Do we dislike each other and want less interaction with each other than people in other countries? There's an apartment building being proposed in the already dense city where I live and local residents are up in arms, saying a tall building of apartments belongs in Europe but not here, Americans don't want that, we're already too full and so on. Why do we hate living closer to each other?
This article threw me for a loop. No cars or TV but all in on ChatGPT?
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YKP0J
>At Maxwell Social, a private members’ club in lower Manhattan that resembles an oligarch’s library, the tech bros were doing “caviar bumps”—dollops of roe slurped from the skin between thumb and index finger—chased with shots of cold Belvedere vodka.
>Shortly before that Dionysian moment, the group was fanning their faces with strips of paper scented with mandarin, lavender and cedarwood, like dauphins at Versailles, and greeting their seatmates with a firm handshake and a quip about their favorite LLM.
>These exercises were part of a four-hour “etiquette class” aimed at tech founders, hosted by VC firm Slow Ventures one Tuesday afternoon in March. About 50 aspiring Zuckerbergs gathered to network and learn the finer points of hosting, fundraising, wine pairings—and, more broadly, how to read the room.
>Though the event was staged with a knowing wink, its underlying premise was no joke: In the AI era, soft skills matter.
>AI can perform complex tech tasks in a fraction of the time it takes even the sharpest MIT grad, and it’s only getting better. If tech founders want to stand out in an increasingly saturated and flattened market, they must bolster brilliant ideas by leaning on the one quality AI can’t emulate: humanity.
>Or, as Slow Ventures put it in one of its class invitations—they must lead “with charisma and grace.”
I'm not sure about this whole "AI can perform complex tech tasks in a fraction of the time it takes even the sharpest MIT grad" business, but at least the next wave of tech oligarchs might be a little superficially nicer while they throw us into the meat grinder.
A thread on pit bulls came up earlier and one of the popular comments was something along the lines of, if you look at "bite statistics" without context to justify your dislike of pit bulls, that's the same as someone looking at "crime statistics" without context to justify racism. Also pit bulls are associated with poverty and people of color and therefore, unease around pit bulls means you're probably subconsciously a classist and racist.
IDK, I just think they're really dangerous and I am scared of them in a way I'm not scared of my friends' pomeranian.
This is something I hear from others in tech, that the average user vastly prefers chatbots and would rather e.g. use a chatbot rather than interacting with UI elements for selections or reading the contents of the page.
I used to build UX that made sense to me as a user, but I also hate chat interfaces and find them frustrating to use when I could just read the source information or change an option myself to understand what's happening. Does the general public preference for AI tools and chat mean I'm a weird user and that I shouldn't take my desire for clarity into account anymore?
I had a driver yesterday slowly follow me through a busy city center while holding the horn, bumping me with his car at stops, yelling about how I'm a pussy and I need to man up and fight instead of ignoring him? I ended up getting off the bike and waiting until the drivers behind him got so mad that he was forced to move on.
This sounds stupid but let me explain.
A common opposition to gun control laws is that they wouldn't work - someone who wants a gun and who wants to kill someone else will always be able to get a gun - so they're pointless. This thread is a great example.
So then why doesn't the same logic work with abortion bans that have the intent of preventing abortions or, as they would describe them, "baby murders"? You could say abortion laws are pointless since anyone who wants an abortion will find a way to get one. Yet many Americans strongly oppose gun laws and strongly support abortion bans at the same time, despite the logic for these not being compatible at all.
Quick example from Boston, a proposed Blue Hill Ave bus lane has been held up for a year because of opposition from local businesses and drivers, even though there are more bus passengers along the road than there are car occupants.
Why is it the case that this minority of drivers has outsized political power? It's political suicide to take away any car lanes here, even though most road users aren't actually in cars.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/14/metro/blue-hill-avenue-traffic-study/
I watched the finish of 98 long beach and it looks like they're both faster and able to follow more closely without being as affected by dirty air. https://youtu.be/tLo0yYRXUfE
It doesn't seem to be a racial thing the way I previously thought (from 2016-2020), Trump and Republicans made significant gains across basically all minority demographics.
I don't understand. Why are a majority of working class Americans, who are voting in reaction to their economic hardship, celebrating and supporting billionaires? At the same time they despise "liberal" coded people, such as teachers or scientific researchers or university employees, who are in similar financial situations to their own?
I live in Massachusetts which is one of the most liberal states in the country and even here I know plenty of people who think that poor people are all lazy or unskillled, that poor people already have it too good in society and get too much assistance, that "not everyone deserves a home", some people simply deserve to be homeless and die on the street because they have nothing productive to offer society, etc
How is it possible to hold all these views simultaneously? It doesn't make any sense.
This is something I have noticed for years: the positions I see supported with "both sides are the same" are almost always a defense of Trump / the right wing, or a defense of voting third party, or a defense of abstaining from voting entirely. It is very rare to see voting for Democrats advocated for with a "both sides are the same" argument.
Why does this occur? In theory at least a "both sides are the same" mindset should lead to a roughly proportional split in voting behavior with half going to each major party, but that's not what happens. Nobody says "both sides are the same, so I voted Biden", it's always "both sides are the same so I voted Green" or "both sides are the same so I voted Trump".
And is this a phenomenon limited to the U.S., or does this pattern happen elsewhere as well?
It seems a real shame what happened to him, with the concussion at Indy and the management after that which pretty much ended his career?
I seem to recall this happening sometimes, since there was no driver in the car it was no longer considered a safety hazard, and the rest of the drivers were expected to know there was a car there and avoid it.
My searching found one example, from toronto 1989: https://youtu.be/-_cc9MXdE6A?t=1115
On the left, this is a common sentiment - if you vote for a candidate, you have no leverage to demand concessions, since they know they can rely on your vote and then you will never be catered to. The only leverage you have is if you refuse to vote for the Democratic candidate and they lose, since then they will have to shift left for your vote in the next electoral cycle.
Why doesn't this work the same way as on the right? Evangelicals are extremely reliable right wing voters and they get catered to regularly. But on the left, the common belief is that reliable voters would be completely ignored.
This is an example of an extremely popular sentiment in progressive spaces, that progressives are popular with a majority of Americans and would easily win if the DNC didn't deliberately sabotage them, because they would prefer losing to Trump than winning with progressives that threaten the corporate status quo.
Or see articles like this that identify Democrats as an enemy of progressives on par with Trump: "the struggle to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same battle."
Is any of this true? I'm a progressive, but if we're so popular, why aren't we winning primaries outside of elections in extremely blue areas like NYC? Or is the primary system actually rigged against Bernie and against progressives in general?
I don't think facts will work, since this seems to now be a culture war issue. Nobody is arguing for cars with studies or scientific papers.
I live in one of the densest areas of the US, with relatively low vehicle ownership, and even here it's still a popular opinion that pedestrians should give way to cars at all times. State law requires drivers to stop, yet the community response to e.g. pedestrian deaths in crosswalks is "why were they in the road? didn't they ever get taught to look before crossing?" instead of holding drivers accountable.
Or drivers raging online over a single intersection with a "useless" red light that protects a crosswalk to a park that's usually full of children.
Or drivers complaining about sidewalk widths, saying that pedestrians have enough space already and that cars have been unfairly punished by narrow lanes to widen sidewalks, in a primary pedestrian area. "I dont care even a little bit about some sidewalk congestion... the city doesnt care about the vehicle congestion everyday cause by their obnoxious sidewalk expansions, excessive bike lanes, and dangerous speed bump patterns. So no, you pedestrians can be mildly inconvenienced". Even in dense and highly trafficked city squares, sidewalks should be as narrow as possible to be still ADA compliant and no wider, since pedestrians don't deserve the space over cars.
They're so much better for carrying people and cargo than crossovers or SUVs.