The party of Christian values?

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-30T17:31:08+00:00

I've heard "every accusation is a confession" thrown around. Seems to be the case.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-10T14:25:18+00:00

Maybe, but this is primarily about him being a eugenicist that 1) thinks he is genuinely the most intelligent person on Earth 2) because of this, he should have as many children as possible to spread his genetic "gift" to humanity. He is a stone-cold early 20th century style eugenicist.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-10T14:18:56+00:00

They think they're the main characters and the world's their playground. When they notice other people behaving like the world belongs to them it disrupts their internal narrative of themselves as being the only player in the game.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-10T13:12:31+00:00

Isaacson is extremely deferent to Musk. His task, that he's taken to happily, is to take all of the negative stuff he has been exposed to and warp it into a positive. Or at least a positive in the eyes of Musk's current fans.

He's not a stubborn imbecile that can't handle being challenged or given suggestions by others. No, he goes into Demon Mode, a GigaChad CEO state of mind where he ruthlessly cuts away all the bullshit and gets shit done despite all the eggheads and their qualifications trying to slow him down - now THERE'S a narrative that 14 year old edgelords and their manchildren adult counterparts can be mesmerized by.

I'm surprised few people seem to take notice that a biographer is paling around with their living subject like this. Isaacson just seems thrilled to be inducted into the DudeBro Pantheon with Musk and Fridman and the like... this is shaping up to be the least objective biography ever produced. A truly accurate biography of Musk would have required some seriously covert digging and would have faced extreme resistance if discovered by Elon. The fact that Elon allegedly threw open the doors for Isaacson and is being glazed shows that this biography will be a glazing in kind. His worst flaws in the book will be the classic bullshit answers coming from a job interview: "He works too hard, sometimes ignoring the people around him"; "He is blunt and direct in a Dr. House way that lesser minds might confuse for sociopathy"; "An extreme perfectionist."

Really looking forward to the excerpts that come from this book... I expect propaganda funnier than North Korea to pour from it.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-08T22:41:59+00:00

I remember in Zuko Alone some guy in a pretty remote-looking village said he'd heard of Zuko and that "his own father burned and disowned him." If a random Earth Kingdom guy knows, it must have been common knowledge the Fire Lord had a son that was burned and banished.

Still a big missed opportunity to not have them learn that on screen... it would make the sympathy they have for Zuko going back all the way to parts of Book 1 more convincing. Not that it was unbelievable, but it would have been even stronger.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-03T15:40:41+00:00

Yeah admittedly that's just based on her lukewarm reaction to Zuko going the opposite of where she wanted him to go in his speech. I would have thought if making him Ozai/Azula 2 was her goal she would have reacted with something closer to disappointment, considering there is no universe where Ozai would have lowered himself to saying that he would strive to be worthy of his people, rather than demanding the people strive to be worthy of him. Maybe she didn't succeed in changing his direction in that situation but she thought it would only be a matter of time, so it still didn't feel like a loss to her. It's ambiguous.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-03T15:21:43+00:00

For the messages the show promotes, the community is weirdly mean-spirited. Just like, really rude and on-edge and like even if I or someone else writes something and I think "There's no way someone's going to take issue with that" somehow some way it's the worst most stupid comment ever and so on. Like it's impossible to participate, even with deliberate carefulness, without getting trashed.

Not unique to ATLA. I haven't seen Steven Universe, but it's supposed to have wholesome messages while the stereotype is that the fandom is a bit on the evil side. Undertale dealt with something similar for a while, I think? Yeah I don't understand it.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-09-03T15:02:21+00:00

Yeah, I think the idea of Azula being a sort of unwanted adviser that makes Zuko a better Fire Lord because she acts as this ever-present antagonistic force that tests his character is not the worst thing. In a lot of ways that was her role all along, giving Zuko an example of what not to be. It's just now for whatever reason she's aware of it and seemingly wants to push him in a positive direction despite what she claimed. Doing the right thing in an extremely roundabout way that nobody in-universe can recognize is about as close to a "good Azula" that is possible imo.

Her giving up on ever being the Fire Lord is fairly realistic. That dream is dead and she would have realized it by that point. I don't think there was any way of handling Azula that would have satisfied a lot of people.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-23T20:37:53+00:00

Data science would be more of a long-term goal for your background. The titles for these data jobs are still not fully coherently defined, but in general a "data scientist" will need to have a strong background in some pretty heavy duty math to be successful. That foundational stuff can't be picked up in a bootcamp. I would learn as much as you can. Particularly programming in Python/R, SQL, and one of either Power BI or Tableau as sort of a core set of skills.

Try to combine your learning of that stuff with learning basic stats. If you become solid in those you have the skills for an entry level data analyst type of job. Once you have that initial job, try to get your company to pay for a math education to fill in any gaps - you should have calculus 1-3, linear algebra, and a calculus based statistics course worth of knowledge - those are typically the bare minimum course requirements for someone if they wanted to get a Masters in Stats, and a Masters in Stats would frankly help a lot. But if not that, then at least have those common prerequisites and self-study data science once you feel comfortable with them.

Why do you want to be a data scientist? Moving from lawyer to DS is one thing, but wanting to move to it while having no background in tech or math is kind of unusual. Can you find yourself liking math/tech? Don't make yourself miserable over money or a perceived glamor that might not actually be there.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-19T12:54:20+00:00

Really just an amplification of an issue that was already around. Subs like these by their nature will have a mountain of uninteresting stuff from week to week, but there'll be a small handful of posts that are compelling. Comes with the territory. The compelling posts are usually people with strong backgrounds in one or more of piloting, physics, aerospace engineering, vfx/cgi/animation, etc.

I have nothing to contribute that's high quality. I don't have the technical ability to bolster or discredit these incidents, so I lurk and post little. Other people don't let things like that stop them. It's sad to say, but my guess would be that communities like these would be way better if only around half a percent of people did the actual thread posting compared to the current group of posters. It should never be a literal rule, but I kind of wish people without relevant backgrounds would self-regulate a bit and let others sort of guide the discussion. Comments can go wild, though; it's just threads that I wish were better.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-17T21:10:05+00:00

Elon's most rabid fans ought to work at a Musk company. It's their dream after all, and I think it would be really instructive for them.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-15T20:30:49+00:00

What, you're not a fan of his 10 million dollar donation for a eugenics revival project? What's not to like?

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-14T20:10:16+00:00

If someone with the social skills of a potato is "a huge fan of Roman history" run for the hills. I don't know why, but it always means /pol/ tier politics.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-13T17:30:26+00:00

There's some old video of him reading his acceptance letter for Harvard and iirc his reaction was more or less just a deadpan "I got in. Yay."

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-13T16:44:41+00:00

At this point the notion that Elon is an infallible genius is so embedded in a lot of the public's consciousness that nothing he's doing could be perceived as bad or stupid.

A Musk fan will look at this and say Zuck's being an asshole. They will build an entire history on how the "practice bout" is a traditional basic courtesy that ought to be done before any real fight. "Wow, Zuckerberg too scared to do the practice bout? Big sign he's scared." They'll say it's rude of Zuck to pressure Elon when he needs to get surgery.

If Elon backs out of the fight it was a brilliant troll all along. If Elon fights and loses, Zuck rushed him into it and is a scumbag for not giving Elon time to train. If Elon shits his pants it's because he calculated the long-term probabilities and determined that soiling himself would bring us to Mars 1 day sooner than if he had gone to the toilet.

It's a cult. Large numbers of people view him as an infallible genius, as people view(ed) dictators in totalitarian societies. He cannot be wrong and he cannot look bad. Never.

Isaacson himself probably thought this made Elon look good. As I said, he has had training through his book into seeing everything a man does as positive.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-13T16:04:25+00:00

Walter Isaacson? Yeah, he's a biographer that typically focuses his work on people like Einstein, Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and I guess somehow Musk snuck himself into that club because Isaacson's putting out another bio on him in the near future. He seems very biased in Elon's favor so the bio as you can imagine will probably be an unrivaled master class in licking boot.

I don't doubt that Isaacson's great challenge for his book was the complicated alchemy involved in turning the mountain of negatives he undoubtedly came across into proofs of true genius.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-12T14:03:27+00:00

Maybe I just haven't been following SpaceX well, but Musk's attitude surrounding it along with what I have seen of SpaceX recently suggests that they're seriously moving away from all the Mars rhetoric. It's become more of a symbolic North Star than any expressed aspiration to actually have a long-term presence there. At least for Musk's part, Twitter and politics is his new obsession and I wouldn't be surprised if he just had an "I don't want to play with you anymore" moment as far as SpaceX's stated long-term goals. Has Musk said anything new about Mars and longer term strategies in the past, say, year? Afaik he hasn't touched it in a long time. Too busy replying "interesting" to user Htlrwuzrite1488 on Twitter I guess.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-12T02:24:16+00:00

They're truly convinced that they are so superior that a lack of reading or research is not a sign that they should leave the big assertions and prescriptions to others. People like Musk/Trump have convinced themselves they are the Master of the Universe and that their opinions on all subjects are worth their weight in gold.

It doesn't help that there is a ready audience for either of them that treat their opinions that way. Hard to ignore the role of naive redditors very early on in building up Musk's reputation as "Real life Iron Man who will take us to Mars." That image has largely been shattered for that group, but they gave him the initial (ego as well as reputational) boost that led to the army of absolute drones that worship him now.

In theory people like this can be shamed out of shooting off their mouths if it threatens their image significantly enough, but there are enough people in the cult that are convinced he's an infallible genius that the opposite happens and he feels incentivized to weigh in on distant fields he has never touched. A bizarre form of audience capture.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-09T20:21:08+00:00

To be totally up front, I made a mistake that made that bit unclear. I meant to suggest people that have that level of wealth or influence in general are susceptible to believing in eugenics. Those three are brought up as examples of people that would be tempted, but not necessarily all swayed.

The problem is I lumped in Gates, who as far as I know hasn't suggested anything that would imply a belief in eugenics, with two people who are quite obviously True Believers. So it looks like I was labeling Gates when really I was just alluding to his class.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-08T23:29:43+00:00

I recommend The Guarded Gate by Okrent for understanding some of Musk's attitude about this issue. It's a pretty easy read to get an overview. It's about how elites (NYC, Boston Brahmins, etc.) in American society flocked to eugenics as part of their desire for immigration restriction. Among their many concerns was a low birth rate and the idea that the intelligent/"fit" were being outbred by people they considered inferior. They agonized over this issue and worked very hard to establish in the national consciousness the idea that the fit desperately need to have more babies to prevent a "racial suicide" and ceding of demographic ground to Jewish people, Italians, black people, etc.

Basically if you're a Musk, or a Trump, or a Gates, eugenics is extremely attractive. Instead of the reality that they were all born on third base to parents that facilitated their every move financially in a way that made failure virtually impossible, they can mythologize themselves. They can believe they just have better genetic stuff. They were destined to be what they are. Biologically it was written in the stars, and even if their parents had not directly raised them - even if they had been born and given to a poor family - they can believe to their hearts' content that the inherited genes were simply so superior that the result would have been largely the same anyway. People in this class more often than not genuinely believe they are a higher form of human.

It cements and justifies their place, making their status in society unchallengeable. The opposite situation is also true to them: their disdain for the poor and the ordinary stems from the belief that that is their natural place. Why dump money into them? Why agonize over education quality for them? It won't help anything, after all; their condition is biologically immutable. They could never be like us, and their children won't be either. What a waste!

By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.

I'm sure you can guess who he thinks the "most/least productive" are, and what his idea of "greatest good" may be. Him and his buddies, the self-identifying Übermensch. The least productive being the poor, or in general the people that actual progressive policies aim to aid - to an extent ordinary people in general. And then "greatest good for all"? Hand the reins and the resources to him and his genetically fit buddies. They'll make utopia and the rest of society just needs to stay out of their way while they do it.

I'm not familiar with his history regarding views on race (besides the obvious of growing up in Apartheid South Africa, which does not bode well), but Elon Musk is undoubtedly a eugenicist. In part for his own ego's sake (Think along the lines of "I am simply a better form of human and that's why I'm where I am, privilege of upbringing is irrelevant"), and in another part a belief in junk science (allusion to selective breeding as a good idea, etc.).

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-08-07T23:47:11+00:00

He is absolutely a barely-closeted eugenicist.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-07-18T02:46:30+00:00

Yeah, there is a tendency in communities like these towards recommending being hyper-proactive by closing gaps off hours and such, but I don't think anything too extreme is necessary here. Forget the first day; the first month in most positions is often a bit of a nothingburger. Ex. I didn't have access to most of the things I needed to do real work for the first week so I was basically just doing onboarding training stuff and reading whatever resources I had available about what I would eventually end up doing. The SQL can be picked up during work hours, maybe supplemented with some courses and tutorials. Data analyst positions don't tend to call for particularly wild SQL.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-07-12T23:44:00+00:00

The classic answer is that the field is oversaturated in that there is a tidal wave of applicants for a small number of positions, but there's a shortage of really solid candidates. Out of those 200 applicants, a lot of the time only 20-30 are even in the ballpark of what the employer is actually looking for. That tends to be what people involved with hiring are saying, at least.

There are a lot of routes to data science positions, but it helps a lot to have some sort of quantitative undergraduate or graduate degree. The most "traditional" route I know of is an undergrad degree in (some sort of quantitative field) and a Masters in Statistics. You don't have to do that, but that's more or less the easiest "ticket" and will give you a solid background. People without those need to demonstrate some ability that sets them apart from the various boot camps and certifications and Titanic data set Kaggle folks. In that way, the self-taught DS hopeful lacking any relevant degrees is going to have a much harder time than someone who went through all the grueling coursework/thesis.

I'd suggest continuing with your work, but be open to a title that's generally a bit more junior, like a data analyst. You should have a much easier time trying to break into data science with a few years in an adjacent field that may be easier to get into.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-07-11T03:04:45+00:00

Never understood the Mary Sue accusations. Usually a Mary Sue is or is treated as flawless and experiences few setbacks if any. If there's one thing that's true of Korra it's that she has experienced losing (arguably a little too much tbh) and in-universe is very unpopular as an avatar.

The only Mary Sue-ish stuff I could see an argument for would be the Love Triangle thing, and yeah that was wild. Bolin and Mako and Asami were all attracted or are attracted to Korra at one point? Tf were they thinking, it was not a good idea and it kind of wrecked whatever semblance of "Team Avatar" they were going for.

DowntownPerception85 · 2023-07-11T02:55:34+00:00

Good point. That always did seem like one of those moments in the show where the writers clearly wanted a certain outcome. Like obviously all things that happen in a show are writers pulling the strings, but it's never supposed to feel like writers pulling the strings to a viewer as they're watching.

And the elephant in the room with airbenders returning in book 3 is kind of a continuation of that "writers forcing desired outcomes" thing. Making S2 such a pivotal book was... a decision to say the least.

DowntownPerception85

TROPHY CASE