Then social media happened

Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:

• they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
• it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
• everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
• the site becomes hard to maintain as a side hobby, including server costs
• they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
• ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the blowback
• people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
• ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
• search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
• costs also rise because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
• the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them
• someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
• back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and need to be replaced by rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and lousy moderation starts to erode the experience
• heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too
• everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but this progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly by hand to select individuals. But this works against exponential growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may go unpaid and necrosis may inevitably set in without more robust growth. One day the site goes offline.

In addition to the many other fine comments here, I will add that when you think someone is so stupid there is often something missing. You may not understand what information they are acting on or you might be interpreting the context according to different values than theirs. As an observer, not understanding someone else’s choice can feel exactly like “damn what a stupid choice.” I try as much as I can to take these as opportunities to dig further and use my imagination to figure out what they must be thinking. Occasionally I come up with something.

This is the best answer.

Thank you for complexifying the stereotype of the mustache-twirling CEO, which most people can’t see beyond. There certainly are more people to blame than just CEOs - people with more power. The entire concept of a fiduciary seems like the seed of evil to me. Once you have a CEO beholden to pursue the interests of shareholders to the exclusion of all others, the incentives are in place for people to get hurt. The shareholders don’t really have to call a single shot (and they usually don’t). The financiers / shareholders are still guilty of participating in this system at all, of course, but surely the CEO is at least as guilty since he’s usually also a shareholder and will be the fiduciary in question to actually carry out the hurting. So I think it’s fair to hate the CEOs, actually, as much as anyone.

But I would agree that the politicians and lobbyists have to be on this list, probably at the top of it. They are the only ones who can do anything about this entire system, which, as soon as it exists, is a recipe for hurting people. The people who drive the regulatory capture that allows our system to become so shitty are surely going straight to hell.

What of the rest of us though, who don’t even run for office and give them a challenge?

You can impose that technicality if you want, but when corruption is perhaps the world’s top obstacle to funding solutions for things, I see little point except the joy of splitting hairs.

Corruption is probably the biggest thing that keeps it from working. Developed countries don’t have the slightest idea what corruption even is. We hear that word in the US and we think “oh dear, bribes!” But in many parts of the world the entire economy is basically spent on greasing every palm, high and low, to keep some regime in power. Whole generations of entire countries have basically gone up in smoke this way. It makes the army’s $400 hammer sound like an absolute bargain.

They go bad pretty fast. Mold spots within a week in my experience. I always try to use it all.

ATAB?

That’s all true. There are also risks with other forms of currency though. Cash is entirely vulnerable to theft (and destruction, and you can even lose it eg: forgetting where you hid it, just like forgetting a password). And other accounts can be hacked and stolen from as well, not always in any traceable way, else there would be no bank fraud or credit card theft. Nothing’s perfect.

It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.

Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.

But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.

Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.

So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.

Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.

Exactly. You are not in your element so even things that seem obvious might not be. It’s very easy to be wrong. And if you do the wrong thing, people will get made at you because “you could have just asked.” Do they really want customers in there all acting on their best guesses? I think that is a fool’s wish. I also don’t get the expectation that I will prioritize sparing the staff a small effort like speaking some info. I’m not taking a shit on the floor and making them clean it up. I’m asking a question. They’re literally paid to help. This is the job. It’s work. This is why they call it working.

Again. You think someone should be able to figure it out with the tiniest effort. But it really may not be so obvious to someone who doesn’t know what you know.

You are not alone here - all people struggle to truly visualize the mind of another person who doesn’t know what they themselves know. Sure you know whatever it is 1000 times over. But the customer does not, and they may have a totally different 1000 things on their mind.

People don’t want to take a guess when they can just ask. If you are in an area where customers can address you, you are there to help them. Why should they stop and guess to spare you effort? It is unreasonable to get pissed off by this.

You know… it’s a courtesy. I do mean it - for what it is. Thanks for handing me my change. I’m not going to fire up my acting chops to “sell it” like they did something extraordinary if they did not.

Yes. They work in the store and know all the things. Others do not. It’s literally not their job to know. It may seem dumb when someone doesn’t know something you have learned 100x over. You may even convince yourself that any normal person should figure some thing out easily. But everyone isn’t working in that store thinking about this stuff for 8 hours at a time and we are all busy living our lives. I don’t believe in being a dick to someone because you think their question is dumb. Frankly we are all smart at some things and dumb at others and the rule should be to have some grace with one another about it.

The water cups may indeed be right there dude but excuse the fuck out of me for not spotting them - I just walked into this restaurant and there are a million things to look at in here.

GenX here. I think it’s the name that’s given to a small collection of social mismatches between the generations’ expectations of one another and their social behaviors.

Gen Z in my view do not place much value on social graces as I define them. They’re under no obligation to please me, I realize. But yeah they do not seem to care much for social graces as I define them. Things like “greet someone before you ask for something,” and “say thank you before you leave.” I try to do these things at all times and I find GenZ do not always return them or give any sign they even saw them. When a cashier hands me my change and it’s time for me to go, I will say “thank you,” and imho it’s good social graces for them to say “thank you” as well or “you’re welcome” or even just “have a nice day.” But with GenZ cashiers, I say thank you, and then realize they had stopped paying any attention to my presence even before I said it. The second the change has been handed to me, it seems they consider the transaction over, period. It can feel abrupt. And in that moment, someone like me can be waiting to hear that “you’re welcome” and instead see the other person staring off into space. I have also heard of worse cases where someone is asked a direct question and instead of answering they just stare. I think those are more extreme cases but it’s believable to me and I’ve heard it enough times for it to be credible. It’s obviously not a universal, constant thing.

I also think that for this generation, being a retail worker is much more of a misery than it was when I was their age. Wages suck more now. People may be less polite now. And corporations have really tried to squeeze the most out of every employee. They have to do a bunch of different things. It seems they schedule the bare minimum number of people they can get away with. Maybe in my day kids enjoyed their job more because they could literally only stand at the register talking to customers when there were some, and in between horse around with the other workers. I think a lot of that slack has been squeezed out of the system. Frankly a lot of service has also been squeezed out of the system. I remember when waiters would pack the rest of your meal to go for you. They still did this when I visited Portugal last year and it was so nice. Many things like this have disappeared. Maybe this is part of why customers are less polite now. Service isn’t what it once was. Not always the fault of the workers.

The bit about the Stare is not always true or even most of the time. But it’s something that happens often enough to notice as a pattern. Once you’ve heard the stereotype of the “GenZ stare” you can start to experience confirmation bias of it. And really you never know if the person you’re facing is GenZ or not.

So it’s not a thing one should over-think. But yes I think there is something real behind it. Like a lot of stereotypes, it’s not fair to apply to everyone, but it may have some origin in reality somehow.

As it happens, I am married to someone raised in a Chinese family so I hear you and am familiar with a lot of the dynamic. We just talk about it very openly as an unhealthy and even abusive way to grow up.

I remember I got promoted at work and one of the VPs above me sent me an email saying “we’re proud of you.” He happened to be Asian. And my wife was floored that he actually said this.

There is no right answer to great big stereotypes like this. Sure, raising someone with love and tenderness can keep them from growing up into a big violent asshole. I call that a good outcome. But in previous generations, this was somehow made into a bad thing. “The women made him soft!” That’s hardcore patriarchal bullshit and an excellent example of men oppressing men.

It sounds like you may be deep in the pocket of that oppression, if you think that “stoic as hell except for occasionally getting mad” is neutral. That is not neutral dude. That sucks. I’m sorry you dad never showed you love and kindness, to the point where you question your mother for doing so. Wake up from this for your own sake.

Could you be confusing the facts with your feelings? You thought the relationship issues were fixable but the partner did not. Were they just saying that as an excuse to abandon you? You could look at this differently. Everyone gets to decide if a relationship is where they want to invest their life. If you honor their right to do this, you could stop looking at it as if the entire enterprise was a great big abandonment of you. That really does sound like your take on it. We’ve all had relationships end. I’ve been on both ends of it. I didn’t see it through the lens of abandonment because I don’t have that upbringing.

But you seem to insist that the facts align with your feelings, therefore your feelings are pretty legitimate and so you don’t know what to do. It really sounds like your feelings are 100% in charge of you here. They don’t have to be.

The Houthis are a large group controlling a big area of Yemen, but not the official government of Yemen. So if the Houthis enter a conflict, that’s not the same as the government of Yemen doing so. But Israel is trying to equate the two. They’re basically saying “Yemeni government, we hold you responsible, we think the Houthis are your proxy.”

So this accusation is not so much about the mere act of entering the conflict, itself, and more about WHO has actually entered it.

A comparison might be if Hezbollah carries out an attack, that’s not necessarily the recognized Lebanese government doing it. But Israel will blame them anyway, if for not other reason than to accuse them of not doing enough to stop it. This comparison is quite apt because both Hezbollah and the Houthis are well aligned with and funded by Iran.