PrimalAnimist

Collections add a little something real to an interest. You are into baseball? Collect baseball cards and baseball memorabilia. Some find a tactile connection improves their enjoyment. For some people, it may be old video games, for others it may be coins, stamps, achievements in video games. Yes they are digital, but you can see them in your achievement/trophy list. I think some people are drawn to collections more than others because they favor a certain learning style over another. I’m not educated in behavior in any way so I am qualified to share my opinion on the Internet. There’s nothing abnormal about that. The collecting part. Not the part where I have no real knowledge on a topic but I feel my opinion is worthy of being heard. That’s actually normal, too, probably. But it shouldn’t be.

https://regenerationinternational.org/2019/07/23/plant-sentience-and-the-impossible-burger/

It may just be the weed, but for a moment I thought I was reading something off a Night City public BBS.

You can’t tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.

I hear a problem and I want to offer solutions. But I gotta fight that instinct.

I’m curious how much of that is instinct vs. cultural programming. I used to be the same way. My partner would tell me about something that has aggravated her during her day and my first instinct was to think of ways to fix whatever it was and not just listen and be supportive. But that’s the exact opposite as the conversations I might have with my buddy would go. When he tells me about a problem, I just listen and if he pauses for a verbal response, I ask him how he handled it, not give him advice on how I would handle it.

So is that a primal bias or a cultural one? Does it come from some sort of deep genetic behavioral coding that we much protect our female mate? I’m certainly not able to answer that with any authority, but my gut says it’s learned behavior. I’ve since let go of that desire to fix. And for me, it’s much more satisfying to always listen as support and learning without seeing it as a task. That’s the default. I don’t even think about a solution unless I’m specifically asked.

I think listening behaviors are quite culturally based as well. For example:

Here in the Appalachian mountains, suppose two guys are talking to each other, perhaps both leaning on a fence. The guy who is listening doesn’t watch the speaker the entire time. They don’t make occasional noises either.

My buddy asks if I want to hear a story about some trouble he had recently with a neighbor. I nod and look at him “Yea”. He then proceeds to look forward, out across the field and I do the same. Buddy says something that I support, like what he did that started the trouble. I nod, quietly, or even make that “this is ok” face. If I make that face, it’s like saying “That makes sense to me, nothing unreasonable about that”. Unless he says something that you know he expects support for, then you just motionlessly stare into the foreground.

If he tells me something the neighbor did that angered him, I will look at him and make the astonished face, he will look at me and nod, then he verbally confirms it as we go back to staring at the field. He will go on about it some, and I will quietly lower my head a little and shake it back forth to show my disbelief in how crappy his neighbor is.

Then whatever conclusion he comes up with, I’ll either say, “hell yeah, that’s what I’d do” or “whoa I dunno about all that now” or something similar. The cues for listening and the correct responses to them will vary probably within subcultures.

I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.

I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.

This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).

I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.

Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.

I still use Google news to follow some topics and it gathers articles from my local news sites, too. But any time if shows an article that prompts me to register to see it, I just go back to the Google news page and tell it to block that source.

You annoy me once and you disappear lol.

But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.

I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.

I feel like they all see the inevitability that AI will drastically change the money model very soon. And it will not be to their profit, so best make every penny they can right now is their mentality.

Of course, you have to realize that the definition of racism can change from an outlook of superiority to power + privilege on a whim too

I’m in my 50s, I don’t recall the definition of racism changing at all, much less “on a whim”. What are some of the other definitions you have seen arbitrarily assigned to the term racism?

Equal doesn’t mean equitable. For example, I hear people say everyone should pay a flat tax. Everyone pays 10% so that is equal. Yes. it is an equal percentage, and yes, the billionaires will pay vastly more than the poor. Suppose you make $1000 a month and you pay $100. That leaves you $900 to pay your bills and eat. Now a billionaire, let’s say he makes $10,000,000 a month. He pays out $1 mil but he still have $9 million to pay his bills…for that month. That is not equitable. Equitable would be to leave everyone with an equal burden on their income. Even if you taxed the billionaire 90%, he would still be able to live in luxury.

I do not feel there would be a need for racial quotas if there was instead there was a quota for xx% students from this income bracket must be accepted. Each applicant would be measured by both their skill and their ability to meet and overcome obstacles. There should be two piles: those that meet the standards, and those who do not. Out of all the potentials, shuffle the names and select at random.

Today I learned that what I consider healthy is very different from what others consider healthy. Fried chicken would not be in my top 10 healthy choices for example. Not criticizing the other guy, but just noting that what is considered to be healthy is sooo wildly distorted by corporate indoctrination that there are likely people who think KFC has some healthy food.

Let’s be honest, this price change was all about being able to charge the big corps mega money for access to their data in order to train new generations of AI. The price is absurd, yes, but the owners of reddit know that Google and Microsoft have deep pockets (among other global corps wanting the massive amount of data reddit has saved).

They never expected the third party apps to be able to pay this much and frankly, they don’t care. It’s HUGE profit from AI corps, and the losses, at least short term, will be overshadowed by the gains. Long term? I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise, but, like I did with Twitter, I have moved on so at this point, it’s no longer relevant to me.