CraigOhMyEggo

Here is what I mean by this. Out of all the times I've been to a doctor, been visited by a cop, called the cops, been to court, went to school, and so on, I've realized lately that I haven't had a single good experience with any of them.

Doctors either always tell me nothing is wrong when something is wrong or said something was wrong when something wasn't. Got traumatic brain injury? Oh it's just a bonk on the head. Got blue balls? Bring em in, doc needs money. The presence of doctors here is so inconsistent with recovery from things like illnesses that the place resembles the stereotypical Sparta-obsessed fascist nation where hospitals don't exist by design.

Police and courts will give you no luck at all stemming from having absolutely no consistency with how they deal with things whatsoever. I've seen child abuse cases where babies are left with behavioral issues that mirror those child rehoming documentaries and the abuser gets two months, while also seeing small cases of assault that lead to two years. I've had instances where I ask police about something they can do. "We'll look into it" they say. Nothing happens. The next thing that happens, they're blaming me for a dead tree from my yard with a branch that snapped off and fell on a neighbor's fence, and I go to get sentenced.

My teachers were like these examples too. Did I benefit even once from my teachers? No. Did I benefit from the social environment? No. Did they treat me like Mr. Burns treats Homer? All the time. They didn't see me as a person, they saw me as a goal. And they would never mind cheating their own rules to achieve it.

And the moment they don't think they have a job to do regarding you, the same jobs they half-ass anyways, they treat you less like an individual to remember and from time to time treat as an equal human and more like a bird you pushed out of a nest without intent to hear from them again. And I didn't realize this until recently, that I have no positive experiences with public servants. Makes me almost not want to work.

Anyone else?

Perfectionists tend to wonder this, now I'm asking.

Consider this installment three of my previous question which is the second installment. For Election Day, I was researching the history of voting which has taken many forms. At one time in history, people voted by dropping rocks in holes corresponding to their candidate, with the one with most rocks being the candidate who won. We've had many forms "of voting", from rocks in a well to paper ballots to voting machines to whatever this anime concept with glowy lights is. Each method has had supporters and critics, for example critics of voting machines will say it can be rigged, critics of paper ballots will say papers can be mismanaged, and critics of counting yard flags as a method will say it's too tedious to do it all.

Suppose we discovered dolphins could understand democracy. So here you are coming up with a way to "express a vote". Underwater, paper shrivels, tech may short-circuit, it's hard to dig a hole with classic equipment, etc. unless you have a way to make something work. How would you teach dolphins to manifest voting in a non-rigged yet massively usable way?

I only just learned today that, when someone from one instance gets banned from another instance, that person not only is no longer able to interact with the second instance, but people from the second instance actually can't see anything the person said from the moment they got banned even though they're still there. I'm disappointed to learn all my friends who got banned from my instance are still saying stuff and nobody told me, making it more akin to an instance forcing everyone to block them (because individuals blocking each other the same way work like this). And this is coming from the person who has fantasized about universalization of federation.

What's something about the fediverse that was most recently unobscured but that you know now?

This post was inspired by a dream misadventure I had the other night where I was just minding my own business getting gophers out of the rice field, then suddenly on the intercom/announcements (which I did not expect to have in my dream, since I was outside, not in a building), a voice said "attention, this is a representative of the fediverse speaking... going into effect today, dreamland itself, err, everyone's dreams, are now a part of the fediverse; that is all, happy floating on cloud nine" and then suddenly a bunch of Stalingrad ninjas popped out of nowhere and ambushed me (yeah, how would you react if that's the case). So I guess I'm not even safe from everyone in my sleep.

When a book becomes influential enough, someone might try to impersonate it, since publishing doesn’t follow any hard rules.

For example, I was explaining to someone that, after (surprisingly not before) I got a job at my local library, I took out a communist manifesto, which I later learned was a fake, with writings in there that were not consistent with the official communist manifesto, such as a call for free love.

I have also spotted a lot of fake versions of Mark Twain books come in, which has a lot of parts deleted or inserted based on the writer’s desire.

On the other side of the issue, lately I’ve been watching a lot of the events unfold in the middle East and have wondered why nobody just ends violence over there for good by making fake Qurans. One or two people have hinted they’ve tried, with some altered movements centered around it (would you call this government gnosticism), but it’s not something you always hear.

What’s the most severe example of a fake version of a book you’ve ever seen/encountered?

I was reading an article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.

I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn't sold, and we're forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I'm sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.

Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?