Y'shtola Rhul as the Magician, a beautiful tarot by @home-halone! I may try my hand at making a physical card one day... I have the tools, sort of...

*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*

I saw it in a cartoon when I was little, and liked it. Have done it ever since.

I’ve been doing barred-7 for so long that I can’t remember when I started, though it would have been for the same “liked it” reason and also had the advantage of being a Real Thing, while using a little circle for the dots of lower-case i and j was not.

(I use barred-Z and barred-0 far less often, only when there’s a chance they might be mistaken for numeral-2 and letter-Cap-O, such as in serial numbers and program keys.)

I’m pretty sure barred-7 developed because the handwritten sans-serif numeral-1 - @dduane​ and I have seen them on restaurant bills all over Continental Europe - often has a long top-stroke that could be mistaken for numeral-7.

That’s my theory, anyway.

You know what I hate about modern mice? how pointlessly anti-repair they are. I have had plenty of mice break over time, and often it's just that some fluff or skin-flakes got wedged in the mouse wheel or under the buttons. You just need to open them up and clean them. Except.. where are the screws?

OH THERE THEY ARE. under the little skid-pads, which cannot be put back on once you take them off, because the adhesive has been ruined! You have to buy replacement pads, if they're available, and maybe cut them down to size, as well as clean off the residue of the previous pads.

You know how this problem could be fixed? JUST DON'T PUT THE PADS ON TOP OF THE SCREWS!

Then you'd have no problem. Easy to disassemble and clean.

But then it'd look 5% uglier because apparently people are scared of seeing screws, and also people might not just throw it out and buy a new one!

It's the terrible sort of weird planned obsolescence that happens as an almost accidental side effect of improving the product. Like, ball mice? They were designed to be disassembled. You didn't even need a screwdriver! Because you had to clean them regularly, or they'd gunk up too fast. Modern optical mice? They still get gunked up, the buttons and wheel still die eventually. They can be cleaned and repaired. But now that it's not required for all of them to be cleaned regularly, that function has been removed. they're designed to be disposable.

The same thing happened with TVs way back when. If you open up a TV from the 50s (or just look at the back, honestly, many of them were designed to be always-open), you'll find a schematic showing where all the tubes are and what models they are. Was this because the 1950s was a golden era of reparability? NO! it's because they burnt out all the time and you had to replace them! As soon as TVs got reliable enough that replacing tubes was no longer needed, the schematics became hidden behind paywalls and for authorized-service-personnel-only.

It would be only a minor change in aesthetics to make your mouse repairable/cleanable. Hell, most of the time when it's not simply fixed by cleaning it, it's because one of these broke:

This is an Omron D2FC-F-7N microswitch, used in a bunch of mice. It's designed to last about a million clicks. With a soldering iron and some solder (like 25$ on amazon) you can trivially replace it. New switches cost between like 10 cents and 2 dollars, depending where you buy it and how many you want. A couple bucks of parts and half an hour's worth of work, you can repair a 40$ mouse that's "died".

But they make it unnecessarily hard with the slide-pads being unreplacable. You have to find ones that match, you have to carefully clean off the old residue with IPA, or the new ones you just bought will fall off. All to make it look SLIGHTLY better (how often are you looking at the aesthetics of the bottom of your mouse, exactly? (no furries are allowed to answer this question!)) and maybe, just maybe, to push it over into "not worth it". You could do all that, but you have to buy new switches, new slide-pads/mouse-feet (SHUT UP FURRIES), and can you remember where your solder even is? you last used it when you were trying to fix that keyboard...

Basically one thing that is maddening to anyone with the very basics of electronic knowledge (seriously: the amount of skill you need for this is the kind you can get in less than an hour from watching a youtube tutorial) that we're surrounded by all this electrical nonsense that will break and have to be thrown out, but is mostly breaking in ways that could be fixed in a very short amount of time with relatively little work.

It's infuriating to go on amazon to buy another damn mouse and it pop up "hey you last bought this in 2021, you fool" and you're like I KNOW, IT SHOULD STILL BE WORKING TODAY!

I have computer parts from the 80s in my room right now that are still working when stuff made in the last 5 years is already dying! There's no reason it should be this way. It's an endless waste of time and money and resources and it's just to make some logitech or whoever executives slightly richer.

It's deeply bullshit. The modern day is going to be identifiable as the geological layer where most of the trash was generated. We're living in the middle of the quisquiliarumferous period: the layer of garbage.

Yeah, it's infuriating.

Just a note, every time I've opened a mouse with these annoying pads, the adhesive got messed up but the pads themselves were intact, so I was able to just glue them back. I don't remember what glue I used, but, you know, don't use superglue, the point is to be able to do it again.

Oh gods yeah, there's so many peripherals that do this shit and it is equally frustrating every time - mice, keyboards, gamepads... worst thing is when they still have visible screw holes but still decide to hide one or more screws underneath pads or labels or shit somewhere.

Honestly I'd love for there to be some kind of double-sided adhesive tape that basically mimics the kind of adhesives usually used for these kinds of things so you could cut your own pieces for easier maintenance and repair.

Okay let me try this one again. The Trolley Problem sets up a scenario that sucks to be in. You either kill one guy, or you kill five guys. Nobody likes these options. We all don't want this be happening. That's kind of the point. It's a moral quandary. It's supposed to feel bad.

Now, according to a recent post floating around on tumblr, choosing either of the two options demonstrates "learned helplessness" and makes you a neolib sheep. The only correct answer, the post states, is to reject the question altogether. (Or to change the parameters of the question to include an option that saves everyone, thus eliminating the moral quandary.)

It sounds nice, doesn't it? Fuck this bad situation, we control our imaginations, so let's imagine a situation that doesn't suck. Hah! Bet you didn't think of that!

Here's the problem. Even though I think most situations generally have at least one solution that is both Feasible and Not Terrible, I have to admit that there are some situations (as in, not zero of them) where all the feasible options are unpleasant. This is a natural consequence of living in a world where A Lot Of Things Suck.

But if shitty situations do exist, even if it's super super rare, then it's not unreasonable to ask, "How should we make decisions when we find ourselves in a shitty situation?"

This is the beginning premise of the Trolley Problem. It says, "Hey what if you were in an unambiguously shitty situation? There are many shitty situations, so let's imagine one that is contrived enough to get everyone on the same page regardless of political affiliation, AND really emphasizes the key parts that I want to discuss."

Tumblr says "let me stop you right there. What if instead...we imagined a different scenario that wasn't as shitty?"

Well, okay, but then we're not talking about the same thing anymore. That doesn't actually count as an answer to the problem, you're just changing the subject to a completely different thing.

Tumblr goes on to say, "Exactly. That's the only thing you should ever do when confronted with an ethical quandary. Frankly the fact that you are willing to even consider a scenario that sucks suggests that you are fundamentally incapable of considering less shitty scenarios."

I just want to say I think that's bullshit. I don't think every problem is a trolley problem, but I do think that some problems are a trolley problem. And I think that those problems are worth discussing, even though they don't feel good. The trolley problem exists as a framework to discuss those problems.

Maybe our aversion to difficult decisions has an impact on our ethical reasoning, and maybe we should actually question how our ethical standards hold up under the weight of that aversion. So maybe moral quandaries like the trolley problem are worth discussing. And if you don't want to engage with the quandary, then don't - you don't have to concoct a whole essay about how the quandary is inherently morally bad.

It's possible that what you really want to say is that it sucks when people treat certain situations as trolley problems, when those specific situations actually do contain unambiguously feasible and unambiguously perfect solutions. I would agree with that.

But like. Let's not pretend that you can reduce all of ethics down to unchallenging black and white moralism.

Tbh I'd argue the thing about the Trolley Problem isn't really even about how we should behave so much as it is about asking ourselves how we actually do behave - looking at our own ethical and moral reasoning with the express purpose of trying to understand how it works and how it reaches the conclusions it does.

It presents a fixed problem: you can either do nothing and five people die, or you can act to sacrifice one person to allow those five people to survive. And then it modifies the method through which you act in order to determine at what point, if any, are you willing to make this sacrifice.

The point of the Trolley Problem is that the vast majority of us are not utilitarians at heart - we're generally far less willing to push someone directly onto the tracks than we are throwing a switch even if the outcome is functionally the same. And this tells us something about ourselves - about how we make moment to moment decisions, especially ones that we might find morally difficult to make.

At some point, the core question of the Trolley Problem is actually about asking yourself at what point, if any, do you accept the idea of causing someone's death to achieve a greater good. At what point does the distance between your action and its result of killing someone become so far removed that you stop feeling responsible for it? At what point does the greater good become great enough to offset the cost of causing someone to die?

These are important questions to ask, both of ourselves directly and of humanity as a whole - because the most monstrous acts in history were all done by people, often quite ordinary ones at that, and if we are to prevent such acts from happening again, we need to understand how our feelings and intuition around morality works, and what ways they can be bent and twisted and manipulated into horrible ends.

The Trolley Problem is an uncomfortable quandary - it has to be, that's the whole point of it. Like with the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek fame, its purpose is not as a problem to be solved but as a test of character - it's a question of who you are in moments of crisis and panic. And sure, you can do as James T. Kirk did and cheat your way past the problem, refusing to accept the idea of a no-win scenario - but, as Kirk himself eventually comes to realise, doing so has its own drawbacks.

Of course, at the end of the day the Trolley Problem is just a thought experiment, one of many potential tools for looking at and analyzing the particulars of human morality. It is what you make of it - and if your first instinct is to reject it wholesale, then maybe that's something worth examining about yourself.

listen i'm just going all in on this setup ok

Biker Witch