226 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
  2. Aug 2023
    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
    1. As legislation targeting trans people has reached an all-time high in the U.S., ROGD’s alleged social contagion has been invoked by lawmakers in states such as Missouri, Utah and Arkansas to justify banning or restricting gender-affirming care for young people.
  3. Jul 2023
    1. to recycle a familiarphrase taught at journalism schools—without fear or favor, and letthe chips fall where they may.

      Which journalism schools taught "without fear or favor"? When?

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

      Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

      In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

      What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

      Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

      There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

      Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

      Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

  4. Jun 2023
    1. so that means that the the Christian products that are out there are largely playing to that 00:46:41 right-wing market
      • the evangelical business model
        • fundamentally depends on marketing fear
    2. the culture is against you the world is against you right nobody respects you and and people are going to denigrate you and people are going to corrupt your children
      • Evangelical leaders create propaganda
        • deeply embedding messaging in their vast media network
        • of books, internet, radio, tv, church
        • to create fear-based, polarizing social norms that fragment society
        • For example, SBC LifeWay sells tens of millions of copies of Christian books that indoctrinate social norms of fear and division into children
    3. white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims
      • The author describes how
        • the evangelical leaders have manufactured the now widespread mythology
          • that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims
        • in order to weaponize fear to consolidate power
    1. they feel 00:09:58 emotions
      • claim
        • AI feels emotions
          • "in my work I describe everything with equations
          • fear is a very simple equation
            • fear is a a moment in the future
              • that is less safe than this moment
          • that's the logic of fear
          • Even though it appears very irrational,
            • machines are capable of making that logic
            • They're capable of saying
              • if a tidal wave is approaching a data center
              • the machine will say
                • that will wipe out my code,
                  • not today's machines
                  • but very very soon and
              • we feel fear and
              • puffer fish feels fear
              • we react differently
                • a puffer fish will puff and
                • we will go for fight or flight
              • the machine might decide to replicate its data to another data center
              • different reactions different ways of feeling the emotion
              • but nonetheless they're all motivated by fear
              • I would dare say that AI will feel more emotions than we will ever do
                • if you just take a simple extrapolation,
                  • we feel more emotions than a puffer fish
                  • because we have the cognitive ability to understand he future
                  • so we can have optimism and pessimism,
                    • emotions puffer fish would never imagine
                  • similarly if we follow that path of artificial intelligence
                  • it is bound to become more intelligent than humans very soon
                  • then then with that wider intellectual horsepower
                  • they probably are going to be pondering concepts we never understood good and
                  • hence if you follow the same trajectory
                  • they might actually end up having more emotions than we will ever feel
  5. Jan 2023
    1. Note 9/8j says - "There is a note in the Zettelkasten that contains the argument that refutes the claims on every other note. But this note disappears as soon as one opens the Zettelkasten. I.e. it appropriates a different number, changes position (or: disguises itself) and is then not to be found. A joker." Is he talking about some hypothetical note? What did he mean by disappearing? Can someone please shed some light on what he really meant?

      On the Jokerzettel

      9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

      Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

      D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

      Ein Joker.

      —Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

      Translation:

      9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

      Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

      Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

      Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

      You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

      Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

      If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

      As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

      And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

      Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

      But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

    1. The uptake of mis- and disinformation is intertwined with the way our minds work. The large body of research on the psychological aspects of information manipulation explains why.

      In an article for Nature Review Psychology, Ullrich K. H. Ecker et al looked(opens in a new tab) at the cognitive, social, and affective factors that lead people to form or even endorse misinformed views. Ironically enough, false beliefs generally arise through the same mechanisms that establish accurate beliefs. It is a mix of cognitive drivers like intuitive thinking and socio-affective drivers. When deciding what is true, people are often biased to believe in the validity of information and to trust their intuition instead of deliberating. Also, repetition increases belief in both misleading information and facts.

      Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J. et al. (2022). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction.

      Going a step further, Álex Escolà-Gascón et al investigated the psychopathological profiles that characterise people prone to consuming misleading information. After running a number of tests on more than 1,400 volunteers, they concluded that people with high scores in schizotypy (a condition not too dissimilar from schizophrenia), paranoia, and histrionism (more commonly known as dramatic personality disorder) are more vulnerable to the negative effects of misleading information. People who do not detect misleading information also tend to be more anxious, suggestible, and vulnerable to strong emotions.

  6. Dec 2022
    1. We analyzed URLs cited in Twitter messages before and after the temporary interruption of the vaccine development on September 9, 2020 to investigate the presence of low credibility and malicious information. We show that the halt of the AstraZeneca clinical trials prompted tweets that cast doubt, fear and vaccine opposition. We discovered a strong presence of URLs from low credibility or malicious websites, as classified by independent fact-checking organizations or identified by web hosting infrastructure features. Moreover, we identified what appears to be coordinated operations to artificially promote some of these URLs hosted on malicious websites.
    1. In the co-share network, a cluster of websites shared more by conservatives is also shared more by users with higher misinformation exposure scores.

      Nodes represent website domains shared by at least 20 users in our dataset and edges are weighted based on common users who shared them. a Separate colors represent different clusters of websites determined using community-detection algorithms29. b The intensity of the color of each node shows the average misinformation-exposure score of users who shared the website domain (darker = higher PolitiFact score). c Nodes’ color represents the average estimated ideology of the users who shared the website domain (red: conservative, blue: liberal). d The intensity of the color of each node shows the average use of language toxicity by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher use of toxic language). e The intensity of the color of each node shows the average expression of moral outrage by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher expression of moral outrage). Nodes are positioned using directed-force layout on the weighted network.

    2. We found that misinformation-exposure scores are significantly positively related to language toxicity (Fig. 3a; b = 0.129, 95% CI = [0.098, 0.159], SE = 0.015, t (4121) = 8.323, p < 0.001; b = 0.319, 95% CI = [0.274, 0.365], SE = 0.023, t (4106) = 13.747, p < 0.001 when controlling for estimated ideology) and expressions of moral outrage (Fig. 3b; b = 0.107, 95% CI = [0.076, 0.137], SE = 0.015, t (4143) = 14.243, p < 0.001; b = 0.329, 95% CI = [0.283,0.374], SE = 0.023, t (4128) = 14.243, p < 0.001 when controlling for estimated ideology). See Supplementary Tables 1, 2 for full regression tables and Supplementary Tables 3–6 for the robustness of our results.
    1. I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

      danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

      http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

  7. Nov 2022
    1. Trope, trope, trope, strung into a Gish Gallop.

      One of the issues we see in the Sunday morning news analysis shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, et al.) is that there is usually a large amount of context collapse mixed with lack of general knowledge about the topics at hand compounded with large doses of Gish Gallop and F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

  8. Oct 2022
    1. Today, the people in politics who most often invoke the name of Jesus for their political causes tend to be the most merciless and judgmental, the most consumed by rage and fear and vengeance. They hate their enemies, and they seem to want to make more of them. They claim allegiance to the truth and yet they have embraced, even unwittingly, lies. They have inverted biblical ethics in the name of biblical ethics.
    1. Your Alternator Is Not A ChargerYes, you read that right. An alternator is designed to MAINTAIN your car battery, not recharge it from a deeply discharged state. Its designed to run at only 35-50% of its fully rated output. When you use your cars alternator to recharge a dead battery, you force it to run at nearly 100% of its rated capacity and that overheats the alternator and dramatically shortens its life.
    1. But this sounds like spreading fear and doubt when the Ruby parser has no such concepts :) {} always binds tightly to the call right next to it. This block {} will never go to using, unless it's rewritten as do ... end.
  9. Sep 2022
    1. Fail to stay competitive and you will lose out in ‘the global race’.9And the threat works. Competition and competitiveness have becomeas unquestionable in the modern world as God, His angels and the Devilwere in the medieval. Fear of damnation in the future is ubiquitous. Todaygovernment leaders universally see it as their duty to pursue their nation’sinternational competiveness as unrelentingly as the defence of the realmand far more enthusiastically than regulating business or collecting taxes.But if competition is really so beneficial, why do global problems seemto be getting worse rather than better? If the markets in which we’re allembedded are competitions, and if competition only produces benefits, asneoliberal ideology insists, you’d have thought that its ‘staggering powerto make things better’ would, by now, have caused many of our problemsto disappear.Clearly, something doesn’t quite stack up.

      !- relationship : competition and fear of the other - the other is unknown but is in competition with you - everyone is driven by the same fear of the other

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  10. Aug 2022
  11. Jun 2022
    1. This fundamental tension—between quality and quantity—is atension we share as knowledge workers. We also must producework to an extremely high standard, and we must do it fast,continuously, all year long. We are like sprinters who are also tryingto run a marathon.

      Do we? Really? This definitely needs reframing and books like this that play on these sorts of fears are both partially responsible, but are also preying on an atmosphere which they're propagating.

      This is the sort of sad thing that a productivity guru would say...

    1. "If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush," he said. "This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences."

      fear hardwires memory of truamatic experiences into the brain.

  12. May 2022
    1. Second, acknowledging increased affective insecurity and that heightened vulnerability and fear will be a factor, great efforts must be made to bolster the care, support and protection provided to people.      

      Mortality salience for the masses - operationalizing terror management theory (TMT) and Deep Humanity BEing Journeys that take individuals to explore the depths of their humanity to make sense of the times we are in will play a critical role in contextualizing fear of death triggered by unstable circumstances and ameliorating these fears with the wisdom that comes from a living comprehension of the sacredness of our life and eventual death.

  13. Apr 2022
    1. Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 [@chrischirp]. (2021, November 24). As well as Tom’s new one (B.1.1.529), C.1.2 seems to be spreading in S Africa—C.1.2 was the one with lots of worrying mutations first reported in August... Plus cases in S Africa suddenly increasing again in the middle of their summer. Https://t.co/fCqfOMcO83 [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1463504890530086917

  14. Mar 2022
  15. Feb 2022
    1. Axios Pro is bundling newsletters together in a high-priced subscription product ($2,500 for the bundle; $599 each) aimed squarely at deep-pocketed investors.

      Old business advice: find the rich and charge them a pretty penny for something they either think they need or fear they can't live without.

  16. Jan 2022
    1. forced into the American Union

      It is important to think about the fear of being "forced into the American Union" in the context of the time. At this time, the American Civil War is still ongoing, and the situation was fragile. Since Canada did not exist and it was only colonies, it is realistic to view America as a threat to the possible development of Canada as a country.

    1. Miracles represent freedom from fear. "Atoning" means "undoing." The undoing of fear is an essential part of the atonement value of miracles.

      This is a very crucial topic. Fear stands among the leaders of bad decisions' motivators so when you'll grasp the depth of meaning for this subject your life will never be the same.

      Let us consider briefly what reasons make you scared. First and foremost you must be thinking that this event or person is absolutely real. The follow up is the idea: this situation threatens you somehow. And final step to get you frightened is to assure you that you have no control.

      The combo of these reasons leads you to conclusion you might become a victim so you need react preventively right now. This is a very nasty hook which you can dodge by realizing: all of those statements are equally untrue.

      Take time to learn what's in the quotes related, without this solid foundation forgiveness can't be understood.

      The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. T-2.6.4

      God did not create a meaningless world. W-14

      I am not the victim of the world I see. W-31

      I have invented the world I see. W-32

      The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. C-4.1

      Forgive yourself the thought He wanted this for you. W-99.7

      What if you recognized this world is an hallucination? What if you really understood YOU made it up? T-20.8.7

      The end of dreaming is the end of fear T-28.3.4

      If I defend myself I am attacked. W-135

      How safe the world will look to me when I can see it! It will not look anything like what I imagine I see now. Everyone and everything I see will lean toward me to bless me. I will recognize in everyone my dearest Friend. What could there be to fear in a world that I have forgiven, and that has forgiven me? W-60.3

      I thank You, Father, for Your plan to save me from the hell I made. It is not real. And You have given me the means to prove its unreality to me. The key is in my hand, and I have reached the door beyond which lies the end of dreams. W-342.1

  17. Dec 2021
    1. been intensified by his long residence in the tropics

      Says a lot about the Victorian society and their views of non-white, British people. Blaming Dr. Roylott's rage and violence on his time in a foreign land portrays the idea of foreign influence to be something to fear and reinforces idea of English superiority.

    2. Were there gypsies in the plantation at the time

      Sherlock asking a question about the gypsies directly after Helen described her death as caused by "fear and nervous shock" is very telling about the society of this time. The fear of these traveling people and people who had foreign influences can be seen all throughout this short story and allows readers to have commentary about the stereotypes of foreign people during this time, as well as social darwinism in terms of English superiority.

    3. wretched gypsies

      The use of the word wretched shows what Helen thinks of the gypsies. Shows how much the gypsies presence affects Helen and another show of what the society thought of these people at the time.

    4. troubled by the smell of the strong Indian cigars

      Another show of foreign influence Dr. Roylott had. Cigars were not uncommon for people to smoke, Sherlock Holmes himself smokes cigars in short stories, but the identification of the cigar being a "strong Indian" reinforces the influences of foreign on Dr. Roylott.

    5. feared by the villagers almost as much as their master

      Important as a description of Roylott. Portraying him as even scarier than these violent animals that wander Stoke Moran, once again showing his violent nature and bad temper that was influenced by his time in India

    6. passion also for Indian animals

      More foreign influences

    7. wandering gypsies

      Gypsies are groups of traveling people that were often seen as a trope of exoticism in Victorian literature and were feared by many due to their lifestyle. The stereotype of gypsies in literature were often unfair and the word gypsy had a connotation that showed them as lesser than the lowest class people

    8. became the terror of the village

      Reinforcing his violent nature and showing that his foreign influence created a violent man who can not be controlled, changing a respectable man into a monster to be feared. Setting up Dr. Roylott as the prime suspect in this case due to his violent nature and his foreign influences.

    9. been intensified by his long residence in the tropics

      The theme of the exotic and more specifically the fear of the foreign can be seen throughout this short story. Mr. Roylott is seen to have become violent because of the influence of his time in a foreign land. The connection of this character and his time spent in India gives the reader the idea that his savage and violent nature was due to his time in a foreign area, portraying the foreign to be something to fear.

  18. Nov 2021
  19. Oct 2021
  20. Sep 2021
  21. Aug 2021
    1. Prof Tolullah Oni. (2021, February 19). Last night @SliderCuts & I discussed qq his 95k+ followers have about #COVID19 vaccines. Went on > 1.5 hrs in the end!! Pple have reasonable concerns that need to be heard and understood & happy to (hopefully) help address. Watch here https://instagram.com/tv/CLcu-UFB8Xy/?igshid=irvs1mlis0o9 @IndependentSage https://t.co/ssxAX2fcfE [Tweet]. @DrTolullah. https://twitter.com/DrTolullah/status/1362702943179464706

    1. Before you go like “Wow!!!”, understand that the packages highlighted above take a lot into consideration when detecting timezones. This makes them slightly more accurate than Intl API alone.

      What exactly does moment do for us, then, that

      TimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;

      doesn't do? Name one example where it is more accurate.

  22. Jul 2021
  23. Jun 2021
    1. Because he was separating families. I remember just telling my mom, "I don't want to go back to school if that means putting you at risk, or putting one of my brothers at risk, I just don't want to go back." And since my father's deportation process was still—we were still going through that as well. I just had to go with my mom to a couple of hearings with her and translate what they were saying and all of the information and all of that.
    2. I told my parents not to get close to the school. A lot of students had to walk home far distances, scared of their parents going for them because they stayed out there for a while and they were stopping cars coming out of the school. They stopped the teachers, they stopped everybody just because of the color of their skin. You got stopped and you got asked for papers or ID, even though a lot of us knew it was illegal for them to stay outside of a school and ask for papers.
    3. The fear. The constant fear, that actually came true [Chuckles], of your family members being deported or coming home from school because since I was underage, I kind of knew that I was safe from that because they weren't going to raid schools, like middle schools and stuff like that. But it was a constant fear of coming home and being told that, I don't know, your dad's not coming back or your mom's not coming back. And it did happen like that. Unfortunately, my father was working and he was raided. So he got taken away and then when I came back home one day from school, my mom told me. It was really hard.
    1. I didn't really have a relationship with my family. When there was a family events or anything, I felt like an outcast. I would never go to them. Christmas, I was always in my room. Every little... It's just weird man. Everything messed me up. I feel like traumatic. Just the trauma of everything.

      Time in US - homelife - family - mental health

    2. So I opened the door and my little brother rushes in crying. And then, I don't know, by the grace of God, they left us alone, but they told us that we had to be in school, this and that.

      Time in US - encounters with the police

    3. So I remember I prayed to God. I prayed to God. I was like, "Please God help me. I don't want to steal from this man. He's really good guy." And, oh dude, this is crazy, because I look in my pocket—I had the chips in my hand and I was acting like I had money.

      Time in US - living situation - abuse - lack of food - theft

    4. And that's that right there... I could see why single mothers and people that just don't have any help, why they stress, or why they go through all that stuff, or why they treat their kids bad and stuff, because it’s hard taking care of kids. I remember not having anything. On the last day of the month, I opened the freezer, and there's nothing in there.

      Time in US - homelife - caring for siblings - abuse

    5. I was like, "Damn, why do I like Taco Bell?" But yeah, I remember I came in a Taco Bell and I had thorns from the cactus stuck in my feet and I remember they got infected.

      Time in the US - childhood - memories - crossing the border

    6. I was in kindergarten when I crossed the border and, yeah, I remember it was tough. I remember we didn't have any water, and the coyotes had beer and I was so thirsty and they kept telling me, "No, you don't want this. You don't want this." But I was so thirsty, I just took a drink and it was the best thing in life.

      Time in US - crossing the border -fear, coyotes, exhaustion

    7. Mike: Yeah. I didn't go to school, because my dad thought that if something happened... And I remember one time the cops came to my house, because my little brother was playing outside and it was school hours. And they're like, "What is this kid doing outside?" And I remember him crying outside, because the cops got him. And I was like, "Oh my God, what do I do?"

      Time in the US, School

    8. Yes. I remember the first place I got to was Tucson. We had gone to Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell. That's why I love Taco Bell. I remember that now. I was like, "Damn, why do I like Taco Bell?" But yeah, I remember I came in a Taco Bell and I had thorns from the cactus stuck in my feet and I remember they got infected.Mike: All this green and pus was coming out and a lady from the Taco Bell gave us some food, and let us stay with her. Really good people too. I remember that every time I think about that. But we started living with them and then we started getting side jobs here and there. There was also a point in time where my dad and my mom really didn't get along.

      Time in the US, Arriving in the United States, First Impressions

    9. And she ended up telling me all that happened, because of that we decided—well, my mom decided—that she wanted a better life for us. So we ended up crossing the border to Arizona. It actually took us three days.

      reason for coming to America - economic prosperity, a better life

    1. Luisa: Yes, this is a secret. My mother did not allow us to talk about it. Even when it came up, I could feel my heart shake and my palms get sweaty because I was so scared of getting deported. That was such a big thing. I remember we went to this science center.

      Time in the US, Homelife, Keeping Secrets

    2. Luisa: Yes. There came a point. We were in the [Pause] process of getting our permanent residency card in order to be able to go to school, and the lawyer let my mother know that me and my sister—my other sister—were not going to make it because once you hit eighteen, you're no longer under the case that you originally filed, so the best option for us would be adoption. We would be adopted by an American citizen in order to get our American status fixed, and that was something my mom and I contemplated for a long, long time, and she was going to go through with it, but my dad put a huge stop to that and was like, "That's not happening. You're stupid. That's not a thing. These are my kids. You're not letting that happen."Luisa: It was going to be a family member, not a close family member, but these were the lengths that you go through to try to get through this. I didn't have a normal childhood. I never got to learn to drive. I didn't go to drivers ed. I didn't get to travel with my best friend to DisneyLand because my mom was so scared of—

      Time in the US, Jobs/Employment/Work, Documents, Driver's License

  24. May 2021
  25. Apr 2021
    1. Your Open Source Supply Chain Is Bigger Than You Think.Reduce your security, risk, and compliance load. Let us scan your Python, Perl, and Tcl application for you and help you gain the transparency you need to reduce open source risk.
    1. THIS is the type of propaganda that is brainwashing our children to take part in a political agenda, instilling the fear of the Earth cooking us like an oven (their description of Venus) in their lifetime, telling them they must take action now at any cost!
  26. Mar 2021
  27. Feb 2021
    1. Eh, that's just sales. Humans are dumb, panicky animals: just look at how J.C. Penny's "Fair and Square" initiative went.Short version: they went full-on no bullshit: no limited time sales, no fake prices discounted, things cost what they cost, no more FOMO, no waiting for deals.It tanked. Horribly.
    2. Why do companies insist on making deals a gamble? Is it basically just to capture FOMO sales?Both rhetorical questions.Edit: I'm talking about how you can pay one price for a deal and then a couple months later it's even cheaper.
  28. Jan 2021
  29. Dec 2020
    1. Most of humanity has undergone a process of education which depends for its effectiveness on the perceived power of some ‘authority’ to exert an unquestioned controlling influence over the general direction of life. A source of influence that depends for its continuing effectiveness on never being subjected to rational scrutiny, or genuine examination of any kind. Such is the beguiling power of full-on indoctrination.

      This is how societies are ruled or governed.

  30. Nov 2020
    1. I refuse to back anything from Queen games. Their kickstarters, IMO, are meant to get people to have FOMO instead of something being worth the price.
  31. Oct 2020
    1. the azaleas

      My grandma used to grow these in our backyard, and I grew up anticipating their bloom, only to see them shrivel up and brown a couple weeks later...for the plant to stay alive, they must be vigorously pruned and cut back regularly...so this choice of flowers, I think, is pretty apt for the themes of youth/entering society/the fear of age.

    1. If you think mathematics is difficult, tough, or you're scared of it, this article will indicate why and potentially show you a way forward for yourself and your children.

  32. Sep 2020
    1. It gets worse when you're working on a team. No-one dares touch styles authored by someone else, because it's often unclear what they're doing, what markup they apply to, and what disasters will unfold if you remove them. The consequence of all this is the append-only stylesheet. There's no way of knowing which code can safely be removed, so it's common to undo some existing style with another, more specific style — even on relatively small projects.