Story time, boys and girls.

When I joined the Army and went to basic training, one of the first things they did was show us how to stand at attention, at-ease, right face, left face, and about face. Then they turned the training unit and marched off.

And then stopped and screamed at us for marching like Nazis.

Turns out, you don't see US soldiers marching like that because it's stupid as hell, and you can't do it for twenty miles with a rucksack. The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn't help you do war.

So we learned how to march like Americans, which is much more casual. The only thing you've gotta do is make sure you match the stride length of the soldier in front of you, but even that is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. We got good, though, because we were assholes.

We would ease out behind someone who was walking somewhere and roughly the same height, and step slightly faster than the person in front of us, until we were close behind them. Then you perform a little skip at the last second to get back to the same stride and close the last few inches. The end result is that your chest is hovering about an inch from their back, your nose is an inch from the back of their head, and your hands are swinging right behind theirs. While walking at full speed.

You haven't had a jump scare until you've marched two blocks, turned your head, and glimpsed someone's face an inch from your own.

Once upon a time I had a whole conversation with a guy about whether the pyramids were made by aliens. He had an issue with the size of the blocks, so I explained how it was likely done-

• Local quarry chips the blocks out of the rock, wedging them to fall directly onto rollers (logs).
• Workers move rollers from the back of the block to the front while oxen pull the block itself slowly to the pyramid.
• Block is slowly driven up a very long, gradual ramp to the work site, where it is wedged into place.

His gotcha response - where did they get the rope? So I had to explain that ropes have existed much longer than nylon.

Other people in the comments are mentioning incentives, low pay, crappy management, etc. I don't want to work, but it's not really about any of this, or it's about all of this a little, sort of.

I want to do good work.

I want to make software that helps people, that does what it's supposed to do, that is fast, non-predatory, and doesn't succumb to endless feature creep or artificially rushed scheduling. Pay me enough to live comfortably, and I'll do this basically on my own. I don't even need all of these things.

I've found that most businesses prioritize between 0-1 of these things.

I slashed the inside of my thigh open with a pocket knife once. It must have missed the artery by half an inch, maybe, although I didn't know it at the time. I had, at this point, been hurt so many times that I closed the knife, put down the piece of wood I had been whittling on, and wandered into the house to ask my mom what to do.

She said "oh my God! Your new pants!"

And then we duct taped my leg back together because we didn't have insurance, and we didn't want to sit in the ER waiting room for the rest of the day.

My girlfriend: "more like cracker barrel"

Scope.

Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like "well that's just one guy." I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.

But you are not wrong. I am wrong.

Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.

Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you're saying there's a chance, right? This is why we don't react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.

We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.

My girlfriend has a theory that he's trying to destroy the platform deliberately. I disagreed with her until he renamed it to X lol

I appreciate your vital contribution to this discussion.

I hope one day we can move past this kind of bullshit. Who gives a shit if she's doing porn on the side?

Why does he have a slash in between C# and C++? Those languages are unrelated except in the philosophical sense.

The videos were pretty standard sex between her and her husband. Honestly, it'd be cool if they just owned it- respond to gotcha questions at debates etc with a shrug and a "yeah, so?" explain how to tip through the various platforms and then give people links. Seems like reacting as if it's shameful just gives right-wing scolds leverage.