ArtieShaw

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

You know, I never even wondered that until you mentioned it. Maybe I'll check it out because now I'm irrationally curious! I bet it's pretty nice!

(/s)

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Yes, and I do fault them for that, but only to an extent. Wedge issues are a valuable commodity, aren't they? Republicans certainly kept banging on that pro-life drum (which supposedly no one really wanted and y'all were just yelling about to keep the rubes on board?) The flip side of that was that you all looked like extremists. (But Roe is dead and buried, so I guess you're doing Nazis now. We all sort of hope that's cosplay as well, but... look at Roe. Someone might start to suspect you're serious.)

I guess there is such a thing as a slippery slope.

In any case, "you had 50 years to make a law about it" seems like a silly argument if the right in question is protected by the constitution. Every SC nominee in recent memory has testified to that specific question under oath.

And what sort of law are we talking about here? It's far easier to restrict a right than it is to affirm it. It honestly makes no sense practically or politically. The only way to attack that right was through a challenge to Roe, so that was how things went down. They had to overturn Roe. Took half a century. I guess that's something.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Issue 1 would have fundamentally changed how citizens can interact with our constitution by making voter initiatives almost impossible to pass.

Honestly - I think it was about both, but the November ballot initiative was absolutely the catalyst. Why else would lawmakers call an August election (something recently abolished), out of a seemingly new concern about ballot initiatives? A power grab was absolutely the goal, but there's a reason they tried for it now.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

That's a good find. Unfortunately for that chief, he seems to have a talent for lighting his problems on fire instead of burying them. What could have been a quiet little small town scandal blew up to become national news. Good work, chief!

And the greatest irony to me is that the newspaper reported on NONE of this. OK, they did cover the story where Karin went off the rails and aired her own dirty laundry at the town council meeting, but it's not like that was any sort of secret.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

I've seen this argument elsewhere and it seems (pardon me) like patent horseshit.

Why is this a state's right? What makes a uterus in Delaware different than an uterus in Nebraska? I'm a woman and an American citizen. Everyone keeps telling me that I live in a first-world nation. This makes no sense. "Oh sorry. You live in a first world nation, but you picked the neighborhood of Ohio."

And let's be realistic - I can afford to travel to anywhere that local, precious state laws where I live are irrelevant.

The idea of state autonomy made sense in some way in the America that existed before telephones. Emergency decisions might need to be made and horses are slow. But let's be honest for just a moment. The whole idea of federation was a hard sell to the slave states and invested powers. These were a mixture of landowners and merchant classes who had been running things locally in their colonies. They didn't want to give up control, and who could blame them? Meanwhile, the young country needed to have everyone on board for some sort of federation if post-colonial America was going to survive. States rights were a compromise. We've been choking on it for 200+ years.

As a country we should have evolved past this many years ago. But we haven't. The biggest disruption to our American system was the Civil War. States rights again. Yeah, so we have that to look back upon but never really seem to reckon with it. The last time I heard anyone significantly whine about infringement of "states rights" was with regard to chattel slavery.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

I had one who could jump to the top of the fridge from a dead standstill. (About 6 feet [2m] vertical). First time I saw her up there I assumed she used the counter as an intermediate step. Nope. It was like she just turned off gravity for a moment.

When we found her she was a kitten who had gotten trapped in our garage. Half feral and scared. I swear she was doing 9 foot parkour jumps along the walls when she saw us.

She's 14 now so she's slowed down a bit, but she has no issues with a human-chest-high jump.

Cats are neat.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

In addition to getting onto the top of the fridge, mine learned to get into kitchen cabinets. I'd come downstairs in the morning and find her just casually oozing out of the cabinet we keep cups and plates in. "my butt was maybe on all your stuff just now. oh hai. got catfood?"

I love them. Some still have secret hiding spots in our house.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

The idea that Jews collectively killed Jesus is nothing new.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-killed-jesus/

And it's still around. Survey from 2004 linked below shows that about a quarter of Americans held that belief and that it had increased since the late nineties. Hell, I think it was a theme in Jesus Christ Superstar.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2004/04/02/belief-that-jews-were-responsible-for-christs-death-increases/

I guess someone could be ignorant of all this, but whenever someone brings up who "killed Jesus" they're usually not trying to make some vague point via an innocent analogy. In other words, if someone comes out talking about one of the foundational ideas behind European/American anti-Semitism, I'm going to make some assumptions.

But who knows. Maybe those hoofbeats mean I'm about to be overrun by a herd of zebras.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

https://cfaes.osu.edu/news/articles/record-wheat-prices-prompt-more-ohio-farmers-plant-wheat-year

This article is a year old, but even in the US farmers are taking advantage of the shortages caused by the war.

Local (Ohio) farmers near us have planted wheat for the first time in at least 20 years instead of the usually soy/corn yearly summer rotation. It's weird enough to see wheat in the fields that something must be driving it.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Is this a reference to something that makes no sense in reality?

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Mine still thinks he fits into a shoe.

Kittenhood was a good time. He could crawl into a sneaker, curl up, and enjoy 360 degrees of pure human foot stink. Now he can only fit his head inside, which is a bit of a tragedy but he still gets to enjoy the odor.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

I'm of the same opinion. It's a shame that she (like her mother before her) can't live in the wild, and I hope they can find a humane home for her in captivity. Meanwhile, I hope she fucks more of our human shit up while she's still free.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Honestly? It has been for ages and ages.

In 1989 a grown-ass grad student at our flagship state university tried to get my 14 year old friend to visit him downstate. (She told me all of this via a handwritten letter, mind you, but she was communicating with this creep - who wouldn't admit his actual age - via an early text only messaging system.)

I remember the 1990s as a weird free for all, but also very gate-keepery. Oh, and those chat rooms/IMs out of nowhere were just... not even a thin veneer of "normal people doing normal things." (I'm OK with that, but let's not pretend).

The 2005-2010 era was all about collaboration (wikis) and forums and LORD ALMIGHTY, that almost always ended as a shitshow. Highlights from my memories of one wiki mashup:

• One kid from Slovakia faked his own online death, came back a month later and held a memorial for himself under the guise of a real-life friend of the kid. No one was buying it, and he lost his shit over the lack of mourning. It was cringe, but people were pretty mean about it.
• Another kid from Louisiana (if you believed his bio he was 11 and lived in a trailer park) was attacked by two adult men for "trying to score contribution points" on the wiki... by adding valid information to the wiki.
  -An unhinged person in the Philippines threatened me with death, violence, and the destruction of generations worth of my family. That threat was delivered with the added terror-inducing information that her husband was a "lecturer at the university."
  -One of the site admin's/owners (a Russian dude who was the equivalent of Reddit's Spez), banned a guy.... this is so stupid and complex... mainly stupid.... I feel stupid just typing this out. It was Russian Spez's birthday and a few people on the forum wished him a happy birthday. (Myself included. I mean, have a nice b-day dude. Typing costs me nothing and maybe it'll dislodge whatever's up your butt.) Another guy on the forum (let's call him Derf) called us birthday-wishers "suck asses." Whatever. Anyway, Russian Spez freaked right the fuck out, banned Derf, and started whining in broken English about why it's unfair that we "think it's OK that people call him suck ass." And although I'm generally a nice person, I took this opportunity to call Russian Spez a thin skinned moron. (Seriously - I'm a 30 something woman and I'm not pitching fits over a childish taunt, but you are? And it wasn't even directed at you? To his credit, Russian Spez didn't ban me.)
  -Was creeped on like it's 1989 once people on that forum realized I wasn't a dude.
  -There were internecine disputes over formatting, where people in the US banded together to create a local standard that made no sense globally, people in the EU banded together to make standards that made a little more sense globally but pissed everyone in the US off because they preferred to say "Kentucky" vs. "KY", people in Finland created their own insular state of affairs and refused to enter a debate over site-wide standards, and everyone else around the world just glowered and waited it out.
  -Then there were the geo-political warriors. There were people in Iran and Iraq who fought an online proxy war over whether the Persian Gulf should be called the Persian or the Arabian Gulf. There was some drama over the South China Sea that I never really delved into. A single man in the middle east made 200 sockpuppets to defend 20 meters worth of sand in the Sinai peninsula that defined the border between Egypt and I-forget-the-hell-who-but-it-wasn't-even-Israel.

That got into HobbyDrama territory, but the point is: Shitshow. Always has been.

People just sort of suck. And when their natural impulses towards suckiness run up against site rules? Shit gets lost. When someone calls them out it becomes a personal grievance. The lawbreaker becomes the victim.

In the end, no one can have nice things.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

Vielen gruss aus Deutschland! Wilkommen und herzliche Wiedervereinigung mit uns. Wir sprechen gern Computor mit ihr!!

(Sorry to all involved about that thing that just happened there. I'm actually enjoying the German instances that I can understand about 35-65% of. IEL)

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

I can talk about a similar (karma-like) system on another site. It was a wiki-style site popular from 2006-2010.

Their original system counted a user's creations and edits. There was the expected amount of drama around who had more creations vs edits. Creators tended to add a lot of high volume but low effort crap. Editors would get a lot of grief over 'stealing' entries because the idiots who created the site put the username of the last editor at the bottom of the entry.

It got worse.

Around 2008 the idiots reimagined the site and expanded the scope. They kept the shitty idea of keeping the last editor's username, but they added a points system tied to how many new features were added. For example: if you added a town you were awarded 1 point, but if you added a street or river you were awarded 1 point for each kilometer of road or river. Shit got real weird.

It was a race towards crap. AngrySteve59 was no longer at the top of the list. He was replaced by GamerJoe84 who had racked up shit points using the new system.

Points just seem to make people crazy. "Rate me! Evaluate my work" - Lisa Simpson

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

I'll sum up this hard truth with an analogy: "You must be this tall to ride this rollercoaster" has nothing to do with punishing short kids. It prevents injury to short kids.

The thing is, letting kids with sub-par K-12 education into higher ed isn't doing them any favors. It sets them up for potentially devastating failure. Many of them will be so far behind that they'll fail within the first year. It's not that they're not smart, or they're not hard workers. They simply lack the foundation that their peers already have. They'll need remedial coursework before they can even try to re-take the standard curriculum. Or they may be able to limp through some basic classes before failing a year later.

Imagine that scenario for all the kids in an entire state.

And to continue your point - you're right that poor kids are punished. They're punished all across the US, but it has nothing to do with whether they're admitted to university. It's because their K-12 schools are funded by local property taxes. Rich districts get good schools with better teachers, and access to better materials and opportunities. Poor districts have few resources, more (on average) parental apathy towards education, and poorer outcomes. Even the top ranked kids from poor schools may struggle when they reach college.

Florida is trying to expand that disadvantage to an entire state. The fact that out of state admission officers will look at a HS degree from Florida the same way they'd look at one from a homeschooled kid isn't a suggestion or a proposal. It's a fact.

ArtieShaw , 10 months ago

You need to install one or more cat containment units. Our favorites are the 9x11 inch, soft grey boxes with 4 inch flexible sides. (Cardboard boxes also work, but my managers prefer the soft and flexible feel of the store bought merch).

The delicate cat diplomatic situation in my office meant that I could only use two traps at once, but it looks like you could manage three without any additional treat-ies in place.

They fit, they sit, and they quickly fall asleep. No more keyboard interference. No more reminders that it's only 3 hours until feeding time. No more worrying about whether you need to report them to HR when they demand you "touch my butt now."

ArtieShaw , 11 months ago

That ear hair is luxurious!

ArtieShaw , 11 months ago

Swing and lounge had a bit of a resurgence in the '90s. It was probably a 'blink and you'll miss it' fad, but it was a whole thing for a certain demographic.

I say this as a genuinely uncool person who had listened to very old music from a very young age. (see username) It was unnerving to have other young people suddenly expressing positive interest in my record collection, but it was also nice that companies were reissuing some better content on CD.

That being said, Vic Fontaine was cartoonish and I hated those episodes. If it was meant to be a homage, it was a poor one.

ArtieShaw , 11 months ago

I wish I had gone with this route, but I honestly didn't foresee the possibility that admin might restore what's been deleted or edited.

I had no intention of ever using the account to add content in the future, but in retrospect it would have been better to keep it in a dormant state.

ArtieShaw , 11 months ago

I think what you're doing so far is key. And it's really the hard part. The rest is just being a friendly place.

No one wants to be one of those 5 people howling into the void when something is getting started, but it needs to be done to demonstrate that people are willing to participate. You might also consider posting easy polls or open ended questions to invite engagement. (If you haven't)