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And a week later the lady found the dog in bed with her best friend! Scandalous!

I didn't realize she founded true North.

Really interesting thing is where the Hellenic Greeks reached India and you ended up with two immortal cultures meeting and the Greeks were cut off by that point geographically but Indian culture was changed forever.

India has an interesting quirk of its civilization that it has an immortal culture. They've been invaded a bunch of times, the people who invade just end up becoming Indian, culturally.

I would expect it to also be similar to silicosis.

My grandpa died of that, it's a terrible way to go. You end up having your lungs sliced up from the inside and the scar tissue slowly takes away your ability to breathe.

Australian Hank Hill

"I tell you hwhat, whilst I've been on the tele with ya, some tuggahs been hwackin in mah traila"

Ross's game dungeon has an episode on the game quarantine. Great game for 20 minutes. He found that dozens of "reputable sources" got the level code for the last level wrong, suggesting that for all the caterwauling about having to just steal work from someone else, they've already been doing it for decades.

You have to admit it's pretty funny for game journos (who we've all accepted suck at video games) to be told to write game guides (guides presumably on how to not suck at video games)

I mean.... *no* exceptions?

I feel like you could come up with some exceptions.

"Laddie, we're gonna burn down this castle next week because it represents an oppressive patriarchy for some reason, enjoy it while you can"

Isn't that the reason everyone's so worried about threads.net federating?

(though I don't think any of us have anything to worry about -- The corpos won't likely federate with the wrongthinkers)

If I had to spend the night in a haunted house or live in NYC, I'd spend that night in the haunted house. At least the spooks in the haunted house don't have government authority.

So what you're telling me is that the uncancellable gym membership can be easily cancelled by saying men shouldn't be in the woman's change room?

No wonder their stock is tanking, uncancellable memberships is their whole business model!

Everything out of the corpos is dead. Next step is trying to do anything else.

"Wait a minute, this certified letter is just various ethnic slurs! Oh wow I didn't know about #17"

Seems to me the case should be the least of her worries. Better to lose the case than destroy her career, and I think that's a very real risk the moment she's no longer a useful pawn.

Going back to the old testament, the Israelites weren't told to go with the flow and do what they were told by the government or the people around them. Kings fucked up and failed to be virtuous, people fucked up and failed to be virtuous, populations fucked up and failed to be virtuous, even Moses and the Israelites routinely fucked up and failed to be virtuous (Moses was cursed by God to never see the promised land because of his hubris), and as a direct result of that, unnecessary suffering was brought upon those people.

Even the new testament which is substantially more chill than the old testament has a strong message of not just conforming to the pressure of whatever society you're in at the moment. Jesus could have just said "yeah, the Pharisees are totally chill and correct" and not gotten himself crucified, but that's not what happened -- he had a vision of right and wrong and pushed for that vision regardless of what the Pharisees said.

Now all that being said, I think it's a false dichotomy to say that self-sacrifice and hard work don't work when you're doing it in a certain way so it doesn't work period and you should throw yourself on your sword to spite your masters. If working for corporate overlords isn't working, then it's time to change strategy, but that doesn't mean hard work and sacrifice aren't a way to get ahead, it just means you need to direct your hard work and sacrifice towards something that'll actually be beneficial, even if it's not something beneficial to the powerful people around you. If you can't do better by being a good corporate drone, then you do better by betting yourself, your family, your community. It's a matter of faith of course that if you pay into the future that you'll have a better future, but when the alternative is just self-destruction it's not a bad gamble.

The sad thing is that many of the people in the street don't give much better answers than they might have before public education.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up the source, but someone did man on the street interviews like this before public education and the answers were surprisingly similar to anything put out today.

I get the impression that there was an "arc of literacy" where there was a point most people were completely ignorant of most things not immediately in front of them, and then there was an era where the common man soaked up books as a primary entertainment source, and lately we've been almost back to where we started with most people never reading anything other than text messages and being pretty limited in their engagement with the outside world.

Unfortunately I can't find any real data to back any of this up. I could be totally wrong and maybe everything's fine.