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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I can’t imagine getting worked up about it either, but then the whole mildly infuriating deliberate oxymoron turn of phrase is that it’s something that should only really be a little annoying but which nonetheless is really quite annoying. It’s a type of silent frustration where you feel it, but you don’t really express it or visibly react.

    In terms of what should they have put on these screens? If they felt they absolutely had to do this or really thought it might help make people’s situations feel even a modicum of improvement, then the glib messages could maybe have focussed on something other than gratitude as their common theme. It hardly seems like the appropriate time to bring that up. By their nature, any cheesy and overly broad phrase is probably going to have a sadly ironic and patronising tone to it in the circumstances but maybe something like “hang in there” or just about anything except what they went with has got to better.






  • I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a “sister” airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.

    During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn’t involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn’t even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.

    I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it’s just a question of knowing the magic URL.




  • Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn’t go there very often because, well, it’s just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I’d see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I’d never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it’s disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.

    A few years later I returned there, I can’t remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it’d gone a lot more normal. It’s a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it’s useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it’d settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there’d been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I’ve not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn’t have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it’s gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.






  • At least it’s broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the ‘continued’ section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it’s encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don’t want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it’s hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the “impairment” especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.


  • I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.