I mean… He’s not wrong. You shouldn’t need your phone number or email as a requirement to drop off a prepaid package with a mailer. The courier service has that info there’s no reason Walgreens should need it.
If you’re getting insurance, asking historical insurance questions should give them a better understanding of your history, like if you’re a brand new driver or not, etc. But it should not be required. Instead of “we have to know this” it should be “we need your history to determine policy risk and provide coverage. The less information we have the higher risk we have to assume and the more you pay. If you don’t want to tell me your history that’s fine, but you’re going to pay more”. In reality the insurance companies use giant databases to know exactly who and how you were insured. Payment histories, claims, everything. So it’s moot and still wrong.
The sov cit movement is ridiculous, but they’re not always 100% wrong in their stances.
Anecdotally I had a UPS Store try to pull the “you have to wait in line to drop off a package so we can get your details” crap for a prepaid drop-off. They can make you wait in line if they demand because they can ask you what’s inside to determine if it’s hazardous. That’s their loophole for preventing drop offs. But they cannot demand your information. I’m not super important but do a fair amount of business with UPS for a rando (thousands $'s week which is a rounding error to them) and after a complaint, got a followup, and magically now they accept packages without requiring information. But you still have to wait in line for them there. The purpose of the information was to get you on the store’s email list for promotions and presumably data sales.
311 is a shit show. You have to pretty much get involved with your local government officials to get literally anything done, otherwise you can just live with your pothole.
City officials have had a hard on for a minor league baseball stadium for fucking YEARS. They asked Richmond citizens for their vote on it, and every single time people said fuck no. It’s $110 million that could have been used to repair crumbling infrastructure, provide support programs, add additional affordable housing, repair our busted streets…noooo, why do that when we can go to a fucking minor league baseball game. Good idea Stoney. It’s getting built by 2026. That’ll for sure bring in money Stoney. Wonder what sort of kick back he’s getting as he’s only been pushing it for like 5 years.
City officials also hard a hard on for a casino to bring in additional “needed money” that they planned to throw in absolutely terrible locations. No one wanted it. I think we had to vote it down like half a dozen times. Petersburg, a crumbling ruin struggling town is now voting to add it. Just what it needs.
Look up the history of Jackson Ward.
Shcokoe Bottome still has buildings were destroyed in the flood back 30 years ago that have yet to be revitalized (but a fucking stadium is fine, right?)
Thats just off the top of my head. Love it here though. Just…lots of annoyances.
Man I was giggling about this a ton of times as it passed by due to the recent admin posting update about all that shit on the deranged vegan sub until just now I realized the comment was from Roge Jogan. Fuck that dumbass and everything he does.
Photomicrographs of feldspathic (L) and lithic ® greywacke. The top images are in plane-polarized light; the bottom images are in cross-polarized light. Cements fill the pore spaces.
For some reason the images aren’t showing up for me. I’m using Sync on my phone - are these images formatted correctly? If they are I’m gona send a bug report to the dev 🙃
Basically many people who have the raw processing power or “IQ” to understand and analyse things can still lack certain “mental infrastructure” or education to understand things. This is especially atrocious for narrow minded people who actively rejected new information that doesn’t fit into their mental comfort zone. Musk is definitely one of them.
I’ve yet to see any evidence that Musk is particularly smart. What I’ve mostly seen is his ability to throw big parties and charm investors with bullshit business speak, while riding a wave of lucky bets and state subsidies to billionaire-hood.
‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.
Musk is far from genius level but above average intelligence. He does have knowledge about rockets on a non-engineering level which you can see e.g. in this video talking about his starfactory (EDIT: Yes watching him in his element is kinda painful, knowing he’s a fascist)
But he and others like him focus their thinking narrow mindedly on the pursuit of profit. Every decision is based on gaining wealth. THAT is by far the bigger problem.
Besides the focus of all education towards profit seeking, technical nerds also seem to “want to” see other fields like sociology or politics or history in a simple and easy to explain way. So they seek principles or the most simplistic social theories that don’t explain anything real. Musk certainly falls into that.
Except now where he seems to go completely off the rails. Possibly a symptom of narcissism ever since he became unpopular, he’s doubling down to find new validation for his fragile ego. So yeah in that sense he is not the best example.
My point was not just about Musk but about the idea of “finding the smartest people to rule”. Because to anybody who is above intelligence that sounds smart except - stupidity can be more dangerous in intelligent people.
Maybe once. But that much Ketamine, plus his advanced age and excessive social media exposure, has degraded his ability to process information substantively.
He does have knowledge about rockets on a non-engineering level
He has prepared statements to read to a friendly interviewer. That’s PR, not intelligence.
Besides the focus of all education towards profit seeking, technical nerds also seem to “want to” see other fields like sociology or politics or history in a simple and easy to explain way.
Musk isn’t technical, he’s a finance bro. And while I agree there’s a strong “Education should be about making money” propaganda wave, I’ve noticed a lot of backtracking on this any time some group of labor activists starts passing around the financial reports of the publicly traded company to their coworkers. Then, all of a sudden, the finance bros become obsessed with sociology, politics, and history, at least in so far as they keep shouting and pointing to Venezuela any time someone at the firm mentions the company health care policy.
My point was not just about Musk but about the idea of “finding the smartest people to rule”. Because to anybody who is above intelligence that sounds smart except - stupidity can be more dangerous in intelligent people.
The fixation on “intelligence” as a discrete and quantifiable measure is what bothers me more than anything. I like to look at track records more than hypothetical quantifiers. Even if Elon were a “genius”, I won’t particularly appreciate the pro-eugenics track that brain power has sent him.
But I find it particularly galling when people conflate intelligence and success. So much of the modern economic system is about who you know rather than what you know. Elon Musk had access to enormous amounts of cheap credit, which he used to take a series of highly profitable gambles. He then leveraged his winnings to pull on more cheap credit.
Even setting aside whether that’s “smart” or “stupid”, I would say its a reflection of statistical probability. There are thousands of guys like Elon. Some make it, others don’t. But what defines Elon in the end is simply luck. Recognizing him as exceptionally fortunate, rather than exceptionally smart or savvy, means pealing off the layers of PR and revealing the human underneath.
Musk is a rich trust fund baby whose fortune started off the back of Apartheid. It’s not a shocker that he’s a mask-off racist. He’s done nothing to prove himself a genius, just a skilled grifter and financier.
It’s also important to recognize that smart people can and do fool themselves into believing whatever’s most comfortable to themselves, unless they actively develop the emotional fortitude to face reality.
Yeah true. But like @jj4211 write it’s also that confident behavior is rewarded. And narrow minded focus on profit is more efficient than being focused on other things. And they need to compete with others on this “game” who pursue the calculus of power. So humility is a really hard sell to them. And media is not looking at politics or politicians in that way at all.
I sometimes feel this lack of emotional fortitude when thinking about reading a book, because books often break up your worldview and require you to adjust. There is a kind of intellectual pain of disillusionment.
I’d say it’s more people who are repeatedly told they are smart can be very stupid.
Many of then might even be “smart”, but the important part is having unwarranted confidence.
Complicating things is that society rewards confidence way more than it rewards competence. If I’m honest about a lack of competence in a certain area but someone else lies during the interview, good chance they are going to get the job over me.
The reality is that everyone can be very very stupid, and so long as each and every one of us is willing to accept and recognize our weakness we aren’t as likely to be assholes.
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