I guess it depends what you mean exactly. Hated by people now? Hated by contemporaries? Hated by specifically American voters vs anyone affected by them? Total number of people who hate? Proportion of population? Intensity of hatred?

There’s also the extent to which media plays a role in this. We’re constantly aware of all the horrible shit Trump is doing, but the average person probably wouldn’t know much about say, The Trail of Tears at the time and it’s hard to say if they’d care given the way natives were portrayed to them. As for how people today look back on these people… maybe it’s just recency bias, but people don’t seem to really emotionally “hate” historical presidents as much as you’d think they should just based off what they’ve done. Slave owners, war mongers, and genocidal maniacs. People mostly know about the big stuff but… they always seem kind of disconnected from the horror of it.

So Idk. Trump is definitely up there, but depending on exactly what we’re talking about, we could probably make a good case for a few other monsters of the past.

Missed opportunity to call it the wrong thing so someone could correct it.

Thanks for the insight. That sounds pretty rough. I hope you can get better soon.

I think it depends, but it’s mostly fine. Like others have said, search algorithms have gotten enshittified and can’t always be relied on for relevant and reliable info anymore. There is of course some stuff that is so basically factual that you could probably just search the term and look at whatever pops up on Wikipedia, but most questions aren’t that simple and often require answers with context and nuance, ideally with the ability to ask follow up questions for clarification.

It’s also a bit of a social experience and sometimes you will get other related discussions growing out of the question.

However, as everyone knows, the best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to state the incorrect answer.

I agree. I’m more wondering at what point the fault occurs. Is it the action itself? The decision to drink? The point at which you drank too much to be safe?

I’m a bit confused what the issue is. I just bookmark the page and from there any links stay on the old version. Is that not working for you for some reason?

I’m always a little surprised when I look into the population MMR distribution for games I play a lot. I’m often in like the top 5% or better in the kind of games I play a lot. But… I suck at them. I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and when I look at streamers who are actually good at the game, it’s not like they’re just a more refined version of me, it’s like they’re playing a different game.

So I like to describe myself as being “the top of the trash heap.”

Oh. Apologies for the US-defaultism. That’s the context I see this in.

As for book stuff, do you have any recommendations of good recommenders? I’ve recently picked up reading novels again after kind of a while of just reading non-fiction. At the moment I’ve just been going to the library and grabbing something off the shelf a bit randomly.

Idk about other people, but I just built snacks into my schedule. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert. I’ve been told that spreading out your food intake like that is better. It all still adds up to the same calories each day and I’ve been slowly but steadily losing weight, so it’s been working for me and I don’t feel hungry much.

Thinking in terms of “need” is wrong for a business. They aren’t there to make a good product and the money is just to cover all the costs. Their goal is profit maximization. If there’s profit they could be extracting, but aren’t, they won’t make the numbers bigger and the shareholders will be sad.

Ads are a gas. They expand to fill all available space. If there’s a place an ad COULD go, then it WILL go there eventually.

It’s different for different people. At the end of the day, all the status quo needs to continue is a lack of effective organized resistance, not full support.

That said, from some anecdotal experience: Some of them just don’t care. Politics comes up with my parents a lot. They’re Democrats, but if you talk to them long enough, you realize they’re just functionally Republicans who are embarrassed by the aesthetics of the GOP. The problems they’ve had with people like Trump or Bush have essentially nothing to do with their awful policies and more to do with them looking stupid. They pretty much unquestionably support US imperialism and are depressingly Zionist. Sometimes this seems like it’s down to a lack of historical knowledge, but honestly if you push them on it enough you eventually break out of the loop of America always being the good guy to just a basic “might makes right” and “it’s us vs them” mentality which you’d normally associate with conservatives.

For example, when I’ve spoken to my Dad about Iran, his position ultimately boiled down to “They’re the bad guys. Trump should be attacking them, he’s just doing it in a stupid way that isn’t working.” The fact that the US isn’t merely not waging an effective war, but actively committing war crimes like bombing schools? Unimportant. The fact that we only have the current Iranian government because of previous US meddling? “That was so long ago.” The fact that the last time they were told a country we were targeting had WMDs, it was a lie? Doesn’t even register. When he said someone should do something about them having nukes, I asked if someone should do something about the US since we have the most nukes and he said something like “I’d like to see them try.” The fact that we are currently allied with a literal monarchy in the region? /shrug. When the conversation drifted briefly to Vietnam, he said that either we shouldn’t have gotten involved or we should have done even more. We just didn’t try hard enough to win… There are still children being born in Vietnam with birth defects due to agent orange. But yeah, we totally didn’t inflict enough violence on them.

To the extent that either of them does take an interest in history, it is almost solely through the lens of documentaries glazing the “great men” of our history while ignoring or downplaying their atrocities.

I think my analysis of their kind of politics is that they have enough shame to maintain their ignorance in order to have cover for supporting the things they actually want. You push that ignorance hard enough and the “freedom and democracy” mask slips off to reveal what amounts to little more than support for white supremacy and fascism as long as it doesn’t affect them or make them look bad.

I’m sure there are others that are simply ignorant and could be convinced with enough evidence. I suppose I was one of them. How could I not be? I grew up with the propaganda version of American history where we were the good guys, except for the times when we weren’t, but those are in the past and we’re better now. It wasn’t until near the end of HS that I started getting a more nuanced view of history and once I understood that my politics weren’t actually aligned with my values, I changed. But even then, the effects of the propaganda are so strong that even today, knowing what I know, I just don’t get the visceral reaction to these past atrocities that they deserve. I know they’re wrong, I just am so removed from them that it’s hard to fully empathize beyond a conscious, intellectual level.

There may be more types, but those are my primary experiences. People who are either currently misinformed or people who actively delude themselves so they don’t look like or believe themselves to be similar to the vulgar hicks they view the Republicans as.

EDIT: I also always want to caution against equating the voters with the people at large. The vast majority of the country doesn’t vote. Only some of that is apathetic people. A lot of people are pushed out by deliberate voter suppression tactics. I’d wager that those voters are way more likely to be anti-imperialists, but they don’t get represented by the ballots and media.

The US didn’t just magically turn out this way because everyone wanted it. From the very founding of the country, the system of government that was set up was explicitly designed to limit the influence of popular opinion. You’ve definitely learned about this in school, but it was probably framed to you in terms of “Not letting a majority oppress a minority” without explaining that the “minorities” the founders wanted to protect were white, protestant, land owning men who then turned around and oppressed all the real minorities.

Yeah, the tech thing makes sense. I used to get really excited by new pieces of tech. My first smart phone, a new game console, etc. Now? I couldn’t even tell you off hand what model iPhone I have nor what the newest one is. When will I get a new one? Probably when my old one breaks.

I think on the gaming side of things, the turning point might be around the Switch. Basically the point where Nintendo stopped experimenting with weird new things for their consoles. They basically just joined MS and Sony in releasing a standard console that could play modern games with the exception of it still having the motion controls from the Wii. The other companies also abandoned trying to do gimmick stuff like motion controls.

Something similar has been hitting me recently. I’m 30. So I was born is the last millennium, but you know, not by a lot. Most of my life has been the 20XXs. But even though it’s been 26 years of that, it just all feels so recent. Like it’s hard for me to call anything that happened after 2000 “old” because… old was last century/millennium. “That can’t be old, it happened just a few years ago!” Checks when it happened: 2012, 14 years ago…

Thinking about how we perceive the time we live through is weird. When you think about it, the lives of everyone alive today has been radically different than the vast majority of human history. There were times when things might not meaningfully change in your whole lifetime, maybe even several generations of people living the same way. Post-industrial revolution everything has happened so fast. Tech and culture changes so often that we conceptualize each decade in the 20th/21st century as being it’s own thing. (Obviously that wasn’t entirely the case, there’s all sorts of bleed over, but I’m just talking about how we think about it.) We talk about almost any other time in our history in terms of centuries and some key historical turning points.

I have now written way too much for a comment on a shitpost. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Idk. Individuals are all different and if it makes the happy juices flow then I guess it’s enjoyable for them. For me there are a handful of people that’s true for but for most other interactions I feel similar to you.

That said: Humans developed a brain that could invent languages to make it easier to communicate and coordinate with each other. It’s probably up there with tool usage for advantages we had. So I don’t think it should be that surprising that our brains usually reward us for it if everything is going right.

To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.

The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.

EDIT: I thought of some more:

• Ascendance of a Bookworm: A woman is reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world. She loves books, but can’t get any because without the printing press books are super expensive. So she sets out to make her own. There’s a lot more going on in the story as well as them eventually getting into magic stuff, but at least the first part or spends a decent amount of time talking about different methods of writing, printing, etc.

• A Place Further Than the Universe: A group of girls go on a trip to Antarctica with a research team. So you get to learn a bit about the place and everything that goes into preparing to get there and survive.

• Keep You Hands off Eizouken: About making anime/animation.

• Golden Kamuy: Historical fiction set in the northern parts of sometime after the Russo-Japanese War during the Meiji period. You end up learning a lot about the Indigenous people who lived there before Japan basically wiped them out.

• I didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep watching, but there was a whole anime that was just about the author’s obsession with this one specific model of moped. It’s called “Super Cub.” You want to see an anime girl read the user manual for an old scooter and then fix it with a lot of detail? This is your show I guess.

I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an anime about trains. I know of one set on a train, but the particulars of how the train works isn’t the focus, it’s just the vehicle that gets them from one story to another. If anyone knows of any I’d love to hear it.

I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade since I first got a gaming PC. I’ve only ever replaced it when the last one was broken enough to not be worth trying to repair.

The funny thing is, these days maybe 85% of my time gaming is spent playing games that absolutely don’t need all the processing power I have. It is nice to be able to play the occasional AAA game, but all of them have looked fine to me. I haven’t really thought “damn this could look/run so much better if I spent another thousand dollars or so.”

I’ve actually been joking with friends about the unnecessary level of detail in some of these games. I was streaming God of War Ragnarok for them and we zoomed in on Kratos’ head and we joked about how some guy had to model the wrinkles on the back of his head/neck when it never matters and you only notice it when you’re going out of your way to zoom in on the details.

Games have reached a level of detail that is more than enough to convey any gameplay or narrative sufficiently. There’s nothing to keep pace with and I’m just hoping this one lasts long enough to avoid the price spike.

Others have good answers, but I wanted to add something that’s overlapping with this topic, especially since you mentioned anime.

I’ve watched quite a bit of anime since college when my friends got me into it. Recently I’ve been showing some anime to my mom based on things I like and which I think she would like. She commented that she thinks anime seems to have a lot of women in it.

To some extent this is skewed by my selection of shows for her, but it got me thinking. At least from my own personal experience, there do seem to be a lot more women in anime than you see in western media. There are many shows with female protagonists or all female cast and even the ones with a male protagonist frequently feature a prominent supporting cast of women.

While they do tend to get over-sexualized, there are plenty of shows where that isn’t the case and even when they do get objectified, there are a lot of them in strong or at least traditionally non-feminine roles. This is a medium where magical girls, battle maids, lady knights, female professionals and leaders are fairly well worn tropes. There are also definitely a lot of them that could be described as Mary Sues because they are just super powerful/competent at whatever they do.

At least from what I have personally observed, I haven’t seen nearly as much misogynist complaining about the prominence of women in these roles. But maybe that’s just the discussion sites that I visit. I also haven’t really done any kind of rigorous counting of shows with predominantly female casts, but they do seem to make up A LOT of the shows I have watched and enjoyed. So maybe this observation is just the result of a bias in my own viewing habits.

idk. I’d be curious to see what others have observed and thought about this. Maybe I’m way off base.

Oh yeah I saw the whole Theranos thing. I know a lot of this stuff isn’t possible for now at least. I was just curious if in principle there are physical things stopping this from ever being reality or not. I remember part of the thing with Theranos was something about the machines not even being big enough for the size of the things they were looking at or something like that.

I guess the portable part is less what I was interested in than the possibility of being able to diagnose more things just by waving some sensors over the body instead of needing to cut someone open or stick a camera in them or take some blood, etc.

Die of some random common illness we don’t have any antibodies for.

Hopefully a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be mindful of that kind of thing though. I suppose at least they would probably be protecting themselves against that, so maybe it would go both ways?