They’re saying that they feel bad that they didn’t pull off the “cool, hip young attitude” that their test markets, data-points, cited studies and weeks of brainstorming sessions predicted, so now they’re going to shift around leadership in the marketing teams and try to approach their social media presence from a different angle, one that appears respectful of modern social issues but also not afraid to throw out some media-safe zingers from time to time! Additionally, a newer model of AI to help reply to questions will surely connect with the people who are all so amazed by AI technology.

That sense you get reading this, that overwhelming desire to find something tall to hurl yourself off of… that’s the reason we haven’t done anything about climate change. We are answering the call of the void because we know deep inside there’s no hope.

Should have took a lot more.

Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow?

I say this constantly, and everyone nods along happily when I say it, but almost nobody does it. What is it? It’s getting involved in your local politics.

The federal government, the US congress and senate and all the executive branch… they’re all supported and propped up by powerful institutions within the states that got powerful because nobody paid it any attention and still don’t. People get elected to represent us who run without opposition and then we wonder why nothing seems to change.

If you get involved with knowing who in your neighborhood, your school district, your city, your county and your state represent you, and then challenging that representation in any way you can, from actually running all the way to just getting on those horrible neighborhood forums and holding yard-sales to get to know your neighbors.

GET TO KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS. Jesus, this country is terrible about this one huge thing that could change everything, which is reforming communities. We scream and cry how bad the world is and make ZERO effort to make it better by forming support systems within neighborhoods. I mean fuck, most suburban neighborhoods have nothing else to do, might as well have some bake sales and yard sales and jogging groups and other things to help get to know each other, right? Or has all our cynicism completely overshadowed any possible chance of ever forming friendly communities in the US?

I used to fantasize about doing this.

When it got to a point that I was making careful plans for how to effectively remove all traces of my existence before walking into the sea or something, I realized that it was probably not a good thing that I was fixating on this “fantasy” and how attractive it was becoming, so I went to a nice little family mental health clinic in walking distance.

I was diagnosed with depression, PTSD and general anxiety disorder. A few years and a few rounds of therapy and medication later and I’m… still struggling. But at least I’m not planning my exit. There’s a lot to live for, but you can’t see it when your brain starts running away with your mental narratives. Don’t ruminate, don’t fantasize. Get some help and do something new with your lives.

This is the better answer. People don’t want a bleak, colorless world, they want art that makes them feel good.

But art isn’t something that makes you feel good necessarily. It can but it also can make you feel other things, it’s a tool for conveying feelings and ideas to someone else, it’s a type of communication. We were supposed to have been taught this as children, that art is communication and we have to be able to hear and see things that make us uncomfortable or we will never, ever succeed in life at the things we want.

Fascists don’t want people empowered, they want people’s imagination squashed so people don’t imagine an alternative narrative to the propaganda that keeps people propping up their dear leader. All channels of communication will be controlled.

This is some toddler-level conceptual understanding. When we start banning forms of communication then everyone should stand up and point at someone trying to undo society. This is a real threat to everything we’ve accomplished as a species.

claimed I was the one arguing with people when it’s actually people arguing with me

What is it like being actually insane?

okay so you’re a victim, maybe someone will wear a colored ribbon for you, changes nothing about my suggestion.

Media uses language like this on purpose, most of their copy comes from single-sources and everyone on every news station is repeating the same rhetoric. They did this with the soup/painting incident as well, making it seem like the protestors ruined priceless artifacts instead of spilling harmless food products on a sheet of plexiglass.

You’re just arguing from a petty and pedantic place while half the globe is frying.

Maybe just shut up. You wont’ regret it, you won’t get stuck ruminating on all these internet strangers who don’t like you, you can get on with your day and let people who care more about our world than old rocks get on with our day as well.

deleted by creator

Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.

The shit is already running pretty deep.

Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

Just to make up for that grevious lack of action about your case, I think we should ALL file reports about those alien peepee touchers until it gets the attention it deserves.

I mean, bathrooms are the most important thing in the world and despite it being a very modern contrivance, making sure the right people are using the right machines to whisk their poopies and pee away is critical for the survival of our species. We have to defend this noble institution against the alien peepee touchers! MAKE THEM LISTEN!

Beamed directly out of the butt and into a small shuttle that follows behind a starfleet ship.

Once the shuttle fills up to the point that it’s almost bulging with pressure from all the feces, they park it on some forgotten moon and wait for alien explorers to discover it and open it up to see what’s inside.

no one who marched through the mud along side him would.

You had me until this line.

Ain’t no mud in space. Ain’t no mud ever on starfleet uniforms.

I bet if anyone even wanted to SEE mud in the Star Trek universe they would need a team of engineers to craft some in a replicator.

Conservatism has only ever been about the most superficial of ideals.

Many of them would have no issue at all with extending laws about gender to laws about appearance and I’m not even kidding. We have plenty of examples from right-wing governments and social trends of the past absolutely leaning into ideas like phrenology or inherent, essential qualities that go alongside things like hair and eye color.

You should be concerned for your friend, everyone should be concerned that if allowed to mature, conservatism in the US would throw us right back into a time when people can face legal penalties for what they choose to wear, for how they express themselves, for the shape of their face and a thousand other ways they would want to police the world around them so it continues to look the way they want it to look. And too bad if you don’t look like someone who should live in that world.

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

One of the older meanings of “spirituality” was the idea of finding the origin of your thoughts and feelings with self-exploration and meditation, it’s about asking “why” of yourself about your experiences until you find some level of more pure truth. It had very little to do with anything mystical or even religious.

Everything that happens in the world happens in your own mind, spirituality is just the exploration of the mind to better understand the world.

So yeah, fuck those scumbags and pedos for abusing yet another good thing and perverting the meaning of the term even further.