This is worse in some industries (academia. Academia is fucked), and I hear it is even worse in the US, but my god is this ever frustrating…
It really shows you how low people think of you, when you’ve worked with them for some time/think they know you moderately well, and then you ask them for a reference, and they either flat out ignore you, or claim not to even know you “well enough”… 😔
Teachers (well, lecturers, tutors, et al) are particularly bad for this - “Oh, I worked with you on and off for a year. Soz lol, still don’t know you from a bar of soap.”
Look, I get it - it takes a degree of effort, and no one wants to be held accountable for “vouching” for someone else anymore, but fuck, everything requires them - Grad School, jobs, internships, everything.
If no one is willing to (legitimately) provide something so basic, how the fuck is anyone expected to even take that next career step??
This seems much, much worse than when I was last in this position (asking for academic references), 8 years ago, too…
Didn’t think we had slid that much, as a society, in that time, but… Yeah. 😔
Stupidly hard to work around, FML.
I’m talking firstly physical “safety”, as exemplified by (in the city I’m currently visiting) the removal of iconic local statues that have been in place for years, because “inclusive” idiots very suddenly decided they were a “trip hazard”… Because everyone is on their phones now, and therefore don’t look where they are going. 😑
Of course, this is just a symptom of a much, much wider problem, and only “works” because we’ve spent three years being terrified of a fucking virus, and all the tribalism that brought…
But this goes much further - you have “cultural safety”, you have “safe communications”, you have “safety on campus”, you have “LGBTQ+ safe spaces” - all of which comes back to our most bizarre obsession with the primacy of feelings and feeling safe, even if, in reality, you are probably less “safe” than ever…
Some of this is worse in Australia than elsewhere (the physical “safety” stuff here is probably the worst in the world), but a lot of the other ideological stuff originated in North America…
All in all, it comes back to that saying about “freedom vs temporary safety”, I suppose, but geese, what a bleak, sanitized, generic and utterly boring society we are building, FML… 😒
Look, I’m not really one to care either way about the fucking thing. It’s a tool. That’s all I’ll say.
But normies (or at least a certain subset), now, are fucking obsessed with the thing. Like, it’s absolutely cult-like, with the usual slavish devotion, the complete unwillingness to accept any criticism, and, perhaps most importantly, a massive overestimation of just what the thing is capable of, and what it can do…
Stupid fuckers genuinely believe that they can have some version of “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, just because of the last couple of years of AI hype, and the fact that it can write better essays than their utterly pathetic selves can even come up with…
Like, fuck, I’ve even had teachers going on and on about how this brilliant device will “save us all, and allow us to be our full transcendent selves”…
The ignorance is astounding. The utter hype-following and clout-chasing is even worse…
Like, yes, the “creatives” worrying for their jobs can be annoying, but they’re nothing on the hype-cultists who have jumped on this bandwagon to the point of basing their entire futures on what they think this fucking system is going to do “for them”…
It’s like the first smartphones all over again, but somehow so much worse…
/endrant
Nothing particularly insightful, but… It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that this phenom is becoming more common…
Like, I’ve had some really bad stuff happen this week, because I let the wrong person into my life (again), but beyond that… Even just “going out into the world” can be so fucking hostile, it’s really no surprise people retreat like that…
“Social dysfunction” isn’t as obvious where I am as it might be elsewhere. Certainly, you don’t really see it, but have a conversation with the wrong person, or even just sit and observe long enough, and it becomes readily apparent that we’ve become a wider society of petty hostility and just general… Unpleasantness.
Places like NYC, Sydney and arguably Tokyo were always like this, but it’s largely “leaked” far beyond that now. Everyone feels like they’re out to get each other, or at each other’s throats, and that if you don’t play along with the odd beliefs of the person you are talking to? They might just decide to do something really nasty…
A 95-year old with dementia was tasered to death in a nursing home in Sydney a week ago (“She was carrying a knife!”). Just yesterday, a huge fire engulfed a massive historic building in Sydney, and no one put it out, until it was a raging inferno enough to destroy the entire thing (the circumstances of all that are very weird)…
Then there has been escalating brawls and attacks on police in several QLD cities this week.
It all feels… Increasingly hostile. And this is in Australia… “Commie shithole” aside, some of these things are quite unheard of…
So… Filtering this down into “ordinary interactions”, where people have become so hypersensitive and hostile about every disagreement, every little thing… It’s no wonder, honestly, that some young men have decided “Fuck this, why the fuck should I even bother anymore?”
I know I feel that way about “friendship” at this point, so for me, that’s pretty damn understandable…
Just my 10c.
Just imagine. The entire modern economy, pretty much anywhere, but certainly in any “Western” nation, is now based on the idea that everyone male and female, works full time…
Universities have become wholly female-dominated. So have many, many professional fields. Most workplaces cater to the wants of middle-class women. So does most government messaging. So does the entire “field” of HR and recruiting…
At the same time, birth rates are crashing to totally unsustainable levels. Children aren’t raised properly at all, and are shipped off to “childcare” or to older relatives, as early as possible. Parents no longer no, or care, how to raise kids.
Cook for your family? Congrats, you’re an outlier. Most people seem to view cooking as some sort of “luxury”, and instead base most meals on either frozen shit, or takeaway and deliver, depending on their background…
Marriage is broken, and hell, most millennials don’t even bother with it. Divorces are higher than ever, and many couples barely even see, or talk to, each other, let alone their kids, anymore. So many kids are from broken homes, now, whatever their background or race…
Yet jobs are still flying offshore (never mind automation. It’s not there yet), and immigrants are still piling in to every Western country, partly to keep the birth rates up, and partly to keep house prices and rents ever increasing… Oh, and to push wages down, of course.
This, despite more “locals” working than ever before. This, despite women demanding ever more catering to from corporate, and all of the “equity” bullshit…
There’s no way any of this is sustainable, and yet it is everywhere… In every single “developed” country.
Some people here like to talk about Russia, but christ, look at their birth rates. Look at China, too. It’s not just “American allies and adjacents” that this is affecting. It’s almost everywhere, with a few very notable exceptions…
Amazing to think that “women's rights” and runaway corporatism, plus unlimited contraceptives (arguably) may be what dooms us, let alone all the trans kids raised on hormones shit…
I would say that maybe some parts of humanity can still correct this ship, but I’m not so sure anymore…
I doubt even in 1980 people would have thought that fucking Nigeria and India would inherit the Earth, but here we are…
/rant
I’ve just been “headhunted”, rather unusually, by (or rather on behalf of) a tech sales company…
They sell software mostly, but also the associated hardware. I’m not going to name the company, but it’s POS-related…
Leaving aside the weirdness of the way they “found” me, or how very odd the entire contact has been - if it turns out that this is legit, would you take it?
The base salary is the highest thing I’ve ever been propositioned, and then they claim up to 50% commission on top of that (I believe commission-only is illegal in Aus - hence the base salary). The recruitment was full of weird millennial shit like “Free breakfast!” and a bunch of emojis. It was all very… Cringe. It was also written with really poor grammar, considering this is a tech company, in Australia…
I dunno. I’m yet to ascertain how “legit” it all is, and it is very much too good to be true, but, apart from being parasites, what are your thoughts on that sort of work/company as a whole..?
It’s setting off a whole bunch of red flags, to me, but I’m also willing to… At least communicate with them further, without giving away anything too identifying, simply because I am looking for work.
I dunno. I don’t like this, and I’m trying to be as wary as possible, but the research I’ve done so far suggests that this is how companies like this do things, even if it is utterly alien to me…
Just wondering what people think, beyond “Run a thousand miles the other way”, lol…
Doing a short course atm. Was having a discussion around job applications and cover letters specifically.
We were told not to include any gendered terms, such as Sir/Madam, Mr/Ms, etc, because "In our modern era, you don't know whether the person you are addressing fits into those categories, even if you know their name" and "You should only ever use a first name, to avoid causing offence" (i.e. no "Mr Adams" or "Ms Smith")...
This is insane to me. I know this will obviously vary by country, but for an instructor to pass that off as some sort of "a given", or even like "You should already know that, you goddamn troglodyte" is... Pretty concerning, to me.
First it was "Use my preferred pronouns, bigot", and now it's "All gendered terms of address are offensive and outdated, bigot". In goddamn formal communications.
Madness. We really are at a cultural dead end.
Austria has some “post-feminist” duet song about the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe and the music industry somehow (yes, really), but my favourite ridiculous thing so far is Poland selecting a literal Insta thot who won Next Top Model, evidently can’t really sing, and is hated by all the fags because she is “homophobic and classist/elitist”, lol…
Ah, Eurotrash…
Australia didn’t even let people vote for our entry this year, because the West Australian state government paid to get a particular entry the right to represent the whole country, lol…
Oh, and the singer is an immigration lawyer, in “real life”, because of course he is…
Wack.
It's really fucking shit. Yeah yeah, "get off Reddit". Sure, but still, this is fairly important. It completely breaks third-party archiving (which is why they've done it, even if they won't directly admit as such)...
It's sort of "funny" seeing all the mods who clamoured for this sort of shit, and did so much of the removing, complaining and moaning that the Admins have done this, ostensibly for legal reasons, with little to no consultation or warning.
Really, this is the environment they created, and they're the ones who broke the site so much that we were relying on these external archives. But no, self-awareness is just too hard.
So yeah, that's that, I guess. Thus ends our ability to see things as the mods/admins do not want us to see...
Pretty damn shitty if you ask me.