>these cafés attract in general "alternative" people. I've got no problem with that, but I'm a bit fed up with conspirationists, anti-nuclear, really left-wing people.
If anybody ever finds a solution to this, every hackerspace in the world would love to know what it is.
I find that the biotech hackerspaces I've gone to don't have this problem. That's because the biotech equipment is not really amenable to back to the land post apocalyptic use and it takes a while to learn how to use it to be able to do anything productive. A lot of kooks think that they can throw some bits together and make an iron man suit. If they actually found out how much work it is to actually make simple things, I think they'd lose interest.
Maybe have people have to take a class or two on how to use the equipment before they can join?
> Maybe have people have to take a class or two on how to use the equipment before they can join?
That's how Dallas Maker Space does it and seems like a good approach. I did the wood shop orientation and decided not to join because I had to postpone the project I was planning. But I don't know whether that filters out the annoyances mentioned.
It would be worth reviewing all the branding and the marketing plans, if you really wanted to solve this. Is it being positioned in such a way to be attractive to conventional, non-politically engaged?
Every goa party attracts esoteric folks- all i wanted to do is to dance to psy-trance, instead i have to listen to a half hour talk about demeter-tomatos. To be honest, if i get really bored, i start some fantasy tales myself- just to see if there is a point, those people will call me out for rambling nonsense.
Side note to your side note: I don't know what the parent was referring to but if I had to guess, I'd guess Goa Parties (which are a thing) as opposed to Parties in Goa.
Goa Parties (in my experience anyway) involve Goa Trance music[0] and are sort of their own subculture but it involves people from all walks, e.g. from Burning Man techie decompressionists to German hippies and beyond. Oh, and drugs, though not mandatory.
But I'm no expert so maybe ask an expert if you're interested in this kind of thing. I bet there are also Goa Parties in Goa.
Yes, there are indeed psytrance (goatrance) parties in Goa :) My friends make a regular trip there for the November full moon party season, like migrating birds.
Wow, these days I see so many people who "know" India on the internet. I'm starting to get to know how the US folk feel, where every other YouTube channel caters to them or when many websites (or at least the ones I visit) assume you're from the US.
There isn't a culture to be cultured against any more. This isn't 1960 where there is one medium that connects 75%+ of people. What you have now are a lot of different cultures.
That's definitely not true. Travel to some country on the other side of the world and you can appreciate for yourself that, subcultures aside, there is a large body of shared cultural beliefs and practices that most of us more or less share.
I don't know if I'd say that, but the persistent idea that we're all charting a unique ideological course from first principles is, I think, somewhat characteristic.
Well, there was a time some rando flipped out after overhearing a conversation I was having regarding my tritium key fob.
Frankly, I've found the overall environments in these sorts of cafes/hackerspaces to be frustratingly anti-social. And I am someone who would be considered fairly left-leaning overall. But good lord were my hopes dashed when it came to thinking I would meet other folks that would be fun to talk to, just because not 100% of my views line up with the accepted SV zeitgeist.
Allow me to generalise a little, but from experience, people with those views (or who are very strongly opinionated), always seem to be able to bring those topics up.
This is exactly my observation as well. You know the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing? It’s like that but can happen in 3 degrees or less, and almost any crazy subject.
There should be an "upvote if intended irony" button on HN, where the author has to flag the post as irony beforehand and gets the upvote only if he did it, otherwise it becomes a downvote and vice versa.
I live in the Northeast and most Christians won't really bring it up unless they know you pretty well (frankly I'm the same because I'm not that interested in having to defend myself or being treated like a hick).
Actually, that is "taking the lord's name in vain" and is quite frowned upon by a lot of Christians. I am not Christian, but I grew up in the Bible Belt and I am aware that is deemed to be a serious form of disrespect. I swear like a sailor, but I try to not take the lord's name in vain in public because I am aware it is deeply offensive to devout Christians, more so than my general tendency to use four letter words.
I was thinking about this the other day, and in the U.K. there are a lot of people who would say they are Christian if asked their religion, but really they are non-practicing or more likely atheists, but don’t want to admit it.
I saw a statistic once where they asked people whether it was true or false that one can only be moral if one believes in a higher power, sorted by country. The highest numbers reached more than 90%.
With this in mind, things like your point make a lot of sense.
I'm agnostic, with a heavy lean towards atheism (I figure not enough data to bother thinking about it for the most part), but "Jesus Fucking Christ" is my go-to when exasperated. For what it's worth, like the sibling comment I grew up in the bible belt, so I'm sure that has a major impact on swear preference.
...so I've heard. I really am being half serious, because people should be able to talk about things that are important and interesting to them. Just because there are few assholes from pretty much every persuasion that can't sense the tone of a conversation or relationship and keep their veganism, atheism, religion, love of pineapple pizza, or whatever to themselves at appropriate times doesn't mean that everyone else should feel guilty about expressing themselves.
But really, not too recently someone thought it was so important they put it on the money and made school children say it every day. I don't think it occurs to most people just how pervasive declarations of religiosity are in America.
It applies to atheists who suddenly stop being a tiny minority. Those who are still in a tiny persecuted minority keep their mouths shut, and those who've been in the majority for a while don't bother talking about it.
(Sources: the bible belt, the bay area, and /r/atheism.)
I'm genuinely curious as to what would be left wing conspiracies? I don't doubt they exist but googling "Left wing conspiracy theories" quite literally brings up a list of "Right wing conspiracy theories".
Anti-corporate ones like anti-vax, or the idea that Big Pharma is keeping us sick for profit. Similar sentiments exist for Big Agri/Food, particularly with GMOs.
Back in the W Bush days there were suggestions being thrown around that homeland security types were using 9/11 as an excuse to push their pre-prepared systems of control on people, that Diebold voting machines were rigged to support Republicans.
> Back in the W Bush days there were suggestions being thrown around that homeland security types were using 9/11 as an excuse to push their pre-prepared systems of control on people,
That's not a conspiracy theory, but a verifiable fact: the systems of control overtly implemented after 9/11 justified by terrorism had largely been proposed (overtly), by many of the same people pushing them after 9/11, with other justifications (often, in the most recent prior attempt, the War on Drugs was the justification.)
There is a related conspiracy theory, though, that 9/11 was engineered (either a false-flag op or simply knowingly allowed to proceed) for the purpose of being used in that way.
The X-Files spin off “The Lone Gunmen” posited that the US government remote controlled an airliner to crash it into WTC and create popular support for wars overseas, comparing it to the (non-fictional) Operation Northwoods.
The real kicker? It aired in March 2001. That 9/11 conspiracy theory is older than the actual attacks!
Often times it's the same as right wing theories. The government is using flouride in the water to control the population. Contrails are actually chemical spraying. 9/11 was an inside job, etc. I've heard these from both friends who are both left wing or apolitical.
Concave earth is hands down my favorite conspiracy theory. The completeness of the lie is astonishing. I actually spent months trying to come up with a way to disprove it on a high-school-education only-trust-your-eyes shoestring budget, and couldn't come up with much.
This is a fun read on wikipeida [1]. I'm curious as to how you could disprove it at all: there's a perfectly valid coordinate transformation that maps our "infinity" to the center of the earth, and the center of the earth to infinity. All the laws of physics become position-dependent, of course, and it's not a convenient space for calculations, but it "proves" that the concave earth is a perfectly valid way of describing the universe.
I don't understand the difference the entry makes between the fact that you can represent the universe in a CHE model using coordinate transformations and "hypotheses". Given that you started from a concave model of the universe and the associated physical laws, you could make reasonable hypotheses and verify them through experimentation.
The most visible point I've seen is that the seasonal star constellations you know well (Orion in my case) will be seen as inverted if you change the hemisphere. The moon and sun position also change greatly. I'm not aware of any ideas that incorporate this.
It takes either time or money to see for yourself though.
Well, they really are hoarding as much money as possible, rewriting as many laws as they can to help themselves do it. And with rich people like Peter Thiel making comments about wanting to use blood from young people the eating babies part is getting closer.
Blood is a renewable resource so I see no problem in making it a market product, with the proper regulation in place of course.
As for hoarding money you are misunderstanding how things work. Money hoarded are usually reinvested somewhere else and does not sleep in a vault or something. Even your bank is constantly investing the money you save on the market. Thats how you can finance companies and startups in the end.
The rich are keeping that money in their own circles, thus only funding the things they themselves care about. They are big time tax dodgers, because they don't want to accidentally fund something that benefits the poor.
> they don't want to accidentally fund something that benefits the poor.
Welfare policies have been shown at multiple times to actually harm the poor in the long run, not benefit them. There are entire books written on that topic. Check out Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 from Charles Murray.
There have been tests done which show an inverse correlation between the cost of a person's car and how likely they are to stop for pedestrians waiting at marked crossings. Just as an informal example.
It is also extremely telling that the people who litter the most are young and rich.
Rich people overwhelmingly care a lot less about people they consider to be beneath them.
It's a product that's there's already a large, regulated market for, in fact (as blood plasma specifically). It wouldn't much extra effort to only buy it from young desperate people...
Yeah today in "not actually a real problem in the physical world" we deal with the plague of really left wing people and their anti-nuclear rhetoric that is plaguing hackerspaces across the globe. Can't we just fission in peace? These monsters are insatiable.
How can we stop this epidemic before it's too late?
If anybody ever finds a solution to this, every hackerspace in the world would love to know what it is.