Asklemmy

About two years ago now, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park writing my initial thoughts on what I didn't know then but would come to know as Youth Rights.

I don't think I'll ever remember why she did, but about halfway through the day Greta Thunberg came to mind, and I looked up the voting age in Sweden. And my blood boiled in a way I've never experienced in my entire life.

16 years old and one of the most famous and recognizable political activists in the world. 16 years old giving a confident, impassioned, admonishing speech to the fucking UN. 16 years old with no legal right to a voice in her country. No voice to vote for the policies she believed in or the people who might enact them.

My writing, already vitriolic to a fault, managed to become even moreso but with the topic abruptly switched to voting. For the first time in my life, I considered where I'd place the voting age if I could do so unilaterally. Not long into considering it I had a thought that I wrote down immediately, a question I've asked well over 100 times at this point with no substantial answer:

When is it reasonable to say to a person, 'If you're not at least this old, then I don't give a fuck what you think'?

And from the moment I had that thought, I have been unable to place the voting age.

Hello everyone

So I have a rather unusual fear of butterflies and a fear of darkness. The first one is definitely the fear that has confused lots of people in my life. I can't explain it, for some reason I am just afraid of them. If one even comes near me, I completely freak out. The latter is a rather childish fear of mine. I don't know why I'm afraid of the darkness specifically, but I know that I can't stand it.

So what are your fears?

Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked "I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski's copyrights", and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.

(Asking for the civilized world.)

Hey buddy @dessalines@lemmy.ml, can you log into your reddit account so r/JucheGang can't be requested? Also there's at least one libertarian troll post on there i might clean up, you can make me a mod if you want, u/FtDetrickVirus and I'll try not to get site wide banned again, and I'll post on that sub too to rejuvenate it also.

my supervisor is an extrovert, whereas I'm an introvert. She feels insulted if I don't share my personal life with her and ridicules me before other coworkers because I separate private and work life and prefer to keep to myself.

I wrote mobbing because that's what it feels to me: a ritual of hers is to always eat together, a time she uses to ask me questions I don't want to answer. I usually answer very vaguely, which is not enough for her. If I eat alone, she'll complaint about why am I being so unfriendly.

She doesn't understand I need time alone to unwind.

She is convinced she is doing me a favor, but the opposite is true. It makes me dislike her even more.

I simply cannot win. It's tiring being blamed and shamed for preferring to read a book instead of talking about dogs or sex.

It makes me want to quit.

I don't know if I go to HR with an issue like this, because they may label me the odd one, the one who's not a teamplayer and use it against me.

Most people are extroverted and react angrily to somebody who keeps to himself and I've been bullied several times for this. Extroverts don't seem to understand that not showing interest in their sexual lives doesn't mean disrespect, but simply that I don't care about it.

I am a student in Germany myself and got the rare chance to influence the education about CS/responsible use of technology people get in a special course I will give for the interested in my school this year.

The students will be eight grade and up, and it is a reasonable assumption that I will not have to deal with uninterested students (that and the probably small course size gives me an edge over normal courses beyond my actual planned lessons).

My motivation for investing substantial amounts of time and effort into this is my deeply hold belief that digital literacy is gonna be extremely important in the future, both societally and personally. I have the very unique chance to do something about this, even if only on a local level, and I’m gonna use that. I fail to see the current CS classes in German "high schools" (Gymnasien), and schools with our specialization (humanism) especially, provide needed education. We only had CS classes from grade eleven—where you learn Scratch or something similar and Java basics (most don’t really understand that either, or why you should learn it (a circumstance I very much understand)).
This state of affairs, and the increasing prevalence of smartphones instead of PCs means most students lack any fundamental understanding of the technology they’re using everyday.
My reason to believe that I’d be better at giving CS lessons than trained teachers is that these have to stick to very bad specific guidelines on what to teach, and a lack of CS graduates wanting to become teachers means our school has not a single one who studied any CS (I did).

Some of my personal ideas:

• how do (basically all) computers work hardware-wise (overview over parts)
• what is a computer/boot chain/operating system/program
• hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs to students that they can keep (alternative: a ton of VMs and Proxmox users of one of my hosts) and have everyone pick and install their Linux distro of choice (yes, this is gonna be painful for all involved, but is also—as I suspect many of you already know—extremely rewarding and can be quite fun)
• learning some "real" programming (would probably teach Python), my approach would be to learn basics and then pick projects and work alone or together (which is useful for learning Git/coding in a remotely readable way)
• some discussion of open/closed source, corporate tech, enshittification, digital minimalism and philosophy of technology (which would be okay because, you know, humanistic school…)
• maybe some networking (network stack, OSI, hacking Wifi networks…)

What are your thoughts and suggestions? Took me some time to get to an agreement with the school over this, so I’d like to do my absolute best.

Possibly relevant questions: what fundamental knowledge about tech do you suspect to be still relevant 15 years from now, what would you like to have learnt, what would you find interesting as a student this age…

Would everyone just make a video and people could watch the videos of who they liked best?

I'm guessing that would be like video dating except worse.

Where I live, we have a saying.

"Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today."

~ Master Wu, from Ninjago (just looked this up, Master Wu got this from Benjamin Franklin, that wise old monk of Pennsylvania)

I was passing some houses recently and noticed a neighbor just spontaneously put in a wheelchair ramp to their front door. Afraid, I stopped by and asked who was in a wheelchair now. "Oh no one's in a wheelchair" he said, "this is just what we did."

I was finding a new job once and they were very keen on asking me if I had any medical conditions or stigmas. They said that they try to reserve their spots for people who specifically fall short of other places.

An artist I know once made any work of hers created during the passing of the comet C-2022 E3 ZTF public domain for anyone living in the Southern hemisphere under the belief that the comet which comes only once every 50,000 years would only be visible in the Northern hemisphere, offering a way to make up for the loss (which in the end turned out to be moot, the comet was a dud and still ended up visiting the Southern hemisphere via telescope).

What's your unique or almost unique way of making life less uneven for people?

A pay-it-forward scheme works like this. Person A does a good deed for Person B and just asks that, in return, Person B does a good deed for someone. Person B does a good deed for Person C and just asks that, in return, Person C does a good deed for someone. The cycle continues like this, with the goal being to create a flowing river of good deeds.

Pay-it-forward schemes have been a trope for a very, very long time, there was even a bad movie made about it (oh Hollywood, what would we do without you). However, as even the movie acknowledges, they are notorious for eventually fizzling out. If you had the authority or whatever that would allow you to and were to ignite a chain for as long as possible, how would you do it?