So you’re subjecting yourself to authority that you believe is acclimating you to do things against your will?

Getting people acclimated to obeying authority by starting with menial commands is a real thing. For it to work, the person doing it needs to have some authority and the commands actually have to be things that the other person won’t object to. Do these people have authority over you? Does changing how you talk about Unix desktops seems like a reasonable command to start that process?

Now, I have no problem with viewing random strangers as authority figures if that’s what you’re into, but it seems a lot more likely that you’ve used this idea of compelled-language-as-social-control as a thought-terminating cliche to justify not thinking about why someone might care about randos online using the word “ricing”. And to be fair, it seems like a weird use a mental energy if the point is to assert dominance, but at the same time, you’re the one engaging with it, so what does that say about you?

Japanese cars, yeah?

Same! Absolute liberals!

During World War I, Lenin advocated for a position called “Revolutionary Defeatism”, the idea that the working class does not benefit from sacrificing themselves for the sake of winning a bourgeois war, and that if the working class is organized, a war which is lost presents more of an opportunity for civil war to escalate into proletarian revolution than a war which is won.

I believe this is the stance of most people discussing Russia-Ukraine here, although delving into that seems like an easy way to get off topic.

I’ll second the Jakarta Method. It’s a very stark picture of what we are up against as people who believe in the abolition of money, among other things.

For real. It’s nice to finally find a place that doesn’t make everything so political all the time.

This. There are many families of statistical distributions which reoccur throughout human systems. We can identify them and group them together, but this is not an arbitrary decision and does not somehow mean we’re acting objectively or without bias. People will try to get by on just acknowledging that these distributions exist and allowing implication to do the rest of their arguing for them, but the only point really being made is “abstractions exist”. Congratulations, you’ve identified a group of ideas based on shared properties. Somehow this is supposed to have obvious political implications?

I’m trying to understand what this means. I know the Pareto Principle from two contexts:

1. Jordan Peterson bringing it up all the time as a vague hand wave to make his disdain for communists sound scientific
2. My old manager who learned about it in some bullshit professional development course

Because of the latter context, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to make this “principle” measurable and rigorous in a real business context and it’s just a fool’s errand. If you start out with a conclusion, it’s easy to map the 80/20 rule onto preexisting data, but trying to actually use it to create predictive models, I found it useless.

Capitalism has killed millions more than its apologists could ever hope to claim communism has.

User name relevant! Take my heckin updoot kind stranger!

The uncanny valley exists to enforce social norms at a glance. I’ve tipped people off about me being autistic faster than most chatbots can coherently remain convincing nowadays.

Reminds me of the places that make you take a “can you recognize basic employee norms and sufficiently lie about your personal life to your manager?” tests