• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

help-circle

  • I can corroborate that it gets crazy even in courses expecting high literacy. I had the painful experience of teaching a 3rd year course in communication studies that was part of the media production stream. It required writing preproduction documentation and a script. There were a lot of questionable attempts but there’s always a range of interest and skill, right? One student, and let me remind you this is third year at a university, I called into office hours. I’m a fan of poetry, so I just had to be sure that she wasn’t cleverly lampooning Gertrude Stein in some ironic way. Sadly, no, she just had no fucking clue how to write ANYTHING coherent. Amazing.



  • It does seem like a power vacuum if you are fully convinced that power needs to be centralized.

    I am reminding the thread that the absence of distributed power is chaos, not anarchism.

    Anarchism is anything BUT a power vacuum. All the power is carefully doled out via negotiation and in no way lacking.

    Strong propaganda is devoted to supporting your presumption that power only exists when concentrated, so it does feel natural and common sense to say that.


  • Anarchism is a lot of work negotiating, setting standards and consequences, balancing forces. Constant politics without an overarching state. Any concentration of capability for violence or resource to be shared must be extremely carefully handled.

    What you are describing is warlords filling a political vacuum caused by chaos.

    Someone has been misrepresenting anarchism to you.






  • Because I can dictate instantly into the Reminders app, without even unlocking my phone, it leaps over executive disfunction issues quite often.

    Hold the power button for 2 seconds and say “add oatmeal and blueberries and coffee to the Groceries list” then go back to my task.

    When I get to the store the list is grouped by type, mostly.

    Or I say “remind me to call the doctor’s office at 9AM tomorrow” and it goes into the default list and the task notifies me at the right time. For the stuff I inevitably brush off, there’s a widget on my home screen that nags me so I can nurture my guilt lol.

    So, I am leaning heavily into Apple’s built in ecosystem for keeping track of things (more private, in theory, as well). I have a about a dozen lists that I add to verbally. Some of those lists are geographically activated so I get notifications when I drive into town that I need to pick up a package, etc.





  • I am all in favour of being frugal and shopping by price, but you are missing some of the value proposition when you talk about local stores.

    In theory, what you are getting when you buy from a local store is the entire brick and mortar experience. This includes a knowledgable sales person who can talk to you and answer a bunch of questions and give you perspective, maybe even an expert opinion. You get hands on service for things like wrapping or solving problems or putting stuff on hold. If it’s a bookstore, you get to browse and pull things off the shelf and look through them and touch the books . If it is a clothing store, you get to try things on.

    Go ahead and shop online, but at some point, you will run into a wall where having an actual physical experience, with all of the building overhead and staffing, is really what you needed, but it doesn’t exist anymore because everybody bought from Jeff Bezos.

    So part of the value proposition is a bit like tax. You invest in your community so that your community doesn’t suck. You get value out of it in that you get to live in a place that sucks less than a place that was sucked dry by Walmart.