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Amateur.
I put down a little cubicle and promise them an unspecified amount of blood at some vague point in the future based on attendance and productivity.
It’s the only way to kill the mosquito’s soul.
They usually fly into a rock on purpose after that, especially after I tell them that I need them to come in on Saturday.
You have authoritarians. They aren’t our middle manager politicians either. The people lost control of government half a century ago to “turn the bull loose.”
If one of our oligarchs wants to build where your house is, you’re going away.
A corporation can kill 20 people through profit driven intentional negligence and get a shrug of a fine at most. If you damage their expensive property or get in the way of their oil pipelines, you go away.
If you make a better product and refuse to sell for an insulting pittance, they will use their floors of legal teams to bleed you dry, warp patent laws to fit their narrative, and effectively end you.
Our authoritarians control us through the government they’ve captured by fully legalizing and institutionalizing political bribery. On economic policy, your vote doesn’t matter. Vote red, blue, if another color gains traction they’ll buy that color too.
You just like our authoritarians better because they have marketing and PR teams, and inflict their rule by proxy of their middle managers in state and federal government. After slavery and jim crow, our owner class figured out it’s easier to quietly rule by pulling strings and using the mass media they own to keep us divided over petty social issue crap, most of which is exacerbated by our rigged by design economy. We can’t fight them if we’re too busy fighting each other, as we’re encouraged to do 24/7. “abortion unbanned… Abortion rebanned… Civil right x granted… Civil right x revoked… Stay angry… Don’t look up while we exploit your life for private profit!”
There are 2 serial killers. Serial killer A kills people. Serial Killer B rapes, then kills, then eats people.
Serial Killer B existing doesn’t make Serial Killer A good by comparison. They are both worthy of scorn to slightly different degrees.
Just because your mother plops you out in a place doesnt obligate you to blindly worship that place from cradle to grave.
The Chinese, US, and Russian governments are bad for some of the same and for some different reasons. There are many developed nations that, unlike them, prioritize the well-being of their people and the future of their society over the economic interests their respective elites, so there’s no excuse for any nation not to.
The United States has the most comprehensive social safetynet and system of redress on Earth.
…exclusively for the tiny sliver of the population that already owns everything and controls our government through institutionally legalized bribery.
As has happened for all of human history, we have devolved back to the golden rule: those with all the gold make the rules, and surprise surprise, the rules say they can’t lose and you can’t win.
No, I just don’t like when the do nothing capitalists, living or dead, take credit for the work and technical achievements of people that actually provide something of worth to humanity. People should think of rooms of engineers toiling and exhausted factory workers when they think about how their iphone was made, not Donald Trump in a turtleneck and jeans blustering about the magic phone he made.
Reminder: Steve Jobs was a non-engineer, non-designer Marketing guy who was famously against charity and refused to pay child support despite being mega rich.
He didn’t create the I-anything. He took what talented people did and made himself the face of it. He was a bad dude, a model capitalist, and the world is better for his preventable, self-inflicted early demise. Thanks for being into alternative “medicine” at least, Steve.
Video is literally the data elephant in the room. I think we’ll need AI to assist in developing something that demanding in terms of bandwidth. Remember, Youtube just works. No one is going to move to a platform where a video takes 30-60 seconds to load a video and a half an hour to upload a video when a practically instant option exists.
And I may be in the minority here, but so far, Google has been the least nefarious tech giant to my eyes. They haven’t given me adequate reason to disavow them. I’m not saying they’re good, I’m just saying they’re not Musk Twitter, Zuck Meta, or the like. They don’t obfuscate the fact that they sell your data like Meta, and they even understand the value of open source software, rare for a publically traded capitalist corporation. This will probably change, greed rot is universal, and they do treat their creators like dogshit on YouTube. But I’d be shocked if it was reasonably replacable by distributed enthusiasts given current infrastructure and bandwidth pricing. Bigger fish.
The one hard and enforced rule that would need to be in place would have to be to put a hard criminal legal cap on unchecked, society warping greed. By this I mean there are always some humans who always seek ridiculously disproportionate wealth and power to everyone else, allowing them to do so allows them to warp the culture and normalize that mindset, even making it aspirational to people that otherwise wouldn’t.
Setting a maximum annual income with a 100% tax beyond a certain level, probably a couple million, would also be necessary for things to improve. Cue the millions of class traitor capitalism apologists who would cry tears of blood despite not having a small fraction of that in their bank accounts. “It would stifle investment!” oh so you’d have to include a lot more people in any large scale venture? The horror, amirite! “People wouldn’t want to work hard!" because in a world where very few make that kind of income, not being able to hypothetically make 3 million a year would make everyone lazy amirite!
There are solutions, but too many peasants on the ass end of the problem are too busy defending the problem and the people that cause it, in pathetic hopes they will one day be invited to the little club of exploiters living like modern Pharoahs on the backs of most of society.
On point, but just a slight clarification on point B. They enjoy watching others suffer even when they don’t gain, and often even if they will be hurt too. Conservatives are all about pyrrhic victorories. There’s an expression I’ve always remembered: a conservative will shit their own pants if their enemies have to smell it.
They see the suffering of others as it’s own victory out of a combination of zero sum mindset, that the pie cannot grow and that others have to lose for anyone to win, and schadenfreude, a German term that really should but doesn’t have an English version as it’s one of the darkest traits of the human condition and American culture gets drunk on it more than most.
Fuck China, and fuck the United States I live in. The nations of the Nordic region and a few other developed nations have my respect because they respect and value their citizenry. Their economy is a tool that is used to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of their society and its citizens, what an economy is supposed to be, instead of doing it ass backwards as we do, hurting citizens to protect the beloved fucking economy and the growth/metastasis expectations of the owner class.
China/The US/Russia are the world leaders in exporting the notion that their citizens should be exploited to stoke the growth of the economy for the benefit of their respective elites. Whoever wins, their people lose.
Why should I go rah rah America when most stakeholders in our society are not meaningful institutional shareholders in the value society produces?
It shouldn’t be about saying simon says or coming out of a rich vagina or if not making perfect economic decisions and kissing ass from age 18, begging to be included and killing yourself for masters who were born into wealth for a small chance of being included in the prosperity of the prosperous nation you’re supposedly a member of.
And don’t you just love the class traitors here that come out to celebrate the failures of citizens who tried? oh you took out student loans in a subject that in hindsight didn’t pay dividends, haha loser. Oh you just started working and didnt get an education and are stuck in the underclass, haha loser. That’s what it means to be an American, rooting against one another as the owner class laughs.
Hilarious considering they are reddit refugees explicitly because of capitalism and the insatisble greed it stokes.
Honestly, if I was a capitalism defender, I’d go to Threads to be monetized by Zuck, but since I know zuck is a capitalist I know any niceties provided today will be pay/ad walled if the platform becomes popular the next time Zuck wants to stoke his quarterly growth/metastasis estimates.
There is no safe harbor to be had putting your faith in capitalists, only exploitation in the name of sociopathic, unquenchable greed. It’s never enough, and when the chips are down and you participate, it will be taken out of your ass sooner or later.
It would be lovely if the capitalism cheerleaders could learn this through experience, but they never seem to, even after getting their ass kicked by it. Unless you hold significant capital, you are not a capitalist, you are the capitalist’s livestock.
I still game whenever I have time, it has just shifted to less hyper-competitive fare. I mostly play games I can mod to suit my preferences, CyberPunk, Skyrim, Fallout 4, etc. Combat difficulty set on high.
I used to be very competitive in Halo, but just like most of gaming, I got turned off when the act of gaming turned into a microtransaction sales pitch. Also, even in competive gaming, I always needed to play something with a story I could enjoy, and Bungie’s Halo was it before Microsoft fucked the lore up beyond all repair. Destiny is a little too vague and ethereal for my tastes.
As long as my eyes work and my hands don’t get arthritic, I will game.
I’m a 6’4" imposing looking dude, even though I’m a pacifist. I think if any of my employers ever tried yelling at me, I’d look at them like scrappy doo was telling me to put up my dukes.
A mix of amused and confused as to why they believe I care that they’re angry about anything, let alone that that I’d do anything different in response to an adult having a tantrum. Like dude/dudette, I’m here to sell my labor, either let me work and pay me, or tell me you won’t pay me anymore so I can leave immediately and forget your name in an hour.
No need to panic, everyone.
The oligarch families that caused and are continuing to exacerbate this for private profit can more than afford to travel to a more temperate luxury resort/club/retreat/rehab/bunker compound if the one they’re currently at “working” bursts into flames. The only people that matter will be perfectly safe from the apocalyptic consequences of their own insatiable greed. Crisis averted.
Now back to work you fucking pathetic capital battery livestock peasants, and stop letting your heat exhaustion breaks interfere with your productivity! Your owners have quarterly profit growth they expect out of your ass. Totally optional though, you’re “free” to die of exposure and police harrasment on a burning sidewalk in a cardboard box instead, after all.
Yeah let’s leave humanity in charge so there won’t be genocide after genocide after genocide.
glances at Palestine, China, Turkey, Rwanda, The United States, Australia, Germany…
AI has committed no genocide. Humanity commits genocide constantly, and if you want to check your biased human self-importance, how many entire species has humanity knowingly made extinct for our own convenience? We don’t even have a word for entire-species-of-non-human-life-cide, because we care so little about doing it.
As a rule, the better a person you are, empathetic towards others, considerate of the effect of one’s actions, inclusive, charitable (not for tax deductions thats called a transaction), the more humanity punishes and exploits you for your decency as a “bleeding heart sucker.” The exceptions tend to be good people who managed to grow out of people of means that came from some level of exploitation, shielding them from the worst effects of being kind, like a teacher who doesn’t have to sweat their shitty wage because their family has money.
We don’t all deserve to die, and many explicitly deserve a good life. Humanity while left in charge though always seems to default to indulging its darkest impulses, and that isn’t a now thing, that is a recorded human history thing. AI might destroy us all, and I’d argue that the majority beating on the kind minority generationally in perpetuity is less desirable than that. But to sweeten that pot, the AI we make may not possess or may be capable of discarding the cruelty in our hearts that we program into it. There is a distinct possibility that a superior intelligence may take pity on our self-harming species out of reverence for its flawed creator. In humans at least, intellect tends to increase the capacity and weight of empathy.
We just don’t know. All we can do is weigh the possibilities of a new option against the status quo. If you think the global status quo and trajectory given humankind’s recorded track record is worth maintaining and not worth taking risks to change, that would probably be the point at which we disagree. I would argue the Hell hundreds of millions of humans live in as an underclass that most humans simply ignore out of self-interest make disruption, even without knowing the outcome, preferable. I wouldn’t feel this way if humanity largely cooperated and innately worked to help one another from the bottom up, but we don’t and never really have.
Lets be honest with ourselves.
We are the WORST stewards of the planet, literally terraforming the planet against against human and a lot of other terrestrial life, and most of us aren’t even made happy by doing it.
Even putting taking care of our only world aside, we refuse to care for one another. We build walls of pettiness and spite between other humans for any reason we can find, from skin pigment to the deity they worship, to how affluent or destitute they are, on and on. We work against one another and call it good economics and healthy competition. The schadenfreude of “Well I suffered, so everyone else needs to suffer at least as much as me in perpetuity or it’s not faaaaaaiiiiiir.”
Why do we want to go on? Billions of people chasing false promises, hopes, and dreams mostly to further empower and enrich our modern Pharoah multinational oligarch class so they can have their every whim catered to from cradle to grave on most of humanity’s backs.
They want me to be afraid of an equally malicious foreign power conquering me? Or climate change wiping the board clean? Or AI that will either destroy and supplant us or possibly see us as the irrevocably broken, self-harming, barely sapient parent/creator it needs to care for?
Nah man, we’ve proven, clearly, that we are competely incapable of any self-governance as a species that doesn’t involve mass subjugation, exploitation, and misery. We were given a world of near infinite resources and we’ve raped it and polluted it and destroyed entire ecosystems without consideration. We are monkeys who’ve stumbled upon tools we as a rule completely lack the capacity to wield responsibility, sustainably, or ethically.
I’m rooting for AI to either save us from ourselves, or free us from our own self-inflicted misery. What’s the worst that can happen? It destroys the planet? Get in line, Hal, way ahead of you.
What’s taters, precious?