And I don’t mean things you previously had no strong opinion about.
What is a belief you used to hold that you no longer do, and what/who made you change your mind about it?
Traffic enforcement and red light cameras. I used to be very opposed to them, but I’ve since come to appreciate the absurdity of America’s car central culture.
Additionally, traffic stops by police disproportionately effect minorities and lead to escalations and other issues, while taking away enforcement capacity from more important things.
I still don’t think the cameras should necessarily be run by private, for profit entities. Nor would I really want cameras that ticket you if you go 1 mph over. But in general I’m much less opposed to the idea than I used to be.
I still hate them. Their goal isn’t to increase safety but to increase revenue, or they’re placed by incompetent people.
Americas aproach to road design is so backwards and gets many people killed.
I thought React was ok. It turned out to be terrible. Then I thought vanilla JS would be better. It turned out to be too verbose. Now I want to go back to jQuery.
It’s an open secret that every language and framework is actually terrible in at least some ways, the trick is to just settle for something good enough for the job rather than trying to find something perfect. Usually that means whatever the rest of your team can work with.
Capitalism and markets
Anticapitalist views became compelling to me from the analogy between the state’s governance and the governance of the firm. The contrast between the (officially) democratic nature of the state and the complete autocracy of private companies worried me. I was initially a market abolitionist when I become an anti-capitalist, but I found no sound explanation for how such an economy would work.Now I am a pro-market anti-capitalist, an unusual position on the left
Market socialist fist bump! 👊
That makes plenty of sense. Capitalism with multiple small companies competing in the market to produce consumer friendly goods and services is something that can really work if it’s well-regulated. Publically traded companies should also be legally relieved of the fiduciary duty to provide constantly growing stock value for shareholders.The government needs to keep tight controls on bribery in any form and harsh punishments given to anyone who tries to commit the kind of white collar crimes you see everywhere (e.g. wage theft, intentional environmental damage, market manipulation, etc.).
No amount of top-down planning from a centralized government could produce the same results as a free market. That said, some things just simply need to be socialized like medicine or energy to prevent financial hardship for the average citizen.
The McDonald’s hot coffee incident.
It’s a trivial example, but it reflects all sorts of issues in modern society.
I had bought into the McDonald’s PR, believing it to be a symptom of an overly litigious society, people blaming all of their issues on others, etc.
But then I actually looked into it, instead of taking it at face value. The face that was created by a very interested party (most notably the defendants in that same lawsuit, but also right-wing pundits pushing a narrative)
When I did, I saw for the first time the claims made by the plaintiff. These were never included in any media coverage. I hadn’t considered that the coffee was abnormally hot, and to a significant level (industry average is about 130F, this was around 180F). I had no idea about the 3rd degree burns in 7 seconds. The words “Fused Labia” had never been seen together. The multiple other similar lawsuits. The offers to settle for medical expenses. And so on…
And the worst part (in my mind), that forced me to take a 180 on the issue?
The entire reason for the coffee being that hot was to save money. This had nothing to do with personal responsibility, or a free payday. This was a megacorp selling a known dangerous product, selling pain and suffering, just to put a few extra pennies in their coffers. This had more in common with the lead/cadmium mugs (also McDonald’s) and tobacco than anything to do with freedom.
I’m not going to say it radicalized me, but it was definitely an Emperor’s New Clothes moment.
This is interesting. What do you mean industry average is 130F? When coffee is filtered the water needs to be just a few degrees below boiling or the infusion doesn’t happen properly. In order to serve coffee at 130F they would either make a bigger batch and store it in a thermos, keep it on a hot plate, or alternatively the customer would need to be kept waiting untill the coffee has cooled enough before serving it to them.
I agree that near boiling hot coffee is too hot to drink and even after it has cooled down a bit it’s still too hot for anyone to properly get to taste all the aromas of the coffee but personally as I like to take my time with it I want it served hot because if they give me 130F coffee and I cool it down further with some milk I’d basically need to chug it right away or else it’ll get cold before I finish it.
There’s a safety regulation, but the mcd manual almost said outright to ignore it. And there had been numerous incidents before, and even court cases. They were finally fined something like half a days’ profit from the sale of coffee. Only the scale of of mcd makes it seem like more than what the paperwork costs anyway. Personally, I think someone in the C-suite should get jail time for ‘gross bodily harm’, or whatever.
I’m reading the wikipedia article on this but can’t find any mention of safety regulations relating to the temperatures at which hot beverages must be served. It says that “… McDonald’s required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C) … coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20 °F (11 °C) lower than McDonald’s coffee.”
Only mention of 130F was made by McDonald’s quality control manager Christopher Appleton who “… argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard, and that restaurants had more pressing dangers to worry about.”
I struggle to understand what the optimal resolution to this would be. You need boiling water to brew coffee. That’s a fact which any coffee snob can confirm. While it’s not a technical impossibility to serve coffee at lower temperatures, a regulation like this would make it near impossible for coffee shops to serve fresh coffee and this applies to tea aswell.
Yeah, but they didn’t serve ‘fresh’ coffee, the whole point was to make a giant urn of coffee and sell coffee from that all day. I don’t know what the boundaries of those rules were, it’s entirely possible it’s different if you serve it in an open steaming cup, but this was Styrofoam take away cups.
Their customers had had problems before, but they didn’t care. I think that’s what got them in the end.
130F is (was) the typical serving/holding temperature, rather than brewing. This has climbed substantially over the years since I last looked. It now seems to be 150-175, and the cynic in me suspects this is for the same reason that McDonald’s did it (albeit higher) in 1992.
However, it can also be explained by changing consumer tastes. Back then, coffee was coffee. It was often consumed black, or with just a splash of (often room temperature) cream. With the rise of Starbucks and the like, coffee is now frequently used as an ingredient in coffee-flavored milkshakes. If these are to be served hot, either the starting coffee needs to be hotter or it needs to be heated after.
As for needing to keep it warm on a hot plate, all commercial coffee makers I’ve ever seen (plus every single home drip machine, which were based on the above) have at least 1 hot plate, sometimes called a heating pad. In fact, the model I see most often has 2- one on the bottom while brewing, and 1 on top for the existing pot. Your home models usually don’t have an option to set the temperature, but commercial models do. Or at least they have a setting that’s been designed for its use in restaurants.
Side note: Try making cold brew sometime. It’s a very different experience, but one that actually works better with cheap coffee.
I replied to another user below but the same reply would apply to this message aswell. I’m not looking for an argument but I just struggle to understand what the desired outcome here would be.
I apologize if it came across as argumentative. Serving coffee that’s too hot to drink saves money on refills, since the customer has to wait for it to cool.
As for an ideal world, it’s worth keeping in mind that McDonald’s (etc) very rarely brews the pot just for you. It’s usually been sitting there for a while. Simply adjusting the hot plate temperature resolves it. It’s also something that other places have solved. While I don’t frequent Starbucks, I hear they have “kids temperature”, which is served around 130F. I presume this is another pot kept at a lower temperature, but it could just be ice. But even above that, you don’t need skin grafts when you burn yourself on 150F coffee.
I’m another Libertarian to Socialist convert. Also ultra-conservative religious to nonreligious.
I started reading up on the origins of beliefs I held. I learned that Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom, a father of Austrian economics) thought that his ideal laissez faire economics could only be sustained with universal social safety nets like UBI and healthcare for all. Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations, father of American capitalism) basically replaced royal bloodlines with wealth birthright, using class separation of ownership (and heavy emphasis on slavery) instead of historic feudalism. His system was basically the same, just replacing the tiny ruling class. And I discovered Marx wasn’t some evil terrorist trying to destroy the world.
For religion, it was all the internal inconsistencies. The problem with fundamentalism is that it’s self-destructive. Everyone fights over smaller and smaller interpretation differences, searching for The Truth, ignoring that you can literally back up any conclusion by justifying it backwards with the text. And everybody in a conservative religion has a lot of immovable conclusions they will defend to the exclusion of all evidence or all people.
I think in growing up I’ve become less prone to looking at everyone else in the world as an idiot. You know how when you’re in your 20s and 30s, you’re driving around flipping everyone off because you think everyone around you is an idiot and a know-nothing.
The older I’ve gotten the more I realize most people, most creatures in fact, are just bopping along trying to survive and get what they can from life. I guess I’ve gotten less judgmental and more empathetic, seeing most problems as a process problem, and not necessarily the result of a confederacy of idiots out there trying to ruin my life.
I often think that we just happen to live in very large communities that are more or less the same as they’ve been throughout the history of our entire species. It’s made me feel a lot more connected to everyone around me because they don’t feel like strangers anymore, they feel like extended family, in a way.
But I still love flipping people off, I just don’t mean much by it. Like a gesture that says ‘wtf are you doing you idiot’
I used to (love flipping people off) but the older I’ve gotten the less ‘good’ it feels. Partly because, as you get older, you develop a really good thick hide that things slide off of more easily - I mean nothing really bothers me the way it used to. That’s one benefit of getting older.
Sounds like your growth is your realization that people aren’t intending to harm you. That, yes, they are just people bopping along trying to survive. That their indifference to you isn’t malice. A great life lesson.
However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t also idiots.
Not so much that people aren’t intending to harm me but just that they are self-involved and don’t intentionally mean harm most of the time. Yes they’re still idiots, but to them I am also. We all are, really.
I’m in my late 20s and I’m on the same boat. Especially when it comes to politics. People are often much more than their politics. Unless they’re in the extreme horizontals of their beliefs.
That nice barista at the coffee shop? Could be a liberal. The dude at the office who held the elevator for you? Could be conservative. That’s just the way it works
Everyone is coming from their own unique set of experiences. And really, as long as I still get my coffee at the coffee shop, and someone is holding an elevator door for me, what does it really matter in the long run. In less than a century, all of us now will be dead and gone, and no one will recall if were liberal, convervative, happy, sad, mean or nice, or even remember that we were here.
Keeping that in mind I try to help other people when they need it and be more sympathetic - life is struggle for everyone.
Yeah i kinda feel the same way, people like politics but they are not politics. Lifes alot more fun if you just dont care what politcal party people are.
Was a hardcore Libertarian till I finally read theory and realized how much Propaganda i had soaked up to think that Socialism was bad and unfettered Capitalism was good. Cringe so hard thinking about it now that I am a full blown Socialist.
Social liberalism is better than what we have atm, in the States, however it sounds like a half measure that could easily be rolled back with Conservative Propaganda against that status quo. I would prefer Gay Space Communism like Star Trek.
The Star Trek universe isn’t resource constrained.
Tea Earl Grey.
Gold watch Rolex.
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Same. Grew up very sheltered, under-educated, and brainwashed. Got out into the real world, started learning, started seeing how things actually worked. Realized that it wasn’t just “sluts” having abortions for convenience. Realized that even though I was super careful and in a committed relationship, getting pregnant would ruin my life and I’d probably seriously consider an abortion and I’d better re-think my stance or have to accept I was a genuine hypocrite. Got into EMS, started going out into people’s houses… the poverty I’ve seen… the way we allow people to live in this country… it’s appalling. Not only am I incredibly pro-choice, I’ve gone from conservative/libertarian to so far left/pro social services. I think anyone who wants to sit on their couch and talk about how people don’t deserve abortions or don’t deserve social services should be forced to go talk to these people because I met so many people who were unfortunate enough to be chronically ill and unable to work or who worked harder than me but in low-paid jobs and who had no hope of ever getting out of the hole they were in.
When I was in my late teens up to around 20 I still believed in God and religion. Looking back, largely to please my Mum.
My views changed because my brother was so dismissive about religion so I started to question it myself properly for the first time. I’d taken it for granted after being indoctrinated into Catholicism my whole life.
Once I started questioning and actually thinking about religion (rather than just accepting it as the dull background to my life) I moved fairly rapidly to become an atheist. I’ve never once doubted or regretted that change. I feel like it was a turning point in my life when I actually started looking around me and questioning everything, and developing as my own person.
I’m proud of you for taking that step! It seems like few people stop to actually question their beliefs and grow from learning something new.
I grew up believing, never really thought about it. Then, in my teens, I started thinking for myself and the cracks started appearing, and I was a pretty staunch atheist for some time. Very big on pure logic and rationality.
Later on, I started thinking for myself again, and started recontextualizing a lot of the descriptions of “God” that were common across beliefs, rather than sectarian fundamentalist pulpit bluster. I was reading Spinoza and I thought of what the burning bush said to Moses, “I am that ‘I am’”, and something just clicked.
I definitely haven’t gone back to my childhood faith, but atheism is certainly something I changed my mind about. A cosmic consciousness just makes too much sense, rationality speaking, when you try to consider what consciousness is, how it originates. Either it’s purely emergent from complex organized matter, in which case the even more complex organized universe could obviously have it’s own larger emergent consciousness, or it’s a universal force that merely concentrates in complex organized matter. Any other explanation is far too arbitrary to survive Occam’s razor.
I mostly don’t talk about it, but it’s Russia. Before the war starts, I sympathised with the russian people and disliked the hate against them. And I don’t mean Russia = Putin. This guy was always a bad guy, I mean russians.
Since the war started, I always believed the people of Russia would be against this war and get furious about it and would burn the political elites down. But nothing happens, a lot of people over there even support the war. And this really destroyed my opinion about them.
“[Susan Sontag] was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.” https://inthesetimes.com/article/susan-sontag-and-arthur-miller
Propaganda is a hell of a drug. I suspect that if you were fed an exclusive diet of their state media, you would have a different opinion of the war.
I have no idea how they would react to a more diverse media landscape. There’s obviously a history and culture there that I don’t understand.
Eating animals. I used to be the Making-fun-of-vegans, I-will-never-be-vegan type of person until I realised that 1) I don’t have to eat animals to be healthy and 2) if there is no need to do it, killing animals for taste pleasure is fucking evil.
So you’re a hypocrite?
I was raised Mormon, am now atheist. Regret every conversation I had in high school about gay marriage. And evolution.
High five my friend. Also got out. Clear and strong memories of advocating Prop 8 in CA
Bernie Sanders woke me from my Libertarian slumber.
While I have never been a coffee person, I always rolled my eyes when someone ordered a decaf soya latte or something similar. “Come on, if you can’t drink coffee then just don’t”.
…Then my friends got me to ditch dairy for oat (both for environmental reasons and the creaminess), then I had to accept the fact that I like it more sweet, then I tried salted caramel syrup, then I found out that two shots is like a hand grenade followed by two hours of misery, and I started drinking one shot caramel oat mochas. And then at my place I saw throngs of young moms who couldn’t have caffeine.
Now you can’t disgust me with your coffee order. If you like it with one and three quarters shot, macadamia milk, semi decaf, with mustard and marshmallow syrup then good for you. Also, let me try it.
EDIT: Coffee snobs: take it lightly. We are all different, and it’s good. Some like the taste of coffee, some don’t and they drink it out of sheer necessity, and if they must stay alert then at least they can make it taste better (for them). I’m sure there are some bean snobs out there who frown to the thought of putting spices on beans.
Person realises sugar tastes good. More at 11.
Things with fat in them taste way better then things without. Find out more about this new lifehack, tonight at 8
Anarchism and Satanism; when I was a kid, it was just something edgy weirdos would talk about for attention, but as a grownup I am seeing the validity of the thinking behind these ideologies - without identifying as one - but I now see them in a more open and accepting light.
