A relative was talking about ordering stuff from Temu. My response was that the products sold through them (they're just a marketplace) are so cheap that there's got to be slavery involved.
From what I hear, it’s also Chinese manufacturers trying to “break in” to the western market by initially operating at a loss. But I doubt how effective of a business strategy that would be, given that there is basically zero brand loyalty on marketplaces like temu. Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK? Fuck if I care! Idk tho, maybe the experience is different for people who buy stuff other than cheap electronics.
But yeah, there is 100% slavery involved. It’s like the cacao/coffee/chocolate industries, down to the “don’t blame us, we’re just buying these goods at market prices, like everyone else” excuse. Brother, you are the one setting the market price.
Ironically I have had good enough experiences with one or two Chinese brands to probably look at their stuff first whenever I ultimately replace/upgrade what I’ve got from them, but they certainly aren’t the “spam random letters to game Amazon’s systems” sort of brands and are really only slightly cheaper than the equivalents from elsewhere.
My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!
Then there’s the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain’t no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.
Those reasons sound retarded. Having a loss leader product or line just means you are recouping it elsewhere. It’s a draw-in, like $1.25 hotdogs at Costco. It’s different than if your whole business operates at a loss for a certain time in order to squeeze out competition. The only way this would make even marginally sense is if say both IKEA and JYSK had a cafeteria and IKEA decided to sell food at a loss while JYSK would not be able to afford in that segment.
From what I know, it’s not actually China subsidizing shipping, but the individual target countries instead, mostly on taxpayer money. This wouldn’t be bad in practice, except that goods not originating from China do not have subsidized shipping, thus the unfair advantage.
Grey cat likes to lie to get into the room you’re in, if the door is closed, by pretending there’s a horrific emergency on the other side of the door. “Help! Help! Let me into the bathroom with you! My agony shall not subside until I have access to this room! I am ill! I am dying!”
Stripey cat likes to open cupboard doors, cardboard boxes and then hunt, kill and eat pouches of wet cat food, then pretend it wasn’t him at all, and he is hungry and hasn’t eaten for days.
Black cat likes a more traditional “I’ve not been fed yet, I am starving”, and also “I have no idea how the water bowl ended up upside down, but it looks like we’re out of water again”.
Thankfully, none of them will scratch or bite (at least not me or my partner). Black and stripey will both gently push your hand away when they’ve had enough tummy-tickle-time. Grey cat can be tickled for at least ten minutes. He just waits for you to get bored.
I love that someone wrote a poem about our cats. Thank you.
I think they’ll like it too - I fear they’re growing tired of me singing “Who’s a little black/stripey/silver cat with a fluffy little nosey-wose, who is a cat with a fluffity tail” to the tune of “Ride a White Swan” by T-Rex.
Hey, you’re welcome! I just thought it would be a logistical nightmare to get past the cats without disturbing them in your picture, and my brain ran with the idea.
On a related note: Check out the book “I Could Pee on This, and Other Poems by Cats”. It’s a little book of poems from the perspective of cats.
In a way it’s kinda poetic that Disco Elysium was destroyed by corporate greed. That being said, it’s a great shame that the original creators were robbed of the beautiful world they created. Fuck ZA/UM.
A couple of the original writers were pushed out, including the lead writer, early on. The rest of the original writers were fired just recently. I don’t know how many of the original developers of Disco are still left at the company, but they were already paid for their work on the game. Regardless of who owns it, they weren’t going to see extra money (unless the firm has become a co-op, which it should have always been).
That’s like you buying a car and when you try to sell it the next person tells you they won’t pay anything for it, in fact they are going to straight up steal it like some criminal.
My dad once told me my mom didnt feel safe walking alone at night in the neighborhood and asked if I felt the same. I said I didnt feel any concerns, but added the caveat that Im not a small woman, and Im a large man.
He paused for a minute, nodded and said “that makes sense.” Then after another few seconds goes “That’s not white privilege.”
He saw himself having an epiphany about privilege in general, so he had to swerve and add race into the mix so he could say a true (albeit unrelated) thing and miss the point.
It’s like when anti BLM people say “All lives matter” … Sure, all lives DO matter, but they’re intentionally missing the point, so they don’t have to acknowledge that police brutality disproportionately affects black lives.
Saying unrelated “true” things to undermine the original statement is a bit telling about intentions.
Reminds me of my white dad talking to a friend of my brother’s who’s black about how he feels when a cop is around. “Not that different, maybe a little safer.” And the friend said he has to be very careful about everything he does in that situation. My dad’s not a conservative type, thank god, so hopefully it gave him some insight.
A few years ago, some cops were in my neighborhood looking for someone while I was sitting in my car. One ducked his head down to look at me and quickly left. I was VERY aware that my skin color might have just saved my life.
I was talking to my handyman the other day, he’s a nice guy and likes to learn. I’m telling him about how much it sucks to grow up in car-centric suburbs, and he told me about childhood.
I told him how the freedom he had now gets people arrested for child neglect, and all of a sudden he goes “yeah it’s so dangerous now with the crisis at the border”
It’s like they’ve been through an “education” camp. You carefully lead them through understanding how the world could be very easily improved, and they’re getting it… Then some phrase reminds them of their conditioning, and they snap back to step one.
It takes months of gently leading them to see that what they’re saying makes no sense… It’s possible, but it’s depressing how many people are falling into the fox newshole
I think a better way to view it is that it’s a search engine that works on the word level of granularity. When library indexing systems were invented they allowed us to look up knowledge at the book level. Search engines allowed look ups at the document level. LLMs allow lookups at the word level, meaning all previously transcribed human knowledge can be synthesized into a response. That’s huge, and where it becomes extra huge is that it can also pull on programming knowledge allowing it to meta program and perform complex tasks accurately. You can also hook them up with external APIs so they can do more tasks. What we have is basically a program that can write itself based on the entire corpus of human knowledge, and that will have a tremendous impact.
The next step is to understand much more and not get stuck on the most popular semantic trap
Then you can begin your journey man
There are so, so many llm chains that do way more than parrot. It’s just the last popular catchphrase.
Very tiring to keep explaining that because just shallow research can make you understand more than it’s a parrot comment. We are all parrots. It’s extremely irrelevant to the ai safety and usefulness debates
Most llm implementations use frameworks to just develop different understandings, and it’s shit, but it’s just not true that they only parrot known things they have internal worlds especially when looking at agent networks
I hate Fox but they have a point. Preaching about climate change (good) doesn’t excuse using a private jet (bad). And obviously the hypocricy makes it worse.
Greta Thunberg made the trip to the US for some climate summin via sailboat. Not to show that it can be done - but to show how absolutely impractical it is. Climate action cannot be about individual responsibility - sometimes we need private jets.
So the rational action would be to start a massive development effort to develop jets that are slower and run on hydrogen fuel cells or something. And find ways to generate hydrogen fuel without carbon. And then distribute and regulate jets.
But that’s basically a planned economy, a taboo word to think or say in mainstream. Instead any small advancement is patented which raises the cost of it to maximize profit.
So no, pointing out Taylor’s swift as hypocrite is not a good point, it is indeed propaganda to avoid sensible action on climate change. Of course it’s way to late now so it doesn’t really matter any more.
Literally, the second sentence of the post says that she wasnt teying to show it was better for the environment. She was showing how impractical it was.
Then you step in and say “but her team was flown over the atlantic”.
Greta: im not trying to make a point about private jets being bad for the environment and boats being a good alternative by sailing instead of flying
You: but you didn’t prove that sailing is a good alternative to private jets by sailing instead of flying.
We have to keep trying of course, but we also have to hedge our bets and plan for the worst. There is a lot we can do on a community level or city level or sometimes on a small nation level.
But globally it’s dangerous to think that what has been happening isn’t going to continue to happen. The political and media situation today is actually worse than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Economic power has further consolidated. Media is worse than ever. The climate protest are being managed all over the world with improved science for propaganda. AI is going to make it worse still, by being able to generate localized just in time strategies for every community.
In the end it didn’t matter if climate change is anthropogenic or not, we are apparently not an intelligent civilization. Meaning on a global scale we simply cannot act intelligent, but more like a slime mold, always moving towards where food or energy (money) is.
We should try to minimize damage locally and create resilient communities or societies or nations. But the catastrophes, billions of refugees, climate wars and genocides are something we have to plan for. Nobody knows where and how bad it’s going to be. Regional nuclear war isn’t unlikely. We have to try to anticipate the chaos and plan for it - and if you can, get out of the way sooner than later. Great Britain is an example of an island that can sustain itself and maintain a civilized society. Or Ireland or Island. While Russia has so many borders to problematic areas it will almost certainly be complete chaos. Europe is going to be a shitshow too, while the USA of course is the big winner: A huge country with only two boarders.
As for environmental concerns, we should try to “terraform” or transplant ecosystems as temperatures change. Because the change is far too fast for nature to migrate (plus artificial barriers today). So that is an important strategy for preservation. The other thing we should do is collect seeds and genetic samples and digitize data and create long lasting archives to preserve them for the future.
Hopefully we survive and eventually learn not to do it again. See, I’m not a nihilist ;) Or maybe it won’t be that bad and we somehow muddle through.
It’s such a simple comment, but this resonated in a way that hit me. I feel like I’m an environmental nihilist, and looking at it as unethical rather than just being a result of hopelessness is a totally different way to reframe this. It’s motivating to keep trying to make a difference!
Do we need private jets for individuals to take on a whim? Maybe we need private jets for government officials specifically traveling to do work on behalf of the government.
Depending on the level of fame, yeah actually. I wouldn’t want to be on a plane with Taylor Swift. Even with her in first class and me in the cheap seats. Imagine all the Swifties trying to get on your plane to see Taylor or just say they were on the same plane, it would be a nightmare. Not to mention the security threats there would be, how many extremists do you think have made a death threat at Taylor Swift? How would you feel getting on a plane someone threatened to blow up because Taylor Swift was abourd?
Like it or not the obsession with celebrity status necessitates things like private jets. No one needs to be as popular as Taylor Swift. That leaves the question of ‘is it ethical to become so popular?’ on the table but I am not interested in getting into that.
not until we turn the kremlin into a pile of dust and bones. after that we can have all the transcontinental rail we want. except for to antarctica and oceania but fuck those guys
I feel like if bombing anywhere could help make more trains then Davos during the WEF, or Washington DC, would be about 100 places further up the list, even if it wouldn’t give you the same bloodthirsty nationalist ahistorical satisfaction. But it seems unhinged to think anyone needs to die at all…
Yeah, but there are some speeds at which airplanes are quite efficient. One thing would also be to make large airplanes slower, to reduce energy costs. In general trains though yeah. China is building a lot of high speed rail.
We could design and plan a zero emissions civilization with a circular economy with today’s technology. Practically it’s absolutely impossible because it would be near 100% wealth redistribution.
Urban density would need to be increased, every home would need to be well insulated, homes would need to become smaller, home / work would need to be smaller meaning companies and living communities would have to be planned and forced to move, many small towns completely abandoned. Public transport, no more meat production, cars replaced with bicycles, smaller cars or 1 or 2 person robo taxies. Passenger airplanes would have to fly slower to save fuel. Massive amount of trains build. Hundreds of thousands of industrial processes would have to be redesigned, factories torn down and new ones build, patents would have to be abolished, no more large scale warships or bombers or jets, industrial production would need to be localized and moved from overseas to multiple smaller producers all around the world. Any of this goes far beyond regulations, and not even regulations are politically possible.
No ‘sometimes anybody needs private jets’. Fly commercial en masse to at least make it one flight instead of 300 separate ones. In this age of very good remote video calling there is no situation where somebody needs to be somewhere else within 2 hours to the point it is worth taking a private jet for all of the relevant reasons we’re concerned with. There were commercial empires spanning the globe long before the internet or manned flight existed and they arguably did far better than today’s ‘nimble’ corporations do. BS rhetoric for people to suggest they ‘need’ to fly private at all.
If she needs to fly private (which she does, her itineraries would never be possible on commercial, aside from the harassment she’d receive from the general public), it’s because her fans actually demand it.
Thats the problem. It’s not the jets, it’s that she’s expected, by millions of people, to stick to an itinerary that’s unattainable without them.
If you have enough fans to be the most famous performer in the world, and they demand you do things that are unattainable without a private jet, then you either need a private jet, or saner fans.
Stop looking at the immediate problem. Look upstream. Don’t build a dam at a delta.
For some reason I don’t think that Taylor has a whole Airbus A380 to herself.
I was able to find she has a Dassault Falcon, a 12-seater. I doubt she travels alone in it…ever. Most of those seats are full, and I’m sure she’s flying direct and on her schedule.
Now, I get the absurdity of a single person needing a plane. But I also get the absurdity of a single person driving an F-250 crew cab to their office job 60 miles away.
After all, the guy in the pickup could have just as well taken public transit and shared. Except in order to take the train, he’d have to leave 3 hours earlier to arrive at the same time, and he’d get home two hours later. And there are several transfers along the way. Also there’s a store off the highway that he needs to go to, and he cant get there on the bus.
Private transport will always be needed. We will never meet 100% of personal transportation needs with just public transit and bikes. It’s an absurd goal.
The more important thing is that private-transport be right-sized for the individual need. In that lens, a 12-seat jet for a pop star, her pilot, body guard, and entourage, makes way more sense to me than a desk-jockey in a monster truck.
If you want to be mad at something, be mad at the fact that society is demanding that she actually fly all over the world so she can sing and dance in front of them, beholden to schedules that could never be possible on commercial flights. Commercial may not have the appropriate routes, or times, or may have unexpected route changes or delays or cancellations.
And the thing about planes is you kind of need to have them with you when you take off. You can’t exactly fly commercial and then take your private-jet for a specific hop and then go right back to commercial, either your jet stays with you or it dead-heads across the world without you.
Not to mention, this is Taylor Fucking Swift we are talking about. She is probably the single most famous person in the world. I would not be surprised if more people could pick her out of a crowd than they could Olaf Scholz. The amount of harassment she’d be subject to on commercial would be unbearable. She needs to fly private just to preserve a shred of sanity.
Add to this I read somewhere that she actually purchased more carbon credits than she would need for her tour to cover for unplanned travel - like to football games. Regardless of how some feel about the carbon credits, it’s more than nothing.
Yeah, you’re not wrong but the point is that there are no simple solutions that any individual can do within an existing society with how it actually works today. We can’t just change a few things and then continue with the same level of comfort or speed. Much of how we live and work would have to be redesigned, then already existing technological solutions could work very well. Basically the objection is just a diversion from e.g. drastically reducing meat consumption that would have an actual impact.
BTW there are single person electric VTOL vehicles like the “opener blackfly” that use less energy per mile than a tesla car. Not less than a (electrified) velomobile of course.
she’s told her viewers to vote democrat and that she can’t contain her political opinions any longer because republicans have gotten so fucked etc. etc., which blows up due to her being a celebrity woman that people like finding reasons to be controversial about
I kinda fell off the bandwagon after the “salary discussions are frowned upon” WAN show ep. Said screw that guy when the Billet Labs prototype was auctioned off. And I quit watching entirely after learning what happened to Madison. She was a huge breath of fresh air and way too funny for her own good, and I choose to believe her because I just don’t know what she would have to gain.
To anyone who felt strongly enough to downvote this, which part(s) of my statement do you disagree with?
Do you believe:
It is acceptable to suppress employee discussions with regard to compensation;
It was okay when LTT’s inventory management allowed a trade secret prototype to end up in the wild; or
Madison should have kept quiet about being sexually harassed by her colleagues and disregarded by HR, which was run by the CEO/owner’s wife?
Do you also believe it was okay for Linus to trash GN or HW Unboxed? Or that the Billet Labs prototype review was conducted correctly and/or scientifically? Do you believe LTT’s initial response to Billet Labs was apropos?
One good thing that came out of this mess was that I discovered Gamer’s Nexus, information packed and down to earth. I’d rather have 20 minutes of information than 5 minutes plus 15 minutes showmanship.
I’d been watching Steve for years. I came to a realization that you go to Linus to be entertained. You go to Steve to learn or make a very informed purchase.
You’ve said this twice but haven’t given any more details. And Steve has changed his testing methodology several times and is extremely transparent on how and why. Do you have sources, has this actually happened more than once, what is a “tantrum” to you?
Exactly what a tantrum is to anyone else - acting in an emotionally charged way, dismissing logic and behaving like a brat. Why are you using manipulative language to dismiss my statement as a subjective thing?
You’ve said this twice but haven’t given any more details
It’s almost like you have access to google yourself. Look up “RA tech Gamers Nexus”.
And Steve has changed his testing methodology several times and is extremely transparent on how and why.
Except for when he gets called out - then his methodology becomes some type of gospel enshrined by the pope himself.
How am I supposed to know to Google “RA tech Gamers Nexus” if you don’t say who was involved?
Also yes I am going to question your hyperbolic and subject language like “tantrum”. It’s not manipulative for me to ask that. Typically a tantrum is used to describe toddlers stomping and falling to the floor screaming and crying. And when I look into it and find Gamers Nexus was harsh and critical, but not histrionic or emotional, I know you’re being subjective by saying he threw a tantrum. So I’m questioning your bias because your comments are filled with hyperbole (gospel enshrined by the Pope himself?? Really??)
Steve could have taken more time to hear RA Tech out or validate his tests or been nicer etc etc and handled it better. I personally am disappointed in his response. We shouldn’t treat anyone as above criticism, especially someone like Steve that people watch for his educational content. However, many other people also disagree with RA Tech. And when Steve commented, 90% of his comment was focusing on the technical aspects of why he disagreed. And I couldn’t find any discussion between the two past that, feel free to give more context or follow up if there is any.
I’m not going to say either Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed had correct benchmarks, but the RA Tech video alone doesn’t disprove them because his testing methodology fundamentally lacks transparency. He didn’t say what resolution or setting he was testing at, he compared those unlabeled numbers with cropped screenshots of Gamers Nexus’ numbers. Gamers Nexus tests at different resolutions and settings, so saying you got better results is meaningless without that context. But RA Tech glosses over that by then shifting to comparing to his own simulated test of a 2 core 4 thread, which is a CPU that he artificially handicapped. And he entirely dismissed 1% lows for some reason? Saying FPS is good enough and pointing to an unlabeled graph that looks to be steady. But I can’t compare that graph to GN’s actual 1% low numbers. Which is especially silly because one benchmark showed GN got a better result than he did but the problem was in the 1% lows… which RA Tech didn’t test. So sure, GN and HU could have made mistakes. But RA Tech’s lack of transparency and amateur testing didn’t prove his point the way you think it does.
I do know that acting like this was some big drama moment or that Gamers Nexus’ entire credibility is destroyed by this one time he wasn’t super nice and patient while disagreeing with another YouTuber is disingenuous. Take all testing with a grain of salt, and don’t blindly believe what someone shows you in a YouTube video (Gamers Nexus or RA Tech)
Gamers Nexus has their own issues, not least of which the fact that Steve throws a tantrum whenever the quality or veracity of his data is brought into question - EVEN WHEN SAID DATA REFERS TO A 10 YEAR OLD PROCESSOR! Instead of admitting there might’ve been something wrong with the old test, he attacked a smaller Youtuber for bringing weird data to attention.
And I quit watching entirely after learning what happened to Madison. She was a huge breath of fresh air and way too funny for her own good, and I choose to believe her because I just don’t know what she would have to gain.
She’s a young zoomer with effectively zero work experience and terminal online-ness… Are you serious?
He also tried to defend his liberal use of a non-compete clause even after acknowledging that they aren’t enforcable legaly. Afaik any of his employees cannot stream on twitch in their free time unless they use LMG for their sponsorships who then take a cut of the revenue.
IMO they were already shit before the drama. There was some good stuff in the past, but for a while now they just produce a lot of videos with not a lot of content.
I never really understood the channel, it’s just an infomercial. I remember Linus even blatantly admitting he wouldn’t personally buy most of the shit he pitches
It is a review channel, that is kind of the point is to tell you about a product. Just to do it in an entertaining way.
Here is a product it is good for this and this reason, it is bad for this and this reason
Here is a comparison of the product vs alternative products.
I would buy because X reason or I wouldn’t buy it for X reason…
It makes sense he wouldn’t personally use or want all of the products he reviews as his needs are different then others needs. But end of the day a successful product would fill someone’s needs. The idea is that someone would see and learn about it any buy it.
What I mean though is things he recommended, he later admitted guilt over on that long winded apology video (the one that is always screencapped for memes), saying that he feels bad pushing products he doesn’t even believe in
So the real question is did he change his ways or not?
Usually if your truly feeling guilty about something you would stop doing that thing.
If this is a true oh crap I want to be a better person type situation I would argue it sounds like a reason to start watching LTT videos. As future videos would not have products he doesn’t believe in. (assuming you put any value on what Linus believes in and assuming he is putting forth best effort to stop/improve.). I assume they have enough money they can pick and choose whatever products they want to review so seem like a easy goal to achieve on paper.
From what I remember of the last few videos I have personally watch and just scrolling through their last 2-3 months worth of videos, the only things they are reviewing that I would say are “bad” products seem to be created to warn people that they are bad products or straight up scams. Like the audiophile video and wish.com videos. Both in my opinion are entertaining and informative and serve as a warning to stay away from the garbage products they are using in the videos.
If you avoid the obvious sponsored product reviews, he does make some entertaining videos.
I like his janky self-made PC cooling videos for example, where they hook up a car radiator or giant ass fans that are clearly not made to cool a PC. Those don’t promote anything.
The problem with the whole genre of tech review channels is that they focus on the latest/greatest stuff and viewing that causes a tech-elitism that ‘PCmasterrace’ used to be a parody of.
Catering to the technosnobs has done more to enshitify the PC parts industry than crypto mining IMO.
Not even close, brother. Back in the 00s you had some of the biggest snobs tech has ever seen in the PC space, and it was largely regarded as the golden years of PC gaming.
I, for one, am wondering what happened to Emily. She’s still listed as an employee, but AFAIK hasn’t been in any videos in months. I miss her content about Linux etc.
I hope it’s something as positive as that! I just wish they’d given us at least an oblique heads-up (something like “Emily’s doing fine; she’s just decided to stay behind the camera for a while for personal reasons and will be back hosting videos [in N months | at some point in the future | never]”) so we didn’t have to be concerned for her.
They did, though. Can’t remember which video, but hasn’t been that long since we got an update akin to “Emily is fine, they’re working in a different project which is why this video doesn’t feature them”
There was a video about it on her channel or smth about it, can’t remember right now. Generally very positive, but doesn’t want to be on camera atm. I’d love more content of her but I can also understand if she doesn’t want to anymore. There are always some shitheads in the comments or elsewhere insulting and making the life of others their problem.
Makes sense, there is no US middle class anymore. The wealthy can just use a private jet while the poor are put on overbooked flights. Wealth disparity is getting worse and not better.
I prefer bringing up that in US “democracy” some votes count more than others. When trump won, more people voted for Clinton and for some reason yanks seem to be totally ok with this.
We are not ok with this, but changing the way it works is a herculean task. The people that it currently works for are very invested in keeping it that way.
Because it’s easier for people to pretend already being busy (focusing on and protesting nonsensical and completely irrelevant shit) vs actually focusing on the primary and relevant things that are actually impacting their lives.
The media has done a pretty good job convincing the vast majority of Americans that we are the pinnacle of democracy and any change to that is either fascism or communism. Wanting a better system is intentionally painted as un-American.
“The media” sounds like a convenient scapegoat. Who gives a fuck about how things are painted? Do you really just go “well, I guess I better waive my right to having my vote count equally, don’t want the neighbours to think I’m un-american” or is that just an excuse for lethargy? I don’t mean to antagonise you but I think you should ask yourself some tough questions once in a while.
You have a great points, though your scenario is a bit too simple.
It’s not that we’re so fat and lethargic that we can’t be bothered to get off the sofa long enough to effect meaningful change. It’s that “the media” is gargantuan and goes far beyond the synthesized news cycles and reports. The OG social media outlets like churches, work culture, family structure, regional Identities, and every other socialized structure you can think of manifests itself into these ideals that have been pummeled into our head since the first time we stood up in preschool and recited the pledge of allegiance.
Making it more complicated is that our real concerns like, paying our bills, feeding our families, getting Timmy to soccer practice, protecting our kids, being a good employee so we don’t lose our job, being a good dad, being a good son, keeping our relationships healthy, etc., etc. is condensed into an infantesimally small amount of time. When you finally get to stop you’ve only got the bandwidth for bullet points. It’s not laziness, it’s exhaustion. It’s not lack of self-reflection, it’s overclocking. We have an entire backbone population that’s absolutely exhausted and still feeling like failures because somehow the American dream is feeling like a greasy, over-hustled nightmare that we’re constantly struggling to live up to.
This cycle does lend itself to your headlines of gun violence, gladiator arena us v. them politics, and on, and on. The system with which we now live is a constant grinder that no longer leaves time for, nor praises individualism and ideas. It’s a finely tuned revenue machine built on an overhauled slavery model that instead praises corporatism, classism, ruling parties, and residual monthly income… with a smiley face of nationalistic exceptionalism posted on the packaging.
Apologies for being so long winded, but some sympathy for the devil might be in order. We’re largely not a bad people. Most of us are kind, optimistic, and try very hard to change the things we see out of place. The problem is we’re becoming more and more just white noise in the background. A sort of spectre of idealisms past.
You make it sound like you’re just a cog in a machine with no agency and I do believe that’s what it feels like (other countries are in late capitalism, too) but you’re not if enough of you band together. You’re not forced to watch your life pass before your eyes, you choose to play along with the machine’s game. Hell, you even got the guns to take what should be yours and you just use them to shoot at little paper targets.
I don’t think of you as fat and lazy or the devil. It’s just frustrating to see your potential go to waste like that.
Great argument. Now instead of preaching to the choir, which is to say someone who already understands and agrees with you, why don’t you elevate your message to all 400 million of us? You know, really get to the ones who don’t understand they’re being manipulated?
No? You won’t do that? Don’t you care about our right to vote and this democracy? Maybe you feel like it’s just not your job. I don’t know, sounds like another way to say you’re just too lazy.
I don’t mean to antagonize you, but you’re the one insinuating that it just takes one person being unhappy about the system to change it. So you should ask yourself the same questions about why you can’t do it yourself. Even if you don’t live in the US, you have about the same resources as I do.
You took a comment that addressed noone in particular a bit personal and now pretend it was meant to start a revolution on a very niche corner of the internet. Not quite what I consider worth my time.
I don’t mean to antagonise you but I think you should ask yourself some tough questions once in a while.
You wouldn’t consider this addressing me in particular? Looks a little like you’re avoiding a response because you don’t have a good answer.
In any case, have fun preaching to people who live in a complex system about changes you don’t really understand. For what it’s worth, entertaining the naive notion of
well why don’t you just ask yourself some hard questions and it’ll all be better
That sentence upset you to the point you feel the need to insult my intelligence, misrepresent what is written, forget that “you” can mean people in general and ignore any clarification. That’s regrettable as I’m sure you do actually understand what I’m trying to say here but can’t address it over a perceived slight.
That sentence doesn’t make sense addressed to people in general. No one says, “I didn’t mean to antagonize you” to a large group of undefined people. Antagonize is pretty specific to a single subject.
Also, what clarification? The only response you made was to dutifully inform me that my challenge to your logic was beneath replying to.
Lastly, it’s pretty clear what you were trying to say. That if only people realized that being un-American isn’t the end of the world, maybe systemic changes could start happening.
What I’m saying to you is, about 150 million of us are so brainwashed and vehemently against opening their minds to that sort of change that they regularly float the idea of rounding up the rest of us to execute.
That’s what our media does to us. And by “media”, I don’t mean the boogie man you decided that I meant, I mean conservative outlets like Fox News that captivate millions of our population and constantly send the message that the people actually trying to change things are evil and corrupt. That advocate for locking up the poor and shooting the protesters.
If you really think that can be overcome by a plurality of us “asking ourselves the hard questions”, you’re woefully naive about the actual situation.
If you want to paint me as the type to be offended at a perceived slight, understand that the slight in question is proposing an overly simplistic solution to a gargantuanly complex problem half a century in the making like we just “forgot” we can change the system.
Isn’t that true for any representative democracy especially when gerrymandering is allowed? In Aus you can easily have a party win more than 50% of the vote but not get in because the votes were concentrated in vast-majority seats.
No, that’s not an example of votes not counting equally…? Am I misunderstanding your example?
You don’t need some mathematical proof to just count all the votes and see which candidate got more votes. It’s how most elections throughout the world work.
In Europe, the countries i know of at least, count each vote equally.
What i meant was that it doesn’t mean it’s a perfect system if your goal is democracy.
Other factors can totally break the purpose of counting votes equally altogether and end up with a unsatisfying result. And my exemple is as such.
(I live in France, we have equally counted vote but with this issue, and some other neighboring countries have it too. If you’re interested i can explain more what the issue is…)
(I guess Australia, for the user you were replying to originally, have it’s own issues too, not that i’m familiar with them.)
Mathematicians worked on how different suffrage creates different results.
There are plenty like the majority judgement but one that i particularly like is Condorcet’s method to solve the problem.
MoistCritikal pumps out a 12 minute video of him sitting in a chair going, “The recent YouTube drama with xXxBlorpkin and Tglof has gone too far” and generates millions of views.
Gotta admit, as an agnostic who was raised gently Christian, that’s part of the reason I’m still comfortable putting all this stuff up in our house. Took a while to figure out a tree topper I liked but one year a saw a dove and that feels less religious to me.
The recurring use of the word bird throughout that series is one of my favorite parts of the show. I love Birdman, the Australian mullet adventurah who shows about at the Air B&B togoonawalkabewt…
Yes, but only the lucky ones win death in a raffle (1 in a 1000). The rest are shipped to mines. And their memories are not wiped clean, because the suffering is the integral part of such economy.
memes
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.