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istartedi (123)
I've been thinking of taking the "rants" that I've done on various topics over the years and doing a series of more carefully thought-out (and perhaps even researched) versions of them, so that they might be more interesting and useful than the average discussion. Also, when these cyclical topics come up I could simply refer back to the essays. Each topic would be titled "The Great $topic Rant", where $topic includes but will not be limited to:
Affordable Housing
American Healthcare
Lobbying
Cryptocurrency (and/or precious metals)
Dark Mode (web design/UI in general)
...and possibly others I'm not thinking of right now.
Never say never, but I'll probably shy away from: Trump, Abortion, LGBTQ, etc. All of these things have controversies; but some are too much an invitation to a slug-fest.
Question to the audience: What topics (aside from the big political ones) do you find yourself frequently "ranting" about, which might benefit from having a well-researched "The Great $topic Rant"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 02 2022, @06:27PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday May 02 2022, @08:21PM
ignoring the problems with X and making up enemy lists when it turns out X doesn't work as expected
This reminds me of how the word "progressive" has devolved from its meaning during the USA's Progressive Era around the turn of the 20th century. Its original meaning was along the lines of "someone who uses science to guide public policy", and thus (believe it or not) eugenics was considered Progressive. Of course you can still be a paleo-progressive and not believe in eugenics, because a Progressive is supposed to move according to the science, not remain locked in to an established platform. See also, people who think they can get communism right *this time*. Ignoring the failures of so many large scale experimental runs is the antithesis of being progressive.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday May 02 2022, @06:39PM (2 children)
Seriously, Dark Matter is a nice one for the series. One might say it is fraught with holes.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @09:35AM
No, that's cheese, i.e. the moon.
Dark Matter is just the name given to a fudge factor.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 03 2022, @01:32PM
As you can probably guess, I AGREE! MIGHTILY!
The AC below says: "Dark Matter is just the name given to a fudge factor.", but Dark Matter supporters look to it as some kind of God. They don't look at it as a 'fudge factor'; they look at it as 'the answer', which it isn't.
A 'theory' that was cobbled together just in order to support General Relativity and that has been showing all it's own holes (such as Wide Binaries existing even though DM says they can't) is not a theory that should be having the financial and 'research' support it does.
Support needs to be given to better theories, but too many people have their tenure and grants tied to DM (just as String Theory still has supporters for the same reason even though it is the laughing stock of physics).
DM needs to die so REAL research can be supported.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 02 2022, @07:01PM
I confess I must be contributing to the microchip shortage. I got my 4th covid shot (2nd booster) a few weeks ago in April on a Friday afternoon.
Let's not forget to rant about masks. And social distancing.
Soon enough as the level of new vaccine injections decreases, the microchips will no longer be in short supply.
And let's not forget 5G! How could we possibly ignore such a grand government conspiracy? And 5G causes covid-19.
There is the well known fact, from Trump himself, that the sounds of windmills cause cancer!
Then there is the flat earth!
Let us not forget the effectiveness of wearing
tin foilgenuine aluminum foil hats! I personally find that if I make my aluminum foil hats with TWO (2) layers, it more than doubles the effectiveness! This is due to an anti-resonance effect that develops between the two layers at exactly double the frequency of the government's invisible brain lasers! Additionally, you can further increase the effectiveness of your aluminum foil hat by an additional 37% if you fashion TWO antennas on the top instead of one.Rant about the Jan 6 insurrectionists who tried to overthrow democracy.
Rant about how it is impossible to moderate an internet platform at large scale.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2022, @07:11PM (4 children)
White background just washes everything out. And people that use gray text on top of that should be drawn and quartered.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday May 02 2022, @08:26PM (2 children)
The Dark Mode rant is basically that you're taking a feature that a lot of products used to have by design, and selling it as if it were something new. My C-64 had POKE 53280,0. The idea that implementing "dark mode" on a phone with enough power to emulate 1000 C-64s is some kind of great new feature is just ludicrous. That's it. That's the rant, which is perhaps a bit too short so I decided to throw in all of modern UI with it. It's just that the phrase "dark mode" is a particular trigger for me. YOU IDIOTS. 16 millions * 16 million color combinations that we inherently have. You gave us 1 combo, and now you're acting like it's a big deal to give us two combos. SMH.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @12:14AM
The micros~1 world discovered color schemes, but they can't be arsed to support more than 2. Visual Studio has dark mode, but still no proper support for theme switching without an add-in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @05:41PM
Ah well, that's just standard advertising gimmickry. You gotta roll with that stuff. The magic works. I mean, you're right that's it's something quite basic. I'm still pissed about how poorly it's done. Some documents still come up white, no contrast between menus and buttons and window borders, etc. etc... I just have to live with being a tiny minority. Page is so bright, I gotta wear shades
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday May 02 2022, @09:25PM
Having the ability to choose a color for the background is superior to having a dark or light mode. I find it far easier on my eyes to read black text on a light blue background than trying to read black-on-white, white-on-black, or gray-on-either — gray always seems too dim, while the higher-contrast screws with my vision.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @01:22AM
Decent landlords are OK, but just about every other form of $$$/month is immoral or worse!
Software as a service
Unlock features in the device (car, etc) that are already there
...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @08:04AM (5 children)
please think about what "well-researched" means for a bit, in the context of a rant.
when you rant about something, it is usually because there's a large enough group of people who don't do things the way you want them to be done.
and you start enumerating all the reasons why they are stupid or just wrong.
people do things differently for various reasons, but many times it's because they don't care about the same things that you care about.
whatever research you do, it's aimed at what YOU care about, so pointless as far as they are concerned.
grow up, accept that only a minority of people care about what you care about, and an even smaller, separate, minority is able to see the connections between what you care about and what they care about (hence they may try to accomodate your concerns).
if you find yourself ranting, it means you've stopped caring what your listeners themselves care about.
if you want to talk to people, you should first figure out what they want, and it's your job to fit that into your world (because it's you who wants to do the talking).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 03 2022, @02:01PM (1 child)
I would say well-researched in this case, would be supporting resource links from authoritative sources. Not CNN.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 03 2022, @02:05PM
I mean, unless you're talking about something like journalism and/or something that could possibly use CNN as an authoritative source. Maybe an authoritative source on cat stuck in tree resource link?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday May 03 2022, @11:36PM (2 children)
grow up, accept that only a minority of people care about what you care about
That sounds like an argument made around the dinner table in every country that ever went off the rails, sliding down the slippery slope in to totalitarianism. Be definition, the person in the minority lost the argument in those cases, but history recorded one type of person as a hero and the other as a hapless fool at best, a heinous war criminal at worst.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @06:41AM (1 child)
my point is that when you encounter a problem your response should not be a rant.
you should figure out why people are ignoring the problem, and frame it in a way that they understand.
no, farmers will not give up on oil and they will not give up on government hand-downs, no matter how much we scream that global warming is happening, and that there's a whole bunch of measurements that show global warming is happening.
we need to make the connection from global warming to whatever they care about, and explain how it will mess that up (because it WILL mess everything up).
now that I think about it, farmers will also need to be informed about the fact that loss of biodiversity is a problem...
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:01PM
my point is that when you encounter a problem your response should not be a rant. you should figure out why people are ignoring the problem, and frame it in a way that they understand.
I don't see these two objectives as being mutually exclusive.
There are many people at think tanks, aka "policy institutes", "working groups", etc. who perform studies and produce reports. These are dry, sometimes lengthy documents that few people read. They're the kinds of things I might cite, but not what I'm thinking of producing. That area is covered.
At the level of Soylent, greater passion is appropriate; hence the "rant" which is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I'm not aiming for a tone that's non-stop raving. That would be at the other end of the spectrum, just as boring to read and perhaps as boring as something like IPCC reports which everyone talks about and sometimes actually cites when discussing climate change but seriously, when was the last time you spent 5 minutes reading through a UN document and came away amused and challenged?
At best, I should hope to turn out something like Swift's Modest Proposal which is a satire but could be regarded as a kind of rant--something full of passion about serious issues, perhaps not likely to change any minds and yet putting the issues of the day in a new light.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @07:14PM
You might start selling rant-as-a-service with top buyers being landlords, pharmaceuticals, lobbyists and crypto bros