betthearm reblogged
u know that thing where an animals grow in a far off place and some idiot introduces him to a new habitat and it turns out its characteristics that help them in their own sometimes are too helpful in the new one and they become like an invasive species yeah thats the word i was missing anyway back to my point i think i saw a human version of that just now i was driving in tonights snow storm and i saw a man wearing a big ass cowboy hat to keep the snow off him and a bandit red bandana to keep it off his face and a big ass pancho to keep him warm and nice ass cowboy boots to keep his calves dry and he was prancing along while everyone on the road looked miserable and frozen solid and idk i guess the point im trying to make here is i feel like cowboys would have taken over russia if given the chance or something
As an Evolutionary Biologist, this is a roller-coaster from start to finish.
That was @uncle-mojave
People tend to think of Cowboys as a South Western thing from Texas to California when in reality they had to deal with insane weather and changes all across the US, Canada and Mexico. Dusters were an incredibly important piece of gear for them since it could go from 100+ sunny weather to a snow storm in some areas in just an hour and oiled dusters would help them keep off rain, snow and as is the origin of the name dust from the trail as they herded cows. Plus they’d also have heavy boots, bandanas and the iconic hat which did not develop until very late in the reign of the cowboy but they typically had some type of wide brim hat to keep off the sun, rain and snow. They had to be self reliant, hard sons of bitches and deal with shit that would kill most modern people. Russia does have their own version of the Cowboy called the Cossack. Not quite the same but tough hardy son of a bitch horse riders that survived in the harsh insane conditions of the Russian steppe which really does mimic a lot of the Midwest and Western US weather.
Also, that was me.
That’s convergent evolution, isn’t it?
betthearm reblogged
betthearm reblogged
there b some some specific ass youtube chillwave channels in this world
Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy vibes
betthearm reblogged
All amazing points and so important to take in. I think I have done a couple of these, but not habitually or intensely. But it's good awareness for me.
betthearm reblogged
One of the recurring philosophical questions is:
"Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?"
Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. At the very least, if it was deep enough in the forest, millions of small gods would have heard it.
Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history...ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just...well, things happening one after another.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
betthearm reblogged
You’re just not ready. At no point in this video when he says the next thing are you ready.
betthearm reblogged
betthearm reblogged
The specific process by which Google enshittified its search
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.
Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.
Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.
Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.
But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.
I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.
We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:
When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:
When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:
What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.
Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:
betthearm reblogged
This is a great example of intersex people being used as a gotcha.
This is an intersex woman who was manipulated into thinking that talking to media about her experience would lead to better awareness, and was instead dragged in front of millions to be commented on constantly for no compensation while tabloids around the world profited off of her.
This is an intersex woman being used as a talking point about transphobia with no mention of intersex people. (Aside from the actual intersex person who commented. But???)
THIS IS FUCKING ME LMFAO I'm so sick of seeing this go around! While my partner and I starve bc I can't get the health care I need or a job with my disabilities or intersex body due to the discrimination it brings.
Additionally, I don't have PCOS. PCOS is under the intersex umbrella but I don't have it.
For my time:
CA $fuzzcheeks | PP @ fuzzcheeks | Ven @ novastarchild
Being astonished by a “bearded lady” feels like some 1800s shit. Some women have beards. Are we not over it by now??
Nope! No part of society is over it. Not cis people, not trans people, maybe one out of a thousand people IF THAT are normal and chill about a woman choosing to keep her beard. I shut down my asks for a number of reasons but one of the most common messages I used to get from "well meaning" people was that I was a Dwarven warrior princess while I was discussing deranged levels of violence I face as a real human woman in the real world. I've had cis and trans people tell me I'm just like the lady from the greatest showman. Nobody is normal about it. Ugly laws still apply socially.
ive seen ppl bring up "the bearded lady at the circus" as evidence everyone loves intersex people and they arent opressed
"Bearded Women" historically belonged to circuses after their families disowned them or actually sold them to the circus. PT Barnum exploited disabled and intersex humans for the sake of profit, and people see this as a Good Thing because these disabled and intersex people had no other choice in life but to be exploited or die. Just in case anyone is confused.
betthearm reblogged
i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam
This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…
Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.
“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”
Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”
The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.
On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.
#why do they do this though ~ @inqorporeal
OH! I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS!
There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice.
Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.
Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.
Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.
The WIRED article explains why:
CISD misapprehends how memory works…. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant.
…the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge.
Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.
Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient.
basically, there’s a big damn difference between choosing to confide in someone you trust and being pressured to make a public spectacle of your trauma
THIS JUST IN: Forced Public Recalling of Trauma Not As Helpful As Voluntarily Processing Trauma In A Safe Space
betthearm reblogged
My brain: You have so many tight deadlines. So many things on your weekly schedule. So many important jobs. You have to get important work done!!!
My hands:
@elodieunderglass I think this is something you'll like
You know me so well, thank you so much!
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a slapping,
As of some one gently flapping, flapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some fairy,” I muttered, “slapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Quoth the walrus, "Are you sure?"
had to draw it
betthearm reblogged
