PerCarita

u/PerCarita@discuss.tchncs.de
2 posts · 134 comments

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Foreigner...? Reading this as a non-Chinese and non-US American is quite baffling. Are these the only two countries in your world?

Humans have had a taste for the macabre at least for as long as we have written history. Public executions used to be a past time activity (even Jesus' crucifixion is told like it was a public show), the morgue of Paris was a tourist attraction, even the sanitised (and controversial) Body Worlds exhibition has no trouble finding an audience. Maybe what's weird is our relationship with death and putrefaction. It happens to everyone yet it's somehow in bad taste to talk about it.

on Make it make sense · c/antiwork · 3 pts · 2y

Where does this silly notion come from? Elon Musk also said something like anti-science, anti-merit, anti-human thing and he's not an original thinker. I've read some longtermism papers, but have yet to come across this exact wording. Where did you hear it? (Please don't say Elon, tell me you at least have the primary source...)

on Make it make sense · c/antiwork · 23 pts · 2y

Mitt Romney's wife shared this lovely story of when they were in college, they didn't ask anything from their parents. They'd come visit and got them a nice dinner, that was it. Ann Romney had to order carpet samples and sew them together so they didn't have to walk on bare floors. Sometimes, they were so stripped of cash that they had to sell stock to get money. They had to sell stock. SELL. STOCK.

She probably thought it was an uplifting story.

Here's another "insider's insight": The car industry is a tough business. The profit margin is not like selling bottled water, especially when you consider overheads in R&D and the regulation compliant measures they have to adhere to, to sell in the German/EU market. Cars sold in the US are cheaper to produce because they go through much, much less vigorous testing, but then they are loaded with stupid add-ons (screens behind each seat, more luxurious user interface, better speaker+subwoofer combos, etc)

I saw someone starting this thought exercise just yesterday - imagine Al Gore became president, say for two terms. Then the boat swung back into two terms of McCain, followed by Obama. No Iraq war. No Benghazi. Possibly no 2006 Housing Crisis. Maybe Covid would still have happened. But anyway, wouldn't that have been a much happier timeline?

Back to no Iraq War, maybe Saddam would have gotten toppled over locally. The Arab Spring would still have happened, but then also maybe no ISIS?

You used Tiktok as an example for something that is more interesting than learning. (Of course it's more interesting than learning, it's digital crack cocaine.)

DB the company has a lot of foreign interests. It bought a British transport company in 2010. Why did they do this instead of reinvesting the money back into the Deutsche Bahn? Because it's a joint-stock company beholden to stake-holders. It should never have been managed like a private company. Now the damage is done and decades of unrepair is catching up to them.

Somehow I don't blame the politics for this disrepair. I blame the execs and upper management.