I was suffering from a burnout for much of the year and read mostly to relax. Reread a bunch of Discworld and read most of the Expanse series for the first time. Some Murakami. The Conway biography ("Genius At Play"), also a reread because it's fun.
But "The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", often recommended om HN, was amazing. It has so much of the history of how personal computers came to be, and so much that was new to me.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
LGBT propaganda... Funny how people who have been gobbling up propaganda about something, always think "the other side" is the one producing the actual propaganda
And yes, i see the irony of this statement
But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda
Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?
If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,
You're probably right, but my main point was that it's funny that people who have been spoon fed propaganda about something always think the opposite of what they now believe is the actual propaganda
Honestly, pretty impressive by the russian government how they are able to do that
Then again, in many cultures (even in more tolerant ones like here in the netherlands) there's always somewhere a latent hatred and/or disgust towards LGBT. So maybe it's nit that hard to bring that back to the surface after all
But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.
Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.
You can't notice that in the last 20 years it became obligatory. It is included in almost every movie and every book. It reminds me of Soviet times, when every book, including Sci-Fi about deep space exploration, should've devoted some pages to promoting ideas of communism.
And it wasn't "conspiracy". I doubt there ever was a requirement to do it. Simply, your book had less chance of publishing if you don't do it. I think it is the same in US an EU now: if you don't include 1-2 bits of propaganda or more, your book has less chances to be mentioned in the bestsellers section or something like that.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
Sometimes it just accomplishes paying your rent so you can do your life's work on the side.
You can have a life of the mind at work, or you can have a mindless job and have your life of mind in your off hours. It's almost impossible to have both.
Man ... if there were a text file with "all relevant business knowledge" in any job I've ever worked, it would have been revolutionary.
I'd say 25% of my work-hours are just going around to stakeholders and getting them to say what some of their unstated assumptions and requirements are.
> I honestly don’t know what the PO and TL gains with this absurd obscenity
There are marketing campaigns that need to be set up, users informed, manuals written. Sales people want to sell the new feature. People thinking about road maps need to know how many new features to can fit in a quarter.
But "The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", often recommended om HN, was amazing. It has so much of the history of how personal computers came to be, and so much that was new to me.
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