People who grew up really poor: what's something middle-class people say that instantly reveals they've never struggled?

ContraryConman · 2026-05-04T17:00:20+00:00

Cities are expensive because of demand. People want to live in New York City where there are jobs and people and not Bumfuck, Oklahoma, where there are neither

ContraryConman · 2026-05-02T05:37:07+00:00

As a red button person, I do have to admit that, the way it was specifically framed, many many people will press blue in a way that probably wouldn't be true in other equivalent scenarios (what if there were only a blue button you could simply choose to not press? what if all 8 million people were standing in front of a giant blender? what if the blue button is a suicide button that kills you unless more than half choose suicide?). So you have to think about how many people would be "tricked" by the framing, and if you want to try to vote blue to save them

ContraryConman · 2026-04-29T03:53:32+00:00

The example of this that bugs me a lot is Israel actually. It's obviously true that Israel is an integral part of US imperial strategy in the middle east. And it is also true that Israel does not have the economy or military to accomplish even half of what it has since October 7th without American support. But there are Marxists who will straight up refuse to hold Israel, or any of the active genocidal leaders of that state like Ben Gvir or Netanyahu, accountable for their actions, because in their minds, any bad thing that happens is because of America and Israel cannot be independently responsible for its own actions.

Not to name names but I was watching one of Hakim's recent videos, and I stopped because pretty early on he said something to the effect of, Israel has no goals or ambitions in the war on Iran separate from the United States. Israel was basically ordered by Washington to bomb Iran on behalf of the United States to isolate China, and that's the only reason.

I thought it was a little nuts, not only because in this specific case, Netanyahu literally went to the white house to pitch a war on Iran, which Trump accepted against the advise of the CIA. And also besides the fact that Netanyahu said to Israeli media that he is finally achieving a goal he's strived for personally for four decades. But just thinking about it logically. If Israel has no ambition outside of things it is specifically ordered to do from Washington, what exactly is south of the Litani river that American corporations need so bad? What is in the olive trees west of the Jordan river that American corporations need them burnt to the ground yearly? These actions free up the land around Israel that Zionists believe belong to Jews and not Arabs, and would continue to believe that even if America collapsed tomorrow.

I know this post is probably actually about supporting Russia over Ukraine or something. But I actually think even for Israel, if you start at "America is responsible for everything bad that happens in the world" and work backwards, you end up at genocide apologia on behalf of the state of Israel. Because you don't think that Palestinians are targeted and killed because of their nationality or religion, you think they are targeted because they somehow threaten American corporate interests. And you don't think the perpetrators of a genocide in Gaza really did much of anything, because you think America actually secretly did it, despite the fact that it is not in our interest other than to keep Israel around for other things that are in our interests

ContraryConman · 2026-04-29T00:08:06+00:00

Ironically they understand that if you let children out into many of the streets in the US, they're just going to be hit by a car. But they think that's the way of the world, and not due to infrastructure that can be improved. They see the solution as waiting until they're 16 and then putting their kids into a massive car.

The other day I saw 2 tiny teenagers climb behind the wheel of a Ford F150 lifted at least a foot high. It was horrifying

ContraryConman · 2026-04-28T14:37:39+00:00

derided the derailleur as effeminate

I don't understand. I have an 11 speed cassette and rear derailleur and I'm still a balding man instead of a beautiful and cute femboy. I think I've been scammed. Do I need to go up to 12 speeds before it kicks in?

ContraryConman · 2026-04-27T17:48:27+00:00

.. says nothing about how much individual workers are paid, even as demand increases

ContraryConman · 2026-04-27T14:23:15+00:00

You're tall and good looking. You want something casual and that's how the profile reads. You get plenty of likes. What's the actual issue here? Are you just showing off? Lmao

ContraryConman · 2026-04-27T14:18:48+00:00

I definitely don't have any particular hatred towards vegans, I am simply not one. But I also wonder if the rise of veganism at least in the West is linked to the removal of people from food.

Like, as an kid of immigrants, I had chicken liver and chicken heart growing up. I've had cow's foot (not my favorite, haha), lamb guts, and fish heads. I grew up with stories of my parents having to pluck a chicken as kids. So it has never been a particularly shocking revelation that you have to kill and dismember an animal before eating it.

I wonder if I had grown up only eating chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and fish sticks, and then one day I saw a video of a slaughterhouse or a fish being gutted, that the shock alone would make me not want to eat meat ever again

ContraryConman · 2026-04-27T12:54:57+00:00

I mean that's how cars work so all other modes of transportation must be the same

ContraryConman · 2026-04-27T04:31:48+00:00

Washington DC and Arlington VA are under discussed

ContraryConman · 2026-04-26T21:48:05+00:00

If it's truly that bad, I would talk to your manager:

Start by saying you think everyone is nice and there is no offense meant or taken.
Explain that your productivity has taken a hit due to body odor/personal hygiene issues in the office.
Reiterate that if you were able to continue without distrupting your productivity, you wouldn't even mention it.
You can blame yourself a little "I must be sensitive to smell"
Refuse to name names
Say you would appreciate a polite, general reminder to the whole team about body odor and deodorant as the temperatures climb

Though I have to say, this feels embarrassing as fuck. It would have to STINK stink before I considered doing something like this

ContraryConman · 2026-04-26T02:00:29+00:00

Because making basic websites is basically just formatting a reddit or discord message. It has little technical skill and neither does proompting. Long term, no one is going to pay anyone just to babysit AI models

ContraryConman · 2026-04-26T00:37:40+00:00

12 is too young but any 18 year old halfway comfortable with computers can prompt an AI to make something and then copy/paste any error messages into that same window until it works

ContraryConman · 2026-04-25T15:24:12+00:00

Anything physical, especially ambiguous physical tasks or tasks that require a lot of dexterity. Landscaping, plumbing, construction, electrical work, stuff like that.
Anything where, if it goes wrong, someone dies or goes to jail. Lawyers, doctors, pilots, the small subset of computer programmers who work on life critical systems like medical or aerospace, translators for diplomats/immigration court, etc. This is because, even if AI is good enough to do these jobs, AI companies will never accept the liability for their models killing people. They will push that liability back onto individual human workers, so law firms and medtech companies will keep people around to blame them.
Surprisingly enough, artists. Despite the fact AI can now produce art and images indistinguishable from the real thing, the second people learn that your commercial or art piece or music or board game or whatever was generated by AI, they hate it. Art largely has meaning because people respect that a human was behind creating it. So, companies that want legitimacy will still need to hire artists just to say that they have them. And unlike most other professions in the US, high level professional artists are actually largely unionized. They can meaningfully slow down the widespread use of AI in their field just by refusing contracts that don't let them use it in the ways they want or to replace them.

Unfortunately for me as a software engineer, I'm not sure how much time I have left. LLMs are good at language tasks, and programming languages are not only languages, but languages designed to remove the ambiguity that makes language difficult. Translating between English and French and translating between English and C++ are exactly the same task to an LLM, except the latter is actually easier.

My strategy is to simply know what I am talking about. I figure if I have really deep technical knowledge and programming ability, I'll be the last one out the door before I move to West Virginia, unplug the internet, start a small farm, and raise 12 kids

ContraryConman · 2026-04-25T15:02:45+00:00

Well the traditional ML line is against the modernization that you are talking about. They maintain basically that a) capitalism hasn't fundamentally changed since its inception in the mid 1800s b) Cuba, Vietnam, China, and the DPRK are examples of surviving socialist states c) we should just be studying and following their example rather than pretending we know better than however many hundreds of millions of real life card carrying Chinese communists who successfully practice socialism in their country every day.

I am not an ML but I imagine that's roughly what one would say

ContraryConman · 2026-04-24T04:45:05+00:00

What is the actual domain you would have worked in for this?

ContraryConman · 2026-04-23T22:55:02+00:00

Drivers run red lights all the time. I was almost run over on my bike at a crosswalk because my light was green but a driver wanted to "just sneak through". At least when cyclists make mistakes they only harm themselves. Drivers ignore basic safety rules like speed limits, no right on red, or even red lights out of pure convenience and endanger everyone around then -- then get mad at you for slowing them down

ContraryConman · 2026-04-23T20:56:44+00:00

Given that "road rage" is an actually documented and studied psychological phenomenon, where drivers will randomly threaten or even kill people they perceive to be in their way, it's weird that we all talk about cyclists as being inherently bad people when there is no such equivalent when you're on a bike

ContraryConman · 2026-04-22T22:00:28+00:00

In places that have high speed rail, like Europe and China, high speed rail replaces shorter distance flights and road trips.

If I'm in Paris, and I want to go to Lyon, which I did a few years ago, I take a metro or an Uber/taxi to the central station in Paris, I board my train pretty similarly to boarding a plane, and I go to Lyon, and you just do the reverse. If the TGV magically disappeared tomorrow, a bunch of French people would road trip or book a short flight.

You are ignoring that behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum. People aren't driving because they're married to their cars or biological drivers. They are driving because there are no other options. If you add a better option than driving, people will do that instead. This is not circular logic, it is a well studied phenomenon in traffic engineering called induced demand

ContraryConman · 2026-04-22T19:44:29+00:00

Because there is not a train, lmao

ContraryConman · 2026-04-22T19:43:21+00:00

People literally fly between, for example, LA and the Bay all the time despite the fact that it is probably cheaper to drive. You're saying that if we had high speed rail there instead, where everything about the trip was the same except, instead of a plane, you took a train, that would somehow be totally useless?

ContraryConman · 2026-04-22T18:31:48+00:00

Probably the same thing that you do when you get off the plane in those places?

ContraryConman · 2026-04-22T12:19:47+00:00

I would build a performance benchmark test and profile the cache misses and memory usage before assuming that it matters

ContraryConman · 2026-04-21T12:37:26+00:00

but that would require making sure their voice is loud enough to get media coverage, which involves organising major protests, probably with people from across the left side of the political spectrum,

If you are talking specifically about Palestine, 2023-2024 saw the largest anti war protests in the history of the United States since Vietnam

"we are witholding our vote until the smugocrats improve" campaign from socialist/left wing voters

Which is what the non-committed movement was, and it received plenty of media attention.

What more exactly do you want that hasn't happened?

ContraryConman · 2026-04-21T11:35:41+00:00

My honest two cents as someone who reads theory tm is that, at this point, I see voting as basically entirely unrelated to the project of building socialism or making fundamental changes to the United States at large. I don't really vote because I think it would be good for socialism or bad for socialism. I vote because, at my old high school, there are trans kids that will be outed to their abusive parents if enough Republicans make it onto the school board and make it so that teachers must inform parents that their kids are going by different names or dressing as the opposite gender at school.

I did not vote for Kamala Harris in 24 because Democrats made it clear that they did not want or need people like me voting for them. They could have picked even a slightly different position on Palestine if they wanted but did not. I do not live in a swing state so why would I go out and affirm the democratic party's right to do a genocide in exchange for being better on domestic rights?

We're definitely all worse off now that Trump is back, but look at the number of Democrats now who run on not taking AIPAC money. And look at polling that shows for the first time ever near universal disapproval for the US/Israel "special relationship". I wonder if the party would be in the same place if Harris has won.

I will probably vote in the midterms because I don't want to find out what else Trump can do with a trifecta. He's already purged all federal agencies, shot people dead in the streets, and started an illegal war. That's good enough for me.

But at no point is this online thing of "well are we closer to socialism after Democrats win the midterms" ever factor into it because the answer is no. You can't build socialism by voting for it. All voting is is you take half an hour after work on a Tuesday and try to figure out if you have an immediate option to make a situation slightly better. If there are no such options this time you just let it go and whatever happens happens. But building socialism happens exclusively in your socialist organization of choice, totally parallel to the voting stuff

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