wjrii

(goes back to No Child)

In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different "customers". The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

Then, to make sure we didn't fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same "University" paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn't do anything "real."

The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There's genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.

wjrii @lemmy.world 3w ago

That said, for a small overall community, I think the example of Reddit did the Threadiverse a disservice. Ideally, I think specialized communities should arise out of generalized ones, forking off when they start to clutter the general community or at least become self-sustaining conversations. Instead, a non-trivial percentage of subreddits was just plopped down with the welcome sign put out, but that caused users to assume that they shouldn't post a certain question in a general community, and made them not want to post it in the desert community that had been set up but had no traffic.

Fortunately, !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world seems to be doing okay, but I know I in particular wouldn't be annoyed to see questions outside my usual interests posted here.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 3w ago

My github is just a clusterfuck of improperly documented keyboard firmwares, but it now also contains fork of bitchat. Performative, maybe, but kinda feels right. And if they all get taken down, maybe I need a codeberg account and the zip file I also saved.

wjrii @lemmy.world 3w ago

Man, Michael Shannon looks grumpy!

wjrii @lemmy.world 4w ago

We’ll just go Highlander 2 on it. It’ll be FINE.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Ex-Mo here who grew up in Northern Florida. Where I was, the LDS community itself had to be fairly chill because there's no sense in trying to tell the kids to ignore 99% of the population for friendship and dating, and getting too publicly self-righteous just riles up the evangelicals.

Funnily enough, I also landed on the idea that all organized religion is bullshit. Not that escaping a high-pressure sect (Diet Cult?) is the only way to get there, but I do think the extraordinary truth claims the Church makes means that when we leave, we tend to evaluate all other religions in that same light, plus they were never shy about pointing out what everybody else got wrong, LOL.

wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Yes, the main thing here is they're feeling a sense of Othering that they all grew up being told was a thing that happened to Mormons, but they didn't really believe it because they were loyal republicans and the majority of them live and die in the bubble of Utah and the surrounding areas, so they're a force to be reckoned with even when not the majority. Those of us who grew up Mormon (i got better!) in the Bible Belt knew that the evangelicals would never accept Mormons as fellow Christians. More understanding groups wouldn't make a thing of it, even if they have the same theological distinctions, but the Bible thumpers were always going to insist on semantic cleansing once they had their hands on the levers of power, and if the Mormons don't accept that they're only as good as Jews and Muslims, they'll get slapped down even harder by a truly Christian Nationalist regime.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

So you need SpaceX to increase its launch capacity to somewhere between 20 to 80 times its current rate, completely reimagine the economics of space-based radiators and solar panels, accept that all that shiny new power and cooling CapEx is just as disposable as the GPUs, and you have to adjust the expected use cases and SLAs to allow for nothing being repairable and latency making them unsuitable for many AI tasks.

Yes. "Possible." I mean, I guess, but we've got some powerful Hyperloop energy here. I cannot imagine it ever being more economical than bullying and bribing rural areas with access to a power grid.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Tommy Tuberville would like a word...

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

They don't deny the divinity of Jesus. It's more that they have a neo-Arian view of the trinity that the godhead is one in purpose but separate in form, and Jesus is the literal son of God the father (they do NOT game out the repercussions of this in a coherent or sophisticated way, but it's what they believe). Theologically, they're sort of polytheists, but the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is an essential part of their belief system. So, it really comes down to whether you're willing to allow certain belief structures rejected by the Council of Nicaea to continue to call themselves Christian, or at least to nod politely at their self-identification, or whether you make academic theology the hill you will die on in terms of culturally significant labels adopted by ostensibly areligious bureaucracies. It sounds counter-intuitive, but there's more than one way to define a Christian.

The Mormons are absolutely reaping what they sowed by throwing in with MAGA, though, and you know the Romneys and Huntsmans are snickering somewhere with a glass of wine, which they can have because they did double-secret off-the-books Temple shit.

wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

What they're proposing: C-3PO.

What they're planning: Droideka.

What they'll sell: R5-D4.

All we want: Gonk.

wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

"He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the islands of French Guiana and 'round the Suriname Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

“sporting ideal”

I think that would have been fine, honestly. She's presumably drawn to him in part because in the pads he embodied an ideal of the rugged, powerful, and large ice hockey player, the shape matching the perception of the sport itself, but in street clothes he's apparently just a dude.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

It’s very good if you don’t mind the subgenre of pathologically narcissistic main characters, like Seinfeld or Always Sunny. It’s also a clever send-up of the Friends era of shows about “hip” young urbanites.

wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

I’m still salty that this is the direction they went with the Mcguffin for Indy 4. You’re going to take Harrison Ford’s last halfway plausible outing as an action hero and waste it on this? A little-known niche element of new age woo conspiracy shit that nobody coming into the movie cared about AND that literally sucks all the magic out of the universe the characters inhabit in favor of underwhelming sci-fi unobtainium?

Also Shia Labeouf.

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1mo ago

I don’t recall the episode, but that’s David Mitchell looking awkward with a woman inadvertently challenging him not to be a wanker with a superiority complex, so I imagine it’s Peep Show.