A couple of weeks back there was an article making the rounds of the fediverse about how people with reasonably decent incomes were nevertheless living "paycheck to paycheck", and a number of examples were given in the article with their individual stories of woe about how they were baffled by how burdened with debt they were. Most of those stories, when you dug in with just a slightly critical eye instead of an automatic assumption of victimhood, revealed people making foolish choices to take on debt and support the maximally lavish lifestyle that they could manage.

The comment section was weird. It turned out that there were some people there who thought this was perfectly reasonable, giving examples of "necessary expenditures" from their own lives that were just as excessive when examined. If you think that building a deck or buying a new bed simply because it's "time for a new one" are necessary expenditures then it's kind of hard to be sympathetic when you complain about how you have no money for long-term savings.

Is there just some basic personality type that finds it hard to be responsible with money, or is this a failure of education somehow? I have ideas for how to help but help will be unwelcome by people who refuse to recognize that they have a problem.

I've lost track, is AI a good thing today or a bad thing?

Nice to hear some solidly good news like this.

Okay, here's a whole bunch I can think of off the top of my head.

• Opposition to DEI initiatives, feminism, affirmative action, immigration, etc., are rooted in racism/sexism. Even dislike for certain movies is rooted in racism/sexism.
• People are being stolen from and/or their privacy is being violated when companies use public data about them to train AI, target ads, etc. People get really mad about this.
• On a similar note, AI art "has no soul" and AI artists aren't "real artists."
• Hamas and/or Israel are evil. Pick whatever position you want on this conflict, there's a flood of propaganda pushing it and reasoned discussion that goes against it is hard.
• Everything Elon Musk does is somehow evil or idiotic.
• Cryptocurrency is a scam. AI is a scam. <insert some other new technology> is a scam.
• Religion is bad.
• All cops are bastards.
• Unions are good and corporations are bad. Heck, the "capitalism is bad" message in this comic is itself propaganda.
• Cancelling major NASA initiatives like Artemis or Mars Sample Return (or James Webb, Space Shuttle, etc. historically) would be a disaster for space exploration and science, despite their wildly spiralling costs.

Okay, that last one is perhaps getting down into the weeds of one of the more particular communities I find myself in. :)

Of course, there are other communities out there that I'm not commonly in that I expect have the opposite "everyone agrees" views on a lot of these things - DEI is part of some "gay agenda" conspiracy to groom children, Elon Musk is an infallible messiah, cops are the thin blue line protecting us from criminals, unions are destructive to the economy and cause unemployment, and so on and so forth. Propaganda is highly specific to its target audience, as this comic suggests.

The fundamental problem is just that in any significant group or community there are always hot-button issues that "everyone agrees" about, and attempting to question or discuss them with any nuance gets shouted down.

They're not going to force the Gazans, no. They're just going to systematically flatten Gaza and shoot people and if the Gazans choose to flee to Egypt, well, that's out of Israel's hands.

You're not going to stop hearing about AI. Perhaps AI companies won't be so high-profile, but AI itself is being integrated into lots of things and it's not going to go away. The only thing that's happened here is that it's proving to be not quite so profitable as expected being an AI-specific company.

Edit: Perhaps not even that, the article appears to be neglecting to mention that this is part of a trend across the whole stock market rather than something AI-specific.

The question "Why has the world gone to shit in the past 5 to 10 years" has routinely been asked every five to ten years throughout history. It's largely due to the perceptual biases of the human mind.

From their perspective, someone just moved into their house one day and when they objected they said "let's compromise, you can keep half of the house." No wonder they rejected that compromise.

Unfortunately we're now a couple of generations past that initial event so it's a lot more complicated at this point.

I don't remember this Mirror Universe episode.

Pretty crumbly and porous brick wall, there. And they apparently neglected to build it around Sevastopol.

The episode/direct-to-DVD-movie "Bender's Big Score" recontextualized the episode with the dead dog and actually made it a happy ending (without changing or cheapening it in any way, IMO).

In the end, the good mods will leave Reddit one way or another. The admins can put as many bad mods as they want in charge of subs and it's not going to help.