Yeah, I ended up looking up the actual Flynn effect numbers AFTER leaving my comment, and had to edit because I was way off.

Oh yeah, they normalize IQ every year, and 100 is always used as the median.

But thanks to the Flynn Effect, getting a 100 (the number they always choose for the middle) in 2024 means you’re significantly smarter than someone who got a 100 in 1990.

So when Carlin said, “think of a person with average intelligence” he was calling to mind (to his 1990 audience) a person who was average in 1990 but would score [EDIT: I originally said 70s to 80s, but I was off by a lot. Such a person would actually score right around 90 points] today.

This is what happens when you take the lead out of gasoline.

Alternatively, it’s possible cell companies like T-Mobile will lobby against these anticompetitive agreements, since it does reduce their number of potential customers. I don’t like cell company lobbying any more than ISP lobbying, but in this case, let them fight.

Something tells me T-Mobile’s got a little too much class solidarity to have any interest in reducing the profits of Charter Communications.

Thanks for the well-written explanation, stranger.

Who knew a company with an unhealthy obsession with harvesting every screen tap of data from every person using their services… would chicken out from connecting their servers to a bunch of clients they couldn’t monitor.

… That said, I actually didn’t see this coming. It baffles me that I didn’t, but I didn’t.

Damn it, it’s now GNL and we have to rewrite all the textbooks!

I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

1. were empty, and
2. had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

Such an eloquent response

Wonderful. Thank you South Samurai. I’ll do just that.

This is one hell of a write up, stranger. Thank you!

Mastodon and calckey have the most active writing communities imo.

It is very difficult to search for something when you don’t know it exists. Now that I know Mastodon and calckey have a vibrant writing community that you recommend, I know there’s some value to finding it and learning how to immerse my account in that community. Much appreciated.

I think the best route is a lemmy or kbin author account combined with mastodon. Instances rarely matter in terms of where you join, so long as it’s a fairly stable and not heavily defederated/defederating one.

You even gave a recommended route!? Seriously, you have my gratitude. This is awesome.

By “combined with mastodon” do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and one at mastodon? Or do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and use it to connect with the writing communities at mastodon?

Thank you kindly. I feel like this answer supplements Samurai’s answer really well and gives a solid illustration of their point when they said,

I’ve looked over the other options, and they’re pretty meh tbh, for a writer in specific.

Now I know what’s so “meh” about at least one of them.