VoxAdActa

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

Oh, but you do! I’m one of those autistic people who can’t fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.

There’s no way to turn off the notification without either clicking “Ignore” or “Reply” (maybe it’s “Accept”). It doesn’t go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.

a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?

RIGHT? AND, AND! It’s a chat where you can’t get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

Yes, motherfuckers, I do demand that all of my morals and beliefs be as close to 100% internally consistent as possible, and yes, I actually believe them all the time. Who are these assholes saying hypocrisy and amoral selfishness are fucking good things?

As is tradition with everything posted as a cool guide.

Glass is half full!

…because the top half boiled off…

I am not a finance guy; this is my kindergarten-level understanding of the situation:

When the interest rates were hovering down around 0%, it was a no-brainer for VC firms to shotgun money out to everyone who walked past their office building. Most VC money doesn’t come from some rich dude’s pocket; it comes from banks and hedge funds and other deeply-market-tied entities. If any one startup they’ve invested in can win the profit lottery, the VCers will massively beat the rate of return they’d get for anything else. One big success can cover a dozen small failures, and, anyway, a business isn’t a failure until it’s a failure.

Now that interest rates are rapidly moving higher, those startup investments are less of a good deal. VC money is more expensive. VC firms are starting to close out their positions on start-ups that aren’t beating them market, because they want to stick their money somewhere more reliably profitable.

Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

The following is a dramatization

“Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
“… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

“When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
“…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”

Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with “it’s not a lie if you actually believe it,” in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like “Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing…” is so gross. It’s like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.

My username finally fits in somewhere!

DING!

“Huh, a text. I’ll get to that later.”

DING!

“Another one? That’s concerning.”

DING! DING! DING!

“Fuck this is must be some kind of emergency! I need to park my forklift and read this right now!”

It’s bamboo