I buy games in Early Access because I want more strange mid-tier indie projects to exist and I'm pretty neutral on whether they are ever perfectly finished or polished. I put some money into them hoping that even the failures spread useful fertilizer around.

I know that I'm likely seeing some tail of the distribution, that the main body hasn't changed very much... though there are some slurs floating around that I thought were not only dead, but archaic. the median Zoomer is much nicer than our own but the distribution has some godawful skews.

there's this crazy recurring Zoomer complaint that they're too poor to cook and *have* to DoorDash, and whenever I see it I feel like I had a stroke. we saw people like that in Madison, but they were... exceptional is polite. I feel like they've been deluded by consumerism in some strange way.

is it harder or are the kids... deficient in some way? I look at the aggregate stats and adult Generation Z is *wealthy* compared to ours at that age, and that's taking into account higher rents and student loans and all that.

I've seen a weird resentment-attachment two-step where young people resent their parents for... raising them normally? not raising them lavishly and therapeutically? but aren't willing to leave because of the creature comforts. and the parents feel horrible and try to accommodate them, prolonging.

I don't have an organic feel for the complaints. conformism is enforced by embarrassment, like the old fake Asian stereotype. how did that happen? so many of them have odd tar-like relationships with their parents. I don't get it. I thought I had a dull life but mine sounds like a pirate to them.

at this point in my life, any new Zoomer I meet is at the end of a long unconscious filtering process for both of us. a big reason I like traveling by unpopular methods to unpopular places. I am sure that Zoomer online culture is basically an aberrant minority. but are they outcasts or tolerated?

I mean, the copay was literally invented because of people like this.

however! a lot of people have absolutely no idea what they're doing. they're like the people who think you should get a refund on your car insurance if you don't get into an accident. no, dude, you have made a category error, and it's on you.

I've thought a little about this, because of this goddam scam era. having investment limited to accredited investors has its own set of problems. so does tiered investment. oligarchy! no individual investment gives us an unresponsive economy. local pooled investment raises the systemic risk.

Investors frequently get taken to the cleaners, and for much more than $20

You guys if you think investing in a product means guaranteed payouts or your money back... wow do I have news for you about investing

More than anything, I think the end of the racial hierarchy of consumption is what drove some of my fellow white Americans fully insane. They could handle, just, rough equality in the workplace. It's equality at the store that really tipped over their applecarts.

Ironically, the group most stagnant since 1980 remain Black Americans. And since the narrative is that government is “devoted to helping Black people,” the undermining and delegitimization of all government policy is incredibly easy to achieve. This goes from union busting to consumer protection

The issue is that the economic stagnation seen in the last 50 years for the lower half of the wage distribution has been tacitly linked to Black economic and social progress. The cultural, social, and political arc runs directly from George Wallace to Archie Bunker to Ronald Reagan to Trump.

These issues are not primarily economic. They are about a racial order that was (is?) critical to the collective White psyche. This is why the “deliverism” of the Biden administration to unions and rural areas paid no political dividends.

Fifth, Black people finally secured their right to vote. They became a critical constituency in most parts of the country. The entry of Black people into the electorate and into legislative bodies changed the political calculus of both parties. (Note how quickly states are moving to reverse it)

Fourth, Black people were able to shop where they wished. In a deeply capitalist economy, the end of legal segregation in public accommodations ended the racial hierarchy of consumption. The idea that there were businesses which did not have to serve the entire public was ended.

Third, the legal ban on racial discrimination in employment. Combined with Black occupations being covered by the minimum wage in the FLSA, we saw a decline in the Black-White wage gap. This was most prominent in public employment. Unions desegregated, labor composition fundamentally changed.

Second, the period they are talking about (~mid 20th century) is important. What else was going on? Let’s look. There was integration of schools. Fiercely resisted to the point of violence. The standard of private public goods was eroded.

When people say: “Democrats abandoned the working class” they are saying several things but not what they intend. A 🧵 First, the message is “working class” == White. All the Black people I know work. All of them. So these terms are a big choice that conservatives AND leftists repeatedly make.

there's a lot of "anti-capitalist left means I don't have to worry about the numbers," when 98.7% of them don't quite get "anti-capitalist left means I have to use my one wild and precious life to do things the market used to do for me," and the 1.3% that do are really weird.

not a subtweet but a supertweet: that's not a Marxist disdain for markets. that's a puritan disdain for markets. you want a stipend funded by a tithe, and royalties as a glebe.

I wonder if there's a franchise equivalent to a cover crop.

the death of late night talk shows: a friend pointed out to me that they were like a party you could step into every night, and the flavor of host defined the party. what happens when the culture gives up on that sort of party.

fantasies about having home cooks and servants at the other place also people are citing Schwartz Cowan's 1983 book that housework has gone up with increased home automation, and entirely missing the point that *gendered burden* of home life has gone up, not that appliances are useless.

why didn't it take? because those worthies picked up the idea that life competence was, at some level, too womanish.

this actually makes more sympathetic to large employers wanting to RETVRN to office work. yes, it's a form of labor monitoring and discipline, but it also allows for talent scouting and direct transmission of standard practices. BlueSky is well past those needs, so we don't see the upsides.

last night I looked up the writer's age and discovered he was 24. Generation Z reanalyzing adult sexual behavior through the lens of the Internet is unlikely to lead to correct conclusions. it is, however, the analysis we deserve.

as a very minor point, relying on evangelical royalty's homebrew online survey for an accurate sample of American sexual behavior is not the greatest sociological methodology out there. it is, however, a step above trawling Reddit, which makes Penthouse Forum looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

broke down and read that Liberal Currents article that has been putting its tongue into everyone's ear. it's not very good. the mindsets behind the politics drive the fetishes, not the other way around. take it from a guy whose identities almost always put him in categories first. even in NYC.

Why Are You Like This? - Fads And Fallacies In The Name Of Science, Martin Gardner - the big black ILM book - a very contrary personality

one thing that's blindingly apparent about the sycophancy found across the board in LLMs is the warped immaturity of the humans at those companies who approve of the "reinforcement learning from human feedback" (RLHF, expanding the acronym to examine its meaning) that engineers such servility.

Whether you’re a denialist or a booster or just someone trying to be objective, Salesforce is going to give us some pretty clear answers as to whether radically shifting resources from human coders to AI will work.

There are areas where the shitstain in the Oval Office is sui generis, and there are unfortunately areas where he's part of a pattern playing out across the developed world.

If someone wants to try out serfdom on some unimproved land, I'm willing to lend them an acre or two to fuck around and find out. We can discuss their oath of fealty to me if they like Year One okay.

My parents, despite their manifold flaws, raised me under a nuclear shadow to be the sort of person who makes a better world than the one I was born into They succeeded, oftentimes in spite of their immediate actions It's time to pay it forward.

People have had children and given them hope and joy in the worst circumstances humans have ever faced (which is not, hate to break it to you, in America in 2026, bad as things are/feel).

ChatGPT is an accident of mathematics that was inevitable once Google made the app that hallucinated dogs

“Why did they make them do art instead of fold laundry” because it turns out that manipulating pixel data is so easy that you can do it by accident and just because a task is low status doesn’t mean it’s easy to automate. Also the human brain will gloss over a lot of noise and fill in a lot of gaps

conspiracy thinking is seductive because it’s SIMPLE you don’t need to unpack five interlocking technology trends you don’t need to understand the limitations of a given technology or the process of how things get built and shipped you just need a villain to hate but this is an opiate

I fuckin' dare you to follow what you're saying to its logical conclusion.

👀

It's somehow worse than I expected. According to a defense attorney, after they got a no bill on the first try, "they re-presented their case after excluding grand jurors who disagreed with them." Then they got a true bill.

I continue to think it’s weird when self-identified leftist on this website express the belief that charts were invented by Will Stancil to cloud the mind

Good luck to anyone trying to make things for them, which will inevitably be met by a vocal minority of teenagers just screaming and shitting themselves at imaginary slights, but I'm gonna stick to not having a side account for my nsfw so I can legally tell them to fuck off.

Tech first got the BernankeBuxx, then, just as that was running out, got the Covid Bailout, and yeah, when two decades and change worth of Easy Money runs out things are going to change.

Relatedly, there is one (1) way to get good at cooking: you gotta cook a lot. It honestly doesn't matter *what* you're cooking, you just gotta do it. I've been cooking from scratch my whole life and I make something from a recipe less than once per month, tops.

The cool thing about cooking is that the repetition-honed skills (everything from physical chopping to understanding how protein will behave at different temps) are extremely transferable. If you get good at cooking a few complex dishes, you can add more very easily.

actually you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to” the terror group known as ISIL