61
votes
What is your 'Subway Take'?
For those who are unfamiliar, Subway Takes is a popular short form internet talk show "in which the interviewees present and defend a unique or controversial opinion, called a 'take'" Takes are usually halfbaked and/or tongue-in-cheek. Some popular examples include:
There are too many states in America
Everybody in New York has rich parents or is selling drugs
Spirit Airlines does not deserve the hate
Italians became white after 9/11
So what's your take?
Three on similar topics, all intertwined.
1- The rapid decline and loss of the term "Equality" in exchange for the separation of marginalized communities is a large reason the equality rights of today (In the US) are being dismantled and the public becoming less supportive.
The shifting to terms such as women's rights, black lives matter, and especially the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA2S+ as the only way to talk about any of this is 1) too much for someone not directly included to keep track of and 2) dropping the usage of equality in exchange for having to list your allegiances, and not say, "Equality" as a full statement, is detrimental to the movement, as its easy to say and understand "Do you support X? I support equality', if someone needs to make up their mind on supporting X or Y, its much easier for them to just ask the question "Do I support equality?". I wrote about it, gasp, on Tumblr a short bit ago.
If you don't support equality, you're automatically a supremacist by definition, and even supremacists hate bring known as a supremacist. No one likes anyone who thinks they are better.
2 - LGBTQ+ is a horrible acronym, it's designed in such a way that does help exclude many different identities, allows infighting, and allows for pointed statements to exclude others (Example: LGB without the T). Additionally for a animal-based society that loves everything sex, we hate talking about it. It makes most of the populace uncomfortable in any dynamic, and the acronym itself is inherently sexual by focusing on sexual preference, and then you just so happens to tack on individualistic gender identity parameters to the end of it. If we had to use an all encompassing (non historical stigmatized verbiage, such as Queer) then I believe GSM (Gender & Sexual Minorities) is profoundly more open and immutably mutable, not perfect, but doable.
3 - The rainbow flag as an icon is bad. Full stop. Aesthetically its derivative (literally, figuratively,) and allows for virtually no personalization without altering the structure and meaning of it. The general imagery of it is rather childish, and demeaning to the entire population that has to be enveloped in it + the "meaning" of each color is so useless and tacked on that it feels, well, tacky.
3a - The equality symbol, =, is vastly better as a signifier than the rainbow flag. Easy to understand with little pre-knowledge, all encompassing, easily recognizable (and known on first approach), and personalizable, fits on anything and everything in any style, just as the term "Equality" is effective.
Oh I love this. I have a similar enough one that I'll just put it below yours.
"Cultural Appropriation" is a net negative to any efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. The best part about multiculturalism is sharing and learning about each other's cultures, and the concept of Cultural Appropriation works directly against that and makes people feel defensive and uneasy about engaging with other cultures for fear of doing it "wrong".
"But Aerrol, that's just misunderstanding the term! It means taking other cultures things and MISUSING them!" Yeah? And how is that different than being a racist asshole? What benefit is there in specifying this very specific fault that is constantly misunderstood, conflated, and used as ammunition by actual fucking racists for how supposedly unhinged and unappeasable the Left is?
As someone who's spent my entire life fighting for better representation for minorities and more equality, I DETEST the words Cultural Appropriation.
Mostly because people get even more pissed when you call them a racist asshole for their Native American Halloween costume/other red face. Also it's from like 1945 academic literature. You don't have to call it that but it's frustrating to have a game of "you're using the wrong words to point out a problem" over and over again just because other people don't like them. (Ala critical race theory or DEI or whatever.)
I don't know that a Halloween costume would necessarily even fall into the category of cultural appropriation. The point of a Halloween costume is to dress up as something you don't normally dress up as, so anything you wear as a Halloween costume is kind of inheritely something that you haven't appropriated.
I think it's a dick move because you're using something that presumably a religious symbol as a costume; I'd feel the same way if someone dressed up as the pope or Muhammad.
Where I think the prevailing opinion goes wrong is that a white person wearing feathers in their hair or native American beadwork or mocassins is somehow wrong. That meets the definition of cultural appropriation, but there's no real harm there, and people don't own their cultural trappings simply because they were raised in them.
Most cultural phenomenon wouldn't even exist if no one shared and appropriated parts of other cultures. There are no cultures that exist in a vacuum, not today or ever.
Well, the company making a "Native American" costume is certainly appropriating culture(s). If someone made their own costume modeled after a specific role in a specific tribe, or if they're wearing traditional moccasins or pieces with beadwork because they're good articles of clothing, whether that would qualify is more debatable, and in all likelihood few people with more sense than beans would see that as deplorable.
I would agree with you there. I think it would be distasteful either way, because most people dressing up as native Americans are using religious and ceremonial stuff like headdresses to do it.
I don't think incorporating native American asthetics in your everyday garb is deplorable at all, but dressing up as another ethnicity of person as a costume is... yeah, pretty bad.
Like, "I'm black guy" as a costume if you're white is pretty fucked up. Wearing streetwear isn't.
Where it becomes worth a conversation on the societal level is when, for example, white celebrities are praised for their urban streetwear aesthetic and black celebrities (and regular folks) are called ghetto for it.
When Native Americans were being separated from families and put in residential schools but models were wearing feathers on buckskin leather bands, they had a point about how it's not actually appreciation, because the people and society allegedly being appreciated were actively under attack.
I'm not litigating moccasins, I said costumes and redface because that's where the "racist asshole" line lies, and the term cultural appropriation comes from academic literature that specifically was looking at the impact of colonial powers adopting the attire and customs for their "subjects." To me that applies here too. But if folks don't want us to use the term, maybe they could be less mad at "racist asshole" or "disrespectful at best." I doubt that though.
Personally I try to buy indigenous things from indigenous people and if something is inspired by indigenous American culture I try to make sure if I'm engaging in it, it's not disrespectful. But my voice doesn't matter as much as theirs does on that. And I just try to listen to the people involved in any such scenario. It feels like the literal least I could ethically do.
I think the cultural appropriation thing is mostly a smokescreen over the true negative effects that they highlight.
Like if a white person is praised for urban streetwear, and a black person is shunned for it, the problem isn't that the white person is praised. The problem is that the black person is shunned. To me, cultural appropriation being framed as a bad thing addresses the former, not the latter.
Similarly, with the situation of Native Americans being separated from their families while white people wear beads. The problem isn't the white poeple wearing the beads. It's the forced separation.
I get that seeing white people doing something that you were shamed for rubs salt in the wound, but it's not the wound. Without the wound, salt is just salt.
Certainly, the bigger problem is always the shaming and abuse. The term just describes this specific effect, particularly coming out of colonialism where say the British would consider the Indian people "savages" but would adopt their attire, architecture, etc. in certain (often still proscribed) ways, while still considering themselves better.
The salt + wound is what cultural appropriation is. There may be some religious practices that, due to being closed, would never be used "appropriately" by non-members on top of that but without the salt+wound it's just sacrilege or other appropriate term.
Late to respond, but I do want to say that I agree with you that language policing is the worst way to engage in any constructive dialogue. Just because I hate the term Cultural Appropriation doesn't mean it's justified for me to make a big stink just because someone else uses it to critique something. I always try and debate points on their merits, not the language used.
As for cultural appropriate being from old Academic Literature - yes, certainly, but it is undeniable that it became part of mainstream discourse around 2010 or so. And that's the point where I saw it really becoming applied negatively - girls getting shamed online for wearing a qipao to their grad (wtf qipaos are not even religious or ceremonial at all...), free university yoga classes cancelled because the instructor was not Indian (I actually saw this happen in a city I lived in) etc. These sorts of things are where it moved from "well I think that's silly" to "I actually hate this" for me.
Also, having been in many rooms where both "racist" and "cultural appropriation" were used and having tried to gently explain both, I frankly have seen and had much better success explaining how something is "a little racist" than ever using the words "cultural appropriation".
I genuinely think that the problem is that (mostly/especially white) people don't listen to the actual people involved when it comes to cultural appropriation, they just recenter themselves as the "knower" of cultural appropriation instead. Like if white Americans had started a trend of wearing kimono during the Japanese internment in concentration camps, I'd say that's vastly different than someone wearing a kimono (or qipao) today on that scale of things.
I've not had an issue explaining the nuances of one vs the other. Tbh people object so much to the idea that they're personally "a little bit" racist being able to explain a societal structural issue like CA is easier IME. But ymmv.
100% agree with your main point. I'll never forget a white girl in my class telling me about her awful brother being a racist coming home with a rice hat to me (a Chinese man) and I just blinked at her and told her... That's really normal and honestly kind of great?
I practically wrote the exact same thing repeatedly on tumblr back around 2012 - horrible idea, so many death threats - but I still concur.
Cultural exchange is the only way culture can change, grow, and innovate. It is the best way unique things can be made. There is no culture in a vacuum.
Plus, I think dreads are cool, and anyone who wants them should have them without cultural appropriation being used as an argument against them.
Sorry to be such a hater, but my Subway Take is that dreads are gross and I don’t want to see more people adopt them. I can understand when someone’s hair is such that many other hairstyles aren’t an option. But for someone else… I’ll pull out a tongue in cheek claim of cultural appropriation.
Dreads really are gross. The ones that black people have do often seem to be less gross though, and I don't know if that has to do with the kind of care they tend to put into them, the kind of black person that's more likely to have dreads vs the kind of white person that's more likely to have them, or the texture of their hair, but they do seem to be nicer.
"Black hair" locs more naturally than "white hair", and usually white people with dreads either don't know how to clean them, or they need the grime to make it loc. Had a few friends, black and white, with dreads, and the cleanliness is a matter of knowledge and hygiene more than anything.
There are definitely times when misuse of a cultural artifact is wrong. But tying in the concept of cultural appropriation gives people a debate tool which itself will be misused more often than not. There are people in both the conservative and liberal camps that do not want to understand anything about racism and find simple solutions instead. One plugs its ears and the other mindlessly yells.
Let me defend the concept - this can be my subway take.
Imagine a young, wealthy aristocrat from an empire. He just doesn't fit in, and wants to break out of the old ways. For his summer holiday, he visits one of the colonies. It's been years since the brutal war, so things have settled down. He visits one village, and participates in a beautiful religious ceremony. This is exactly what he needed, and he heads home feeling new and fresh. At home, he tells all his friends about the experience. At parties he brings up "well you know, when I was in the colonies...". He uses the experience for analogies in his writings. One day he recalls a flute that was used in the ceremony. He builds a factory to sell them, with an instruction manual on how to play both local and exotic tunes. Half the profits go to build wells.
Imagine an upper middle class white American. On the internet he reads about the black lives matter protest. He goes out to join several events, and is enthralled by the energy. He tells all his friends about it. At parties he brings up "well you know, African Americans are struggling with..." He decides to start a website selling black lives matter goods, using some cleaned up exotic designs he saw at the protests. Half the profits go to the cause.
For me, cultural appropriation contains these key elements: 1) Local cache from viewing other cultural as primitively enlightened. 2) Power imbalance. 3) Capitalism. It's a criticism of liberals by liberals, which is why the online discourse (left vs right) is missing the point. Actually, I'm surprised conservatives don't love the concept as a way to critique (1). In general, I like it as a criticism of the first three as ideas, and not of an individual person.
Now for a more controversial example. An American anime fan buys a Kimono and uploads photos of themselves wearing it to Instagram. That's good, I like that they're enjoying expanding their world view. Almost no Japanese person you ask would have any problem with it. And yet, the use of Instagram shows they're clearly in it to signal to their community how exotic their tastes are. America bombed Japan to the ground, and to this day maintains military bases all over the country to keep them in line (I mean, "for protection"). And that Kimono was probably maybe in a sweat shop in South East Asia. These are good uncomfortable critiques.
I thought the rest of your post was pretty well argued, but this surprised me. It's not 1946 anymore - Japan is an active and eager partner in the US-Japan alliance.
Okay, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record... They're a democracy. If they don't like it they should do something about it.
The fact that there isn't a mainstream national political party which supports changing this indicates that the national population generally doesn't see this as something in need of changing. I don't think you can hand wave that away as being just due to the national government. It sounds like the national population is content with the local trade-offs.
EDIT: typo
I don't think those are comparisons that work in your favour: Americans have extremely contentious debates about healthcare and guns.
The point isn't "If you don't like it vote differently and it will change" — it's that if enough people care about an issue this will be reflected in a democracy's national political discourse.
It's not that I don't get the rest of what you're saying, it's that it's irrelevant to my disagreement with this single point above:
I think the fact that there is no national-level debate over kicking the Americans out of the bases indicates a general national acceptance of the status quo that cannot be hand-waved to simply being a property of the Japanese federal government.
I don't disagree with any of the other points you've made. I just don't think they support the distinction you drew between the national government and the population at large.
There is an irreconcilable bridge between the political alliance and what the locals think of the rowdy marines. The former is how Japan is an active and willing participant. The country of Japan, not the citizens of just Okinawa, find it beneficial to work together at a military level with other countries to the point of developing the shared next generation fighter jet (GCAP), has both naval and land military drills with the Americans and other NATO allies, and strongly favour American presence as an NK and China deterrence.
The latter is a tourism problem.
Yes that's exactly it and what was likely meant when they questioned the "keep in line" argument. Geopolitically you speak about the countries, sometimes even the name of the capital, to get the point across you're talking about the geopolitical entity that we consider a country. Not the citizens.
It's no different than saying Russia invaded Ukraine. Trying to absolve the average citizen of the crime of the government is laudable but also often futile and sometimes even detrimental. Besides that, colloquially and contextually we also understand that American citizens don't monolithically support Israel when someone says that America supports Israel. The distinction is usually unnecessary to point out.
To add to this, there have been a number of rapes committed by Americans stationed at Okinawa bases. At least one is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia page.
Very good point!
In all of these examples, I don't see any actual harm done. The people in all of them are profiting off of ideas foreign to them; what's the issue there though?
It doesn't seem particularly relevant that the kimono was made in a seat shop either. The blue jeans that the guy in the example are wearing are likely also made in a sweatshop. The issue is the sweatshop, not the kimono.
Like, is it annoying when people suddenly start eating a food or drinking a drink or listening to music or using language you've used your entire life, way before anyone in the west heard of it? Yeah, but it's annoying in sort of a hipster, "I was doing this before it was cool" way, not in an actually harmful way.
I feel like this is more about the Philadelphia and Progress flags (and other similar deriviatives). My understanding was that the rainbow (the basic six color format of the flag) was to be taken as the whole thing, not individual colors. To your point about a more generic (and less divisible) acronym with GSM, one could leave a color or subflag component out to say "Yes, but not these groups," whereas you can't have a rainbow without the full spectrum (ROYGBP in this case). I hadn't considered the idea of using a less mutable acronym to be more inclusive but think it's a cool idea.
Which is the point! The usage of "LGBTQ+ (oh and women's rights, and BLM, and asian rights, and disability rights, etcetera, etc, &c)" is that it is a term that requires modifiers to extend your stated belief sets (there's a reason its so long and has a "+" sign now...). Whereas Equality/GSM, is far more encompassing as you then have to subtract from the statement, inherently destroying the meaning in the process.
"Ah, yes, I support GSM/Equality, but not the [blank] and [blank] and [blank] people. " So, I mean, do you really support equality then? So you're saying some are better than others?
Versus: "I support the LGB/GLB/LGQ/LG" ah, so you do support some, but do you really support all of them? Now let me ask and really nail it down to determine if you actually support, forgot some letters, or just trying to hide your disdain for equal rights to only a small subset.
The original pride flag had a meaning for each color.
Rainbow flag (LGBTQ) - Wikipedia
Then pink was hard to get and people forgot. But it wasn't about communities just parts of life.
Oops, I knew it wasn't each community, but also didn't know the rest, and even had that article up as I was checking things IIRC, so that's on me. Thank you!
This just reminds me of my hot take that having a flag for everything is silly. I don't like the colors on the lesbian or gay male flags, and it feels bad to atomize every queer group into their own special nation.
I don't have any issues with the term LGBTQ since it's historically significant and the Q encompasses everything. The rainbow flag is also fine since it's inclusive of everyone under the rainbow or any part of the queer spectrum.
I agree with all these except the rainbow. I think it’s a lovely symbol, even though I agree that the meanings for each color feel forced and contrived. My biggest complaint is just that they stole it from Fred Hampton/Jesse Jackson. (No I haven’t actually checked the timeline on which came first.)
That said, the insistence on adding little things for each subgroup to the flag, even though the rainbow is already a metaphor for all the beautiful colors at once starts to make the flag look and feel like /r/Place. It comes from the same issue you mention with Take #1.
At some point culture seemed to shift towards people getting insistent about finding ever more precise and specific labels to categorize themselves into self-segregating groups and I think this is very unhealthy as it both denies individuality (relating your identity to a prepackaged label instead of discovering your authentic self in all its ineffable and inarticulable glory) while also masking the ways in which individual experiences are universal and generalizable. Thankfully I think this trend has actually stalled out by the early 2020s, if not reversed.
I kind of blame the rise of marketing and consulting think for this. The way you’re trained to operate there is to identify discrete groups that you can tailor outreach to. But the point of marketing is to sell shit, not to create community. No surprise it coincides with NGOs turning into fundraising machines instead of organizations that actually do anything but just raise funds to raise more funds. Also not surprising that it gets popular as people shift their social engagement to social media, which is designed from the jump to serve ads and forces people to format their socializing according to the logic of an advertiser.
I have a few thoughts/corallarys to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0 is required viewing in my eyes because all this language policing is, to me, literally the opposite of what people want to do if they want effective change. To me it looks like an entire generation of people who have been trained wrong and are now their enemies best weapon because they're literally doing the wrong things.
I hated locker room talk. It has been weird to me to watch a bunch of people decide to champion their rights based on them wanting to have the same level of hyper sexual discussion in public as was traditionally associated with high school boys. I know this is not everybody, but it's a very loud portion of the group, and I don't think it does them favors. Again I am reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3h6es6zh1c
I recognize that these issues are VASTLY more complicated than my little blurbs, but as someone who 100% agrees with the goal, it's hard to not be demoralized when I see people divide themselves and drive away potential allies over the strangest things.
I thought of the exact same Key and Peele skit for #2. It's great that people are comfortable sharing their desires: shame and stigma suck. It's difficult because America is way too puritan in my opinion, but there should definitely be some norms and expectations around what should or shouldn't be shared in public.
I'm a flag nerd and queer man 100% with take 3. The other takes gave me a lot to chew on (especially since I'm in a hetero-normative marriage so effectively presenting as a hetero cis male). Great read, thank you!
Maybe not controversial, but:
HOAs should be abolished, immediately disbanded, and funds should be disbursed to homeowners.
Everything that HOAs do can be done better through more simple organizing. I have lived in neighborhoods with and without HOAs, and I have observed that the HOA-less neighborhoods did not devolve into chaos. Everyone still cared about the appearance of the neighborhood and kept it looking nice. By contrast, the HOA neighborhoods I've been a part of felt like a police state, and when there were actual problems (like malfunctioning street lamps), the HOA did nothing but give excuses as to why the problem was not fixed.
I agree with this with every atom of my body. HOAs are so slimy it baffles me they are allowed to exist; the fact that they mandatory come with the house is absurd.
I’ve always been anti-HOA, but the Last Week Tonight episode a few years ago about them really radicalized me.
I'm the president of my HOA board of directors, and honestly I agree with you in principle. If cities actually maintained the stuff inside newer neighborhoods, HOAs wouldn't need to exist. But they don't, and that's the catch.
Our HOA services 1,936 households and maintains three pools, eight playgrounds, a pump station for irrigation water, tons of alleys and driveways, basketball and volleyball courts, and a bunch of greenbelts. That's not to mention all the lawyers, insurance, management company, building maintenance, etc. The town explicitly won't touch any of it. When we ask them for help in areas of overlapping responsibility, like parking, they don't do anything effective. Our operating income is about $1.8 mm. We've asked them to take over the pump station, and they can't or won't. Developers build these kind of high-maintenance communities, the city takes the tax revenue, and the HOA membership (homeowners) are left holding the bag for long-term maintenance. In my state it's even legally required once certain amenities are added, in particular the green belts for water drainage.
To be fair, the math doesn't really work for the cities either. "Nice" suburbs don't pay for themselves in property taxes. Low density and spread-out infrastructure are expensive to maintain. So the costs get pushed down to HOAs, and everyone ends up frustrated. I'm fairly convinces 99% of the people living in this neighborhood have zero idea what we actually do as a HOA.
So yeah, I'd love to abolish HOAs too. But unless we rethink how suburban development is funded, someone still has to keep the lights on. I am deciding whether to run for reelection to do this torture for another 3 years. I don't think I want to. I'm an engineer who likes to just fix the problems I see, not get a consultation from an expert who will then refer you to a lawyer who will then run up a bill researching things just to tell you "its risky".
The way this historically worked (and in my opinion should still work) is that you have two types of development. Urban and rural. Urban development takes place within cities and towns. Taxes pay for municipal services like sewer, water, schools, fire, police and so on. Cities and towns have defined borders and are relatively small areas, which drives up land cost and encourages density, which makes those municipal services affordable.
Rural development takes place outside of the limits of a town or city. They're handled by the county government, which will have a sheriff, fire department, and a few other services, but other than that, the rural folks are on their own. They don't get municipal water service, they use a well. They don't get sewer service, they use a septic tank. When they call the sheriff, they don't expect them to be there for an hour or more; they take care of their own defense for the most part. There are schools, but they're small, and far away. There are roads, but most of them are dirt. Because of all these things, it really only makes financial sense to live out in the county if you need to; ie, you're a farmer.
The problem is that we've done a ton of development where people want to live out in the middle of nowhere, away from cities, but they still expect city services. We've tried all sorts of things to make this happen. Expanding city limits, consolidating county and city governments, HOAs. None of them can change the laws of physics or economics though. The cost of infrastructure is far more dependent on distances than it is population. It costs largely the same to provide infrastructure for a thousand people in one place as it does for a handful of people miles away.
As a result, cities go bankrupt playing this losing game of trying to support all of this extremely expensive infrastructure, and the costs are borne by the people who still live in the cities and are cheap to support (ie; poor people).
It's something you can't come up with a clever solution for. The only real solution is to go back to strictly enforcing the city limits, shrink cities back to their more historical footprints, and force the people who live in these far flung exurbs to pay the true costs of the services they consume. It would make it far more expensive to live as inefficiently as they do, and result in more density in cities, the way they should have been all along.
So I'd agree with you, your HOA probably is required. I'd go even further though, and say you should probably just be incorporated as a town or village. There are costs that you're still likely consuming an outsized share of. For instance, I don't imagine your community has their own school, fire department, police department, courthouse, sewers, roads, and so on. Even with HOA fees covering things that would traditionally be a citys responsibility, there's a good chance you're still consuming more than you're contributing to the citys budget.
It's just a really expensive way to live, but it gets subsidized by debt and poor people, so most people don't even think about the true costs.
ok iv read this post and iv been debating whether I should reply because im just a dumb person who has no idea about HOA. I wont own a home ever in my life so im really just spitballing here on this topic.
You have raised a good point and what I have taken away from it is that maybe your specific HOA is just too damn big! In my head I feel like it should be broken up into smaller groups which might make it slightly more manageable for people. That would not get rid of the bureaucracy of all the other stuff that goes into this but ya know it might help.
Also I think that maybe everyone should have a turn to be involved with the HOA. This strays into my vision of a "better" society. People are happy to palm this sort of thing off onto others then quick to complain when things don't go their way, but as you said people aren't aware of what you are doing. So naturally for everyone to have an equal idea they all have to have a turn doing the work. Again easier said than done and probably a symptom of the world's idea of how politics works. I should say that my thinking is often inspired by anthropological texts of how indigenous societies function which is not the best way to view our modern way of life but if you wanna be involved in society, you kinda have to be INVOLVED in society.
With all that said I actually don't know about what im talking about with regards to this topic so take whatever I said with a pinch of salt. Good luck with whatever choice you make and keep up the good fight for your community.
This is basically how HOAs started. Don't get me wrong, most are abhorrent, and the good ones are usually "well at least they stop X but god Y is dumb", but the same group that's not fixing your street lamps isn't going to fix them magically once the HOA goes away.
There's a lot wrong with how we handle housing in the modern age sadly.
To give a bit more context (because this was an actual thing that happened to me):
After going back and forth for months, the HOA finally let me know that this was a grid problem, and the responsibility of the power company. They made it clear that they were not going to do anything about it, and that I should talk to the power company directly. Meanwhile, they had sent me a letter to tell me that my small black lives matter sign in the yard was in violation of some rule and that I had to remove it.
I'm fully aware that abolishing the HOA would not fix the street lamp. My point was that its existence is a net negative for the neighborhood. The few positive things that they actually do (maintaining common areas mostly) could easily be handled directly through informal neighborhood organization.
Why aren't street lamps the municipality's responsibility, even?
In some cases, they are, just paid for by the HOA.
The real reason why HOAs have exploded is that a county government can offload services and taxes onto the HOA, maintaining nominally low taxes and reduced county costs, without having to deal with municipal formation or annexation.
The town I grew up in now requires new developments to have HOAs to bear the cost of what should be city services (trash, road maintenance, snow plowing, pocket parks, etc).
The obvious solution here is to just raise taxes to gain economies of scale and have everyone pay less overall (or better yet, accept that suburban sprawl bankrupts municipalities and mandate more fiscally sustainable patterns like small lot sizes and rowhomes), but the area is too red to even consider that. So if you were to buy in that town, you would be getting a significantly better deal by buying in the non-HOA neighborhoods, because it's not like the taxes are reduced on HOA residents in proportion with the municipal services they receive.
In fact, in this particular case it was the power company's responsibility, and the HOA only served to be an impediment (and enforcer of other bullshit rules).
I recently purchased a townhouse style condo which is in an HOA. But it's a particularly weird setup in that there are only 5 members of the HOA because our condo building only has 5 units. One of the units is currently vacant, so on practice only 4 members. No one actually follows any rules -- we presented our "HOA president" with a copy of our keys after we changed the locks, per the bylaws and he was like oh no one has ever done this, it's fine.
So the only purpose it really serves is to provide a way for all neighbors to pitch in for general upkeep and maintenance of the building exterior and roof (and pay premiums for the building insurance master plan).
I think HOA-type arrangements are necessary for any type of buildings with shared structures (walls, roofs, etc). Probably with shared "yards" too, if some type of landscaping service is required and it makes sense to share it.
But beyond that, they're excessive. I was part of one that had a golf course and two fishing lakes (both of which I never used). But if someone wants those, just join a country club?
I also had someone complain about some very slight paint peeling on my backyard patio. Why are you looking at my backyard that close? Had to paint it to avoid a fine.
Very thankful I am no longer part of an HOA. Current city code enforcement is a bit particular about some things but it keeps yards from overgrowing with weeds, pools from growing green, etc. Supposedly they can enforce via drone but I've yet to see that actually happen.
On one hand, I also feel like some HOAs go too far, so I deliberately avoided HOA properties when house hunting. On the other, I feel like this is one of those ideas that sound good until you try to draw a line, and there's no place to draw it that works for everyone. How would you cap "simple organizing," where all organizations above that line would be abolished, and what would you do if certain communities needed organizing exceeding that cap? Maybe something that could work would be requiring a financial justification for each rule, renewed every few years or so, otherwise that rule gets removed. That would incentivize having very few rules, but I feel like this is also only an ideal that's really hard to enforce in practice.
Why draw a line at all? Why bring some sort of advisory board into a situation that really just involves people agreeing amongst themselves? Need to maintain a common area? Maybe talk to the neighbors and work out a schedule for who mows it and when? Or maybe you find out that a few of the community really like gardening and are willing to do the whole thing themselves. At some scale organization is required, and that's understandable. Municipal government provides important service. But a grouping of 10 or so houses doesn't always need to default to advisory boards and monthly fees.
You have to draw a line to define what you are abolishing. What scale of organization is considered required and understandable, and what scale of organization is not? For a row of townhouses that share a roof and have a shared yard, can a community designate someone to handle the maintenance? Surely, the residents of all ten units won't simultaneously engage with the roofer and gardener, will they? What if the expenses are high enough that no one really wants to take on the financial responsibility personally, and people want to pool their funds in a consistent and secure way that ensures that people will contribute what they agreed to and doesn't rely on one person's honesty to hold the money? Bam, you have the definition of an HOA.
Sure, a lot of HOAs seem overly restrictive. I rejected the idea of buying one house under HOA in part because the agreement forbade things like hanging up laundry to dry, even in the back yard. However, there clearly is a use for some community agreements which vary based on need. It's easy to point to some agreement that should obviously be allowed and some agreement that seems entirely frivolous, but deciding what is considered an overly intrusive agreement requires drawing a line somewhere in between.
I don't disagree on principal, but it seems like overly restrictive HOAs have become far more common in recent years. Clearly we swung too far in the "definition of rules" direction. I'd like to push pack against the notion that we need these hundred page rule-books and monthly fees in order to have functioning communities. Also this is by definition a tongue in cheek thread, so I stand by my assertions. 😝
Fair enough. I think we're on the same side. I'm just a nerd who likes to argue about technicalities. I hung up some dog leashes and harnesses to dry outside this past weekend and felt grateful I wasn't living under that awful HOA agreement.
My guess is: The line for "this is too much HOA" is when a house comes pre-packaged with a mandatory, paid membership in the HOA, including quasi-legal rules.
Want to have a voluntary paid membership attached to the house to access additional services like the community pool? Go ahead, but keep it voluntary. Want to ensure homeowners keep their homes to a certain standard? That's what local laws are for, and being actual laws the process and enforcement comes with the expected degree of oversight. Want to organize a thing like redoing the greenery around 'ere, or organizing a block party? No need for a HOA there. Want to organize and fund that the trash gets picked up? That's what the municipality is for.
There's no place for this private-public abomination. Parts of its functions are mandatory for the homeowner, but sit squarely in government/public territory. Some are voluntary, and thus private. Is there perhaps place for a level of organization or two here? Like, a subdivision level of local government, with a small amount of bureaucracy to organize the extremely-local issues like trash pickup, code enforcement of petty (aesthetic) issues? Maybe some structure for local private organizing, that has the infrastructure to stand up a block party, or organize a community-driven landscaping makeover? Absolutely. You can even have both those if you insist.
But the moment you commingle public and private issues and either (A) make a public issue a private problem or (B) give a private organization governmental powers, you start to tick off some principled sensibilities in me. I suspect there's a very good political-theory reasons we tend to avoid mixing private and public things.
Yeah hang on to it if you can. I had a place with no HOA for a while and it was so nice.
Ultimately, it’s a freedom of association question. While you could probably prohibit mandatory HOAs, you’d likely run into constitutional (and possibly federal statutory) issues if you tried to ban them period.
I can dream. Regardless, I believe I adhered to the spirit of the "Subway Take" 😉
I agree with this, and I live in a house with an HOA.
The issue is that most of my neighbors don't.
Most people who own property are older, wealthier, and like the suburban police state. The fact that if they don't like some kid playing on the front yard, they can make the homeowner's life hell, and they get an outsized say in what other people do with their own lives isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Any HOA can be dissolved if it's members vote to do so. Most of the people that live in them, and especially the ones that are involved enough in them to actually show up and vote don't want to.
All of the things about HOAs that people complain about online are the things they like. They like that they
can fine people for not having the chance to mow their lawn on a given weekend; they're retired and mowing their lawn to compare to other people's lawns is their main hobby. They like that they can fine people for having cars in front of their house; they don't have friends that come over to visit so there's no reason anyone else would ever park there.
Basically, the whole point of them is to force everyone in the neighborhood to live lifestyles similar to theirs, and punish them if they don't. They enjoy this aspect of them, so even if there were county wide votes to abolish them, they're not likely to pass.
The root of almost all our political problems is the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
A larger house and representative districts sized to match the original intent in the constitution -- approximately 1/10 the size they are now -- would make lobbying and gerrymandering and party-based politics much more difficult, and it would practically eliminate the small-state bias in the Electoral College.
That law was a blatant act of self-protection by the sitting members of congress and should have been challenged and overturned as an unconstitutional restraint on states and citizen's rights immediately.
Similar US govt-related take: the 17th Amendment was a grave mistake and should be repealed. If we're going to have a senate to represent the governments of each state, then those governments should decide who their senators are (ideally by a top-two vote in each state legislature in my opinion, but that's another take).
I believe, deep in my heart of hearts, that if the 17th Amendment had never been ratified, we would never have learned the name "Ted Cruz".
Both this and the patent comment I agree so much with. Senators were meant to be like Prime ministers, representing not the people, but the government of the states. The fact that there is no one in the federal government that represents the states themselves as an entity is one of the big reasons why the fed has been able to consolidate so much power and control. The entities that raise funds to support the federal government have no voice in said government.
If I could personally draft amendments:
-Repeal the 17th.
-Expand the House considerably
-Expand the supreme court, and have each case heard by a random 9 justices to avoid temporal judge shopping
-Hottest, and least thought out take: (Somehow) make a rule that disallows ANY political party from holding a majority in either chamber. This one would take a lot of work to figure out how to implement, but I beleive it's a national shame that an unelected group of party bigwigs can make descisions and 'whip' their members into action; it removes the entire purposes of the chambers as deliberative bodies if what gets passed is almost entirely decided in party congresses.
I like your take. I'll vote for you!
1000% agree, and I think states like California should sue the federal government on the grounds that their representation has been unfairly diluted.
California is almost perfectly represented though? We have 11.6% of the population and 12.0% of the house reps. The states that are underrepresented in the house are Delaware, Idaho, South Dakota, and the Virginias. California is solidly in the middle of house reps per resident. We should definitely increase the number of house reps for other reasons, but California would actually lose representation in the house if we did.
Wyoming has the lowest population in the country at 587,681 and has 1 Representative to represent them. California has a population of 39.43 million and has 52 Reps. This means that on average one of California’s Reps represents 758,269 people, a difference of +170,588 when compared to Wyoming. If representation was proportional and California’s Reps represented the same number of people as Wyoming’s single Rep California would have 67 Representatives.
Yes, California's delegation would be 67 people of a new house size of 578 (or 577, depending on rounding), which is 11.6% of the house. A net loss of 0.4% of the house. In order to keep as much relative power as we have now in a house that size, California would need 69 reps.
Also, Wyoming doesn't have the lowest population per house seat, that would be Rhode Island at 556k/rep.
My take: Everybody should play an instrument.
I think music universally enriches lives. The ability to play and perform it, whether it's a tambourine or contrabass flute, there's a method of expression available that transcends the spoken/written word, conventional emotion, or even thought. It divorces the process from your mind and body and turns it into something external, and I think there's sort of a magic to that conversion.
90% agree (but I’m a gigging musician so I’m definitely biased), and think you might get more buy-in if the take was that everyone should have to participate in some form of the arts, or artistic creation. Lot more broad, potentially a lot more appealing, same end result (IMO).
Mind you, I also used to be a HS band director so I had a very vested interest in everybody playing an instrument lol. I just know that it’s a tall order, and just doesn’t click for some. But I DO think that participating in the arts in some way, shape, or form offers the potential to enrich anyone’s life.
Edit: I share this quote way too often, but Kurt Vonnegut is once again apropos:
My bias leans more towards music, I think, because I've done it for the last twenty years of my life (purely hobbyist, but from guitar to bunch of other strings, and electronic music production), but definitely some engagement with creating art as a way of outward expression would check the same box.
Oh for sure, I’m right there with you. I was coming more from the approach of “how do we make this take not-so-hot?” I think everyone should at least try an instrument for sure, maybe even a couple if the first one doesn’t stick. So many instruments feel so different. I grew up a percussionist but had to learn all of the wind instruments during school to become a teacher. I tried flute for the first time at 20 years old - turns out I really really like it. In a different life, someone would have convinced me to give it a shot in 5th grade and I would have saved myself a lot of load-in time at gigs ;)
I agree. Someone who loves to draw might not be interested in music.
But artistic expression should be supported
Idk this feels like projecting personal preferences across a population. I learned an instrument as part of standard ECs, and it was pretty mid. Nothing mind blowing.
There are certainly many other skills I’ve learned that were more important to me than learning piano.
That's sorta the point of these sorts of takes, but I don't mean to a level too far beyond basic competence at a minimum (play chords on a ukulele, simple tunes on a penny whistle, where people can get that dopamine hit of learning new, easy stuff).
I thought it was pretty much settled that kids who learn to play an instrument do better in other classes. That doesn’t mean all kids will get a chance, though, instruments can be expensive and so are lessons if the school doesn’t provide them.
I have to some a lot of that is learning fractions before they’re taught in school.
People get weird about instruments. You can get a great ukulele for $65 (base Kalas were like $50 before this whole US inflation shebang recently), for example, even though any enthusiast will say "Don't spend less than $200 bro." And harmonicas, recorders, and other similar flutes for less than $10, and occasionally interesting instruments for surprisingly low prices like certain flute type instruments in the US, all of which come with basic instruction manuals.
Not trying to be combative, but my first years with music were learning things from my dad with a cheap pennywhistle, and he wasn't particularly skilled, and was very poor when I was growing up.
I don’t think i agree with this for the reasons mentioned. While i do feel like everyone should learn an instrument just to see if it sparks something in them, i dont think learning an instrument fundamentally enriches a persons life. I learned to play the guitar and realized after a few years music just doesnt flow through me. At the time i could play rather well but it never inspired something transcendental as described. I enjoyed it to relax but not as a method of expression.
I don't believe becoming a father is magic. You are not suddenly connected to the cosmos, life does not suddently gain meaning. What I do believe is that, after 35+ hours without sleep inside a delivery room[1] assisting your partner during an extremely exhausting process for everyone involved, completely cut off from the outside reality, leaving that room can be a little trippy.
I love my son. The cosmos has nothing to do with it.
[1] Which may be preceded by other strenuous steps either inside or outside the hospital.
Yeah I may or may not be understanding what you're saying, maybe @OBLIVIATER is closer, but there is no hormonal change in a dad body that happens when you smell a baby and obv not when you birth a child—it can be overwhelming and difficult and definitely life-changing, and it's been truly wonderful but not easy. I recommend Eraserhead to anybody who is willing to watch it lol, as it is the best depiction of that feeling I have seen. What I do think happens is that, often, or again at least for me, having kids changes your perspective on your own life & everything around it so very much, because of exactly that—you do have to work on those feelings yourself a lil bit, but when you do they are real and they are yours, and then, again just speaking for me maybe, you are willing to do and change things for them that you would never do for yourself. So if you're not thinking about it a lot it probably seems like that all just happens.
Brain chemicals are a hell of a drug
Traffic lights should act as stop signs late at night.
It seems wasteful — for both fuel and time — being the only car at the intersection waiting for the light to turn green late at night.
There was a power outage in the area a few weeks ago and the lights stopped working — they'd blink red until they were fixed. You're supposed to treat them as stop signs when that happens.
I was able to get home so much faster that night.
That should be the case for all street lights from 10 PM to 6 AM.
Timer based lights should be abolished altogether. It's such a waste to be waiting for over a minute while absolutely nobody is crossing the intersection.
Most small intersections should be roundabouts instead of using lights.
Perhaps even better:
In areas of the Phoenix metro, some intersection lights will turn flashing yellow at late night. This indicates you can drive through with caution. No need to stop unless there's something in the road, etc.
Where I grew up most stoplights changed over to blinking yellows after midnight.
I actually have seen lights do this automatically in some areas at night. I can't recall where exactly, but they do the exact same thing as in a power outage.
I feel like I saw that happen in some rural areas a couple of decades back, during a period at night they'd switch to either blink red in all directions if they're about equal traffic or yellow just for the busier road as a caution but not stop.
Happens at certain intersections in cities too, or on the weekends. They are thoughtful about it; there are some places it doesn't make sense to stop all cars going one way just in case a car comes but red flashing with yellows on the cross isn't super safe due to visibility or speed or something.
But I love it. I currently have zero traffic lights in my small town though so I'm unimpacted at home.
I would also settle for smarter timing on lights. The city I used to live in would automatically have longer left turn advance green lights during rush hour and change to unlimited green lights past 11pm I believe. Basically, the light would stay green until someone pulled up at the cross street and stayed there. You would see the walk sign start counting down and eventually the lights would change. However, if the person turned right then the countdown would stop and the walk sign would go back to saying okay to walk.
It must be expensive, because my new city has replaced lights and not put the same thing in.
That is the case in my city in Brazil. The reason is not waste, but violence. You're a sitting duck at a traffic light at 23pm.
Sorry but that's... such an american thing to say. In most of Europe this has been the case since at least I was a kid.
At night the traffic lights turn blinking orange, which effectively "disables" them, meaning you have to pay attention to the other traffic signs and priority rules.
Which country is this? Because I have also lived in Europe all my life and I have never seen this
This is common in the Netherlands. I dont know how common it is in other European countries. The Wikipedia page on flashing amber lights only mentions the US, Canada, Brasil and Australia as other countries that use them.
The irony here is that makes the post above this sub thread feel like "such a European thing to say" in that it misunderstands America as a singular experience while assuming Europe is.
We all have our blindspots, so no shade, I'm sure there are even more places that do it rurally but don't get noticed by wiki editors
This happens in Czechia as well. IIRC in small towns it used to sometimes be like that even on weekends with low traffic, but that's probably gone now as car ownership rose rapidly. In cities many traffic lights work 24/7, but you still do commonly see ones that get turned off around midnight.
100% agree
Way too many people enjoy being a bully and use whatever excuse they can to be one. I don't take seriously people who won't call out their own team because they think it's ok. It's probably why i'm more irked when leftists/progressives/dems/whatever do it because their supposed ideology is "be inclusive" and then they use that exact stance to bludgeon and attack people for being ignorant.
If your stance is you want to help poor ignorant people who've been let down by society, and then you spend your time calling huge swaths of people dumb and say they deserve what happens to them, you're not actually helping.
The idea that the purpose of the left lane on a 4-lane US Highway is for passing only is ridiculous. I understand that in certain states it's the law, but in my 20 years of driving I've:
A) Seen countless drivers ignore this rule and
B) Never seen or heard of anyone getting a ticket for ignoring it.
And if most people don't abide by a rule and in turn nobody enforces it, it's not much of a rule. Generally speaking I think most folks treat left as the "break the speed limit" lane and the right as the "go the speed limit" lane.
Hard disagree.
When you have a great idea but nobody is abiding by it, you have a culture problem, not an idea problem.
I live in a place where people respect "left is only for passing, then you come back in front of the car you just passed" and it's wonderful. Mind, I don't know how good culture can be passed to bad, but I disagree with just doing away with good to call grey white.
I just drive like I want other people to drive (which includes not misusing the passing lane just because a percent of other people do). I think bad drivers seem more numerous than they are because they're the ones you notice. Overwhelmingly, the passing lane is for passing and I see most people treat it that way.
You're a better person than I. I very much "when in Rome" when I travel somewhere where folks dont move over. I mean I still don't occupy the left, but neither do I immediately vacate the middle when someone comes behind me :/
When considering very different states, and very different roads and traffic, the difference might not be one of culture, but of the roads themselves. Using the far-left lane only for passing on major highways in California, for example, is not only not a rule, but is not possible. There are numerous places where there are left-lane exits, and some places where there are left-lane entrances. In some cases, the left lane (or lanes) may be restricted to only certain vehicles, and in some cases those vehicles (eg, buses) are relatively slow. In many cases, highways might have 4, 5, or 6 lanes in one direction; in some cases, these might split such that using only the left lane for passing might leave only one lane going in a particular direction, or such that the left lanes will be moving much slower than the right lanes.
There are also rarely instances on major California highways where passing is particularly important, such that it should have a lane dedicated to it. If there is no congestion, there will be almost no cars, outside of special circumstances, that are travelling below the speed limit, and in most cases, most cars will be travelling significantly above it. There would rarely be a circumstance where passing by using the left lane would make sense legally. If there is congestion, all lanes will move below the speed limit and at the maximum speed possible given the congestion, speeds will tend to roughly equalize, and encouraging passing would, by increasing lane changes, worsen the congestion and be a detriment to everyone.
This is likely why the rule on California highways is not that the left lane is for passing, but that specifically slower vehicles should stay in the right-hand lanes when possible.
By contrast, on rural roads with two lanes in a direction, and where there may be vehicles that travel at significantly different speeds, having the left lane primarily for passing both makes sense.
I lived in the Bay Area for awhile and this was not my experience at all. Left-side exits or entrances were no more common than they are in other parts of the States, nor were any other lane configurations. Even without them, people would regularly drive under the speed limit in the leftmost lane - like, multiple times per drive, in areas with no special lanes. I personally would attribute the behaviour entirely to driving culture.
I may be extending my view of Los Angeles to the entire state, sorry (I don't usually drive in the Bay Area); there are a number of prominent left exits there, and no one drives in the leftmost lane under the speed limit unless there is congestion.
Interesting! I haven't driven much in LA, but my impression was that there was too much traffic for me to make many inferences on driver behaviour. Bay Area traffic could be terrible, whether at rush hour or weekends when everyone returns to the city - I was always surprised at just how many people were on the roads at any hour of the day or night!
I can think of one, the first or second exit off the Oakland Bay Bridge going west into the city. But I generally agree with you, they’re not common.
I've also seen the left lane used as the "I'm travelling between states and don't want to be bothered by cars entering/exiting the highway for the next several hundred miles" lane.
I saw someone do this while being (eye)balls deep into their phone. When thinking about how they were driving and the observed behavior, I was pretty sure they intentionally got in the left-most lane so they could use their phone with the least amount of interaction of other cars on the road. They were going about the speed limit which for the left lane is slow so everyone was passing them. It was 3 lanes in this direction so the right lane is both the slower lane and also the lane where everyone gets onto the highway, and the middle lane is the one people shift to to let others onto the highway without issue as well as going faster than the speed limit but not catch a ticket faster, so there's still a lot of action going on in the middle lane. The left lane has the least amount of interaction and if you're someone who is holding the phone up with one hand and staring at it which is what the woman was doing when I saw her, you don't even really have to look ahead if you want to be careless, you just assume everyone else will work around you.
This made me think of another take: We need some sort of authoritative body to bring back and enforce the use of tactile controls in motor vehicles. Actual knobs and sliders with feedback! Touchscreens are dangerous and have no business being put in front of drivers.
Mixed feelings, but I definitely think it should be enforced that you shouldn’t be going slow in the left lane.
I knew somebody that got pulled over in Michigan for not moving over while in the left lane. It’s one of the most satisfying things to hear that actually happened. I doubt it happens often, but I know it happened at least once.
I wish people around here respected that, instead we get 20 cars stacked up in the left lane and 2 or 3 in the right. The ones on the right are where they should be, everyone in the left is "passing" or "not slow traffic". Inevitably, some people end up mindlessly pacing the car next to them and we get rolling roadblocks. I need to actively control my anxiety.
My hot take is that speed limits should be much more strictly enforced. It would be not a large challenge to install actual speed cameras on Interstates. It would solve a lot of contention with the left lane, it would prevent a huge number of traffic deaths, it would reduce bias, and it might actually lead to limits being raised where they can relatively safely do so. Lax enforcement only benefits anti-social people.
I think this varies a lot depending on where you live. When there's only two lanes, having room to pass is important, but sometimes there's so much traffic that it's just not feasible for awhile. When there are more lanes, I've found that different places that have culturally very different approaches to lane rules - much of the Midwest is pretty respectful about leaving the left lane for fast traffic (although Chicago is just straight chaos), whereas in central California I found people just drove wherever, and lane speed is constantly changing. I prefer having the lane hierarchy so that I can "choose my driving adventure" (and leave the really impatient drivers to their own lane); I find the "free for all" dynamic stressful and really dangerous, because the impatient drivers just weave in and out of traffic while leaving very little space between cars.
I'm from California and was driving through Colorado two weeks ago where this happened. They had the "Left is for passing" but everybody else was just going down that faster than the right lane.
Preach!
If there aren't many cars on the highway and I'm going fast then why should I have to get back into the right lane after passing a slower driver? If feels like a rule imposed by the sort of people who need everything to be at right angles and panic when presented with choices.
The only rule should be: if you're driving slower and aren't already on the right, get on the right when someone going faster is nearing you.
(Sidebar: did you realize how controversial this would be? Some of the nastiest exchanges I ever got into on reddit were on this very subject.)
haha, yes, and there's a very good reason I didn't engage past the initial statement. I also avoided endorsing the idea, just stated that an unenforced law/rule that nobody follows isn't much of a law/rule.
That being said, my general rule is go with the flow of traffic up to the point where I don't feel comfortable/safe. At which point I merge to the right and follow some slow-poke until the left lane chills out a bit.
Hahaha, stirring the pot! 😈
I think there are too many serious, sensible, and very elaborate takes here. The subway take should be short and inane. The comment section has reduced the concept of "subway takes" to just "takes".
My subway take is that crustaceans are just the bugs of the sea and that you are a hypocrite if you won't as eagerly slurp on large, land-based arthropod like a tarantula or a king cricket as you would a crab or a lobster.
Tildes is not the best place for comedy.
Day at a time, lou. One day at a time...
But then again soup is one if the most used formats for "don't inspect"-food, just eat it. And all seafood has an inherit air of soup (the sea).
So, I just can't agree with you here.
Non-soup or non-stew, a.k.a dry, "just throw anything in there" food is much less common so starting to eat and get used to eating landinsects is less reasonable (on average) to eating waterinsects.
I challenge you to eat the sea like a soup! Most people can't stomach it; the sea is not food and is generally not edible at all.
Even if the ocean had a soup-like quality, that should not extend to the things you take out of it, and the arthropods within are only considered food once you take them out of and wash off the "broth" of the sea and turn them into non-soup.
If it were the case that crustaceans are edible because they were once of a soup that is the sea, the non-hypocritical arthropod connoisseur should accept tarantulas and king crickets once they've been sufficiently soaked in ocean water.
Ah, I see now where you made your mistake: there are no non-hypocritical connoisseurs as being a connoisseur requires the basic hypocrisy that taste matters!
And as for the rest of us, we simple plebs of the anthropoid eating world, we just do as we "always" have done and once we "always" have been eating landinsects that will be perfectly normal too.
Now, with that being said the connoisseurs who have written about it do in fact base their hypocritical view of the matter on the soup metaphor, as shown here, here, here and here!
My hot take: advertising should be illegal. Before you blow up on me, I haven't really thought this through much as far as enforcement, what counts as advertising, blah blah blah.
However, it seems to be the root of so much that is wrong with modern life. Clicks get farmed to show ads to people. Every square inch of public space is monetized with ads. Profiles are built for every person on the planet, cookies track us, our time is wasted, we're manipulated to want and buy things we don't need. Ive never met anyone who was like "ads are great!". Even with things like taxes, people will say "yeah paying taxes suck but we need them". No one says that about ads. Basically everyone agrees that they're a blight. Why haven't we done anything about them?
A lot of people say that lots of business models just wouldn't work without them. To that, I say that if your company supplies a product that no one finds valuable enough to actually bother to pay for, then what does that say about your product?
I think without advertising there'd be a shift in people's perception about things like that. Right now, paying a few cents to view a website sounds preposterous to most people, but that's because we're used to advertisers subsidizing it all, at the expense of our time. I'd love to browse the internet knowing that the costs are paid for and without running aggressive ad blockers. Walk through the streets of a city without garish lights directing me to look at a billboard. Pump gas without some loud ad being blasted in my face.
They're totally unproductive, don't improve anyone's life, and actively make most people's lives worth but they're a trillion dollar industry. Get rid of them.
That's a really hot take, but I love it.
I feel like there's definitely a happy medium, but as we live in a world where everything must drive value, and it forces maximum advertising for extra revenue, I'd happily exist in a world without ads.
My view is that, although I hate advertising, a complete lack of advertising would work in favor of the current establishment. Even superior brands and products would have a much harder time breaking into the market.
I might favor heavily regulated advertising instead.
I wonder if it would though. You can't really compete with coke and pepsi because everyone in the entire world knows what they are, since they spend billions in ads and product placement. If they were just another drink in a grocery store, surely they wouldn't have the immediate emotional familiarity so many people have with them and if a smaller player could convince a store to stock their soda alongside coke, and it genuinely tasted better, it might have a fair shot at eating up some of its market share.
The stuff that gets the most advertising money are things that explicitly aren't quantifiable. Things like perfume, luxury brands, food and drink. Even things that have more quantifiable characteristics aren't advertised on that anymore. Car ads usually just feature some guy in a suit talking about luxury, or some guy in blue jeans talking about how tough a truck is. The major players are mostly on top because that kind of advertising stoak deep triggers in people that cause them to emotionally identify with brands.
Without that, maybe they wouldn't be so ubiquitous and they'd have to focus on making better products instead
People would actually just consume a lot less across the board so I’m not so sure the established brands would.
From my experience of occassionally selling stuff I made, like ceramics, and founding and for a relatively short time running a startup building and selling designer hi-fi loudspeakers with a friend, creating a valuable product that your customers like is the easy part, the difficult part is letting at least a small part of your target group know that your product even exists.
That said, I also hate advertising. I think it's morally fine to deface and damage in any way all intrusive advertising in public. But banning marketing would damage the small and little known products much more than it would damage the big corporations that piss us off the most. I don't have a solution for that better than regulating advertisements in public, which some countries and cities do better than others.
That's a hard thing for me to wargame in my head because I have no idea what a world without ads would really be like. Like yeah, letting people know your product exists would be hard, but it would be hard for the big brands too. Maybe when you're going around to shops demoing your speakers, they'd be more willing to take a risk with an unknown player with a better product because their customers won't just go into a store and say "I want the sonys".
It's a chicken or the egg thing. Is Sony, Sony because they make superior products at a cheaper price and are thus able to afford ubiquitous advertising? Or is Sony, Sony because they advertise so much so everyone knows about them and just defaults to buying Sony when faced with a decision?
Probably both. Sony mostly makes relatively low budget things where economy of scale helps a lot. With high end products with high margins and high marketing budgets economy of scale matters less, so it's different.
Yes, this is a valid observation, but it shows how the the reality is always more complicated than the ideals: we specifically tried to avoid hifi shops because they just don't work very well.
The people working there are in general not very competent because they're "educated" from materials given to them by the manufacturers, which tend to be borderline false advertising, and have no actual knowledge in the field of sound reproduction that is actually relatively well studied and scientific. So they make bad recommendations and don't really know or sometimes even want to know (the real issue) how to sell a product that does some things differently than most of the market and looks differently from most of the market.
So we tried to work around this by marketing direct to customers and to interior designers, which also allowed us to reduce margins and in turn the final price. Reaching interior designers is just slightly possible using word of mouth, cold calling etc. (but isn't that also intrusive marketing?), but reaching customers directly, which is the main thing that allowed us to just offer them a better deal than most, would not be possible.
I think another problem with the whole idea is that all the "no marketing" solutions I can imagine, in a fictional world where huge multinational brands do not already dominate, would drastically reduce reach of everything and make the economy more local.
This would significantly reduce efficiency of everything, reduce competition, and it would also basically lower the maximum winning amount in the gample that is entrepreneurship, but without reducing the responsibilities. All of those things would be quite bad for the economy.
I guess the real question is can you actually ban advertising? Especially if you look at the modern influencer advertising culture. You can technically ban it, but you can't necessarily stop somebody from talking about the products they're using or even just showing them as they do a makeup tutorial or as they talk about the game they're playing while streaming or something.
It almost makes me think by banning it you bring back some of the worst parts of less regulated advertising. How do you even confirm advertising is happening or how can you prove it at least?
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
No worries, friend. That's exactly what I'm looking for!
The EU should federalise
As a non-euro, the EU seems to be at the point where it doesn’t have enough power to be fully effective, but it has enough power to piss people off.
We should vote for ideas, not people or parties. Ballots should just have short lists of bullet points describing position on several topics submitted by the candidate themselves, similar to the blurb that is often included in the voter guide. No names or parties or identifying information would be allowed on the ballot. Maybe with some randomization of order and a few variations in wording so people get slightly different ballots, like when the teacher passes out several versions of a test to reduce cheating. Anyone found posting identifying information matching blurb with candidate outside of the ballot is punished severely, let's say something similar to treason. If you're too lazy to read all that shit, then go away, I don't want your vote.
Don't ask how we'd enforce the rules on the text. That's someone else's job.
"You guys" is gender neutral and the only people who are allowed to say "y'all" are either Black or from the south. White Yankees saying "y'all" is cultural appropriation and is unpleasant to the ears. It's like hearing an American say "cheers" or "mate" or "lads" - it's not right! It requires a specific accent if you're going to pull it off. And if you think you can be cute and substitute "yous" without being from the northeast, you're wrong. If for some reason "you guys" isn't your style, go with "folks" or "friends" or anything else, just stop saying y'all.
sure thing babygirl
To be clear, no, "you guys" is absolutely not truly gender neutral. As a trans woman, it makes me extremely uncomfortable to be referred to with male terms such as "dude" and "you guys", and it's basic decency to not keep using such terms towards after I make the above explicitly clear to you. If someone keeps doing that intentionally, on a good day I'm going to think they're an asshole.
First of all, this babygirl was almost baby of the year, missy. Be careful who you mess with.
Now that that's out of the way, can I ask where you're from? I've lived in the western US for most of my life and have family in the south and midwest and I feel like its a regional thing. Throughout my life I've heard women greeting other groups of women with "you guys." Though that was mostly in the West/Midwest.
Kenan and Kel fought valiantly to make "dude" a gender neutral term, but sadly they were unsuccessful. I agree with you on that one.
I understand that not everyone has the same elevated cultural knowledge as me, so I recommend and regularly use "folks" and "everyone" when addressing a group for the first time. The important thing is that we need to get white people w/o southern accents to stop fucking saying "y'all."
Not that unsuccessful. I've called every female friend and every woman I've ever dated dude my entire life.
People insist "guys" is neutral until you ask them how many "guys" they've fucked. And all of a sudden it's clearly not.
I've gotten very good with folks/folx and y'all (no I'm not southern, my Illinois friends with family from the south use it and I've long since picked it up) especially in written communication. "You guys" slips out when I'm presenting to large groups and I'm still working on it. But your reasoning is exactly why I'm attentive to it and keep trying.
It's a context thing. "Guys" on its own is NOT gender neutral. Nor is "that guy/this guy/those guys" etc. "You guys" is something entirely different and people regularly use to address a group, regardless of their gender.
Spanish has a pretty simple rule where one male in the group makes the group male and you use the feminine form only when the whole group is female.
That’s basically the subconscious use of “you guys” that I see used. Similar to phrases like “all men are created equal” when it’s meant generically it’s presumed to be gender neutral and only becomes masculine when the intended gender is relevant to the statement.
After I was apprehended by the fun police I started to put a little more thought into it and my working hypothesis is that English has gendered terms that become gender neutral once the subject and speaker reach a certain level of familiarity.
Some examples: Dude, bro, girl, bitch (the friendly version).
We use informal language with strangers and acquaintances all the time, but if someone were to use one of those terms with an unfamiliar person of the opposite gender, it could easily be seen as insulting. It only becomes acceptable once you reach a certain level of familiarity. Would I call my female colleague "dude" or "bro"? No. But have I done that with my friends? Yes. I've seen two women call each other "dude" and "bro" countless times.
Unsurprisingly, it's mostly a one-way track, with typically masculine terms being more likely to become gender neutral. That's either another W for the patriarchy or another L for the male ego, you decide. There are, however, a few people in my life who have casually called me [cis het male] girl and bitch (the friendly version) in conversation, but they were gay. That's either another W for the gays or another L for the straights, you decide.
So I can see where people are coming from when it comes to their opposition to "you guys" as an informal greeting in an unfamiliar setting. But where I'm from it's always used as a gender neutral term regardless, and I think we should drop the familiarity requirements for it.
Lmao want you to know you're not the only one who feels this way
Yeah I was actually thinking about how gay dudes call me “gurl” or “bitch” all the time and I don’t really think anything of it. I don’t even think it’s a familiarity thing I think it’s a similar dynamic to reclaiming a slur where gay men were denigrated as being effeminate and ended up adopting it on their own terms.
I want a linguistics dissertation (are there still linguistics majors) on the relative gender-neutrality of "yinz"
Not quite. "You guys" would also be used to refer to a group of exclusively women. My fiance has definitely said to a group of her (female) friends "You guys wanna get something to eat?"
"You girls want to get something to eat?" Would feel a little cutesy, and "you women want to get something to eat?" would feel like you were an alien wearing human skin on her first assignment.
I mean, they (the signers generally and Jefferson specifically) definitely didn't think that all men were created equal, and they didn't include women when it came down to laws or religion, so I do question whether "men" is actually universal there as written.
This isn’t really a topic of debate. “Men” in generic usage was assumed to include everyone. Now the reason it evolved that way is because people’s mental pictures of who mattered only included males, so they didn’t feel the need to get picky about differentiating. If I had to guess it probably happened as society got more complicated and administrative and lines between “who you are at home/with family” and “who you are in society” started to get more and more attenuated, which coincided with a lot of hardening and formalization of traditional roles.
In fact, “man” originally was gender neutral in Old English. It didn’t start to mean “male” until after people started using the word “woman” (wif-man) to specify they were talking about a female. Only then did “man” take on the implication of being male only.
Yes, I know that. I was speaking to its use in that specific instance where regardless of the assumption the writer and signers did not in fact actually mean everyone. Jefferson didn't think I was created his equal, he just thought it was a nice thing to say to oppose a king.
It is, IMO, demonstrative of why there's a difference in the connotation and denotation of the word "men" and why many women may not feel, regardless of the rhetorical flourish or the dictionary definition, that "all men" is actually inclusive of them.
So yeah I think there is plenty of room to discuss it.
Sure there’s technically “room for discussion.” But strictly speaking it’s not accurate to say “men” can’t include “women.” People can choose to interpret themselves inside or outside of a term if they want but that says more about the listener than the speaker most of the time.
It’s not so different from a mirror image of “not all men” sorts of responses. It’s obvious that someone venting about experiences with men doing X doesn’t literally mean ALL men do X all the time. A person can decide for themselves if they want to read such a comment as if they’re the general case or an exception case. I just think life tends to be happier if you elect to interpret things in the nicest possible way instead of the most adversarial possible way.
You seem to be ignoring a very specific thing I'm saying. I am talking about the explicit statement as written by Thomas Jefferson. We know that he owned slaves. We know he didn't consider all people to be equal nor all male humans either. We also know exactly how the same founding fathers wrote the Constitution and set the nations' laws to exclude many people from the idea of being created equal.
This isn't adversarial interpretation, I was making a half joking statement about the specific phrase you used and you ignored the context even after clarification. This isn't that deep, it's the barest of analysis of a specific 250 year old phrase.
I'm confused why you are ignoring that context and responding as if critiquing this one thing is like calling a poster here an asshole. I'm not. I'm calling old TJ a slave owner who didn't give women rights either and doubting that he meant what he wrote. That's the point. It doesn't matter whether I see myself in "all men" if he didn't, and it is very reasonable why many people wouldn't see themselves included because he didn't either.
People in TJ’s own time were commenting on the hypocrisy of those words being written by a slaveowner. But to read it as being hypocritical you kind of need to have interpreted it as it sounds, with “all men” meaning “everybody.” If it didn’t mean everybody there wouldn’t be any hypocrisy.
I don't know how you're explaining my point to me and still missing it. All I can suggest is to go back and reread what I previously written because I do not know how to explain it again and I think I'm being clear and instead you have decided that I mean something entirely different.
Have a good one!
It is to you, it's not to other people. Someone else just told you explicitly it's actively going to make her uncomfortable at best. It doesn't make sense to insist it's gender neutral to me while ignoring her post.
I don't like making people feel uncomfortable, so I try to avoid it.
I addressed her in a separate comment and even explicitly mentioned other alternatives that I regularly use. Hard as it may be to believe, I get it. When you're a nail, a lot of things start to look like hammers and some assholes will use non-hammers to bludgeon you anyway. But this is my silly little take and I'm going to defend it. And all I'm trying to say is that this asshole isn't a hammer and isn't trying to bludgeon anyone...well, unless they say y'all when they're not supposed to.
At the time I replied you hadn't, I saw that you have since but I'm not a time traveler at the moment.
We disagree about "y'all" so eh
Just know that a southerner dies everytime you say it. That might sound good to you on its surface, but there are a lot of good people down there and your odds of hitting Lindsey Graham with one of those are pretty slim.
We're in two different moods about this, so I'm gonna bow out.
stay classy @DefinitelyNotAFae
(when I read it it sounds like I'm being an asshole lol but frfr)
Taken in the spirit in which it was meant
(◔‿◔)
I am also making an effort to not use it, but like you said it slips out sometimes.
I try to just use the collective "you" for the most part, because I think "folks" just sounds really weird.
Folks works for me, but idk, because I'm Midwestern maybe? "OK Folks" is up there with "alright everybody" for getting the attention of a big group for me.
I pick up a lot of language from the people I'm around and subconsciously slide into it around them, so I don't usually notice if I've picked up "y'all" or a more country accent until I'm into it. I can't do it on purpose just fall into it.
I try to use "folks", which works in a bunch of ways, but "y'all" just has the nice informality that "you guys" has, without the slight twinge of exclusion. So I'm gonna keep using it.
I'd say we should just invent some new words for plural second person, but you can't force language like that.
Bring back the singular 2nd person, "you" is already plural! (Basically same answer just in the other direction)
I'm hearing that I have permission to say the words if I adopt a British accent.
Will do.Cheers mate! 👍"mite".... nailed it.
Piggy back subway take: all languages should aim to move pronouns, nouns, verbs...nearly all parts of speech, towards being non gendered.
It's hard to learn, eh
I guess I'm the minority here but I honestly really like the concept of very gendered languages, even if they can affect me negatively. I have a conlang of my own which expands beyond the common indoeudopean grammatical genders in legitimately meaningful ways, and I find it SUPER cool
Compromise like the Chinese language, where we have 他/她/它/祂 （male/female/neuter non human animal/ neuter non human deity) but all pronounced the same ?
My kid came up with a sci fi world where not only is their alien language extremely gendered and counted, each part of speech also changes depending on your relationship with + feelings towards the person you're speaking to, and the relationship with /feelings towards the person you're speaking about.
Also, and this isn't pointed at you, but it's spelled "ya'll" not "y'all"
It is not a combination of "you" and "all" (which is what everybody thinks it is, and how you'd get ya'll).
It's a combination of "ya" and "all". Hence why it's pronounced at all. The apostrophe goes between the two words, like it always does - hence "ya'll"
Fucking yankee-ass dictionaries and autocorrects making everybody spell it wrong
I was going to write out why this is wrong, but it's already present in https://writingexplained.org/yall-or-ya-ll-difference, https://www.southernliving.com/culture/yall-or-ya-ll, and with historical sources in https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yall_pron going all the way back to "y'all" in 1856.
Even if I were to grant your "ya" thing you still have the issue that there's no reason to claim the apostrophe is required to take out the latest letters. It could just as easily take the first a as the second. Your rationale would only really hold up if we were spelling it "you'll" because there's no reason to say that the "ou" of "you" contracts differently than the "a" in "ya".
The bigger problem though is that "ya" in that sort of usage isn't even real. Even in the "I tell ya what" sort of examples those are just trying to clarify a dialect in writing. So you'd see it in dialog of a novel for a southern character, but actual southerners don't write like that because they know what word they're saying. Similarly are things like a character saying, "I'm from New Joisey."
Contractions are also not consistent enough to claim that there's a hard rule the apostrophe goes between the words by replacing letters on the front of the second word. Some of the most common ones, like "don't" and "won't", wouldn't even follow such a rule.
As someone who comes from a century+ long generational family in the south (and all the political fun that comes with that), it's funny to be told how it is we write apparently. Don't look at my families written historical items I guess. As well as the fact that dictionaries are used to prove how I'm wrong even though I started with the fact that it's dictionaries that are wrong. Dictionaries are not infallible.
But the cultural imperialist normally win out, as they get to write what the rules are
why would you think this lol, @zestier has it sorted but this is the worst urban legend I've ever seen. My mind is being blown that somehow it's possible to get the etymology backwards & claim that a word is spelled the way it is pronounced? Like a verbal backronym? idk that's nuts. "Ya" as in "ya dingdong" is 100% a recent addition to spoken English, I'm saying past 30 years, while second-person plural "y'all" comes straight from Latin vos, so that wins by like 2000 years.
O.o I grew up in the south and always have spelled it "Ya'll" too. I still spell it like that today, didn't even realise this was a point of contention, that's just how it's always been in my experience, never knew it's been wrong this whole time.
it's ok lol, it's not a big deal, I'm just a speller—folks in the SE aren't historically known for worrying much abotu apostrophes so I think you're good: there was a sign in GA for ages advertising "Peache's for sale" and I don't even know what to say about that one.
If a word from it's own culture has always been a way, maybe it's the outsiders that are wrong.
"Ya" being a recent addition in the last 30 years is straight up wrong. Ya had insanely common usage here pre-1985...like way before then
Like it's weird to me that actual southerns are coming in and saying "it's spelled this way" and ya'll northerners are coming in and saying "you're spelling you're own word wrong"
From outside the US, “y’all” is a distinctly American contraction and is thus abhorrent. I appreciate the attempt to steal “yous” as well, but the bogans will have a bone to pick with that one, especially since the evolution of “youses” and “yous guys”. My go-to for a large group is “party people”.
I live in the south, and think I agree with you. Hearing white northerners saying y'all is incredibly cringe. I never say it because it would feel weird despite living here for my entire adult life. If you don't have the accent it just sounds very tryhard.
I think "you all" is perfectly fine for me. Pretty cool too have a grandpa who was a "yinzer" though
As long as the ou and a are audible were good.
My personal favorite is "youns" (or "yinz" I guess)
In the song Under the Sea in the Little Mermaid, the opening line is:
They live in the ocean! They should have absolutely no concept of a lake, much less the familiarity with lakes to use them in an effective metaphor.
I know it’s ridiculous but this actually annoys me.
They had the coral is always brighter in somebody else's reef sitting right there!
Agreed on principle, but the issue is now you have to rhyme with "reef" - beef? Leaf?
Grief kind of keeps the meaning of the original line
In the spirit of half-baked takes, I think that furlongs per minute is an intuitive 1-10 scale for automobile speed. This is 7.5 miles per hour (exactly, no rounding), or approximately 12 km/h. Metric purists could use centimach instead, which is very close; millimach would also be acceptable for a 1-100 scale and rolls off the tongue better.
This is ludicrous but is presented well enough that it seems appealing. I love it. Bravo.
"I don't know why this guy is going 8 in a 9, but it's driving me crazy."
I hope that meets the theme of the thread.
It could have other indirect effects too. E.g. you could formalize the informal tolerances for speed limit enforcement. If you're in a 5 zone, then as long as your speedometer says 5-point-something, you're probably fine. Once you hit a full unit over the limit, then you're much more likely to get a ticket.
How would a dimensionless number, which is not a unit at all (and, therefore absolutely not an SI or SI-adjacent unit) and differs wildly based on the medium something is moving in, be used as a "metric purist's" unit for speed?
My point is that if a metric purist balks at the unit "furlongs per minute," then centimach is going to give you basically the same number for any given speed.
Again, mach is not a unit of speed, or a unit at all. The (non-SI) unit you're looking for "speeds of sound (under specific criteria, for a specific medium etc etc)".
Further, notice that "millimach" in fact translates to a number in the same ballpark as km/h
I'm greedy so I'll take 3
Everyone should have to read and pass a test on the Cooperative Principle and Grice's maxims before being allowed to comment on the internet, and should be made to retake the test yearly to keep comment privileges
Driving at the same speed as the person next to you for more than some arbitrary distance should be a ticketable offense, and speeding laws should offer flexibility up to 5 mph exclusively to accommodate this
Saying that every homophobe is secretly gay is high-key homophobic. The gays are oppressing themselves? Bruh
Maxim of Manner, submaxim 3:
Well, there goes Tildes. Look what you've done.
The thing with verbosity is, what is considered "unnecessary" can be highly subjective. I'd say it also depends highly on context and goal. For example, is it purely a transactional information exchange or is it social interaction?
I’ve got a couple:
There’s definitely others I have, but I can’t remember them right now, or I’ve already talked about them.
Whew, that second one is certainly a hot take.
I've thought before that mandatory national service could do all of the things that you mentioned, but I really would not want to see that be mandatory military service. I (think) I would be okay with it being an option, especially if we reduced our standing military force to account for it, but I don't really think the US needs a bigger military. What I'd really like to see is something like the Civilian Conservation Corps, but expanded to also cover things like public infrastructure and other types of public service. I like the idea of citizens being expected to spend a little time contributing to the public good after graduation, and CCC-like programs could also serve to train some basic job skills and get kids out of the areas they grew up in, potentially exposing them to people and places who are different than what they're used to.
But I don't really have skin in the game when it comes to this, so it's easy for me to say "young people should be required to spend a year or two serving the public good" when I know I'm too old for that to be expected of me, regardless of the good I think it could do our young people and the country.
My issue with mere National Service is that it would still Balkanize along political lines - liberals would do CCC work, conservatives would be in the military. The desired effects would be significantly weakened.
Yeah, I mean if I had my way military service wouldn't be part of it, or would be limited to a very small force. I don't like how militarized our society already is, I don't particularly want to increase that anyway.
As someone living in a small rural community, I gotta disagree with this. Local governments are the only way folks out here can get things done. The local government has the means and personnel to fight for the resources we need from the state. Without that, we'd be completely overlooked. Even a well-meaning centralized government would find itself making decisions without personal knowledge, or focusing on the bigger areas because they are louder and more obvious.
Agreed. Paired with our municipal water and electric services, we hardly need a federal government at all! Y'know, except for passing back the 30% income tax the federal government hoovers up from every working stiff, in the form of obnoxiously specific grants that are usually biased towards car infrastructure and fossil fuels.
I always feel alone when I tell people this, but I think we are on the cusp of (and arguably, partially in support of) the return of the city state.
This kind of interferes with me being an anti-military pacifist. Since I was very young, maybe 10, my parents told me to flee to Canada if I got drafted. You need to register for the draft to get a federal student loan, so I even signed my name as with the addition of “I am a conscientious objector to war” in the signature box (I’m told this part gets scanned into the system).
I wish we didn’t need any military, but I don’t think that’s true. We certainly don’t need any more than what we have.
As someone from a country with forced conscription, all I have to say is:
lol. lmao, even
Care to elaborate on which one and your experiences?
Literally none of those is happening with conscription 'round here unless you're one of the few people who get a hard-on for the army. All that usually happens is you wasted 1-2 years of your youth/life running chores for a(n often shitty) lieutenant or sergeant and the only good thing you got out of it was maybe that you made a couple of friends at best
Nordics, Baltics, Alpine, or Greece?
I could also see Korea on that list
"Utilize" is a word people use when they want to sound fancy, it has no real use over the word "use" otherwise.
When gardening you use a shovel to dig a hole.
But you utilize a shovel to bang in a stake.
Utilize is supposed to convey a novel, uncommon use.
Sure, but there's nothing automatically wrong with wanting to sound fancy. In some contexts, utilizing "utilize" might have a more appropriate effect on the text than using "use".
In technical documentation, for example, "utilize" might be used to describe something the software makes use of, while "use" might be used to describe something the user makes use of.
"The software utilizes this function...".
"The user uses this button...".
I like that we can have multiple words that mostly mean the same thing and can mostly be used interchangeably for different effects, or to give reference to different things.
Disagree, sort of.
To "use" or "be using" is normally a present tense activity, whereas "to utilize" means to either be in direct present use or to generally use an item at another point in the past or future. Utilize is timeless, whereas use or using is present... well, use.
You can preface "use" with other terms, such as "am using" or "will use" but that immediately excludes present use, and obviously excludes "used" for past tense. You can remove the need for am/will/-ed by utilizing "utilize" to structure your speech to be as timely as needed.
This is one that I think could also be the difference in my mind, one has a possible metaphoric, figurative, or mental bend, as it could be the subtext:
At this point, I have gotten tired of using examples, and will never utilize their power again today.
I mentally flipped back and forth between "use" and "utilize" in all your examples, and both versions seemed to mean the same thing to me for all examples.
In English, the base form of a verb (in this case "use" and "utilize") can serve as both the simple present tense (what you call "direct present") and as the bare infinitive (what you call "timeless"), which is tenseless. Both verbs have that quality, contrary to the distinction you insist on here.
You can also just say "I use examples in my arguments" to imply, infinitively, that you use examples, just as you did in the sentence before.
Your example also doesn't really make much sense grammatically. You should probably rather write "I am, have been and will be using examples in my argument" since the auxilary verb is different depending on tense.
The difference between use and utilize is as ibuprofen pointed out in a sibling comment to yours.
To play devil's advocate, "use" can sometimes have a negative connotation when used with people, whereas "utilize" is neutral or even positive.
However, people do 100% utilize that word the way you described as well. ;)
If you really want to consider the utility of the word, then you must utilize utilize by utilizing your utility bag of utility tools to utilize the utility of utility, utilaterally!
Utilitze the Utility of Usages of Use!
Utilitze the Utility Usage of Use!
Utilize the Usage of Use!
Utilize Use!
Use Utility!
Usetility?
utiliooze!
U!
u!
In a similar vein, when I was in the army, I would absolutely HATE when people would say "alright, come up and orientate yourself to the map" ORIENTATE. God just hearing it makes me mad.
It apparently is a word, but it's just a very stupid sounding synonym for orient.
Wow, I haven't thought about that word since I was a kid in army cadets. I guess it's industry terminology, which can be silly. Like how in archival and records, they use "disposition" instead of "disposal".
A Smithsonian institution dedicated to junk* mail would have done the nation some good, especially if it was introduced in an era like the 1970s.
Edit: changed "spam" to "junk"
I like this one. Truly oddball!
It's a weird one, but I stand by it. A cultural institution who's mission statement is to explicitly educate the public on advertising could have been the needed "shot in the arm" for the American zeitgeist against anti-intellectualism and hyperconsumerism, especially if it was introduced at a time like the 60's~70's.
After a certain number of years and funds raised, there'd be plenty of ways to move this organization around to keep itself alive and relevant. Start an art collection and a gallery wing, but it's all posters and advertising from acclaimed artists and design firms and whatnot, use that as a further money printer. Expand the gallery to include neon signs, like the "American Sign Museum" in Cincinnati. Have a computer wing, throwing spam mail to accounts, pop ups and banner ads making example websites useless, etc.
Theoretically, American companies would be throwing money at said institution to feature their name and advertising and it could be done in a way that doesn't compromise the original mission statement.
It would be a tough nut for conservatives to try and crack, because on the surface level it totally does celebrate consumerism. Coca Cola and Pepsi both would be pissed at them if they shut it down. It absolutely is celebrating Americana, but at the same time absolutely educating the public on what "FOMO" is, how easily "wants" and "needs" can be conflated, etc.
It'd be really neat.
I was very fortunate to go to an above-average high school, and while most of it was pretty normal there was one oddball class taught by an English teacher that I took called Media Literacy. Being 15-17 years old and being shown how deceptive advertising and the media can be was an important formative experience, and I wish more people had similar. This was maybe 2002, before these sort of ideas got co-opted by mainstream-ish lunatics, dumbed down and turned into something like "Don't trust the MSM, the real news is on Newsmax/Truth Social/Twitter/Tiktok/some random Telegram channel!"
Also I've always said that formal/philosophical logic and rhetoric should be required for all high school graduates. I don't know what subject you deprioritize to get the time to teach it, but surely being able to spot fallacies and logical inconsistencies in life is at least as important as being able to name the parts of the cell, who the 11th president was, recite and use the quadratic formula or do stoichiometry.
(Been a while since I thought about them, and sadly these ideas are starting to feel quaint - we can't move forward until we can stop moving backwards. In the end I'd be happy if we could just teach safe sex and evolution and leave Jesus and ChatGPT at home.)
What people are actually mad about is that they're judged for being racist. (applies to other areas too). They couch it in "you're turning other people away from your cause" or "learn to take a joke" but what they want is an "n-word pass." Because they could say the slur, make the joke, do whatever, they just don't want someone else to disapprove because that makes them feel bad. They don't care about how their words make someone else feel. It's no different than "don't teach slavery as an evil because white kids will feel bad" ignoring how awful those same white kids taking advantage of the teacher approved "pass" to read Huck Finn make black students feel. "It's a classic" they say, "it's canon" they say. "Suck it up" they mean.
Edited to fix a verb conjugation
Its always annoyed me how SO MUCH of the conservative propaganda is centered around making white men feel better about themselves.
Like, its right there, we could teach them how to be good people and then society would make them feel better about themselves, but that fruit is juuuuuust out of reach. Theres a whole subreddit making fun of how theyre SO close, and yet, whoosh.
The fact that nudity is illegal-by-default globally is absurd. If anything, wearing clothing should be illegal. Clothing leads to unhealthy views, negative health outcomes (aside from skin cancer), and fetishization of the body. And the environment and society both would be better off if we were limited to parts of the globe where we can survive without clothing year-round.
There are pretty good reasons why humans started wearing clothes though. I'm curious which negative health outcomes you're referring to, because just the increase in skin infections from minor abrasions and pathogens seems like that would kinda push it the other direction
If nudity was legal at all venues and a lot of people walked around naked it would be harder to determine what is and what is not a sexual offense. The physical act of ripping the victim's clothes produces a lot of evidence.
It's sad, I know. But I do believe that is true.
Even with that aside, I'm absolutely not sitting butt-naked on the same bus chair someone's unwashed naked ass was sitting...
We should move all the American holidays by one month. Halloween is coming up in just a couple weeks. I'm still wearing a t-shirt outside. Every Christmas I think "wow I sure hope it snows", because it snows in January not December. I should be able to wear white all September. Conversely, I'd much rather be outside grilling on the fourth June. Global warming demands a response.
I've been saying for a while that December 25th should be the beginning of the festive season of Christmas rather than most people taking down their decorations by the start of January. We need more holiday cheer through the bleak months in the north.
You'll be happy to know that is the original way to celebrate Christmas; the 12 feast days* of Christmas begins Dec 25 and continues to Jan 5 (or if you're old calendar Orthodox, then we have second Christmas until the 17th)
It also casts a wider net for having white Christmas!
But don't put those decor down yet! Starting Twelfth Night, we move into Epiphany Feast hurray!
* 12 feast days because we precees Christmas with 40 days of vegan diet nativity fast. So the whole season goes from Nov 15 to Jan 5, plus 13 more days if old-calendaring.
The Halloween comment about t-shirts confuses me; Halloween is better when it's warmer so you don't have to wear coats over costumes. (also, I wish I was wearing t-shirts, been hitting freezing where I am)
Agree with you on Christmas though. Feels weird having that at the start of winter.
Not sure how to handle MLK/President's day or where the cutoff is, but I love the idea of late January Xmas and adjusting the schedule based on climate change.
Phenomenal take. 100% agree. You understood the assignment.
As a Canadian, we would resist this notion. Halloween is already too late in the year, and it is not uncommon for kids to be trick or treating in winter jackets
Holidays should be more evenly distributed. And we should have one in January to look forward, instead of having this depressing post-Christmas ecstasy comedown we currently have.
As someone who lives in both the US and Europe: some European countries are frustratingly dishonest about inclusion, fairness, and equality, and often the same people who will deride the US for the more overt discrimination and bad but honest policies there are themselves complicit in the more covert discrimination, bad practices, and dishonest policies. More frustratingly, it feels like the discrimination in the Europe is often facilitated and justified through arguments around fairness and equality that end up being discriminatory in practice, and is often masked by self-congratulatory, largely meaningless expressions of support.
"Self-congratulatory" is the EU's middle name.
I find that on the ground level, Americans are actually much, much more tolerant, inclusive, and curious about people of other races and cultures.
European leaders talk a good game about inclusion, but everyday European people are quite insular.
Thursday night football and the games in Europe have gone a long way toward killing fantasy football. It was better when you could log in 1-2 days a week to research injuries etc and set your lineup. Now, so many games happen at weird times. To stay on top of it, you need to pay attention on (1) whatever day your waivers process, (2) Thursday, (3) Saturday in case there's a European game starting early the following day, (4) Sunday, and (5) Monday. It's much more of a chore. I finally quit last season and am much happier.
Some of the takes in here are pretty heavy, so here's something a little less serious:
All other directional pairs of US states are balanced (North and South Dakota, Carolina), and then you get West Virginia. WV is a convenient acronym, and so I think they should rename Virginia to East Virginia for geographical name balance. I will also accept "Big" and "Little" Virginia, although "Little Virginia, mountain momma" doesn't have quite the same ring.
I am all for gender equality, but nipples look funny, and some are really off-putting. I think everyone should be mandated to cover their ugly nipples equally. Swimming, beaching, MMA - put all the nipples away!
On the contrary. People should cover all of their chest at any given moment. Except thje nipples. I am making nipples legally mandatory to be displayed at all times.
I do not need that amount of chafing and incidental nipple injury at all times, no thank you.
Well, see, a wizard cursed me again with billions of money I need to get rid of fast and I have now turned to lobbying...
Fucking wizards man
Ah, I see you are one for tassels and rocketry.
What if we made that “little” into a “li’l”?
That's perfect! I can feel the movement getting stronger already!!
Note: This thread could have quickly, quickly, devolved into a horrible locked thread. A few years ago it certainly would have, but everyone here has been so kind and trusting with each other that its wonderful that we have fostered that sort of community here.
I think it's more that some of the people who previously would have made the counterargument have just left Tildes. I don't think that's a good thing on the whole...
RRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
wew that's a sturdy statement
We are holding back New Years Eve from being the best holiday. It's a global, non-religious, and non-environmental - a purely human-devised celebration of time. Had a great year? Reminisce and raise a toast to the next one! Had a shitty year? Take the night to liberate yourself from the past, and raise a toast to the next one! All this crap about getting blackout drunk and new years resolutions just serve to make the day less enjoyable. Everyone should henceforth make NYE a night of hanging out with the people you want to have in your life next year, and going to watch some fireworks with the rest of your community!
Public spaces need more sleeping spaces. And I'm not really talking for those without a home (although, hey, bonus). No I'm talking for the day nappers, the siesta grappers, those who just need to take five in the black after a sweat or two. We do a lot lf weird shit in public already - normalize just kinda sleeping whereever too!
Take the second: 3D printers are much more important household appliances than standmixers - also kitchen appliences are way, WAY overpriced and the common household should siphon some money away from kitchen gadgets and into actual gadgets! Like automatic rechargeable AA battery stands!
All for the nap support, but ...
I've never had a 3D printer and doubt I ever will--can't imagine why I'd need one. On the other hand, I have a 25-year-old Kitchen Aid I use at least once a week. At the time it seemed expensive, but in retrospect it works out to something like $10 a year (and falling, since it still works just fine).
So many things in our lives are made of plastic. So many thibgs in our life have their main functionality stem either in part or in full from a static shape. With a 3D printer, some glue, some plastic filament and an internet connection a staggering amount of useful things can be made without ever needing to have it fabricated at a factory. Add some hours with a 3D modeling software tool, and you are now both able to create new static objects AND mend both printed and purchased stuff. Don't like the surface of the printed stuff? Well just do as you would with wood - sand it down and paint it! With the correct coating the only way you'd know it is plastic is because of its weight. Want something sturdier than standard plastic? Well just get some specialist filament that's extra sturdy. And also, don't underestimate the strength of good ol' plastic - shaped in the right way, it is quite sturdy!
Some kitchen appliences do things you can't do with hand and grit alone, but many are tools that are incredible conveniences and upgrades without being mandatory for cookery.
A 3D printer on other hand is replacedable by very little other than clay and kiln or wood and woodworkers workshop. Want a makeup stand that is just so? Print it. Want some coathangers for the entre? Print them. Want some sippy cups for the youngsters? Buy some foodsafe filament and print them. Want dividers for your drawers? Print them. Want a new handle for your drawer after the old broke off? Print em. Hell, want a new drawer, in part or in whole? Print it! Caps and containers for pens. Cable organisers. Ceiling covers for lamp outlets. Child safety locks for cubboards. Vases. Sporks. Food containers. Lost boardgame pieces. The missing button on your vacuum. Ab. So. Lutely. ANYTHING.
Like, we are at the point were we can translate a digital 3D model to a physiclal object with a press of a button. It boggles my mind that more people haven't bought the machines that can do that yet.
Also, as to the price of kitchen equipment, that is very much todays prices, not yesterdays that I'm thinking of. Like, most of the equipment has long since been developed, and the internals aren't what you would call sophisticated. I can completely understand if some of those appliences were expensive back in the 90'ies, or even the 00'tghs, but today? Just absurd.
There's a cultural vibe that non-profit work is inherently morally superior over for-profit work.
I think both have important roles to play, especially with non-profits producing cultural output. But I think 2 things:
I know folks who have a mindset that things should be purely positive so they'll block anything that's net-positive if there's any amount of negative. And I know folks who work in non-profits who have produced little or sub-optimally for society, almost always buoyed by public funding that could've been more efficiently allocated elsewhere — morally a net negative, imo. I know someone who's an architect for non-profit housing, but is it really good that their organization provides housing at 50% higher per-unit production cost than for-profit housing? Just to have a non-profit label?
I've seen a bunch of non-profit grocery stores fail because they were started by non-profit-minded folks who somehow thought for-profit grocery stores were evil and exploitative and they could do better, but it turns out that running a grocery store is actually really difficult and the profit margins are razor thin and it takes real skill — and they didn't have the business or operational skills to compete and fulfill their mission, as their prices end being higher than for-profit stores due to lack of sales volume, and poor inventory turnover and management. Imagine that.
I don't even think this is a subway take, this is just clearly all truth. Apart from non-profits not nearly always doing good and sometimes screwing the market by subsidizing their budgets from tax money, the non-profits that are actually doing good (like well functioning homeless shelters) often use that sense of moral superiority or just the feeling of doing good and serving society to overwork and underpay their employees.
I know quite a few people who did non-profit work at some point in their careers. I can't think of a single one who didn't experience this. Government / civil service also has a bunch of "for the greater good" exploitation. I'll be strongly advising my kids when they enter the workforce to avoid such jobs until they've grown enough in their career to know their own worth, understand the true nature of employment relationships, and to confidently negotiate (and maintain) favorable arrangements.
Gun violence has been done to death, but it apparently never gets solved when we don't ever do anything about it. That's not the subway take.
Gun ownership should be tied to service in the National Guard and getting regular mental health checks. Failing a mental health check or if somebody is flagged for potential mental health issues or is forced out of the National Guard should lose their right to own a gun (until evaluated and given a clean mental health billing). Exceptions should be made for physical handicaps, just because somebody is handicapped shouldn't bar them from gun ownership or being able to serve in some capacity.
People that go on shooting rampages have a tendency to be isolated and fall into weird insanity spirals where they don't interact with anybody and even though they may start showing signs of mental deterioration, nobody does anything about it because everybody assumes it's somebody else's responsibility. Then when something happens, everyone is like, "We should've paid more attention to the red flags." Owning a gun doesn't make you a crazy person, but a crazy person with a gun can do a lot of damage.
Further, requiring people to be in close-knit groups with other people would help to root out mental health issues. If you're required to be around other people for extended periods of time, mentally unwell people are more likely to be found out over time by people close to them, versus just wallowing in their mental health issues in a downward spiral.
The 2nd Amenment states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It's pretty clearly talking about a well-regulated militia (it's literally the first thing mentioned) ie The National Guard. The connection it's making is that, "We need to have a well-regulated militia, so therefore people should be able to own guns... so that they can be called upon by these well-regulated militias". Otherwise, what would be the point of mentioning anything about them? People owning guns, but not being involved with the militia doesn't guarantee anybody's safety, if anything, it's the opposite. If they wanted individual gunowners to just haphazardly protect the nation, why even mention "well-regulated militias"?
It's not a "magic bullet", it won't automatically solve every shooting death ever, just because something doesn't magically solve every problem ever doesn't mean it can't help.
Schools should require a gun safety class. Multiple gun safety classes for the different grade levels. We have sex ed, we need gun ed. The only source of information on how to handle a gun should not be Youtube.
Thoughts?
I'll see that and raise - We should bring back shooting as a sport through out school. Marksman, 3 gun, old school, whatever. Teach shooting along with safety.
Absolutely, but imo we kinda need to get to a point where bringing guns onto a school campus even just for teaching isn’t just throwing fuel on the fire
No argument there.
Not disagreeing with you, but submitting for your consideration that as always it's enforcement that bring down good ideas. Take mental health checks: your president "passed" the man woman person camera tv check. In reality these checks allow the power group to have guns when they shouldn't, and keep marginalized groups from having them when they should.
So, agree, with heavy caveat
For clarification that check is part of the "Mini Mental" ( MMSE) which is about cognitive functioning and dementia and he "passed" it five years ago and claimed it was difficult.
It's not assessing mental health disorders and assuming he actually passed all parts of that test, which he might have, it only measures that moment, not now.
Contemporary Gun violence in America is actually caused by a series of messy cultural factors, rather than gun access itself.
Specifically:
Don't get me wrong, guns are certainly part of the problem, but I see a fundamental unwillingness to confront the full picture.
Sinks in public restrooms are all designed for children and I don’t know why. If you’re installing multiple sinks in a bathroom, why do you put them all at waist level or below? I’m a big guy, and I’m tired of having water droplets on my shirt from having to bend over to wash my hands when I go to the bathroom. I feel like they are put so low because they are trying to discourage people from washing their hands - a tactic that I will note appears to be working at least 30% of the time.
It's probably a mix of accessibility and cost both by putting them all at the same height?
I actually feel the opposite— it’s rare I find a sink that my 4 year old can use without me awkwardly lifting her with one arm and helping operate the sink with the other hand.
Sinks should be installed at the higher height, with a folding (permanently installed) stool below it. Not too high of a sink, though, for wheelchair users.
Borders are fake and we should stop pretending that they're real.
I mean this seriously, but in the intended spirit of the thread, feel free to take this argument to ridiculous conclusions :)
A related take: if we're going to have political borders, we should be a lot better about making them follow geography - rivers, mountains, watersheds and so on. Straight line borders are ugly!
Kitchens are an unnecessary expense and should not be mandatory. This is not a novel concept and is in fact quite traditional - historically (as in centuries ago), city-dwellers bought pre-cooked food from street vendors daily, instead of paying rent for that extra room/space to cook for themselves. (Also it meant the apartment wouldn't burn down as often, if nobody in the building cooked everyday.)
Also, there should be more restaurants that offer one (1) dish. Restaurants tend to be expensive, and I strongly suspect it's because everyone who wants cheap food doesn't eat out everyday - so restaurants cater to an upmarket crowd, which means offering lots of choice, at great logistical expense.
Not mad at it, but you should probably get rid of four or five just by consolidating within the original 13, not just RI. The full vid touches on it, it's only 6 mins.
My real subway take is that the USA should be at least three countries.
Everybody in Miami has rich parents, is selling drugs, or is on OnlyFans.
Yup.
Writing God in lowercase serves only to demonstrate that the writer is an atheist. If this had anything to do with logic you would also write in lowercase other names and titles for entities you deem fictional, such as Batman, Superman, Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent.
Does this only apply when talking about "the" monotheistic "God" or for polytheists or other people discussing (or believing in) multiple gods too?
Yeah I don't think you would capitalize a category I think. But if you're referring to a title or name it is usually capitalized. It doesn't matter if you think the entity is real or not.
That said anyone's free to write "god" as much as they want. I don't care. I just don't believe this is about grammar.
Honestly I think this is God's fault for dropping His name and just taking the title for a name. An audacious move but definitely going to be an issue. I tend to specify "their god" or "the Christian god" because I don't typically talk to "God" and when I am saying "oh god COME ON" or something, I don't mean "God" if that makes sense.
In short I try to specify. But it's much more complex than God vs god for me
I feel like this would almost exclusively punish people who are lawfully using firearms for lawful things. If I'm about to go do suicide-by-cop, what do I care if the ammunition was $100/round?
One of the few reasons I still enjoy using Instagram! Love that guys channel. I have two:
Acura no longer sells anything other than the Integra. Lexus discontinued the GS, IS (partially), the ES looks horrid, the LS (their debut model) is turning into a van/SUV apparently, and the LC is probably going soon.
The only other brand that sells a wide diversity of cars is BMW, but they've been hit and miss on their designs (although the M240i looks great, and hopefully they don't discontinue it in the next 3-4 years). The only reason you should need an SUV is if you have severe back/mobility problems. People raised people in cars for dozens of years, surely it's still possible today.
its got to be "we won" and "they lost"