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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • This is largely untrue. I have worked in manufacturing my entire adult life and in my experience people are very eager to do manual labor type jobs if those jobs pay well and provide stability. The problem is that most of them don’t. It would make everything more expensive to pay everyone doing these jobs better but it would be worth it longer term by making a society that doesn’t just rely on there being a constant supply of an artificial second class of people that can be underpaid and exploited with impunity. When people say “nobody wants to work manual jobs…” the implied rest of that sentence is “…to make the same amount of money as someone working retail.”

    I hate Trump and his idiotic tariffs, but this argument that we need immigrants to do all the jobs Americans don’t want to do is based on the racist idea that Americans are too good to do these jobs- the reality is, they are simply not desperate enough to take them for the amount of pay that is being offered. It’s a blatantly false narrative and it only serves to harm anyone left of Mussolini.


  • I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it’s so much worse on ways I don’t even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It’s crazy what people will accept if it’s done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.




  • That is a conspiracy theory that can easily be disproven if you look literally anywhere outside of Western Europe. Muhammad started Islam and composed the Qu’ran at the beginning of that time period, and the Islamic calendar begins in 622 AD. According to the Phantom Time theory, basically none of early Islamic history actually existed and it’s a fabrication by… The Pope?! It’s an absurd premise. The Abbasid Caliphate was founded in 750 and still existed in 911, with all sorts of written and archeological evidence in favor, and let’s not forget about the other Roman Empire that existed in that time frame and have their own historical and archeological evidence, including about events that overlapped with Western histories such as Irene of Athens being pressured to marry Charlemagne. Again, it stretches credulity that the Byzantine Emperors and Eastern Church or any Muslims whatsoever would be swayed to fabricate so much of their own history by the Pope. This theory is absurd at best and racist at worst because in erasing so much Western European history it just kind of assumes literally nothing was happening anywhere else in the world either.



  • It’s happening with pretty much all professions. I’m a chemical engineer and it’s pretty much every role at my plant, the plan is just make everyone work so much they hate their lives, and then those people quit and make things worse for everyone else that’s left and it’s all fueled by an endless supply of fresh college grads who are just thrown into the deep end with the understanding that over half of them will get fed up and quit within a few years and those who stay will train the new ones coming in. It’s not just engineers, it’s operators, mechanics, maintenance coordinators, safety reps, anything you can think of. While technology technically allows fewer people to do the same work, that same work is just getting worse and worse because each employee has to do so many different types of things and have so much riding on them personally that they feel like they can’t leave or take any time off without messing up the whole operation - there is no redundancy.

    Everyone I know in the chemical industry is saying the same thing. Everyone is overworked and wages for chemical engineers have been stagnant for the past 20 years in spite of inflation and each employee delivering much more productivity than they used to. I have started to envy the production line staff who at least get overtime pay and don’t have to think about this shit once they clock out. They just leave and it’s the next shift’s problem.




  • I’m just saying the whole premise of the meme is extremely flawed. It’s made to imply that modern life is in any way as bad as medieval serfdom and that is just not true. For example, did you know that most medieval peasants didn’t own their own ovens and were forced to take the food they produced to someone else to cook it if they weren’t eating something that could be cooked on a simple hearth? Or that they literally weren’t allowed to leave the land they were assigned to without permission from their lord? Yeah things are bad today but they were way worse back then.







  • I hope so. Textual analysis suggests a “2 Q” theory where the earliest posts were mostly one author on 4chan (interestingly not all, several early drops are believed to be from different users) and then another person (who I believe wholeheartedly is 8chan administration Ron Watkins) started posting as Q and moved to 8chan. I’m interested in knowing who the earliest Q was and what the content of the very first Q drops was, given that there are believed to be several that didn’t get archived. Several people have claimed to be 4chan Q but none of their stories are particularly convincing. My guess is that it was a bunch of random trolls at first and then one of them just went with it when they started getting a following.


  • Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.


  • This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

    TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.