Maybe a staffer called the wrong takeout and delivery number.

Agents provocateurs have been with us all along. It’s an old tactic. I have run into some myself.

What’s new is algorithmic manipulation.

• regular, persistent, angry protests (necessary and foundational)
• small, medium, large organizations in coalition, loosely coordinated, some ad hoc
• pressure and advocacy at all scales of government
• strong, educational and propagandistic cultural surge across all forms of media
• a meaningful conversation at most kitchen tables, and coalition of former adversaries
• a vanguard of shitdisturber vandals and saboteurs to draw ire and attention in useful ways (dumb fucks usually mess this up, the circleA tattoo is so shallow)
• critical mass, then the changes just cascade

This is how history teaches us about change. Read Antonio Gramsci, it’s useful.

Yes, analogous to drug companies emphasizing treatment over cure.

Fortunately, we also educate each other daily through casual and professional encounters, so we can work towards a culture that appreciates education.

Ummmm, the “education” vaccine is pretty effective with the right ingredients.

Thank you!

It is important to remember while Alberta’s carbon emissions are very high, it is not their most toxic export.

That honour goes to The Right Dishonourable Stephen Harper, whose guidance of the deceptively named International Democracy Union will send ripples of suffering and extinction throughout the timeline.

Well, we all have varying degrees of parochialism in our local outlook.

It’s also, in the simplest way, incompetent.

All those weeds provide some ecological service in some way. If you look at my yard and note it’s covered in tall straggly white flowers, you could say weedy, and be right. I would clarify that wild carrots are helping convert our heavy clay soil into good tilth, and supporting a massive number of pollinators and pest predators.

And why would we put up with yellow dock going to seed everywhere? It’s the most nutritious chicken fodder, and it also gives tilth to heavy clay.

Don’t get me started about dandelion!!

It takes way more work to build something than tear it down. Keep it up!

I fear that standard civics and activism isn’t going to be enough. The culture has to shift away from cults and individualistic myths.

Thank you for your sacrifice in this matter.

You attribute an uneducated, uncivil approach to human nature, but I have been in human queues around the world, and they vary hugely based on cultural and social differences.

What you think is human nature seems to actually be driving culture in your region.

Yesterday I had a swasticar driver actually let me in on a disorderly merge. I was amazed, it was a first. Clue: nothing about Hondas changes people to be better. Tesla and BMW drivers are just shittier at sharing. This is culturally allowed.

Well yes, society functions only with cooperation. Uncivil behaviour ends with violence and dismay.

However 3s usually allows for slow adjustments which alleviate caterpillaring.

3 fucking seconds

The answer is a simple 3 second gap.

That’s it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.

CS grads are in the worst position ever. University is often mistaken for vocational education, however that would be a technical college.

I have spent a lot of time crossing between a practical education environment, aimed at production skills, and university, aimed at thinking ability and abstract skills.

Honestly, my experience is that students are much more capable in a production environment after a two week boot camp than after three years of university on a roughly parallel topic. However, the non-idiots in the academic case will be able to understand arguments about the context of what they are doing better.

The point is that a philosophy degree might be more employable than a CS degree in some situations. The dude who cofounded Flickr and Slack was working off of an english degree. Use your degree for understanding and some projects for knowledge.

I also have a humanities degree and work in IT, with a wide range of applied skills I learned from necessity instead of a prof.

So create the necessity for skills by making useful shit, or even just fixing things. Find friends and make a silly app. Volunteer at a nonprofit and improve their CRM database. Build a homelab that you share with roommates. Find the local permacomputing group and help them turn all those shitty win10 obsolete machines into sleek linux machines. Ignore money and employment as task criteria for a few years, or freelance IT gigs.

Solve real world problems for real experience.

Or, like, you know, they got bumped and it’s get a hotel or fly another airline.

I dunno, but I’ll buy Algernon some flowers if you’d like.

One shitpost meme video in your downloads folder = hundreds of Word docx files. Pick the low hanging fruit.