• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 24th, 2024

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  • I would like to see a random person. Put the entire adult population in a lotto and draw a name. Congrats, that person is now president.

    The knee-jerk reaction is to be horrified by this prospect, but I want you to stop and really think about this for a sec. I think we can all admit that most of our leaders/politicians are, to put it mildly, fucking monsters. Those positions attract personalities that fall firmly in the Dark Triad (machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). And those that are capable of getting themselves elected are pretty much guaranteed to have at least one or more of those traits.

    But these traits are relatively rare in your average, everyday person. Although the media tries it’s best to warp our view of the world, individual people are, for the most part, good, decent folks who want to help those around them. It’s practically built into our DNA. The problem is it only takes a small handful of selfish jackasses to ruin things, and our society tends to listen to those that are being the loudest.

    By this metric, if you take a random person off the street, you have a higher chance of them being a good person; rather than if you selected from a pool of politicians.

    Another benefit to this is the person entering office has zero ties to any company or billionaire. Lobbyists spend billions to ensure that anyone elected is already in the pockets of whatever big industry wants to fund them. By the time someone is elected, it’s already too late as they’ve already had their hands greased and have accepted gifts, officially or unofficially. That’s just the way the game is currently played. But a random person? They can’t bribe someone ahead of time if they don’t know who that person is going to be. Oh sure, I suppose they could try to appease the public as a whole so that your average person already has a positive opinion of them; but would that be such a bad thing?

    Is it a perfect system? Hell no. Leaving leadership up to the whims of chance is a dangerous move to make. But is it a better system than the one we have now? I say yes. I truly believe we would be better off with a random person as president than any known politician or talking head.












  • Here’s the thing, restaurant level food safety is there to prevent 1 in a million chances of something happening, and usually would only effect those with weak immune systems. It’s a huge overabundance of caution born out of a desire to avoid lawsuits, and if you are serving to the public, you should 100% follow it.

    But at home? Personally, I think 1 in a million is overly cautious. I’m fine with 1 in 10,000 and trust my immune system to handle it. I am too poor to throw away perfectly good food because I got lazy after dinner and waited 3 hours to put it away instead of 2. I survived all of college off of pizza that was left at room temperature. And yea, you can cite that one case of the guy who got botulism or something after eating a 3-4 day old pizza, but I want you to think about the millions upon millions of pizzas people eat every day without following restaurant-level food safety and realize how crazy it is to base your entire personal food safety philosophy around avoiding extreme edge cases.

    Eat day old pizza, thaw your chicken in the sink, store your food in large containers if it makes more sense than small ones. I promise, you will be fine. You are far more at risk driving to the grocery store to get your ingredients than you are from eating food that’s been at room temperature for a few hours.





  • The thing is, on places like AITA, those made up posts may seem benign and just entertaining, but I encourage you to look with a more critical eye. Well over half the time, there is usually someone in the story specifically acting unreasonable or idiotic or “bad” in some way or form, and they tend to belong to some group or another that the poster is relying on biases of to try and make more convincing. It’s not usually minorities exactly, but things like bosses, or in-laws, or tourists, or women in general. Just some group that people often have preconceived biases against. And then people read the made up story and go “Yea, those people really ARE like that!” and even though it’s completely fake, there is now mental support for those biases; and the world gets just a tiny bit more unfriendly and a tiny bit more isolating.

    Another common defense I see is “the same thing happens in all forms of fiction, but I don’t see you complaining about movies or books!” which completely ignores that other forms of fiction aren’t trying to pass themselves off as something that actually, really happened, for real; with real people, that actually exist and act like that. And that’s the difference between telling a story for entertainment, and just fucking lying.



  • It’s pretty easy actually. When you want to get rid of the hiccups, make a conscious effort to have a hiccup, and then suddenly you can’t.

    It’s why all those wives tale techniques work. Scaring people? Drinking water weird? Having your head upside down? It’s the part after that works, where after someone has you do their flavor of weird hiccup ritual, they then look at you all expectedly and wait for you to try and hiccup. Then suddenly you can’t. You’re trying, but now it’s a conscious effort, and it’s really hard to hiccup when you’re actually focusing on it.


  • Spotting fake BS on the internet. It just seems so obvious to me when someone is making up a story for clout, or to plug a GoFundMe scam, or to push an obvious narrative of hate toward a group of people. And then I go into the comments and want to fucking scream.

    And then, when you point out that something is fake, half the time people get all defensive about it. “Who cares? It’s still a good story” or “Well, it might be fake THIS time, but I can imagine people actually doing this, so I’m going to internalize this as more proof for my biases.”

    I don’t get it, how is it so hard for people to spot? Like, yea, there’s the occasional one that’s done so well that it’s easy to fall for, but 99% of these kinds of posts and videos are so blatantly fake that I worry about the level of critical thinking skills the average person has. I thought the explosion of AI shit would make people be a bit more skeptical with the things they read and watch, but it feels like it’s going the other direction.