading standards are maintained, I suppose that's another way to go.

This describes more than half of the corporate software projects ever started, IME.

Mayhem is always an unreasonable choice. And it certainly won't feed you if you're hungry.

And judging by the pictures, very few of the protesters were desperate, tired, hungry, downtrodden, etc. For most, it's an opportunity to virtue signal for a day or two, and then go back to their relatively affluent lives and forget about all of this.

Hardly a one would be caught dead tutoring some inner city kid with their algebra. Far more fun to taunt cops in an impossible position.

I also don't read links that purport to tell me that it's safe to plunge my arm into boiling water.

I think it's spectacularly offensive to tell black people that there's no problem of other black people killing them in their neighborhoods. The problem clearly exists and is in desperate need of a solution. The real question is how to fix it.

You're right that Internet-ish companies are a special risk. But even run-of-the-mill organizations seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid these days. I sat today in an all-hands anti-racism videoconference. It was bland enough, though it would at one time have made a good SNL skit. (It was a bunch of woke white women declaiming our failures.) Committees were proposed and also the hiring of (even) more D&I consultants and personnel. As usual, no actually useful action was proposed, but we have once again checked the box.

There's a lot of truth to this. When I ask such a person what they're really willing to sacrifice to improve the situation, it's crickets. Talk is cheap.

Aside from that, if we must change the terminology, can we at least all change it to the same new terminology. The last thing we need is 20 new euphemisms.

Over most of the last few decades, most corporations' politics were limited to things like United Way drives, etc. Right or wrong, the situation today is very novel, and we may discover why companies were loath to get involved in this sort of thing in the past.

Personally, I'm finding it a significant distraction in my organization. It does leave me wondering if I shouldn't leave for a more neutral one.