Nah my wife loves Forged in Fire too much for me to dare criticize Damascus, its way too cold in my neck of the woods to spend a night in the dog house… And we don’t have a dog house.

I feel like there should be some quotes in there. Damascus “Steel”

Kinda telling how little regard this gets in the same week that I was scrolling through multiple repeats of stories about Ozzy Osbourne. If he had shut up and enjoyed living life on his profits from the 80s & 90s he would be held in higher regard today.

Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.

In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: “We will take that under advisement.” Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl “letters” they get from a certain “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY” about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.

Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:

I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur’an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).

After all we don’t want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I’m sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.

I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.

Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.

P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.

I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

Huh, the more you know. It was some time back that I was selling them, a depressingly long time ago now I guess. It’s a shame they have bowed to economic circumstances, the article I just read (which was translated so nuance may have been lost) makes it sound like they fell into the pandemic trap of scaling to meet demand during an unforseen boom and then couldn’t justify the size and scope of the workforce once that demand rationalised.

My family recently purchased a Bosch front load washing machine (autodose 1 button operation and teenagers is a match made in heaven) and they have 3 series available, 2 are manufactured in China, the other is manufactured in Spain. I had several retailers tell me to steer clear of the Spanish product, it carried a higher price tag than the Chinese lines and had a higher fault and return rate. We have been happy with ours so far but time will tell.

I’m not sure Miele is struggling that much, was a few years ago now but I remember a sales rep telling me the story of the annoyed German executive who “was unhappy” with a division of Miele as they had run out of room and had to “off shore” a factory to keep up with demand. The new factory was in Austria.

I am a huge advocate for them, back when I sold white goods and small appliances they often had really solid products and they maintained their “prestige brand” status by testing their products to an extent I haven’t seen many other brands bragging about.

Usually we sold to new customers on word of mouth from existing, and existing customers who wanted to scale up or down as family requirements changed.

To be honest the answer is obvious, straight forward and impossible. Society just needs to reject entirely any company that embraces shitty “AI”.

I mean it’s not as though “AI” is in any way intelligence, it’s just utilising large data sets to make it look that way, think about it, you meet a person at a party who is entirely oblivious to social norms, incapable of understanding tone, not able to improvise and adapt to conversation, but is really good at stating and restating and respinning facts that they picked up in previous conversations, is that the smartest one in the room?

In every one of my interactions with AI it has reminded me of talking to my ex’s autistic son, he was astounding with the things he could remember and repeat (and would do so with absolute conviction) but would crash out when given too many explicitly contradictory tidbits of information.

So assume that any company that replaces workers with it is happy to embrace slop and ask yourself if that is a company worth your business?

Unfortunately the world is far too influenced by America and has spent too long buying into the narratives that have been used to strip Americans of all the characteristics that they like to believe define them.

So the general public is dumb, reactionary, intolerant and beligerent in far too many places around the world.

The tiniest trace of class solidarity and any company that opted to embrace the shit slop as anything other than a tool to enhance the existing workforce would be shunned and reduced to irrelevancy and the world could move on.

For what it’s worth I fully 100% believe that AI is attainable, but when we get there we will see LLMs as equivalent to alchemy and shake our heads about the amount of resources we spent trying to turn virtual lead into digital gold. I also wonder if our descendants will curse our wholesale destruction of the planet following these modern day charlatans down the path of environmental collapse just to explore a dead end that was never going to yield a positive result.

Yeah you’re right, unlike evangelical Christianity, which treats women as valuable and treasured members of society… Nah just kidding they are just ambulatory wombs that occasionally make noises as far as the evangelicals are concerned.

I am disgusted by religion, all religions, but let’s not blind ourselves to the reality that when religion is an excuse for shitty behaviour it’s not restricted to a single religion, and its not like getting rid of the religion would remove the shitty behaviour it would just mean coming up with a new justification.

I don’t know your teachers or situation and I am going to wildly generalise here, but having worked with teachers, they were probably just their best.

They are teaching a syllabus they didn’t write (you can only put so much make up on that pig) to a group of largely disengaged students, for generally insufficient pay.

They probably just wanted to make it through the day without contemplating self harm.

A spirited contrarian student who fancies themselves an intellectual can be dealt with the ideal way, engaging them, acknowledging the short comings of teaching content to a wide range of intellects/engagement levels.

Or the less ideal way, draconian authority. Sounds like you ran up against the former. Sorry that was your experience.

I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

One was designed by solution focussed engineers looking to balance a host of competing factors, material use, strength, interoperability with systems manufactured by other companies.

The other was designed by fed up engineers based on the insane demands of a drug addicted narcissistic nazi.

I like it, however are you concerned about having something made out of hard plastic, glass and metal at roughly head height in the event of a crash?

Having seen a few improvised claymore mines in cars (rhinestones or diamontes on steering wheels or dashes) it’s always something I consider.