Well if it wasn’t you then I apologize.

Yes I was about 20 when mobiles took off. But my “rhetoric” wasn’t proved wrong or right. It was just my perspective. You can have yours too and that’s fine.

Somewhat true if you have anyone left who wants to talk to you by email.

First people stopped using it for socializing, and now it’s slowly on the way out for work communication too IME. Not secure enough. Better to use a secure messenger which requires login. And personally I quite like this, assuming the messenger is on the web and requires no software install.

The reality is that the main surviving use case for email is as a notification engine.

By downvoting my comment you’re saying you don’t care what I have to say. So that’s the end of this debate. Good night.

From an Atlantic article yesterday:

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

want to reschedule something on the fly

Yeah it certainly got easier to be late and generally not keep commitments, that’s for sure.

I do agree that communication when out and about is a genuine killer feature. It’s was the original use case after all. But doomscrolling social media, or banking, or shopping, or playing dumb games, or most of the other things I watch people doing in public - personally I am never going to buy the argument that this is about “convenience”. To me it’s pretty obvious that it’s just addiction and irrational social contagion.

Almost all of these things can be done from a computer, siting in comfort at home. And some of them, i.e. communication, are even more pleasant that way. The supposed convenience of the mobile form factor is mainly a function of habit. I speak from experience, having mostly kicked that habit.

The “emergency” argument is particularly tiring BS IMO. Somehow we managed for all of history until basically yesterday without this functionality and got by just fine.

The fact that technology exists is not in itself a reason to adopt it. If only we would learn this lesson at last. Rant over.

I would prefer that “wrong” people without “proper education” be countered with arguments rather than jeering.

After all, without arguments, who is to say that the person who’s wrong is not the one jeering?

To me it reads more as someone who is jaded, cynical, perhaps a bit wounded by other people’s attacks on them and projecting their insecurity and frustration about that.

IMO very few people are assholes by nature. If we can create an atmosphere, and tools, that encourage civility, then we will get civility.

at least person gets the idea that opinion is in fact unpopular

And why is that important?

Interesting. Of course, “obnoxious” and “in love with their own voice” are highly personal judgements that are pretty vulnerable to motivated reasoning. In other words: if they were making a point that you happened to agree with, perhaps you wouldn’t think those things.

Downvoting is intolerance made cheap. It’s a button to say: “You’re wrong, I don’t care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP”. If you did the equivalent of downvoting in an in-person discussion, you would be an asshole.

But what really annoys me personally (someone else mentions it) is that downvoting reduces the visibility of the downvoted opinion. It’s literally soft censorship.

I regularly leave discussions after receiving cheap downvotes in return for my carefully considered contribution. It’s a statistical certainty that I’m not the only one.

Downvoters should consider the opportunity cost of their actions for the quality of the discussion they are taking part in.

THIS is the reason.

Downvoting is literally a form of censorship. It’s the virtual equivalent of shouting someone down.

It was never popular even in France, for a simple reason: the week became 10 days but the weekly rest day was still only 1.

Vocabulary is loaded. The words “rich” and “poor” conflate munificence with success or happiness. When we see an injured animal and say, “That poor creature!”, we are obviously not talking about its bank account. By the same token, being short of money is a problem but it absolutely does not make you a “failure”.

Same experience. And it’s a shame.

And yet I’ve found that, occasionally, after I brace myself for the blowback, instead there comes a thoughtful reply which assumes good faith. It’s those occasions which keep me coming back.

All the people here saying, “Just block them” - personally I just can’t help suspecting that these are the same people who themselves are insulting and abusing others, who in turn are saying “Just block them”.

The solution is not that everyone blocks everyone else. The solution is that we behave civilly and respectfully to each other.

IIRC a quarter of the Republican ad spending was on that single ad, “The Democrats are for ‘they/them’, Trump is for YOU”. It was that effective.

I don’t care much who is right morally. America’s culture wars are almost an irrelevance to me as a foreigner. I care because it’s skewing American elections. Trump is about to pull out of the climate accord and it will be partly because of this. That is just a crazy situation. You guys need to turn down the temperature. On the Democrat side that means less moralizing and hectoring because it is very visibly driving the other side crazy. It’s not worth it.

In polls and focus groups, the voters themselves say otherwise.

If you tell Americans outside cosmopolitan cities they must declare themselves publicly as “cis het” or else they’re a bigot (I caricature but only slightly), then you should expect to lose elections.

And American elections tend to affect other people in the world. That’s why lots of us wish you would let up a bit on this nonsense.

That’s an interesting take. Declaring one’s pronouns as a way to announce one’s presence (or not) in a dating pool. Okay, but personally I doubt that’s the main driver. After all, in the internet era, finding one’s tribe is as easy as two taps on a screen. Gay guys can now have as much sex as they want without any third party even knowing, as you must be aware. I certainly am, indeed I speak from experience. So this phenomenon of needing to wear jargon and pronouns on one’s sleeve, I think it has other causes, mainly.