I believe all pyramid schemes have earnings. The problem is that the bag has so far been shown to be pretty empty and somebody is going to be left holding it.

This is as good an excuse as any to break out the ol’ IBM corporate songbook

Tech has always been suits at the top, hippies at best an annoying necessity because they know how to actually operate the machine.

I think it has to do with the kinds of stories these characters are used to tell. Batman is a tortured billionaire who tries to use his vast resources to solve the problem of crime single-handedly, and he keeps people at arm’s length because he’s afraid that personal ties will endanger the mission he’s given himself (or something like that, Batman scholars feel free to chime in if I got it wrong.). Spiderman is a story about a broke kid trying to make a difference in the world with the limited resources he has. Similar goals for both characters, but different preconditions make the stories meaningfully different.

I think these flaws are what endear fans to a particular character because they struggle with the same problems (overly self-reliant, broke as hell) and if you have a character grow past them, you’re now telling a meaningfully different story. Might still be an interesting story, but I get why people who love these characters would consider some changes to be dealbreakers.

This is kind of a foundational feature of serialized character stories: if you want to keep telling stories about the same characters over and over again, they can’t fundamentally learn or grow or change meaningfully, not permanently anyway, because then the appeal of the character fundamentally changes, so you get characters like Batman who are stuck in this sitcom-y eternal purgatory of constantly slamming their heads against their own limitations, and still failing to grasp the root issue. And really I think, it’s not for them to figure out. Their stories are there so that we can see our own flaws in them, and learn from them. And once we have, Batman will still be out there, being a lonely nerd for other lonely nerds to identify with.

I think comparison can be accompanied by misery but I don’t think it’s inevitable. I don’t know if it’s possible to go your whole life and not compare yourself to anyone, ever, on any metric. Some people are better than I am at some things, and I learn by comparing myself to them. I think the trick is to not condense it all down into a single spectrum. I mean that for broad moral judgements (e.g. “I am a better person than my boss”) as well as in particular domains (“My co-worker is a worse coder than I am”). I think that type of quick judgement can always be peeled apart and analyzed, and learned from, and I think that resolves a lot of the tension that typically comes from comparison.

four pane terminal: top left running htop, top right showing the commit history for a gnarly repo, bottom right just running cat /dev/urandom, bottom left is a cowsay script reciting the dialogue of “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace”

This is my real answer lol. All I ever run on my chomebook is this and a web browser.

For me it’s always https://hackertyper.com/

They’re intentionally easy questions because ego stroking is a tried and true way to farm engagement. Like those old ads that went like:

99% of MIT students got this question WRONG! can YOU do better?

3 + 8 / 2 = ?

I believe it, I’m a wreck.

Indeed. Sure it’s worth it or whatever but it’s the fucking worst.

Not OP but I was in a similar situation. Whole family was poor, white, Christian, Republican, listened to Rush Limbaugh (and the horde of soundalikes) on the radio in the car every morning on the way to school and everywhere else we went. I don’t think I ever really bought in but when you’re a kid there’s just so much about the world you have to take on faith, often because you don’t know there are other options besides the defaults you grew up with. Eventually you get around to questioning things and the foundations start to crumble. For me the first domino was that I couldn’t really square why god would make people gay if being gay was a sin, and they didn’t really seem to be doing any harm, even the very abstract “sanctity of marriage” argument kinda falls off once you see that het people get unlimited “violating the sanctity of marriage” passes and queer folks get automatic damnation. After that more foundational assumptions started to fall away and I drifted further from the church over time until I became the heathen radical socialist that shames the memory of my god-fearing parents to this very day.

Broseidon, Lord of the Brocean.

Sometimes I am sad but I don’t really feel sad, or feel sad enough… Music helps me feel the feelings I already have, but have a hard time feeling. Some of those feelings are sad and the sad ones are just as important to feel. I guess what I’m describing is catharsis.

The Post Office is secretly being controlled by the US Government. If you look at the actual laws of the US it allows the President to appoint someone called the Postmaster General who’s in charge of the whole thing.

I think it would be a pretty good prank to bring this up in a “favorite crazy conspiracy theory” conversation where all but one participant agrees that it’s a baseless conspiracy theory and see if the one other person insists that the Postmaster General Theory is real, or goes along with the crowd. But I really don’t think my friends are coordinated enough to pull it off.

Especially the turrets. I love them so much. The first time I took one down and got hit with the “I don’t hate you” 💔 😭

“This traumatic thing happened in my life and I wish people wouldn’t joke about it”

“Wow that sucks here’s a joke about it”

Why? to what end?

Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.

You inspired me

I do not fear the motion of my feet.
Though every step be toward the final bourn,
I see no path to orderly retreat.

The energy assigned in brief to me
No art preserves, no science can reform.
And so I boldly choose what is to be

The range and purpose of my tiny mete.
I will not, while I can, myself pre-mourn,
But rage, rage against the rising of the heat.

Wow, I had forgotten how much I used to detest lima beans. Don’t think I’ve had them since I was a kid. I wonder if I’ll like them now.

Pfft the absolute human hubris to hold up these entropic sleight-of-hand tricks as impressive. Nature abhors a refrigerator. Heaters are the ultimate power in the universe.