Ask Lemmy

Phantom hatred. Imagine for a moment, someone is calm, consistent, and composed one moment. You then walk into the room and it's as if a curse causes the otherwise stoic individual to be overcome by a visible dislike for you. You examine yourself and can't pinpoint whatever about you could cause this, but it happens wherever you go. In short, something unknown and unexplainable about you causes people to act out of their principles in the worst way, like reverse charisma applied to mass hysteria. If a schoolteacher is lenient enough to only give detentions for big misdeeds, by this phenomenon, your luck finds yourself with a suspension. If you know an officer who is lenient enough to give only community service for things as major as vandalism, by this luck, imagine them giving you a few weeks in jail and all it can be chalked up to is this metaphorical voice that directs people into hating you. And yet not a single person lets their rationale be spoken aloud.

Speed humps. On my daily 5km drive, there are about a dozen of them each way.

I have a 900kg car with sports suspension, and I need to slow almost to a stop for many of them.

Meanwhile people in 2500kg road-blimps are blasting through without slowing.

Most are bumps in the road that taper on the sides. Vehicles with a wide enough wheelbase miss them amlost entirely, whereas my 1.6m wide car gets launched into the air.

The greater the kill capacity of your vehicle, the less you are affected by these "safety" devices.

I work in a manufacturing facility where the assemblers, mechanics, machinists, and technicians, are unionized. My white collar, not unionized colleagues simultaneously express jealousy about the benefits the union members get while also saying they shouldn't exist while also complaining their own salaries are too low and not keeping up with inflation.

My dudes, this is what unions are for. If I worked one of the covered jobs, I would join the union in a heartbeat.

Join them, don't try to tear them down.

People. "This is fine, the world is fine, our societies inverse robin hood economy is fine, climate change is no big deal, ecosystem collapse is no big deal, wars? Those are overseas and we're not in them. Yeah, we'll be fine."

Stupid doctors. Starting in the medical field, I had this notion that a doctor is this kind of universally intelligent, best-of-humanity kind of person.

Some of them are.

But some of them are absolute dumbasses who happen to have a photographic memory that carried them through med school... Like, full blown trumpanzee, falls for conspiracy theory bullshit, superstitious nutjob, knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed idiot.

It shouldn't be possible. No one who makes it through med school should be mentally capable of instantly plummeting to the rock-bottom of stupid as soon as they step foot outside of their field of study (which fortunately most of those types deliver at least passable quality of care).

University bureaucracy

Donald Trump is not only running for president again, he might actually win.

Executives from non-IT companies joining internal IT planning meetings.

So where I live (US) we have carpool lanes - not on the highway, but on regular commuter roads, city blocks, mostly commercial but also some residential areas. These appear on the right-hand lane. You know, the turning lane, where other vehicles are turning onto the road, or turning off of it, where there are intersections and entries for parking lots and driveways and such.

These lanes make no sense whatsoever. I can't even imagine the logic behind how they were designed. There's no benefit to being a carpool driving in this lane, because you will always be slowed down by other vehicles turning onto the road or off of it, so there's no incentive to carpool. There's no way to enforce these carpool lanes because anyone stopped by a police officer could just claim that they were going to turn at the next intersection, so ticketing non-carpool drivers is impractical.

I can only assume that this was an idea that sounded good on paper to somebody, but was never reviewed by anyone who had actually driven on a road in their life. I understand the logic behind carpool lanes on the highway (in theory, though they're not particularly effective in practice), but I can't understand these, or why they've continued to exist for more than a year.

Housing prices and incomes.... Absolute insanity

Reality itself: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” —Niels Bohr

Lemmy and the users of Lemmy.

My father

Politicians

Older generations