I went to NYC on business (trade show, working the booth). I was glad I was there only for the closing weekend. Some of my colleagues had to work the booth the whole week and be in NYC the whole time.

I really did not like New York, and I didn’t even go to the rougher areas. Just too noisy for me, too expensive, and it smelled bad.

And this was in the early '90s.

I have to agree here. I decided after a job interview in Houston I wouldn’t go to the USA ever again. This was in the mid-late '90s. It hasn’t improved in that time.

It wasn’t so bad when I was there (in the '80s) but yes, Italy has far more important and beautiful cities to visit.

My personal favourite was Florence.

Any theme park. Except Disney. I’d gladly go to a Disney park. After hours. With a tanker of kerosene and a box of matches.

Absolutely. And also, compare, sometime, the medals the USA gives to its service members compared to the medals that Canadian service members get. I mean the USA isn’t Soviet bad but it’s also pretty pandering.

People aren’t stupid, by and large. (They may talk stupidly. They may act stupidly. But they can actually see things. They just sometimes ignore that before talking or acting.) And yes, they can tell when the “praise” and “encouragement” they get is hollow and pointless. You don’t even have to look at the obsequious degenerative AI slop to find this. You can go back to all the late-'80s to early-'90s crap with participation trophies/certificates and “everyone’s a winner”.

When I started in school, it was really hard to get recognized. It took a lot of work and those who got recognized for it had a sense of genuine accomplishment. They had genuine self-esteem. But there’s that word: self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important, make no mistake, but unfortunately it’s not something that can be easily codified or built up in people. Institutions can’t stand complex problems with complex solutions, so they went the easy way. They started handing out trophies and certificates to everybody. Sure some of them might be marked “first place” or such (though often, as this trend became entrenched, they didn’t even get labelled with that much; people would be announced as first place, but the trophy was a generic “I attended” variety), but everybody had a trophy or, increasingly, just a certificate. (And of course since they now had to hand out dozens of trophies where before they’d only hand out a few, the trophies dropped in quality to generic, plastic, chrome-plated crap and the certificates were placed in low-grade plastic holders that would warp in three weeks.)

And a weird thing happened.

Because the people who “won” a trophy for being there knew this wasn’t any meaningful celebration. OK, maybe the first couple of times they were happy about it, but it didn’t last long and pretty soon trophies, certificates, and other forms of “recognition” got viewed as more junk. That “self-esteem” wasn’t building in those who lacked it, but those who actually worked hard for recognition certainly lost theirs. “The trees [were] all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.” Because genuine self-esteem comes from genuine effort leading to genuine accomplishment and authentic recognition. And we’re very good at spotting the inauthentic.

So bringing it back around to that AI and your question, yes, excessive encouragement can have the opposite effect if it comes across as inauthentic and patronizing. The nauseating obsequiousness of AIs is one of their more off-putting features for “normal” people, and it does active harm to people who have serious self-esteem issues, either tanking them further or puffing it up to the point of delusion.

The last tech job I worked marketing for had a security product (you probably have used it without knowing it). They had a group in-house they called the “Tiger Team”: people who were supposedly tasked with testing the security of the product. You got into the “Tiger Team” by finding a flaw in the security.

The “Tiger Team” did nothing. At all. Didn’t even meet. Hell, half of them didn’t know who the other members were. The job of the “Tiger Team” was to sign the NDA that had dire consequences if you spoke to anybody else about the “Tiger Team” and/or the security flaws in the product.

So basically the “Tiger Team” existed only to conceal flaws in the product. Not to fix them or find more.

I read actual news sites once a week only these days. Sometimes news stories cross my Mastodon feed that seem relevant to me, but most times I just pass them over.

I can’t change the way chucklefucks in the USA behave, for example, and reading about them shooting themselves in the foot so often they think walking around and leaving bloody footprints is normal is not something that I can change, nor do I need to know it. Same for most countries that are neither my country of residence nor my country of citizenship.

So I ignore it. Because it’s literally irrelevant to me, my knowledge or lack thereof will change nothing, but constantly hearing doom & gloom stories has a measurable negative impact on my sanity.

There has been an unparalleled explosion in knowledge availability in the past 75 years. With the introduction of broadcast television, then cable television, then the early Internet, then services like Wikipedia and beyond the amount of knowledge available to the public has snowballed exponentially. This is so obviously true that denial is risible on the face of it.

But what is also obviously true is that over that same time period the threat of authoritarianism has been on a steady rise. At first the domain of “communist dictatorships” and a bunch of little countries here and there with right-wing assholes in charge, the world is now faced with rising tides of populist authoritarians where there was one presumed-healthy democracies, and with tightening grips in places that had already been authoritarian.

… the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.

So this seems sus.

Hence the use of the word “viable” right at the start to set the stage.

There is no viable alternative in my case. I’m Canadian. I live in China. There is no way to go from the one to the other without flight. So I keep it to rare visits instead of making it an annual thing like some of my fellow expats do.

Likewise, we also stopped using planes completely

I’d go that route too, but I literally live have a world away from my family. So I had to fly to visit them. In 2003. In 2016. And in 2024. I’m fine with three two-way flights in 25 years.

Chiming into the chorus here: haven’t owned a car since 2001. There’s no need. I live in what amounts to a “fifteen minute city” and for those rare things that aren’t within a fifteen minute walk of my home, I have great public transit to use instead. In almost 25 years of living here I think the total number of times I’ve had to use a taxi or hired van or the like to do something that wouldn’t be easily done with public transit have cost me less than 1% the purchase price of an automobile.

So I’ve saved the price of a car, the price of fuel/charging, the price of insurance, the price of maintenance. My lifestyle as a result is much better than it would be if I continued using cars.

(I’ve also calculated that if I took a taxi too and from work daily it would take me five years before the costs of that added up to the price of purchasing—just buying—a car.)

No, but you can have a neverending bottle of grain alcohol paired with a never-emptying bread bin.

I don’t drive anymore so phone battery.

I’m continuing my binge watch of Grimm.

OK, let’s go with an analogy.

Someone with a decent English vocabulary comes to North America. They have a good vocabulary … but not a good grasp of idiomatic expressions.¹ And sometimes they use the wrong synonym here and there.² It’s a quaint and charming thing. So they want to buy a gift for a friend. A little pocket-sized stuffed animal. Specifically a cat. So they go to Amazon and look for a “pocket pussy”.

飞机杯 (fēijī bēi or “airplane cup”) is not, as I thought, a travel mug for use in aircraft. It’s a masturbatory aid. That means the same thing as a pocket-sized plush cat.

And after one search, followed by uncomprehending staring at the pictures of a few entries (because the text wasn’t easily decoded, being full of euphemisms), I got male masturbatory aids recommended to me for a good five months.

¹ They think, for example, that “horseplay” and “pony play” are basically the same thing.

² For example they might talk about reading a book from beginning to terminal.

The world’s largest digital souq. A huge B2C and C2C conglomerate in which, basically, if it can be sold at all it’s available. I have seen for sale on Taobao the usual things like clothing, toys, food and drink, etc. But here are some other things I have seen sold:

• real estate
• cars
• buses
• a decommissioned jet liner
• Asian giant hornet nests (hornets still living)
• rent-a-boy/girlfriend
• sex dolls (almost RealDoll™ levels of realism) for pets
• soap dispensers shaped like Jackie Chan’s (or other celebrities’) nose
• breast milk soap
• bowls with integrated phone holders so you can use your phone while eating
• bottled flatulence (no, really!)

It’s a wild, wacky, weird, woolly place that has some embarrassing issues related to its recommendation system. (Ask me about “airplane cups”…) And it’s simply the best place to buy anything. Even jet liners.

Taobao. Definitely Taobao. I buy about 85% of my stuff through it and its paired TMall app.

I’m with you here. No idea what the joke is even supposed to be, not to mention if it’s funny or not.