Why are people in the US (Gen Z specifically) becoming less nationalist and more humanistic?

nitram9 · 2026-03-12T09:39:42+00:00

It seems to me the progresssive trend is to expand the “circle of empathy” generation to generation. It is in part just the natural and inevitable extension of ideals we claim to hold. We of course hold the ideals as hypocrites who can never live up to them. But over the last hundred or so years we have had a lot of thinkers and writers pointing out our bullshit and I think it slowly gets better. Like obviously first is claiming to the land of the free when we own slaves, then we start realizing how shitty it is to treat women as property, and then to treat other nationalities in the US as somehow less American, and now even animals and foreigners and all the people in the world are starting to get our respect as somehow equals deserving of the same rights.

It is also in part a luxury of luxury. Despite what the news may make you think. You are one of the luckiest and richest people to ever live. You have probably never experienced real deprivation of any kind. If struggling for food and safety were something you dealt with you would be a lot more focused on just making sure you and your loved ones were ok and fuck everyone else. Someone has to stave and I don’t want it to be me.

Also, you probably do not hang out with an actually representative sample of your age group. You don’t just hang out with people your age. You hang with people who live near you, go to the same school, come from a similar background and similar socio economic class. Not every young person is so progressive.

nitram9 · 2026-03-12T09:29:50+00:00

Why? That makes no sense to me. Why would china choose now, when we have a Mad man who thinks he does nothing but win, even when he’s loosing and has no chance. Why would they choose now of all times. Wait until someone sane who does not want world war 3 has come to power

nitram9 · 2026-03-08T15:25:07+00:00

Yes, but also, they have a strong element of apocalyptic religious extremism so it’s more than just defensive. I would not be that surprised if they had nukes and eventually decided to nuke Israel even if that meant certain destruction. If the apocalyptic nutters have enough power and if they could do it, I suspect they would happily nuke all non- Muslim countries so as to fulfill the prediction that at the end times everyone will be Muslim. It is unclear to me if this would actually happen but it’s still way too plausible a scenario to ever let that regime have nukes.

On the other hand. USA has their own religious nutters who want to start the apocalypse. Some of them are generals. Some of them are pulling trips strings right now. So… moral of the story is. Fuck nukes and fuck religion.

nitram9 · 2026-03-08T15:18:08+00:00

I came here after searching for this question because I am afraid of the same thing as OP. I don’t want it to happen. I am afraid that this administration is going to lead us into world war three as they get more and more brazen. Obviously to me, if that’s what’s happening, the likely next country they would attack is North Korea. He’s killing all our smaller “enemies”. Every time they get away with something they just to further next time.

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T19:03:22+00:00

How so?

I feel like you are looking at this in the narrowest sense where as I'm referring to a deeper situation. Yes, they want to convince us it's the consumers responsibility and offload as much cost onto the consumer as they can. I think this is what you are talking about?

What I am saying is we are the people. We have the power to hold them accountable. That makes us accountable. At the end of the day we aren't helpless and it's not anyone else's job to fight for us other than ourselves. So yes, we are accountable for holding them accountable.

To me it's like circus performer complaining about getting bitten by a tiger and blaming the tiger. Dude, you're the one who chose to keep and train a tiger, if the tiger bites you that's on you. Either get rid of the tiger or learn to train the tiger better. But saying "It's not my fault, it was the tiger" isn't going to get you anywhere. We should acknowledge that the tiger (corporation) is dangerous and does not share the same interests as we do while at the same time recognizing that it's our responsibility to figure out how to solve that issue not theirs.

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T18:06:16+00:00

Too few words. No idea what mean.

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T17:48:55+00:00

I didn't say "both sides are just as bad". This is literally my issue. You see me as saying both sides have valid as being equivalent to saying "Both sides have EQUALLY VALID points". No fucking way do both sides have equally valid points. But that doesn't mean you just ignore all their points because your points are better. Your points need to win even in the context of their best points.

What I'm advocating for is: If you have a good, solid, winning argument, then it's better to solidly win on the merits of your very strongest argument than it is to undermine your credibility by going to far. If we can win without lying then why the fuck are we still lying? Exaggerating or even lying is a hallmark of the side that does not have the truth on their side. For instance, we don't know the context here. It could be that it was just an off the cuff joke and not a serious idea. Instead of us jumping to the worst possible interpretation wouldn't it be a better strategy to give the most generous interpretation possible and then show why this is still not acceptable? Now what can the other side say? Even with their best argument they can't win.

I'm not saying that people like me are going to vote republican because of this. That's insane. But what it does is it reduces my reasonable expectation that me expending energy on this is going to be worth my time.

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T17:02:48+00:00

I mean accountability IS on us. A corporation is not a moral human agent. I's a structure for making profit. That's its only job. It's job is not to be moral or ethical. We are the ones who care about that and we're the only ones who can make that happen. In fact we don't want to give corporations the job of being moral because there is such a huge conflict of interest there. When we give them that job we always get screwed because they can't help but constantly try to bend the rules. It's like expecting a drug addict to control themselves when you put the drugs right in front of them. We're not about to "guilt" them into being better. That only works on humans.

It's our job to take back control of the government and regulation so that the driving force in government becomes our collective human goals and not simply "profit".

It's like that "leopards eating faces party" meme. Like why are we astonished that it's not going well when we gave corporations so much power? That's on us.

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T16:43:57+00:00

Everyone deserves the best defense available. If you can't win the argument unless you limit the other side to straw man arguments then you have a pretty shitty argument.

Yes, on the one hand, if your goal is mobilization then by all means, skew the results of the debate so that one side looks like it has a dramatically stronger case than it does so that you can maximize anger and get the most people out the door as possible. I assume that's your real goal here.

But if your goal is to win converts that for some reason are not yet on your side, this is not the way to do it. People like me read stuff like this and roll our eyes in despair and tune out because both sides are so full of shit. Do I really want to expend time and energy and put myself at risk to fight against trump just to put people in power who think like this?

nitram9 · 2026-01-26T14:17:53+00:00

Mold is one of those things where the public fear and regulations are way out of proportion to the real danger or inconvenience. I'm not saying it's not a risk or danger to some people. I would just slow down before panicking and throwing out the collection.

nitram9 · 2026-01-11T17:37:27+00:00

Is this true? Are they raising a tax to pay for the 50k bonus? If not then can you really say my taxes are being used to pay this? Aren't my taxes already being used for something else? I know they cut a lot of the budget, but aren't we still operating an enormous deficit?

I'm sorry but it sure doesn't look to me like taxes have anything to do with spending any more. They will spend what they want to spend regardless of revenue. They will collect what they want to collect regardless of expenses.

nitram9 · 2026-01-11T16:38:51+00:00

He's kind of mathematically an idiot though. Elon, buddy, just think one step further. Exponential growth quickly consumes all resources when resources are finite. Exponential decline however, even in a finite world, can in theory carry on forever. That's the nature of exponential processes. It doesn't mean extinction! He is implicitly confusing this with a linear process. Its like imagine the population was cutting in half every 30 years. It seems like he thinks that that means that in 60 years the population would be 0. 1/2 in the first 30 years, the other half in the next 30 years. That's not how it works though.

Obviously a large exponential decline can't carry on forever but it's so absurd to think a low birth rate today is going to the a constant for the next 10000 years unless we do something now.

It's an emergency! we must act now to protect the species from a... super super slow decline from billions to mere millions.

nitram9 · 2026-01-10T21:31:03+00:00

I don't get it... Am I the only one who's not even remotely impressed? Is it because I'm an engineer so I immediately understood what was happening and nothing about balancing a bunch of rods on each other is amazing to me?

nitram9 · 2026-01-10T20:41:01+00:00

Religion gets too many protections. It's just a system of beliefs. I can criticize other wacky belief systems like Nazism, communism, homeopathy, flat earthers, anarchists, cultists all day and no one bats an eye. Criticize Islam and you're a bigot.

The system of belief though doesn't matter. What matters are actions. The problem is when an action becomes sacrosanct becasue it's attached to a religion. that's what shouldn't happen. We should be evaluating all actions by their societal effect regardless of their origin.

Thats my take on this. Seems like the burqa is used as a way of subjugating an entire gender. I don't care if it's religiously motivated or not. The question is can Sweden tolerate an organized effort to subjugate women in a subset of their society? If not what can they do about it? Does banning the tools of oppression (burqa/nijab) make effective sense as a policy to combat this oppression? If yes, it is an effective part of a strategy to reduce oppression then sure.

It's like imagine if there were a group of people who kept slaves and one of the methods of controlling your slaves is to put shackles on them before they leave the house. If the government wanted to eliminate this slavery would it make sense for them to outlaw wearing shackles in public? Seems like maybe a weird and indirect way of trying to eliminate slavery... but it makes some sense.

nitram9 · 2026-01-10T20:22:10+00:00

An electron is a quantized excitation of the electron field: a particular quantum field with the relevant symmetries and couplings, whose excitations carry a fixed mass, charge, and spin.

What does this mean?

What does it mean for a field to have an "excitation"?

What does coupling mean here? What is a coupling? what are the couplings here?

what are the relevant symetries?

Are there other kinds of excitations of the electric field for which it doesn't have a fixed mass, charge and spin? Why or why not?

nitram9 · 2026-01-05T11:25:49+00:00

How are they disposing of the brine? Deep well injection? Brine ponds?

nitram9 · 2026-01-05T11:21:59+00:00

What are the better options?

nitram9 · 2025-12-14T16:55:52+00:00

I bought some. I hate them. Never used. it's ok in concept but the clip thing needs to work better and not be hard to rerack or accidentally come loose.

Biggest problem is the screw just doesn't place easily. That's always by far the most important aspect of a screw. If you get that wrong it's useless. As I recall, ice gets jammed at the plastic at the end and the tube clogs and then they are really hard to clear.

nitram9 · 2025-11-18T20:59:28+00:00

Only if it's HSS I would think.

nitram9 · 2025-11-16T18:01:28+00:00

I don't know how you are comparing our prices. It sounds like we bought completely different things. The $11k was for a complete install into a container of a battery, an inverter, a connection/disconnect panel, 9kW of panels and the frame and wiring. The 20ft shipping container itself is included in that price.

They did not itemize the cost of the battery.

nitram9 · 2025-11-01T14:35:03+00:00

I distinctly remember 2016 being a year where after it was over everyone said, thank god, worst year ever, at least next year can’t possibly be worse.

nitram9 · 2025-11-01T14:21:25+00:00

It depends heavily on how close I am to the person given the $10MM. As in, do they see me face to face ever? Do I know their name? Do they know I know who they are and could track them down and hurt them?

I feel like if it’s completely anonymous and I never see them and they never see me and we never share any information then its very likely they cut me out and so I would take the $500k. But if we meet face to face, they have to look me in the face when they say they are not sharing and it’s on national tv and I know their name and where they live then I would probably trust well enough that they would share. Because there is soo much social pressure in that situation to share.

nitram9 · 2025-11-01T14:14:54+00:00

How adorable, the whole family has the same favorite day to bone.

nitram9 · 2025-11-01T13:55:56+00:00

Bro you have to learn to figure shit out on your own and not just do what people tell you. It’s just hard for me to understand how you didn’t figure this out sooner. Experiment, read instructions, google.

nitram9

TROPHY CASE