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You don't need to close *all* the oblivion gates, do you?

I'm surprised any conservatives or even centrist liberals are still on reddit.

Not a happy place for people who don't follow every opinion reddits hivemind finds acceptable.

Vox deus, vox populi

I was thinking about it last night, that Asia sort of proves that just working harder doesn't actually solve the problem.

The Chinese and South Koreans study so hard their eyeballs get screwed up (which is why they all wear glasses, myopia is rampant in their cities), and yet both countries are on the verge of demographic collapse (South Korea in particular).

That doesn't mean you shouldn't work hard, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't defer gratification, but what it does mean is it takes more than hard work and sacrifice to succeed.

I had a dream about this in college. It was a time I was working way too hard -- I'd get up super early and take the first bus to school, finish my homework, go to class all day (essentially a full 8 hour day of classes), then stay until the last bus of the evening studying. In that dream, the drill Sargent from Full Metal Jacket screamed at me: "In every war you had a winner and a loser. Do you think that the only reason the other side lost is they weren't working hard enough?" -- That was 20 years ago now, it's stuck with me because it's true -- Hard work is important, but it's also important that we're doing the right things.

One of my favorite lines in a book of all time is from Sun Tzu. It's been translated various ways, but effectively the statement is: "To fight the battle then look for victory will ensure you lose. You must first win the victory, then fight the battle." -- So from that perspective, there's a lot of important things we're ignoring to fight battles when we should be finding victory instead.

I had my three year old read these posts back to me out loud, and he said: "egads father, it seems to me quite likely that these people are putting words in the mouths of their children to give a strange sort of pseudo-authority to their own rather inappropriate anxieties towards merely losing an election. I would coin a phrase 'argumentum ex pueritia', or argument from childhood, to describe this self-evident fallacy. Most children at this age generally have between 200 and 1000 words in their vocabulary, and are learning basic concepts such as sentences containing up to 5 words, let alone drawing comparisons between atrocities or the Holocaust which are taught in high school and modern day politics. Rather than being evidence of some immutable truth, if a 3 year old said such things it might be evidence that the parent was coaching the child in ways that are wholly unethical."

Naturally I slapped him and told him to finish his pocky.

The worst part I hate to say it, is that this isn't a new thing that belongs to labor. The two largest parties in the country were both complicit.

It's one of the reasons that there's been this flight to Reform, because people want a political party that's going to actually do the things that they claim are important.

I travel a lot for work, but I want my son to know I'm always thinking of him, so I hand write a letter for his mom to read, and I seal it with wax so they have the visceral feeling of snapping the wax.

That old practice, whether it's for letters or for wine, is pretty neat.

The only thing I know about smelts is that when they get into a lake, apparently it makes the fish that you try to catch from that lake not very good.

If the big one hits California after everything else that's happened that's some serious Soddom and Gomorrah vibes.

I was pretty excited hearing the video about it.

If I were trying to get a great deal, I'd definitely do my best to bully a weak and ineffective leader to get him well and truly on his back foot (or even to get someone else in that seat)

biblically accurate puppy dog

Honestly though, it's a great song. It's obviously meant in jest, but at some point people stopped having a sense of humor and then committed cultural suicide.

Gemini says reddit told me to kill myself ...

It must be true it's on the internet, but given the specific source now I want to live forever as an immortal.

Something most people don't realize is insurance companies are the most powerful regulators on the planet.

Fortune 500 companies routinely spend millions of dollars because insurance companies told them to, and happily. Meanwhile they'll whine and complain all day long if they have to follow a law.

It's pretty crazy tbh. Most people wouldn't believe it if they saw it.

Edit: and shutting down tens of thousands of insurance plans shows the power they wield because they didn't get what they wanted in terms of risk mitigation.

The movie wish is an allegory of Justin Trudeau during the awoo flu. He's about to be trapped in a crystal forever.

Hmm. Yes, we should eliminate all taxes. That should fix that little problem.

Wait, that wasn't allowed?

They were basically living under fascism over on big tech!

Jordan's really doing this eyebrow thing that's uncharacteristic of him.

I remember years back I was advertising on Facebook. I had a 100 dollar ad budget and they were charging 5 cents per click.

So that's 2,000 clicks.

So, that'd be fine, except this was a restaurant, and we burned through the ad budget fast. Like, about a week maybe?

This was only a city of 100,000 people and the ad was set to be a local ad, so you'd expect that if nearly 2% of people not just saw the ad but visited the website, you'd see a huge boost in sales, right?

Not really... of all the ad campaigns we ran, facebook used the money up fastest, claimed to have achieved the most clicks, and yet had the least impact.

That experience led me to strongly believe that there's a lot of ad fraud going on.