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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 month ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
187 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 4 weeks ago

To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it's own lately) and I've never worked in government.

But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there's anyone who isn't convinced after reading all the headlines then there's no convincing them.

detailsSome news stories are still saying "could we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?", but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender people's visas as "fraud", and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.

I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:

  • I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don't think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn't think I'd have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I'm worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.

  • My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria

  • My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.

  • My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.

* Since I'm taking the work visa route I'll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.

[-] mlen@awful.systems 7 points 4 weeks ago

As someone living in Switzerland for over 6 years, the labor laws aren't exactly like in the rest of Europe and people are sometimes a bit too much on the freedumb side of things. Also weird german or (possibly less weird, I don't speak it) french and high cost of living.

Then again, it's not anywhere as bad as what's happening in the us

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Don't worry I know (approximately) what I'm getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things don't work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so won't start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but I'm at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.

weird german

When my German teacher told me she can't understand Swiss German I thought "haha I'm in danger".

this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
26 points (100.0% liked)

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