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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

One poll this week suggested the liberals could get 7 seats in the next election.

I'm praying for that outcome.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I feel like vi should be like 300 loc max

To an extent, I think that there's something to be said for there being problems in American culture. Few on the right would argue that participation trophies, passing students when they can't actually do the coursework, watering down elementary School and high School curriculum to make it easier, or stifling kids with rules preventing them from doing anything but the are good things. Few on the right would argue that the coddling of children to the point that 10-year-olds can't even ride down the street on their bike without the cops getting called is a big problem. Few on the right would argue for the failed approach of so-called gentle parenting is a net negative and fails to teach kids self control. Few on the right would argue on behalf of replacing shop class with gender studies. These are all things going on with our culture right now. They're all things that I think everyone would agree probably need to change.

On the other hand, there's the story about why the Americans beat the Germans to the atomic bomb despite the Germans having all the best physicists. The highly educated Germans kept on trying to do all the math based on a cubic plane, where is the more practical Americans did all the math based on a sphere, greatly simplifying the math. That difference ended up being critically important to solving the problem which ultimately ended up helping to win the war.

Now let's go back to the culture question, is the United States the same country that won the race to the bomb through clever application of practicality? I think it would be really difficult to make that argument. How many kids are working with their hands? How many are growing up learning to weld with their parents? How many are going out camping on their own for days on end having to figure out how to handle things on their own without an adult present? How many are working on their own cars? How many kids are stuck doing basically nothing but watching brain rot on YouTube all day?

Now sure, there are some households where stuff like this still happens. Rest assured that my boy will be learning how to weld poorly from me and hopefully much better from his grandfather, and I'll be involving him with routine repairs on the car, and obviously won't be able to send him camping alone, but we can go camping with minimally required supervision.

But the other thing is that necessity is the mother of invention and opportunity is the father, and a lot of people won't have a chance to have an entry-level job. Sure, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went on to found apple. No one seems to mention the fact that they had good jobs at HP before that to learn their trade and get the sort of capital they were going to need to start their company. And Jeff Bezos, he was able to get himself into a very nice career in finance before quitting it all to go start Amazon in a garage. Getting an entry level job is actually very important. Not to mention, having that entry level job and still being able to afford a place to live -- if jobs and Wozniak we're spending three quarters of their income on housing then they never could have quit their jobs at HP to start Apple computer.

But it's a big problem companies have, they want to have fully developed employees without actually having to develop employees. And for now the ways around this have been to get Americans to pay for their own education, but they still aren't actually ready for the workforce at that point. So at that point, you are expected to spend a boatload of money on education most of which has nothing to do with what you were going to do for a job, then you are expected to spend a boatload more of money at an unpaid internship so that maybe someday someone might actually pay you. Employment ends up being a luxury for the rich. And then Vivek Ramswami says that you're a bad person for wanting a job and to have time off now and again. When I was learning my field, everyone told me that things were going to be so easy because all the boomers were about to retire. Well that took a little bit longer than expected because the world economy crashed and then the world economy shut down 15 years later, but now the boomers are retiring and they're dying of old age, and it doesn't matter because even though those jobs are open there's been no one groomed into those positions. I was lucky and diligent and that allowed me to walk a very narrow tightrope, but most people won't have the luck I did. Most people need some kind of practical pathway to get from no experience to ready to work.

The purpose of a job is not to have a job though, unless you're a CEO like him. The purpose of a job is to be able to support yourself and go off and have a family and do all those things, maybe be able to help your friends and family, donate to your church. Most of these people who work 80 hours a week are going to go extinct because they don't do any of the things that matter in life.

In the end, the diagnosis makes it pretty clear first of all that trying to replace the American workforce with h-1b's is viciously immoral -- it is simply refusing to give basic levels of opportunity to the people living in the country that you are using to develop your business. What really needs to happen is a systemic overhaul where first of all parents are allowed to and encouraged to help their kids learn real skills from them, are allowed to and encouraged to help their kids learn self control, are allowed to and are encouraged to go above and beyond helping still virtue in the future generations, and are dissuaded from using new age postmodern forms of parenting that reduce the impact of the family and leave young people adrift; second of all teachers and schools are encouraged to focus on many of the same things, real skills, virtue and trying to excel, because at the end of the day there aren't that many hours that kids spend in school or at home. Childhoods aren't that long. So kids need to be taught stuff that actually matters, not cultural brain rot from people who are more interested in reinventing all of society than in the success of individual children; third, workplaces need to be incentivized into creating entry level jobs and hiring local people into them. You will never have any journeyman electricians if you never hire any apprentice electricians. You will never have any senior engineers if you never hire any Junior engineers. You will never have any senior managers if you never hire any Junior managers. It's insane that this point needs to be brought up, but the entire of global industry doesn't seem to understand that.

One thing that is not an answer that a lot of governments seem to think is, is putting out more advertising campaigns to try to get kids into engineering and the trades. When an apprenticeship comes up, there are hundreds of applications received. The idea that nobody wants an apprenticeship is just wrong. Now, for a lot of people once they get into the apprenticeship they realize that they don't want that job, and that's why you should be able to hire tons of apprentices and fire most of them. One of the points of an entry level job is to find out if that person is actually suited for that job, and the idea would be to quickly get rid of them if they're not suited for that line of work. In higher education this happens pretty often. Engineering classes will start with hundreds of people, and have a graduating class of a few dozen because most people can't do that job. But at least give people a chance.

Those are rookie numbers.

I have to assume the lack of a quotation mark means the quote includes everything else you'd read on Twitter that morning.

Woke is just a borrowed word they used to describe themselves. Its poor grammatically because it comes from African American Vernacular English.

It's a euphemism treadmill type thing, like a euphemism on ramp -- it only began carrying a negative connotation once people realized the ideology was bad.

Now progs are like "I'm not woke! Woke isn't even a thing!" Even though they're the ones who created the term.

The opposite happened with terms like chud, or chad. Both were initially intended to be considered derogatory but gained generally positive connotations, with Chad being particularly funny because it was supposed to be like "Chad stole your girl don't you hate him?" But the online right was like "Chad, you are an example for the rest of us, let us make you our king."

For chud it's funny because the elitist progs want to talk down to people who aren't like them, and the anti-elitists are like "I am everything you say I am and that's great."

That's like a reverse euphemism treadmill where they try to find terms to attack their enemy but their enemy isn't bad so the terms take on a positive connotation.

Naw man he's a good one he forces you to submit a w-2 before scamming you to prove youre rich enough to scam.

It's actually complicated.

ISPs love piracy. Youtube even loves piracy. They would be way worse off if they were held accountable for piracy on their networks or sites. Chinese manufacturers use piracy on a mass scale -- you can buy unlimited games on amazon (that weren't legally placed there). If AI companies can get away with mass piracy, they're more than happy to.

"no, I just came out of the womb knowing how to do everything." Oh yeah?

Everyone with eyes should have predicted this. "Oh, this is the best economy ever and everything is fine" meanwhile grocery bills have doubled but wages have stagnated.

Huh? They always have had those. You must be remembering wrong.

I mean, most people won't want them, but some people will -- so why not? Some people really want full spectrum light.

Just nuke southern ontario and vancouver island, it'll be fine after that. And give Quebec to France, they'll love that (and immediately surrender it back to the US as is tradition)

Thank you, Mr. President! When are you sending the army to annex the 51st state? I want to prepare a gift basket.

Got the new 'servers' in place. 100% fanless still, but these two guys used to be Intel Atom D2550s (about as powerful as an old netbook), and these guys are AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G (about as powerful as a new low power laptop, 4-5 times faster).

I really need to find my label maker for obvious reasons haha
Parts scavenged from roadside signs and stolen from banks (I hope)

Reincarnated – The Hero Marries the Sage ~After Becoming Engaged to a Former Rival, We Became the Strongest Couple~

In case anyone else was wondering.

Don't panic about losing your guns, he's going to take away your ability to use money long before that matters!

It's kind of sad, 2024 saw the meltdown of a lot of folks I respected online, or at least the final chapters of ongoing meltdowns.

In the end I guess, wisdom isn't something that a particular individual can own, it possess you for a while, and perhaps you can help spread it, but it can just as easily disappear into the ether, and you end up going on at 12-hour Ayahuasca Bender online for the world to see... Or the world can find out that you were having a massive cocaine Bender with your kids in the house. You can find that just as quickly as wisdom possessed you, it leaves you, and in your arrogance you will go off and do something really stupid. So if you believe that you have a time you should nurture your wisdom by following it's advice rather than listen to the luciferian impulse to think that your intellect can outsmart your wisdom.

And I guess equally importantly, be careful not to idolize human beings, because every one of them is fallible. Especially yourself.

There's a saying that has changed a lot over the years due to inflation, but only in becoming more and more true:

"It's possible to become a millionaire through honesty and hard work. But not a billionaire."

When that was first said, a millionaire was worth the equivalent of 19 million dollars today. Today, someone working a fairly normal job and saving consistently will become a millionaire in their lifetimes.

His wife is at Walmart. That's a coat rack.

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