gbzm

When you mix paint, you mix pigments that each absorb certain colors, so they won’t reflect it. You’re subtracting colors to the ambient white light that reflects a smaller and smaller portion of the spectrum on the painted surface, and if you mix enough colors you substract most of it and get a dark brown or even black. When you encode rgb values for a screen, you tell pixels to add colors to the light your screen is generating, and if you add enough you get a white light.

I’ve been in similar situations in large or semi-large chat channels when you want to adhere to something and give the possibility to others to adhere similarly without flooding the channel with messages simply saying “me too”. So attaching an emoji reaction feels more adequate, that way anyone can just append their own and you can see groupal adhesion directly. Sometimes 💯 works, but it sometimes doesn’t.

EDIT: the more I think on it, the more an emoji saying “+1” feels like it should fill that need when 💯 doesn’t. Maybe someone should propose this to the Unicode consortium

“Lapel” was an interesting find. That and “development” really hammered in the importance of accentuation. I’m still unsure of what I want to do with “schedule”. “Burger” sometimes sounds off when I say it.

They’re not entirely wrong, of course, but they’re really stretching this simple stereotype into some deep difference in psychologies and assigning it to this “concept of a marketplace of idea vs. rationality and enlightenment” oversimplification.

Honestly, as a European person who’s been through bits of both school systems, it mainly sound like an uninformed rant from an American who’s angry with the state of the US and who’s completely idealized Europe as a result – even though their only vista into EU cultures is a bunch of titles of unread articles from the part of the US media they most agree with.

Which would be fine if they hadn’t worded what amounts to an overindulged shower thought in such a peremptory fashion.

Basically they behaved like their own stereotype of “american psychology”, which we do have quite enough of at home thank you very much.

It looks like the blowback is less about one side beinng better or worse than the other, and more about this whole thesis sounding like the most obnoxious fourteen year old you’ve ever met larping as a sociologist with zero substantiation to their sweeping statements

That it’s pretty shit from the bottom up. Boring Lagrangian giving rise through great efforts of complexity to an endless dead void. On a mote of dust somewhere, there’s a soup of unusual chemicals making short lived bubbles of flesh that are compelled to eat each other for survival. Some of them organized into a System; it’s bad. It can change for the better or the worse, in increments, if enormous emergent collective efforts are made. On the individual level, though, existence is either painful or less painful but more boring if you’re lucky. But generally you don’t think about it and just kill time waiting for death.

I’m not very big on life myself, but to me that’s only superficially what this is about. To me it seems the negative reaction you get is because “life is boring” is an expression of personal suffering first, and a judgment about an objective, intrinsic quality of the very concept of existence second. So you have to be careful when you want to argue that boredom is not an intrinsic quality of existence because you end up invalidating an expression of personal suffering, which is generally considered gauche.

Second, your arguments in favour of life not being boring generalizes conditions that may not be everyone’s. The ability to change jobs, move, find new friends, etc. is not necessarily universal. People who struggle with depression, in particular, may feel that your argument boils down to “pull yourself by your bootstraps”. People who are in situations of economic or social servitude will feel it comes from a situation of personal privilege.

I wouldn’t want to convince you that life is boring, it’s a good thing that you enjoy your existence, and the very fact that you enjoy it is a proof by example. That said, I think your approach to trying to make people find good in their own lives by convincing them sight unseen that their bad experience with it is their own fault is misguided.