The people who have fallen behind the most are the ones who don’t realize they’ve fallen behind. “What you know you don’t know, versus what you don’t know you don’t know” and all that. They are also the people least open to catching up when the opportunity presents itself; if you think best practices haven’t changed since you were initially trained, why would you even entertain any information that contradicts what you initially learned? Part of this is ego, as it would require admitting that you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time (so instead these people keep doing it wrong as some kind of sunk cost fallacy).

I remember really enjoying How I Met Your Mother when it was airing. I tried for a rewatch recently and only made it a few episodes in because I was so disinterested. It felt empty, and the humor wasn’t hitting. I think it’s a combination of I’ve changed (I’ve aged out of the “20-something singles fool around in a fantasy version of NYC” demographic) and TV has evolved (good comedy shows are no longer just goofy hijink situations and setups for one-liners).

So instead I rewatched Archer season one (same era as HIMYM) and fortunately that one still slaps.

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?

Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)

Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong “why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” vibes. Articles? Don’t exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you’ll change the meaning of the sentence.

“Went” is a complete sentence in Japanese.

When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.

I know everyone hates HOAs because they’re usually petty and dumb, but this is where I think they’d actually be helpful. Designate certain neighborhoods as “quiet zones” where similarly obnoxious activities (that have reasonable, quiet alternatives) are banned: no motorized leaf blowers, lawn mowers, souped-up motorcycles or muscle cars. If you want to own one of those things, don’t move into that neighborhood.

I’ve come to realize many people feel “forced” to move to incredibly space- and resource-inefficient (and thereby ecologically-damaging) places like suburbs and exurbs for basically two reasons: better schools, and in an attempt to escape asshole neighbors. Sometimes it’s so that they can themselves be the asshole neighbors, but generally people are trying to live in a “nice” neighborhood not over usual HOA things like house siding color and properly-concealed trash cans, but rather for a general desire for peace and quiet. I know I dream about living on 40 acres not so I can start a dairy farm, but to escape the various forms of pollution (primarily noise, air, and light) emitted by my current neighbors. But I wouldn’t feel the need to do that if my neighbors had similar desires as I and limited things like car idling, porch lights, and landscape-related noise. Meanwhile the neighbors upset at me for keeping my yard wild to support wildlife could have a neighbor with similarly bland yard maintenance standards.

I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.

For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”

I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.

I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.

Fukisima

Dogs with blue eyes look absolutely psychotic to me for some reason, like it’s indicative that they’re the serial killers of the canine world or something. It’s super unnerving. This doesn’t translate to any other animal for me; for instance I think blue-eyed cats are gorgeous.

I don’t understand why some people find monkeys cute. They’re so ugly and obnoxious! They don’t even have the presence or majesty of great apes either. The further from humans on the evolutionary scale, the cuter primates tend to be IMO. By the time you get to lemurs, bush babies, etc, you’ve hit standard mammal cuteness.

I’ve heard two good explanations as to why she’d publicize such a story:

1. She botched a common Republican technique by choosing the wrong victim to villainize (full explanation here)

2. There are witnesses to the puppy murder (construction crew) so this is her way of getting ahead of the story before someone else tells it (AFAIK so far we’ve only heard her version; maybe reality is even worse)

Probably the cheapest and easiest way for most people to get into bike camping is by getting a trailer instead of obsessing over squeezing everything you need on the bicycle itself. I imagine some folks would consider that “cheating” but fuck 'em.

To the confused comments, the mind of a pre-schooler (the target demographic) works differently from that of an adult. There were a ton of episodes, and they tried lots of different things, and I’m sure lots of very little kids were frightened by the show now and then. Actually, I got curious and found this Youtube video of some guy’s “top ten scary Sesame Street moments,” and while I remember watching most of those skits as a kid and never found them scary myself, he describes decently well how a very young child could be scared.

However while Sesame Street was never scary for me, there were some segments they did in the 80s/early 90s that were, well, in the style of the 80s/early 90s, and as such they were a bit creepy. Kind of in the same way that the Chuck-E-Cheese animatronics were a bit creepy. Some of the shorts I remember were MTV-parody music videos, or there would be a puppet with disembodied legs walking around, or the segment would use liminal space in an ominous way, things like that. I’m sure if I were to watch them today I wouldn’t see anything off, but there was something I found slightly unsettling about some Sesame Street clips of that era.

This was cross-posted to “usauthoritarianism”

Otherwise I wouldn’t really care, but like wtf. Of all examples of authoritarianism/fighting the system, feeding a parking meter? What is this, anarchy for infants?

I assume it’s shorthand for “pays for”

My understanding is most shorthand/euphemisms nowadays seem to originate from tiktok’s strict and sometimes inscrutable censorship rules. Maybe this is one of them?

Edit: apparently this was a case of text-to-speech gone away. I prefer my head cannon of tiktok trying to censor conversations about anyone who “pays for” an elicit service.

Eh, I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Parking is a huge thorn in the side of transportation reform, and ensuring parking turnover is actually pretty crucial to a functional transportation system. On-street parking is public right-of-way that could be a bike lane, enhanced bus stop, street seating for restaurants/cafes, parklets, drainage swales, large medians for trees, wider sidewalks, the list goes on. However we don’t get these nice things because “wE NeEd ThE pArKiNg SuPpLy.” Except often you’ll find that there would be sufficient supply to remove the parking on even just one side of the street if turnover were higher, and turnover is not higher because people are abusing the parking. Things like store employees parking all day in spots meant for customers, people using on-street parking to avoid more expensive lots at the destinations they’re actually visiting (like entertainment venues), etc. Have you ever encountered a parking meter that would only let you put in 2 hours of money even though you need the spot for much longer, and you had to run out mid-way through whatever you were doing to feed the meter? That means you were probably not the intended user for that space and you should have found longer-term parking elsewhere. Maybe that store manager that runs outside every other hour to feed the meter rather than use an all-day parking lot (but that’s a three-block walk away and this parking is right here!!1) or taking public transportation (because that’s beneath them) would rethink this behavior after an expensive ticket. Point is, I’m not sure helping people skirt parking regulations is fighting the system or standing up for the little guy.

Vogue tells a different history of the trench coat, claiming its origins are actually raincoats for active well-to-do British gentlemen:

https://www.vogue.fr/fashion/article/vogue-encyclopaedia-the-history-of-the-trench-coat