I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.

Unrelated rant following:

Back in around 2002-2003 as I started becoming cognitive enough to appreciate different artists and styles, I didn’t have Internet at home (Eastern Europe yay), but we had a couple of non-local TV channels somehow. One being VIVA (the German channel, not the UK one), which at some time of day just played the week’s top 100 hits for Germany, many of which were one hit wonders. Tatu was one of them, though they were more of a 1.5 hit wonder (they’re not gonna get us was half a hit compared to the big one).

This was wonderful, because it got me hearing all kinds of music as a 7 year old that I normally wouldn’t have. Where the hell else was I going to hear The Rasmus - In The Shadows, a bunch of songs by Eminem, and then suddenly Las Ketchup Song? Or for something way less commonly known: Travel Time by Starsplash

Not the person you replied to, but agree with them to some degree, at least on the fact that any strong political stances are dangerous for a business.

If I ran a service and gay people are celebrating pride on it, that’s none of my business and they can keep on doing whatever they want. Similarly, if conservatives want to throw a straight party without outright saying gay people deserve fewer rights, it’s fucking weird, but it’s their business. The moment anyone advocates for harming someone else, THAT’s when it becomes a problem for me. Goal of a business, in my opinion, is to serve as many people as possible.

I just wouldn’t want to voice support for, or against, anyone’s rights, as a business. It’s horrible that LGBT rights are a politicized issue, sure. But if I ran a business, and there are 30% otherwise quite well-behaved customers who would drop my business because I changed my logo to a rainbow colored one… I just don’t see myself doing that. If I’m providing a service at the best price/quality ratio, it would just mean they drop me to go pay a homophobic business owner even more money for the same service. Does that actually benefit anyone, other than the hypothetical homophobic business owner?

But the worst, most cowardly thing, is supporting LGBT rights and then WITHDRAWING that support. If you’re political already, fucking stick to your beliefs. Don’t abandon them the second the political landscape starts changing.

No, it’s definitely political. So was the Civil Rights movement in the US. So was Womens’ suffrage.

Pushing for change is political, even if it’s nearly universally agreed that the particular change is necessary and good. I agree with LGBT rights and as far as I care, they can have a month long pride if they want, it doesn’t in any way chafe my willy. However, I agree with the person you replied to. As a business, ANY stance on ANY political cause risks alienation of some part of your customer base. Doing a 180 on your stance like Jagex did is of course the worst thing you can do, because then you alienate the people who agreed with you, but the others will still remember when you disagreed with them. Once they decided to do pride, they should’ve fucking stuck to it, at least for the year where they already had events scheduled!

If I ran a public-facing business at all, it would have literally no political allegiance or opinions. No stance on LGBT rights, no political donations (not really a huge thing in my country anyway), etc. Just do my thing, provide a great service, make sure my employees and customers are happy, and… The LGBT folks can do whatever they want, I’m just not voicing support for them as a business. Even if I as a person root for equal rights, I just don’t want to take a stance as a business owner. Donations to charities, including LGBT charities, are fine - I just don’t want it to be particularly public. But then I just prefer privacy in these kinds of matters.

What did Trump say about Elon’s computer knowledge winning the election again?

Oh yeah it was definitely fucked up. But at least we didn’t end up with Harris, so the world is saved.

Oh sorry, republican voter and/or republican helper.

It’s less that anyone said he’d be better for Americans and more that everyone said don’t vote for Harris, while Trump received no criticism. Getting dem voters to stay home is an old old republican strategy and the tankies definitely helped.

'cept the entire tankieverse saying that you shouldn’t vote for Biden (later Harris) because they’re the ones causing the genocide in Gaza. Like yes, they did jack all to fix it, but we all knew Trump would be even worse. Telling that to just about any tankie resulted in “How can it get any worse than genocide? Voting for Biden/Harris means you voted for genocide” or something along those lines.

Didn’t take very long for Trump to go “lol Gaza is prime beachfront property tho, let’s get em fuckers out” after he got his throne back.

I love how this is actually an example of progress. These days, ML can be used for this kinda thing and it’s not too bad at it even.

Manchin might have a (D) next to his name, but he’s always been a republican in spirit. He cheered hard for Trump. Only reason the party accepts him is that no real democrat is gonna win west Virginia and they need every seat they can get in order to have a majority

Essentially the entire system is bullshit and while the democrats are ineffective, I’m not sure they’re always ineffective on purpose.

And the entries would’ve gotten ludicrous towards the bottom

My cheap ass TV from 2019 is 55 inches. How much is a 55 inch monitor? Or a 65 in monitor if I want to upgrade to a bigger size in the future?

This average height manlet here is glad to be off Tinder. It sucks. I’d honestly rather pay prostitutes. I’ve never done that, but seems better value for money if you value your time as much as money (and I personally value it more)

My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.

Tell me you hate your own culture without telling me you hate your own culture.

The same reason mensa is a thing. People like to toot their own horn.

Fair enough, I’ve also at one point been 13 and done a bunch of useless online IQ tests. Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I’ve never really thought you could even study for.

To a certain extent yes, but no one can be an expert at everything. There just isn’t enough time, and expertise is really what society rewards people for at the end of the day.

Absolutely. But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don’t cut it. In my own field, I’ve seen software engineers who can’t program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years. Now imagine you’re 10 years into a career and it starts becoming less and less relevant due to changes in society. If you’re naturally intelligent, you’re both 1) more likely to have learned more from your 10 years than others have, so more valuable for longer, and 2) more likely to be able to switch to an unrelated or semi-related career path and become useful in a shorter amount of time.

Of course it gets more complex than that because general intellect doesn’t span ALL skills. In fact, it’s more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood. There’s just skills I won’t learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it’s been that way since childhood.

Hell, maybe general intellect isn’t a thing after all.

I think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess). It’s a pointless measure. My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others. There’s people from good families who have never suffered from malnutrition or emotional abuse and went to good schools, who aren’t all that smart, and people from far worse backgrounds who are geniuses. Something must be contributing to that. If not genetics, then what? At the same time, yes, people from emotionally healthy families with no financial issues, are more likely to be successful in school as well as life in general.

Doesn’t seem to be in my country yet, but apparently it’s in a few other EU countries so there’s hope yet!

In the meantime I log into Facebook when I need to buy used car parts. There’s other sites but it’s nowhere near as usable as just writing “hey someone wanna sell me a 3.0 tdi (BMK/ASB) turbo pls” into the Audi group on Facebook. Such is the life of driving shitboxes anyway.

Wait, do people actually study for IQ tests? Why? Language makes sense, if I tried doing one in German I would fail because I barely speak it at an A2 level, if that.

I reckon general intellect does matter. In a world where your job might not exist in 5 years because lol AI, it’s best to be able to adapt fast. Specialize, yes, but one day your specialization will be useless. Best case scenario, it’s after you’ve retired.

And going back to heritability, there’s definitely some heritability there, but the problem with twin studies is that twins tend to have the same socioeconomic backgrounds too. Still, just malnutrition, environmental pollution, etc, are big enough factors that taking care of those on a nationwide scale (since we’re talking about a particular nation here), would be much more significant than eugenics. Then we get to education - again, this same particular nation has a lot of gaps in the availability of good quality education.

It’s genetic and environmental (I’d argue that societal is a subset of environment - the society you live in is part of your environment).

IQ is far from a perfect measure for intelligence, but it has a high degree of inheritability - up to 80%.

However

As soon as malnutrition comes into play, IQ is automatically severely diminished. Add in all the other environmental factors too, and - it turns out we do have a lot more we can do to increase peoples intelligence, before resorting to eugenics.

“Golden Dome”

Given that gold is a relatively soft material, I assume that this one isn’t for defense like Israel’s Iron Dome, but rather for large scale golden shower parties for Trump and friends.

Python itself might not be, but all the AI shit runs on GPUs so it’s CUDA or OpenCL or whatever underneath