This feels like a false dichotomy. You can be superior to those conceptual camps by building an array of skills.
This is even obvious to heavily technically minded people, who lament how one kind of engineer would benefit from stronger grasp of other domains. Communication skills, understanding of how to exist within social structures, and all those “soft skills” have the power to multiply the value of the technical skills.
My sense is that the loudest proponents for devaluing soft skills are those who are bad at them and want a moat rather than having to work at them to compete.
- I'm still not over how great it feels to have confidence that Carney has a strong understanding of the economics of these political manouvers. Not only is he not a !@#$ing moron, he's a deeply experience economist more than he's a politician.
- Stratification of trading partners is nothing but good.
- This feels like safe toe-dip. Both sides have agreed to terms that are temporary, meaning there is no surprise rug-pull moment. Which is something the Americans are using more and more to keep everyone so !@#$ing wound up.
- This could be a long-term play for China: establish a presence in the North American auto market. The U.S. is right there. (Watch the Americans ban Chinese EVs from border crossing)
- Even better long-term play: establish North American manufacturing. How about Ontario builds Japanese and Chinese cars, turns CAMI and others into a Roshel or other military vehicle plant, and says good riddance to the American auto makers that have been rug-pulling long before Trump got into politics.
- A great opportunity to start improving trade lines for Canola. Possibly a trial balloon for other primary and secondary resources?
- Canada cannot stand on its own geopolitically. We must be closely tied to a major power. Intuitively that choice is the EU But I fear that China can move much faster and we'll find ourselves de-facto in their sphere while the EU is still debating this and that.
I don't love that Carney is relatively conservative-leaning for being Liberal, but I do really appreciate the fact that he's professional, competent, and stable. He speaks like (what I see as) a regular person and he's not there to whip supporters into fervent chanting.
I'm absolutely relieved that Poilievre didn't win the election (or his original seat). Setting aside just how far to the right he is, I've heard him described as an idiot both by another MP and by someone (who is himself pretty conservative) who met him at some social event.
Imagine that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Fuck binary politicking, what the people want is reason and logic to form decision making, with foresight and compassion. Being a centrist isn't a bad thing.
It was. Then the U.S. turned into whatever the hell you call all that.
Now we have U.S. automakers who are derefential to the current regime's leader and are pulling out. The Federal and Ontario government both tried to somehow make them happy, but you can't make that kind of monster happy. So it's time to move on.
Mobile has been like this for me for like a decade or so. But in the before times it was just barbaric and ridiculous to either be cut off or absolutely ravaged by fees.
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.
That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
Do you maybe have too little slack in your life? If you have too little emotional energy 'in your tank', compassion and empathy and such naturally go down as there are less 'resources' to spend on empathizing with others.
For what it's worth, banter on social media with someone you're not familiar with is almost always playing with fire. It's really easy for something to come across wrong or just be kind of exhausting, and this effect is magnified the more of a spotlight that person has. You're just one of thousands of interactions they've had that day/week/month, and so unless you know they enjoy that kind of playfulness, I find it's worth assuming they don't. This is, ironically, especially true with people who publicly post in that tone, because they get it coming back at them all the more frequently.
It really doesn't have to. I thought I was being clever when in a thread I likened something Michael Godwin said to being Nazi, because I thought it was a funny self-reference, and he just gave me the Twitter equivalent of an eye roll and moved on.
Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.
I've seen this before where physical illness can deeply affect a person to the point their personality seems to do a 180. There's no difference between physical and mental health, it's all interconnected.
The only lesson here is not to idolize people that create content you like.
Don't overcomplicate it.
> But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing.
Chronic diseases (of which aging is one) can do nasty things to people and animals. The lesson here (which I think you picked up on) is to try and be kinder. It may not always work.
Maybe it’s not meant to be signal. It’s meant to be noise that makes the signal increasingly hard to distinguish. You get used to there being bullshit and now you can’t tell precisely which unlikely but maybe plausible messages are true. It helps weaken the ability for the target to be able to engage in meaningful discourse.
I hate to admit it but I failed the NPR real vs fake video quiz [1] and it is exactly because of this. There is so much fake noise out there that it is very hard to tell what is true.
Thanks for sharing this. I got all 4, but none of which were so obvious that I had absolutely no doubt. I had to reason about all of them. And I'm absolutely confident that a LOT of perfectly reasonable people can potentially score zero on this test.
Same. Managed all 4. But the differences are tiny and I'm only 70% confident. Most of my judgement is based on human reactions to a changing situation.
Yeah, I have pretty much stopped analyzing the media itself for cues, and am evaluating the scene and the actors. Are they convincing? The behaviour of the cops in the first video were entirely unconvincing. I didn't consider the video quality, artifacts, lip sync issues, etc.
Thanks for sharing. I am curious which of the four quiz questions you failed—to me they looked relatively easy to tell apart, but I follow the progression of this tech very closely.
Personally, I've mislabeled the one with the animal in the restaurant as AI generated. I might have clicked too quickly because it was looking like the animals trampolines video's. I've not really looked at the timestamps.
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
4/4 for me, but probably only because I knew about that tear gas incident, and that snake was way too loud and they don't tend to move like that unless it's sand.
The tear gas was the only one that had me guessing. Knew the video was real, but wasn't sure it wasn't doctored just at the end with the throw. Overall, it read more real than fake, I was just sure they were going to try to "gotcha" me.
This is even obvious to heavily technically minded people, who lament how one kind of engineer would benefit from stronger grasp of other domains. Communication skills, understanding of how to exist within social structures, and all those “soft skills” have the power to multiply the value of the technical skills.
My sense is that the loudest proponents for devaluing soft skills are those who are bad at them and want a moat rather than having to work at them to compete.
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