perhaps they should just lay square eggs

What is “holiday” on this list for?

Humans are famously garbage at comprehending statistics, and most Darwin Award winning conservative behaviors are born of it.

Take any mundane thing that was part of a status quo of a previous era in recent memory. Anything at all. Research comes out suggesting that thing has a small, but non-negligible risk to be quite harmful. So we collectively shift to a new behavior that tries to eliminate the risk. A shift that, in most sane and civil peoples’ opinions, is so unobtrusively small that any theoretical benefit we’re trading away is probably well worth the risk elimination.

But oh, a certain group of people will bitch and moan and scream and piss all over themselves in rage over how you dared to take away something so integral to their culture and lifestyle! The risk aversion is never worth the vain fringe benefit of whatever perceived quality was lost because the risk is completely invisible until it actually hits them personally.

Milk used to taste so great! God’s gift to the world! Then we all started boiling it and now it tastes worse! And for what? Because a couple of weak-bodied cosmic lottery losers were getting a few tummy aches? The vast majority of us are all suffering over nothing! Life was so much better when we weren’t all scared of things that won’t happen! We did it for millennia and we turned out just fine!

Then you point out all the people actually getting hospitalized from pathogens in raw milk, the very thing we were trying to avoid in the first place, and if they even believe you at all they simply consider it an acceptable price to pay. Better to live in a rich and interesting society where you’re free to risk harming yourself and others than a milquetoast one where imperceptible threats have been preemptively eliminated at great cost.

And then they turn around and work to ban books that mention trans people or ban porn websites to save the children or some other dumb shit.

I remember my 6th grade science class having a lively 15 minute discussion about whether or not rockets can work in space since there’s no air…. We’re looking at videos of rockets working in space and then debating whether or not they do. 🙄

This feels a tad different than the person in the screenshot. Screenshot person fundamentally misunderstood how radio waves worked. Meanwhile, 6th grade you absolutely understood how rockets worked, at least to the level of understanding that they need air to work. Because you were right the whole time, those kinds of rockets can’t work in space without air. The slightly absurd solution that you wouldn’t readily know without a deeper understanding of how the rocket is built is that a rocket literally brings its own air with it!

Charging at them directly where they want you to charge, their designated fall guys, sounds like a superbly inefficient strategy. You are pinching a huge amount of bystanders caught in the middle to for a proportionally negligible effect.

Yes, if someone who is desperately asking for a proverbial (maybe literal?) bullet in their head puts a hostage between you and them, can you still plow right through the hostage and get them that way? Exhaust everyone they can possibly field to eventually break through to them? Sure, in principle. That can balloon to an absurdly high casualty count, though. Is it really all worth it?

It’s a lot more efficient to, wherever possible, sidestep around the hostage, get behind them and strike directly at the problem. That’s exactly what Luigi Mangione did, and its effectiveness is exactly what’s being applauded.

If your rebuttal is that what Luigi did is far more of a risky path to take, you don’t wish to take a risk like that, and you’d rather faff about kicking low level grunts instead because that’s an easier, lower-consequence option for you that theoretically makes progress, okay, I guess. I personally think you’re just wasting your time and energy pissing off only the wrong people. Only big stunts are gonna move the needle, in my opinion.

Regardless whether you support her general conduct, I think we can all rally around one tenet here:

Don’t harass a shitty company’s T1 support out of priciples against the company in general.They’re in no better position to effect change in the system than you are. They exist only to be slightly more competent phone robots, turning your whiney noise into itemized actions, and filter those actions down to a restricted subset of system commands the company permits them to do.

If anything, they’re on our level of the totem pole. Any outrage directed at them for actions of their broader company are a gross misdirection and wholly counterproductive.

I don’t know who this lady was speaking to on the phone. But if it was some minimum wage phone bank slave who is just the ablative frontline of the customer support hotline, I don’t support her threat in that context.

At least in the case of fumos these days they’re made-to-order. Buying 10 of them isn’t snatching 10 of them from the carts of other potential buyers, it just means 10 more fumos will be made. If anything it’s strictly increasing the supply and making them more accessible to people who couldn’t make the preorder window.

This was absolutely not the case a few years ago, though. And just because you’re technically not scalping doesn’t mean you can’t still wildly overcharge.

Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.

I’ve seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as “respect distance”.