Colonialism seems to leave quite a mindfuck on local populations themselves. The young people I knew from Hong Kong (at the time since this was a long time ago) considered themselves British. Ethnically Chinese yeah but if you asked they were British. If the locals can be propagandized by invaders it’s pretty easy to convince western zeitgeist that Hong Kong was anything but an occupied region of China.
Much of the world has gone insane with capitalism. Why am I paying like $10-$20 for friggen USB cables when I can get it from China for a few dollars. Probably the actual cost. A few dollars for the product. And what like $15 to whatever millionaire/billionaire dudes who need keep padding their ridiculous game breaking stats.
People can’t even tell anymore because the goal posts have shifted so far. The anchoring bias has normalized the price to $20. Much lower prices seems like it must be cheating or something right. Has to be the only explanation. Can’t be anything else. Nope.
How the flap of a butterfly wing can change history.
Crisis actors. They have gotten quite good at this thing.
They will both agree to broad idea that “rich bad” and “middle class is struggling”. Their relative suffering is what they both agree on even though they’re different.
If the 40k person saw how the 400k person lives in real life, they would be rolling out the guillotine for the 400k dude. But without proper context online that 40k person will go to bat for the 400k person if anyone brings up the topic of lifestyle.
The further up the scale the more luxury there is. However people work with more binary thinking. So it’s easier to point at the dudes making 1000k or more. The territory of more unfathomable weath. Really there’s a lot of excess going on way before we reach the multi-millionaire to billionaire strata.
I’ve thought about this from time to time. Have we been kind of a neurotic generation? I could never tell if it was just me that was seeing things or what. The under 30s seems more indifferent. Might be because they are mostly the children of Gen-X? Are over 30s a bit uptight? How did we end up this way?
From personal experience growing up so many kids were obsessed with the rat race from way too young. That whole mindset that you must to university to get all your credentials to fit yourself into a cookie cutter. The defacto life track until the illusion started to crack.
All in all I think the over 30 generation has a really hard time with self reflection. In particular talking about the faults of our own generation. Which is paradoxical against the whole mental health awareness stuff.
I’ve seen this play out first hand with people gradually climbing up the socioeconomic ladder as they reach middle age. They forget how things were at the lower middle class compared to the upper middle or even proper upper class.
It gets hard to talk about these days with the social media bullshit muddying up discourse. Because people start seeing red at the mere idea of broaching this topic.
VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.
Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.
Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.
Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn’t have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.
Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.
I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.
For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren’t inter-compatible they’ll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.
Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it’s indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh…
Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it’s impossible to fix this.
It doesn’t matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It’s still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.
I’m sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don’t doubt people can because it’s simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.
This is what Democrats need. For the younger generations to be the adults in the room. It’s been time for it a over a decade ago. They should have been preparing lines of succession during the Obama era.
I think higher education may have played a role. Kids have to spend more time studying for longer into their life. Less time for careless days of youth when every job requires 10 years of experience. Young people have been obsessing over how to fluff their CV with credentials rather thing just living life.
I refer to it as the social graph. When a site starts using metadata to map how users are related on a social platform. And then implementing features based on that. It’s not a buzzword but that’s the technical root that stems everything that makes an enshittified Facebookified site.
Unfortunately when reddit started becoming a social graph based site, the technical literacy of the user base also plummet. So nobody knew wtf a graph structure is.
The popular feed for Canada became voat. The far right subreddits are the top posts every single day.
Evidently given the state of affairs whatever share of “most people” has been tipping away from a balance.
Call it unchecked greed. Call it nobody wants to work anymore. It’s two sides of the same coin. The framing is just hurting someone or others feelings. The underlying problem is the same. Too many greedy people don’t want to work.
It falls under a greater problem of our time. Everyone thinks they can be clever by becoming a passive income earner. So we get things like middle men which has been increasing the cost of things because every hand needs to grab a cut along the way. We have people becoming landlords slowly amassing rental properties which created a bigger and even life long tenant class. We get economies that revolve around stock markets pivoting industry from productivity to shareholder profit.
I don’t know if this is a trigger phrase like it is on reddit but it’s true that nobody wants to work anymore. Societies require people to work to keep things going. Can’t have everyone sitting on their ass waiting for others work for them.
Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to be the sucker that didn’t get a leg up on everyone else. So everyone plays along with this massive collective cognitive dissonance.
I watched RocketBoom until suddenly they ran out of money. I don’t know what happened but it seemed like they were on the up and up. They even did videos with Sesame Street. If that isn’t a solid endorsement…
Then one day it was announced it was over.
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
He was weak but they couldn’t adjust his mic levels? That was weird.
We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.
Four months is a long time but the window is closing. Dems need to move fast.