#culture engineering

[balioc]

Since most people are producers as well as consumers, there's a real and substantial tradeoff for most people between "increasing the bounty of the world by making production more efficient" and "making production suck less for those engaged in it."

...this tends to get obscured, of course, by the fact that there are generalized economic measures for productivity and bounty but (mostly) not for suckitude-of-work. Also - as leftists love to point out - by the fact that the people with the most power and influence in the system have, let's say, very nonstandard circumstances when it comes to issues of work-suckitude.

Still and all. Probably worth trying to tackle the whole thing on an abstract ideological level, rather than getting caught up in a thousand tiny situational battles.

[themadkiing]

[weareravershq]

[jastervhett]

Boba Fett VS Jodo Kast: Twin Engines of Destruction

Boba Fett (To Jodo Kast): "You're NO one! Not Dala, not Shysa! NOBODY!" - Star Wars Twin Engines of Destruction

Always ❤️ this line. It showed that Boba knew of Tobbi Dala & Fenn Shysa AND he also knew what they looked like. Proving that Boba was well aware of not only his Mandalorian heritage but also well-known/ important Mandalorian figures….

And I ❤️ how Boba upheld the Mandalorian Tradition of reclaiming/ removing Mandalorian Armor from all encountered individuals that are Non-Mandalorian (Similar to how Din Djarin repossessed Boba Fett's Armor from Cobb Vanth).

And last but not least, I can't leave out the classic Boba Fett line: "This IS my face."

[toyastales]

1957 Facel Vega FV3 Coupé

https://whatyoulookingatnow.blogspot.com/2025/05/1957-facel-vega-fv3-coupe.html

[surrah698]

[thesilicontribesman]

Roman Bronze Double-Action Water-Pump, Probably 3rd Century CE From Bolsena, Italy, The British Museum, London

This pump had two pistons (a), which were raised and lowered by a rocking-beam (b). The pistons were housed in two cylinders (c). At the bottom of each cylinder was a non-return valve (d).

When one of the pistons was raised, the valve was pushed open and the water rose inside the cylinder. When the piston reached its highest point the valve closed, trapping the water inside the cylinder.

On its downward stroke, the piston forced the water out through a side pipe (e). It then passed through a second valve (f) into the central discharge pipe (g), where it drained away.

[ourstoatmeansdeath]

I've seen a few posts from people who think Henry was being shitty to Gorgug or setting Gorgug up to fail by allowing him to do 3 years of the artificer track at once. But I have a lot of experience in STEM, and I think Henry was being incredibly kind in a very engineering-coded way.

I did an undergrad degree in engineering and have been in STEM spaces for more than 10 years. And the STEM way of being an asshole is much more like what Porter did. So many people who don't look like they fit the stereotype of who belongs in STEM have been explicitly told to leave. Like, I was at a conference last year where a presenter asked all the people in the room who had been told to change their major to raise their hands. And there were lots of us with raised hands. (This was in a diversity equity and inclusion session, so a lot of non-traditional looking people for engineering.) If Henry wanted to be an asshole he would tell Gorgug to leave, or that the curriculum was "rigorous" and half-orcs can't usually hack it, etc. But he didn't!

Henry did the classic STEM thing of laying out all of the options, even the ones that aren't desirable. Since Porter won't sign the MCAT, the reasonable options are all gone. Henry mentioned that Gorgug doesn't need to be in school for artificing to be an artificer ("If artificing is something that brings you joy and brings happiness to your life, you don't need school. You can do that on your own.") Which is NOT something that STEM people do. I've never heard an engineering professor say that someone who does STEM stuff as a hobby can call themselves engineers. Henry is being absurdly kind by saying this.

When Gorgug says that he wants to do artificing in school, Henry gives the option to do all three years of school at once. [Note that Henry did not suggest this at first. Henry didn't offer it until Gorgug basically asked for a loophole.] This reminds me so much of all the STEM people who know a system really well and give you advice on how to navigate it. They note that their path isn't what the system was designed to do, but if you really want to do it you could do it this way. Which is exactly what Henry does. This also gives Gorgug the agency to decide for himself.

Henry also goes out of his way to say that the people who work hard are the ones he would bet on. This is also so nice as a STEM person! I can't tell you the number of professors I had who said that a specific problem shouldn't take long, or "if you're efficient you should be fine." I also had a professor who said some people can code and some people can't, and he didn't know how to help the people who don't have a natural aptitude for coding. Henry saying he thinks Gorgug can achieve this through hard work is super enlightened for a STEM instructor.

tl;dr Henry is incredibly enlightened for a STEM instructor. He tells Gorgug that Gorgug can still be an artificer without formal schooling, and then when Gorgug expresses a desire for the formal education he tells Gorgug the path. If Henry does a heel turn I will be emotionally devastated lol

[sthilarions]

Okay I’m never gonna write the fic that is written in my ideas file as “save a horse ride a cowboy/he thinks my tractor’s sexy”

I’m never gonna write it so it’s irrelevant that Edwin grows heritage crops and is at the cutting edge of small-scale organic farming techniques, he’s listed as a co-author on a dozen different papers, which he worked on while sitting perched in the raised bucket attachment of the aforementioned tractor

it’s not relevant that Charles kept coming by on his horse and interrupting him, standing up on the saddle to get his head roughly level with Edwin’s to ask him about what he was doing (and not at all to impress him obviously of course)

no reason to mention that Charles ended up as a co-author on a paper, the BA standing out in the list

or that Charles’s horse has gotten very used to being ground-tied next to Edwin’s tractor so his rider can hop up on the bucket next to some weird human

or that the next paper they co-author, Charles’s name has an MS, which didn’t even take him longer than two years to get even though he was doing it long-distance, which he says is because he had a lot of free time to work on stuff while out sitting by bob-wahr fences under beating sun making his eyes dance, and curled up in the back of his F-150 under the stars. it was probably easier for him than most people, he says, if asked, with a loose grin

And it definitely doesn’t matter that the next paper after that, he and Edwin have the same last name.

(The cowboy church* that Charles went to for social reasons refused to let them marry there, which they’d expected but Charles felt it was the right thing to do to ask anyway, but that was alright, because the pastor, Charlie, went rogue and agreed to officiate for them outside of the church, so they got married out on Edwin’s back 40, the ranch dogs and farm cats running around under the feet of the half dozen guests, the other weirdos in the area, and the fiddler played til dawn)

*Cowboy churches are a real thing, this is not a joke.

Another bit of relevant cultural context is that none of the cowboys I grew up with had four year degrees. That Charles starts out with a BA means that while he’s under-credentialed for an academic setting, he’s simultaneously already over-educated for his own cultural context, and probably spends a lot of time getting mockingly called “professor” by his ‘friends’ and remembering not to use overly fancy words and so forth.

Also he probably tries to avoid Zoom calls because having a noticeably rural accent around academics is Fraught, he checks his emails twice to make sure he hasn’t typed ‘y’all’

I am not writing this and I therefore do not know that Charles’s MS is from A&M, which is both the best university for his field and so virulently homophobic that I have a lot of acquaintances who had to drop out from there specifically because of that, and that the co-authored papers were on the topic of using animals for sustainable agriculture, like using Lacewings to manage aphids, and goats to manage invasive flora; Charles's knowledge of animal husbandry and Edwin's knowledge of sustainable agriculture meeting in the middle

If I were actually writing this as a fic, I’d mention things like the instability and draconian download caps of HughesNet that mean if Charles needs to download a big file like a recorded lecture he has to set an alarm for 3AM to download it during the unthrottled grace hour; the laptop running out of charge out in that truck bed, Charles using money he doesn’t have to buy a converter so he can charge it off the F-150

how he was doing homework under the stars not because it’s romantic but because if he gets out of the cab and parks on top of the tallest hill he might be able to get line of sight to a tower and hotspot off his phone (and worry about the bill later); about how he can only work for brief periods at a time during the day because the sun will make his laptop overheat, how he keeps an ice chest full of Nordic Ice in the back seat of the truck not just for water but so he can pop his laptop in there to cool it down; how he overclocks that shitty laptop making it run data analysis in R; how he rations his gas so he can turn on the AC once in a while and charge his laptop and still be able to drive home.

How Charles and Edwin started carpooling for the hour-long drive each way to the grocery store for the monthly stock of jugs of bottled water, that they need because the leaky water pipes they and their neighbors maintain themselves (because no government or corporate guy is gonna come out there) run under cow pastures and pesticide-laced fields and septic tanks and the tap water isn't safe even boiled, and they use the couple of hours in the truck to bounce ideas off each other, a laptop balanced on the truck's center console, pausing only to touch their hats when they pass another truck.

…but I’m not writing it, so.

[balioc]

If you provide no incentive to Do the Thing, then very often people just won't Do the Thing.

If you provide an incentive to Do the Thing, then very often people will Do the Thing just because they want the incentive, and they'll do it in the most mercenary and antisocial way possible.

These are both, potentially, huge problems. These are both looming failure states.

(It gets super mega obvious with parenting, right? We have a ton of kids who need people to raise them -- orphans, children of abusive families, etc. This need, when it arises, is a desperate need. Having someone not show up to meet it is really really really bad. And parenting clearly isn't something that you can just make people do coercively, not if you want good results, so you need volunteers. But: if you hear the words "this person is raising kids for the money," the scenario that comes to mind is also really really really bad.)

A lot of high-level policy engineering must consist of wrestling with this nightmare dilemma, making judgments about the least-bad place on a spectrum of awfulness, and tinkering with the incentive structure accordingly.

A lot of high-level social engineering, in the ideal case, consists of finding ways to change culture and values so that you can transcend the dilemma, by inducing people to Do the Thing through methods other than direct incentives. (Or, alternatively, by reallocating a rare and precious resource -- The Right People -- to the problem of Thing-Doing. But a lot of folks are allergic to that kind of thinking these days.)

A lot of really dumb discourse consists of people understanding one of the maxims above but not the other one.

[cosmicportal]

Hemudu culture - China

[themadkiing]

[sundialdotjpeg]

I LOVE BEING BLACK I LOVE HAVING A BLACK DOCTOR I LOVE NCUTI I LOVE DOCTOR WHOOOO

[heilos]

I have come to the annoying conclusion that many search engines are becoming super useless in trying to track down historical research without bending over backwards for answers. The amount of garbage that shows up in the results is so incredibly aggravating and has nothing to do with my search terms or questions. I cannot in fact "just use X search engines" apparently.

[kenyatta]

‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine (NYT)

There have long been figures behind the scenes shaping public opinion about celebrities — through gossip columns, tabloids and strategic interviews. The documents show an additional playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era. While the film, about domestic violence, was a box office hit — making nearly $350 million worldwide — online criticism of the actress skyrocketed. “He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Ms. Nathan wrote. In the following weeks, Ms. Nathan, whose clients have included Johnny Depp and the rappers Drake and Travis Scott, went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Ms. Lively, the text messages show. Jed Wallace, a self-described “hired gun,” led a digital strategy that included boosting social media posts that could help their cause. [...] Three days later, Mr. Baldoni texted Ms. Abel, flagging a social media thread that accused another celebrity of bullying behavior and had generated 19 million views. “This is what we would need,” he wrote. Ms. Nathan soon floated proposals to hire contractors to dominate social media through “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change narrative.” “All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” she wrote. [...] It is unclear exactly how Mr. Wallace operated. There are references in emails to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages cite efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was favorable to Mr. Baldoni or critical of Ms. Lively. “We are crushing it on Reddit,” Mr. Wallace told Ms. Nathan, according to a text she sent Ms. Abel on Aug. 9. The next day, one of Ms. Nathan’s employees texted, “We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative.” Ms. Nathan wrote to Ms. Abel: “And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” When a TikTok sleuth started asking questions about Mr. Baldoni, Ms. Abel texted that “this girl is on a very dangerous crusade.”

[aro-culture-is]

Aro culture is doing your final project in school on amatonormativity! And needing at least five peer-reviewed articles on the subject so if anyone has any suggestions (especially ones available for free)…

I'd definitely start by citing Elizabeth Brake herself, https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/

unfortunately, i am not a humanities major and I'm unsure what journals are best for y'all. perhaps try searching @jstor for papers?