Software developer, intermittent indie game dev, formerly u/captainbland on reddit. Also kind of interested in medical imaging etc.
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To a large extent people are just the products of their surroundings. Doing the default thing is an energy saving technique, as well as something which people do to prevent being ostracised by their peers. If you’re able to break that in some small way, you’re still doing better than most.
If you want to do more, I guess you have to interrogate why you’re not doing more. Is it fear of rejection? Fear of failure? Lack of time, energy or resources? Dependency on e.g. cars? Lack of confidence in your actions?
News corp. They’re the single most effective driver of fascist influence in the 21st century among the politically passive part of the population. Everything that all these other companies do is underpinned by News Corp outlets like Fox, The Sun, etc. justifying, equivocating, scapegoating and propagandising.
It’s more like, a blog is a personal thing. Using some off the shelf solutions removes that sense of personality to me I guess. It kind of makes the act of publishing the post feel like I’ve cheated somehow, when, all I’m really doing is putting text on the internet and I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself from a technical POV.
I get this with game dev as well, I’m much happier with games where I feel like I’ve worked with lower level tooling than a pre made engine. Sort of a personal not made here syndrome thing I suppose.
They were pretty well optimised, frequently sharpened and they had an angled blade with a decent amount of weight behind it. This means that there’s reduced surface area at the point of contact so higher penetration. Guillotines don’t miss as they’ve got a guide, unlike axes which were known for occasionally gouging the victim’s back, because executioners did miss!
I think there’s another issue in that the agencies who receive the executive order are essentially obliged to act as if they are legally binding until they’re shot down in court. This means there’s a sort of time gap where an executive order can enact an essentially permanent change (e.g. delete a bunch of info, bomb something, etc.) and the court has no way to get it reversed by the time they rule on it.
I hear this kind of thing a lot and I’ve been tempted to think it myself. But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence and this kind of thinking has been too complacent.
There’s this whole alignment of the billionaire class taking long term, unveiled and direct ownership of the government sphere, in the most powerful, militarised country in the world, in a way that was even unprecedented under neoliberalism. And it really depends on how little backstabbing goes on between them which determines how long this show will go on for. It might be 5 years, it might be 500.
Think of it this way: the first term was reconnaissance. He and his team were probing all the weak points and creating the conditions for the second term, doing things like getting the right supreme court judges in place that now he’s personally almost untouchable from a legal standpoint.
This second term is the main event so to speak, and I don’t think the US should expect the pace of change to slow down any time soon.
As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?
This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?
And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?
I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.
Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.
The unfortunate reality is that most jobs linked to humanities are considered “passion jobs” for which there are more applicants than openings by a wide margin. If you don’t have connections that gives you an edge, you’re likely being crowded out by those who do.
This is probably not helped at all by AI/LLM buzz meaning firms are increasingly seeking to automate roles associated with language processing of whatever kind.
So suggestions might be: Widen your net: consider roles like administration, HR, paralegal etc. which generally go to educated people but don’t have specific academic subject requirements.
Retrain in something in demand like a trade, healthcare assistant or similar.
Attempt to leverage your language skills to present yourself as a “prompt engineer”, lean into the AI hype to land a job.