Maybe this freak should just text uncle steve whatever he wanted, or a “call me when it’s convinient” message, and then steve will probably see the notification at some point in his morning routine before too long. If this guy really needed to call steve anyways, for whatever reason, he shouldn’t care about time zones, because it’s an emergency.

If you were commonly calling whatever place you were calling, you’d probably be able to intuit what time they woke up anyways, so it’s all moot.

I dunno. I think it’s pretty easy to make a big deal out of time zones and calendar measurements and whatever but I don’t think it really, actually matters that much, because the main thing they facilitate is communication. Time zones and timelines should be engineered more around the human condition, I think, than around anything else.

But then, I think, to construct anything around the human condition is kind of paradoxical. If you create a schedule, then you have created a schedule. I.e. if you construct time, then you imply the existence of something that needs to be measured. That implies deadlines.

Frankly, that’s too much pressure for me, so I’m going to take the more controversial stance here: Abolish time. No more time, no more numbers measuring when I should do what. You’re either gonna tell me whether or not to do something now, or to do it later. The people gotta learn that time is more subjective and contingent, and they gotta start showing up to their work shifts whenever they want to make money, instead of just showing up at a given time when the fuckin steam whistle goes off like it’s the 1800s.

what if we just put them all on an island and then blew it up immediately

I tend to think that twd is fiction, and the people who negan piss off, who want to kill negan, only need to get lucky once, while negan needs to keep succeeding over and over (I’ve never seen the walking dead tho I’m just kind of going based on vibes).

I’m not the smartest guy or the most well read or what have you, but the idea is basically that whenever someone becomes overtly greedy or authoritarian, the mutual benefits of co-operation kind of ensure that this is a non-issue. Everyone that’s co-operating would simply choose not to co-operate with that person, or that organization, and then they end up not getting very far. Maybe if it turns violent, then the same thing happens, just in that everyone kind of mutually crushes the organization, or dissolves it, or what have you.

You know I think the point most people fire back with is that authoritarianism tends to be thought of as like, more effective, right, because they can “make the trains run on time”, or some such nonsense, but I think they’re just conflating this with the idea that authoritarianism is more effective in a crisis, which is partially why authoritarianism is constantly inventing crises to combat. The idea, basically, is that if you have a singular leader, you can pivot and accommodate things more easily, make judgement calls easier, and you gain a capacity for rapid response. This is, you know, questionable, things end up being more complicated in practice, and leaving everything to a singular point of failure is a pretty easy way to make a brittle system. At the same time, even were it completely true, it’s still only true for the short term, that it’s more effective for short term gains. Long term gains, mutual co-operation, is much more effective.

Basically, the refutation is that greed isn’t really a fundamental component of humanity insomuch as it is a choice, and anarchism tends to think that greed is a pretty bad one. Not only for everyone but the greedy, but just generally, for mutual, long term gains. If you change the environment significantly enough that you can ensure this is more overwhelmingly the case at the macro scale, then you’ve kind of “won” anarchism, in a sense, you’ve won the game.

Peace and love and hippies and Woodstock. Gen Z will be no different.

This but with the emphasis on the people who got fucking killed or put in prison or aged out of the ability for revolutionary action, while the rest of them kind of, left those guys to rot in jail, and went on to just exist passively in the system, and purport the same hippie mentalities, and then get sorted, just the same as last time. Power corrupts and is magnetic to the easily corruptible.

You know, I do wonder if, as the contradiction builds, and the farce kind of becomes more obvious, with like, the starbucks pride month rainbow logo while they also crush their unions, I wonder if everyone will make progress along that, as the marxists kind of tend to predict, with the whole “capital contains the seeds of it’s own destruction” spiel. I dunno. I think probably people don’t give a shit about contradiction though and are free to just keep living with a totally normalized cognitive dissonance.

I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It’s not true to say we’ve “grown up interconnected”, by the 2010’s, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn’t a grand a unifying “american culture”. At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90’s could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we’ve all become atomized, there’s a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that’s not “the culture”. There is less genuine engagement with a “the culture”, and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.

You know, along those lines, there’s also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can “coordinate”, yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you’re doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would’ve thought that tech literacy would’ve gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don’t know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.

I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can’t, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we’re kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we’ve seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don’t learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won’t), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they’ve grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.

In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They’re all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I’ve seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don’t really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I’m wrong.

Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that’s maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.

I thought this was kind of an old meme by now? I seem to remember it being reported on in english media by the late 2010’s, like 2018/2019, and the half-life of memes is pretty bad anyways + I would assume english media would get around to these things somewhat after they’d been spent anyways.

My bad, I was thinking of “躺平”, lying flat, as mentioned in the article.

In any case I think there’s definitely like, an element of this reporting that is, you know, relatively obvious in the amount of bias. You might compare this to, say, if china reported on like, growing incel movements, or something, as evidenced by the spread of andrew tate. Or, maybe better, the quiet quitting movement. They’re not technically incorrect, and those are pretty significant problems, but it’s also, you know, there’s a reason why they’re choosing to report on that, and not like. I dunno, something else. Say, toxic work culture. Sigma male grindsets. The total inverse, you will rarely see reported on by, you know, the fucking wall street journal. I have a skepticism for the motives of the media, is basically all I’m saying. I agree with the memes though the chinese government and chinese society et large kind of blows chunks, similarly faulted as is most of modern society broadly.

you know I think most people understand that a comedian’s “role” is to be funny, right. and then, they will argue against that comedian, on the basis that they are not living up to their role, they’re not funny. dave’s wrong because he’s not funny. if only dave was funny, then what he’s doing would be fine! I think this is kind of misguided, kind of dumb. you argue against them, accepting the premise of their argument, but then you have an inability to fully take their perspective, see the comedy they apparently can see, and then it kind of falls flat. you’re also not the arbiter of comedy, like, have some perspective, some shitheels are going to find that funny, and their comedy, you know, it exists. we have to stop pretending like it doesn’t.

no, my issue isn’t with his comedy, whether or not he’s funny, I don’t really give a shit about that. I care about whether or not what he’s doing is morally right. comedy is just kind of blatant escapism anyways. are the dozens of people saved from suicide by direct consequence of watching dave’s comedy, are they worth the lifetimes of time wasted on watching him? I don’t want to get like morally puritanical about all media, or say that countercultural media has no place in society, right, but I also think that you have to be trying to do something with your media. just kind of throwing it out there so people can whittle away their life on laughing at your funnyman jokes is kind of lame. that’s why george carlin was good. george carlin was actually not that funny. I know, sacrilege, heresy, whatever. I prefer mitch hedberg, pure wordplay. it’s not that he was funny, it’s that he was legitimately correct, and radical for the time, and unfortunately still somewhat radical today. but it stems from the fact that he was correct. dave being funny, not funny, whatever. but dave is just blatantly incorrect in his worldview, here. the perspective from which he makes these jokes, i’m sure the jokes he’s cracking are funny from that perspective, but it’s a wrong perspective, a bad perspective. it shouldn’t like, not be allowed, be outlawed, not be conversed with, discussed, but it’s a wrong perspective. and i find his comedy to be bad on that basis, rather than on the basis that he’s not funny.

Instead of an office chair, I opted for a loveseat, on risers, that I can pull fit inside of my desk.

Risers end up being necessary for a standing desk, if you have a loveseat, apparently, because a loveseat sits much lower than most good computer desks that I’ve found, so to get comfortable typing position, you need good risers. You’re also gonna need a couch that stands up higher than your loveseat’s feet, so you can clear the feet and pull the desk in far enough (it might still not be enough, frankly). You might wanna opt for castors, though, since then you can make use of a standing desk, if you have one, which is probably a good idea instead of sitting on the couch for too long.

And, you know, after all that, I get a seat that’s kind of frankly not that comfortable to sit on for extended periods of time, because nobody has engineered their couch for you to sit on for multiple hours. I would wager that’s probably a bad thing anyways. I’ve been looking into standing-to-sitting desks, in order to overcorrect from this problem of sitting in one position, and get a desk that I can sit on the floor with, and basically whatever position I want. But that also kind of sucks, because there are only two and they are both like 1000 bucks.

On the other hand, a loveseat is much better for spooning, than having two office chairs. So that’s a bonus, if you wanted to spoon at your computer. Or you could just cast your screen to the smart TV you probably already have and buy a bluetooth computer controller for like 20 dollars or less.z

I hope someone reading this gains some insight because of this. You should buy a regular chair. It’s expensive but just buy it please I’m begging you, don’t make my mistakes again.

Floors, carpets, stairs, your feet, a bicycle, maybe even your car, dirt, gotta invest in good walkable dirt, uhhh, what else here… socks, probably chairs, ladders, flights, if you’re flying always invest a lot in it, uhhhh. yeah probably some other stuff.

I dunno I guess the point of my joke is that I think this is one of those heuristics, or like, general expressions, that ends up taking longer to say than what it actually means. “invest in your shoes and bed” takes longer to say than “invest in anything that keeps you off the ground”.

None of the idiots who brag about driving a semi have done any of that either.

That’s definitely not true. People can still have a self-image as a kind of asshole truck driver, and also still use their truck. People make this argument, that somehow these kind of aesthetic qualities have some sort of bearing on who does or doesn’t use their truck, and to me, it just kind of comes across like the only people who are allowed to drive trucks are the people who are acting in socially acceptable ways.

The argument is less about the people who use their truck, and more about the relative frequencies of use for everyone generally. Most people would be better covered by a rental. And then we could also make the argument that our development patterns would encourage the use of trucks far too much anyways.

Edit: wait, did you mean to type semi, or hemi? I kind of assumed hemi, but if you mean semi that kind of changes everything and I don’t know how to respond to that.

I don’t really know if any of that holds true if I already have the game in my possession. Maybe if it was theoretically the case that future software was harder to pirate for some additional drm insanity, but then the neat thing is that games that are just released are harder to pirate and tend to never be on sale, so that’s a kind of automatic balance. Also

There is also the fact that others see you using it and are encouraged to not using alternatives.

what do you mean by “alternatives”? alternatives to piracy? alternatives to the games people want to play?

If you even use the software you are supporting them.

How?

It’s just sort of kind of like a slightly more advanced form of spam, or trolling, or really fucked up propaganda/news. The integrity of the ideas and the evidence itself is more what should be evaluated in an argument anyways, rather than the source, and I don’t think like, evidence, generally, like, evidence in general, proof of things in general, is going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t think AI is advanced enough to break encrypted p2p communication, so I don’t really think there’s much of a chance that shit just gets totally wiped off the internet and you start seeing like mass memory hole type shit. It’s more likely that you end up seeing mass disinformation campaigns. You know, like what we’ve had since forever, where you get the population to do it to themselves.

really omega level convincing stuff, there.

Pretty much anyone who claims they get to rule over me and not provide people with a service.

The problem is that these two things aren’t, you know, unrelated. You say, the health insurance people, right, and I would generally agree they can go fuck themselves, but I think if we kill a bunch of them, the power vacuum will probably just fill itself with the exact same shit, while people slowly get radicalized and possibly become nationalistic because everyone’s getting killed by a foreign government, you know, especially as the government that’s getting bombed to shit starts cutting propaganda about it. You need to actively be providing an alternative that people will flock to, when you go and kill these people, otherwise, you’ll just be eliminating infrastructure in the form of people, and you’ll be turning everything into a dark age political radicalization hellzone.

More than that, drones are bad at constructing infrastructure, but they’re really good at destroying it. If you’re tearing through a housing complex to kill a terrorist, you’re going to make a lot more disillusioned people out of those who are now homeless. It’s really epic how people don’t understand this, and don’t understand how people might not look kindly to a military occupation generally, especially one that isn’t helping much to build out their infrastructure, or, maybe more importantly, position them in a way where they’re actually well off in the global market, since that’s something they have to worry about now in a neoliberal, globalized society. And then instead everyone’s just like, yeah, well, they don’t want our help, but they’re still a threat, let’s kill everyone, and then we can save the little girls that are never going into the classroom again after they’re fucking dead.

I hate this place, bro.

Ahh, the taliban, or the brave mujahideen fighters, of course, are being religious fanatics again! Who could’ve guessed! I’m sure when I look into this comment section, I’m going to see lots of people doing historical and contextual analysis, and maybe even some religious analysis, as to why this is the case! I’m sure I won’t see bigotry directed at muslims in general for being the victims of politically conservative radicalizing oil wars! I’m sure everyone will have a totally rational opinion on this!

So he’s basically just a liberal, right? Similar expansions of the police and increasing militarization happened under thatcher and reagan. He might call himself an “ancap”, but he’s probably just gonna be the same as them, in practice, since we live in a globalized economic system. No call from me on whether or not he’s going to be worse or not as bad, but he just seems like he’s basically the same as them ideologically.

You know I really question how many children are gonna grow up in the world basically fatherless, or with an absent father, because there’s this idea that the man has to be the one sacking everything they have in order to “put food on the table”. Gone for most of the day, devoid of energy when they come home, meat on the chopping block. I wonder how many kids would pick a better house, brand name foods, more toys, over more time spent with their dad.