taking notes for legal hearings -not as a real court monitor, but verbatim notes. I've been doing it for a couple months but I'm finally getting more shifts and making good money

yes, of course - why else would I be here? he cites the same statistics (hosted on a different website) that i used.

to put it another way, when i hear people like mr. berliner talk about media trust and activism ruling over facts, the dogwhistles are too shrill to hear the surface message of "npr isn't very good", which i think we can all agree with. i view it as one of the best options available, but honestly that puts it at "fine" for me because most are just dreck

i am too used to this kind of thing being used as a shuttle for bigotry and polemics about people like me, and the response to the article has cemented that perception for me

well, looking at the statistics, there has been a dip in NPR's radio figures at least based on this back down to pre-trump levels -I've seen other stats on total platforms combined, so including podcasts, online video, etc, that pushes it up to 50 to 60 million weekly consumers. if you cut it to donating members ,i don't know how the statistics have changed because i can't find that data, but you could make an argument either way on whether subscribers would be more or less likely to abandon the station

anecdotally, I'm not sure how to respond other than that my experience has not been the same as yours. i think given our past conversations on the subject that you probably have some insight as to why that is.

i will say that my mother used to be an NPR donator but stopped because she felt they weren't left wing enough. i think the political and cultural war in america demands more partisanship than NPR can provide.

the meds are working and the job is going great

there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it

there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it.

so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo.

there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats.

people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.

I'm not a doctor, I'm not embassy staff, and I'm not a Russian agent, so my opinion doesn't matter, but this one has smelled to me like "Chronic Lyme Disease but for spooks" since it came out. the combination of symptoms that doctors can't figure out, the belief in a coverup, pinning it on secret russian weaponry - the whole thing is a tall claim with short proof.

the simpler answer is that like chronic lyme, it's a collection of psychosomatic symptoms and random other ailments that get unified and blamed with this label. that doesn't make the symptoms not real, and it's got no more weight behind it than the spy weapon theory, but you can't prove a negative except by showing what isn't true. none of the studies so far have found anything.

my views on this are colored by my biases, but without getting into any of the political side of it, i think that looking at the medical evidence and the announcements made by the US govt etc on this is enough to warrant caution at a minimum when things like this come out

just watched the redone cut of alien 3 and it was better than i expected - kind of odd compared to the other two and clearly the inferior to both, but it had its own something to it

honestly the biggest negative for me was all the stuff with the alien which is kind of funny - i liked all the convicts and their weird behaviour, and the little thing with the doctor and ripley was cute even though there's never been a lezzier character to make straight - but there's no mystery to any of the horror elements and the action is really repetitive. i feel like it's a knock on the movie to have the best part be the character interactions when the writing is not standout great at any point

the cgi and the compositing is pretty bad but it was the era for it and the practicals were pure and true like they needed to be

i dunno, people make it sound to be awful and the director hates it, but i thought it was alright. i guess if you're grading on the curve of the first two then it's not good though

while i travelled, my passions for to groom

i came upon a sentimental tune

it was not..

the vast majority of the growth in the arab population was due to natural population growth and not migration - and more jews than arabs migrated to the country in total. unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by net, you have it backwards.

the majority of the arab population was settled even at the time of the mandate censuses. the idea that palestine was an empty land is a colonial myth of convenience.

busy work day but it might yet end early. on any day i only work until 3 at the latest anyway. when i get home it's hot dog mac and cheese for dinner. I'm stuck on some kind of africa kick so i might make it a pdf dive weekend project so it's not just skimming wikipedia and public documents

the company that bought the old one is much better. i get paid more per hour and i can bill more time. it's only been since january but I'm averaging closer to 4 shifts a week so that helps a lot

mood stabilizers have been doing me good, and some of my various ailments are fixed from getting off the SSRIs. next week i start the process of getting a CPAP because apparently i had sleep apnea all this time. yesterday i slept 4 hours after work and another 7 that night. based on all that I'm off the thyroid meds now because that was likely a bugbear

got a new learner's permit again so me and the boywife can finally get licenses this year inshallah

passed the 4 year dating anniversary a few months ago. about to hit the 6 year transitioning anniversary. getting out of the covid timehole has been strange. every year is messy in its own way. doing the open relationship since last summer has been great i think -the actual process of meeting new people is a pain in the ass and effectively a lottery on whether it pans out, but i've made some close friends* out of it and it's done a lot to limit the cabin fever and that sense of being a piece of shit. I'm glad me and my boyfriend were able to be together all through the lockdowns but after being effectively unemployed, depressed, and spending all day together for 2.5+ years it's nice to remember how to be human

the other little thing that i wanted to say was (as per the Wallerstein convo) cooking it used to be a Woman Duty and now it's a Nobody Duty. the shift from unpaid to paid labor with women entering the workforce spread the household responsibility of cooking/cleaning/kids/etc, at least nominally, across everybody - and now that people don't train their daughters to do it, nobody gets trained to do it. the grassroots is gone, for lack of a better word, and you only get this scattershot stuff about home ec or scrabbling things together out of necessity until you figure it out, and the two roads are roast beef girl and doordash coiner

it's tricky to talk about because it's not like forcing all of it unpaid onto women was any better either, but you're right. money has hollowed the whole thing out. now there's no script, and we're just improvving for lack of being told what to do by the world

2 things:

1. a lot of people are really embarrassing. that's not their fault, and you still shouldn't give them a hard time about it, but man. crying over roast beef because you're stressed about cooking it is really lame.

2. there but for the grace of god go I. I grew up fringe upperclass had a stay-at-home-mom who could cook and (through becoming a vegetarian, along with everything else) had the time/money/desire to make a waaaay broader variety of things than a anglocanadian midwestern household would have on the average. i loved to get in the kitchen as a kid. i loved to bake things and cook things. i loved, and still love, food and eating.

i've also been "mentally unwell" in one way or another my entire adult life, and there's nothing that sucks the love out of you than coming home after however many hours of work and having to do yesterday's dishes because you didn't do them last night, because you had to do yesterday's dishes before making dinner, because ...

preparing and cooking food is one of those invisible labors that, because everybody has to do it, gets its difficulty discounted. it's timeconsuming to plan, prepare, cook, and clean up after meals. generously it takes me an hour to do all that, if I'm doing anything more complicated than "combine premade fridge staples in pot" or "combine pantry things in pot" or the classic "grain and cheese in oven". sometimes i don't have an hour to spare. sometimes i don't have an hour in me. i've been roast beef tears girl before. sometimes the little things are what tip you over the edge.

i held this one in the drafts because i wrote it before cooking dinner. i made a classic recipe of mine that i made hundred times during the pandemic, and i have it down to a military grade aluminum schedule so i decided to use it as a case study

ingred. 1 can crushed tomatoes, 1 can black olives, 1 pound rigatoni, 3 cans tuna, and relevant accoutrements.

start boiling salted water for pasta. fry up olives then tuna in some olive oil until mildly sizzled. add very generous # fish sauce, oregano, garlic powder, pepper, and red pepper flakes or equivalent ground red pepper. mix in tomato. let simmer and then cool to low. cook pasta and combine it and 1/3rd to 1/2 c pasta water when done to sauce. eat.

it took me about 30 minutes to do all that and to clean most of the dishes. there's still the final pasta pot in the sink that sits even now at midnight. the rest is done. it's the power of an all pantry-meal.

a cute name would be pasta Qttanesca. I've substituted too many things to make it italian friendly, but what do they know anyway

but what is better parenting? i don't ask to try to score debate points: i don't know what that looks like, and any insight on what you think it is would guide me to better engage. calling all hubski parents: what do parents have to do? what do you do right now, at whatever age your kid is at? what do you think you should do, or could do better?

This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.

i don't know how to respond other than to say that the lack of comprehension among the elderly and the internet-elderly is cooking them as well, and that they are eating the slop and enjoying it more than young people. if you weren't part of the pre-eternal september vanguard, and you aren't tech-adjacent, and you didn't spend some part of your youth online, your base level of knowledge is "how do i print pdf" and "facebook said there are chemicals in the tapwater." i don't think it's absurd to talk about what-ought-to-be in this context when we can all see that what-actually-is is a mess.

all you need to be a parent is to have kids. think about the average person in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc - and extrapolate that knowledgeset to the average parent in the same age range. i think it's safe to say that for a really large chunk of people, the internet is incomprehensible beyond the lake that they skim the surface of. from what i see, people make themselves a range that they stick to: email, social media, a little youtube if you're getting spicy. they keep it shallow because they are conscious of their own ignorance, and develop skills to avoid showing it.

the continuing problem is the fact that young people are much, much more equipped to deal with all this than their parents. GenX begat GenZ, but the percentage of IRC-hopping andies and Cory Doctorows of that generation is still not very big. Now that Millennials are giving birth to GenAlpha, we see how ("more") internet-equipped parents are raising internet-accessing children, but those kids are still preteens at most.

There's no survive the internet class. there isn't even a be a parent class. instead we have the onslaught of "phone bad, screen bad" from every source read by the parent age brackets, and either you know nothing about it (aforementioned GenX and older beyond the Elite Percentage who could probably roll and smoke >90% of the world population on this), or you're a Millennial and you have extreme guilt over your own screen use and internet addiction, and project your own experiences on your Ipad kid.

I'm not at all equipped or qualified to solve any of this. I do think that I'm more capable of narrowing down the problem than the average OpEd writer of the world, or the average Haidt. Maybe that's egotistical, but I believe it.

as a fan of the total war games and the paradox interative games: a lot of titles are just not worth buying on release. a few years onward, they're cheaper by a third or half, they're much more stable and bugfree, and they have much more content. the only reason to buy in right away is to experience the highs and lows of it before it's been picked clean by gamer andies who treat the world like a speedrun. but if you're able to avoid that kind of person then you'll be fine to wait as long as you want. the game will only get better.

I'm not a fan of Haidt. he asks good questions about internet mental health impacts on kids, but loads it with his political biases and takes cheap shots here at wokeness, campus crybabies, supposed tiktok antisemites, etc. it's easier for me to take his research concerns more seriously when the generation bashing is less present. for that reason I appreciate the first linked article in this list, and this rebuttal he lists there. The rest is fundamentally unserious and driven by media hysteria. He says he can't find young people to make counterpoints - that does not match my experience.

anecdotally, my internet use came from extreme social isolation. i was homeschooled and had effectively no friends or peers beyond my older sister. i was socially crippled and depressed and anxious before i was even a preteen. the Internet was a godsend for me as soon as i had unfettered access to it around 8 or 9 years old. through the Internet, i received information about my gender and sexuality that led to me realizing i was transgender upon hitting puberty, which simply would not have happened otherwise.

my situation is extremely common for any given societal deviant. but it's obviously not that simple. i was also exposed to things that were not at all appropriate for my age in ways that were not appropriately supervised or controlled. i saw graphic violence, child sex abuse images, heinous levels of bigotry, radicalizing fascist groups, and just a level of bad behavior that everybody here who haa used the Internet for a long time is familiar with. I eventually got into a serious of longdistance age-gapped relationships at 15-16-17 with people in their mid-20s that are emotionally complicated for me to understand and likely crossed the line into being abusive at times. the Internet is not safe.

the question to me is whether on balance, the shift from physical to online life has been a negative or a positive for my generation. even with all the burrs and barbs of it, I would still wholeheartedly say yes. parents, schools, and authority figures have this need to control every aspect of kids lives, right up through when they're not kids anymore. It never ends. See Haidt's condemnation of college students. i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear, but it's also the best or only avenue to reclaim your autonomy when you're desperately seeking it.

the kids aren't fucking, drugging, or making trouble. if some of their brains get cooked, I'm okay with that. i don't see how the solution is continued coddling - especially when the people proposing it seem to be so focused on how this generation is a bunch of neurotic snowflakes. my diagnosis is lighten up

cetere autem censeo Google and Facebook esse delendam.

just as a brief note: putting your toddler on an ipad all day is like sitting them in front of the TV, but also spinning a roulette wheel that could show them pregnant Elsa dying from getting the Spiderman vaccine. I'm not a doctor, but i think the problem here is not the Internet, it's not interacting with your child to teach/play with them. if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth. you control that yet. if they're old enough to be smarter than a golden retriever, and you let them use a few sites, they'll be fine. letting a teen go ham online will be fine, as long as they're not cutting class or something to do it. make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax. parents are bombarded with people telling them to be scared. you don't need to be

i don't remember my comment on food culture at all but i still agree with it i think - to elaborate more, i mean "food culture" like the media of food, restaurant chef attitudes, etc.: all the crust that rings around the actual cooking and eating. "british food culture" to me seems like it's centered around doing the same old shit that has supposedly been done since time immemorial -but like the scottish clan regalia and emblems were actually 1800s era nostalgizing more than real reflections of the past. the same goes for a lot of other european countries where food plays a big part in nationalism, except england has a misfortune of their national foods being greasy and fried or mushy and stewed.

i think the pitfalls of american food culture are interesting because of the stratification between "high" and "low" and "middlebrow"versions of it, and they overlap weirdly. low is chick fil a and popeyes culture wars. high is gastronomy andies making inedible food in big cities. middlebrow is some paste-on-toast shenanigans

i dunno, I'm just freeballing it

it's quite freewheeling, but i found it quite interesting: another quote:

The strange, uninspiring ideological cocktail of socialism with Chinese characteristics, from Deng Xiaoping Theory to Jiang’s Three Represents to Hu’s Harmonious Socialist Society all congealed into litany without much of a concrete meaning, with its endless list of numerical targets and PR-speak buzzwords, is not so far removed from Tony Blair’s Third Way, or David Cameron’s Big Society and Northern Powerhouse, or any of the other projects unveiled by the endlessly ambitious British political class since they stopped having ideas.