and 100% less naziism
For whatever reason this sparked a whole bunch of nonsense in my brain like “100% nazi-free chicken!”
And “should I drink skim milk or 2% Nazi milk?”
or “buy the new German EV, it’s got 50% less nazi than our leading competitors!”
Thanks for that brainwave
You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.
Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.
There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and asks for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.
This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:
From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers negotiate a deal with other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour a different office worker spent working for that factory.
A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.
A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the…
A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.
An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.
An office worker in the government works for the court. They make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, employees, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.
The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…
And there you have the modern day office worker.
TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understand or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.
If someone doesn’t want to live and doesn’t have anything to live for
This is a temporary problem that can change. Depression isn’t a feeling. It’s a disorder, an imbalance, a prolonged neurochemical misfire. It’s horrible, and feels inescapable.
But any thoughts you have about the past - and any beliefs you have about the future - are directly influenced by that imbalance. There is no true depiction of the past in our heads. No future in front of our eyes. We simulate the past and future in the present moment.
When we access memories, we re-experience them all over again.
Depression prevents you from feeling good, so even your own memories feel hollow and devoid of meaning. A happy memory is filtered through the same process as a happy experience, and both are temporarily (and reversibly) stripped of emotional value while you are depressed.
The same is true for the future. You simulate your predictions as if they are artificial memories of the future, but they are also filtered through your present context.
While depressed, it is much, much harder to imagine a happy future. Not because you have pulled away the rosy glasses and seen truth. Not because you have found cold logic. No. You are, ever and always, an emotional animal, and you are defined even by your lack of an emotion.
To imagine a happy future is to simulate a happy experience. It’s required - to imagine oneself happy later, they literally have to experience that ‘potential’ happiness now.
With depression, the past feels faded and the future feels hopeless. But - unlike depression - those are just feelings. Those are literally just in your head.
Your perceived past and predicted future are defined by the range of experience you can have in the present moment. If you can’t feel happy now, you can’t fully process that your life was ever happy or will ever be happy again. But those are just feelings.
It might not feel like it now, but you have been happy before. You can be happy again, as long as you live. Not for as long as you live… but only if you live. The only thing that can stop you is death.
This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you. . . You will be warm again.
He never has to admit he’s wrong. He slanders whoever and whatever he wants without ever acknowledging the concept of responsibility, such as his own trade deal with Canada.
I don’t know about that. It’s possible, but Trump’s scapegoats generally don’t get golden parachutes. They get crushed underfoot while he moves onto the next one. Every contractor stiffed on the bill, every lawyer thrown under the bus, every single high-level advisor who he either completely “forgot” or just straight up attacked on live TV.
If they’re still useful - like literal violent traitors - they might recieve a get-out-of-jail-free card every now and then. But if they’re not useful anymore? A publically intoxicated news anchor turned disgraced Defense Secretary, who is stupid enough to add his wife, brother, and a newspaper editor to illegal self-deleting group chats involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
He’s getting burned, if only as a distraction from the fact that there were a whole bunch of other high-level executive and defense staff in those chats that A) never should have agreed to use self-deleting Signal messages, and B) should have noticed an unauthorized recipient in the chat and shut the whole thing down immediately.
The fuckup in chief doesn’t have allies, he has handlers, stooges, and scapegoats, and they’re all too fucking stupid to realize that the only thing separating the stooge and handler from the scapegoat is a matter of time. There’s nothing fascists love more than ruling from a position of fear.
A Colombian national is facing up to 20 years in prison
For the record, he was already facing life in prison. Or worse. This administration is not just sending people “back”. They’re sending people to die. Good luck trying to scare obedience into people on death row.
(Maybe someone on F-droid could get on that?)
Seconded! I read and thought the same things, something like that would be huge right now. Hell of a time crunch and hostile work environment, but it could save a lot of lives.
being transgender is like being left handed in that it is an innate quality which cannot be changed even if it is suppressed, but there’s nothing in what he wrote here which is an argument for that implication.
There is nothing implied here. The parallels between the two is the explicit argument of the quote.
The apparent growth in the transgender population is similar to the apparent growth in the left-handed population. Transgender, gay, and left-handed people were all around before it was socially acceptable.
It was known and in the public consciousness long before it was tolerated, and people would persist in being transgender, gay, or left-handed despite it literally being a crime.
They were punished and oppressed, yet continued to exist. When it finally became more acceptable, each population appeared to explode by a sudden increase in people self-identifying and self-reporting.
But in each case it was always there. It’s nothing new. A patient seeking medical transition was on TV in 1975. People just didn’t notice because they are a relatively small minority, and because they were forced to hide from others - or worse - from themselves.
And worse? When I see a vehicle here in B.C. with a Washington license plate, my shackles immediately go up. It makes me feel really bad… but there it is :(
It’s okay. Many of us understand. It’s the nature of the times. It could be worse… our hackles immediately go up when we see our national flag. We are told to stand and salute it every morning as children, and now when we see it in public we are forced to worry whether it belongs to a crazed nationalist with more firearms than brain cells.
Yes, adult men protesting against a teenage girl causes harm. Full stop. No, nobody here needs to justify that position. You just need to imagine grown men wearing wristbands and holding signs, showing up at every school soccer game to protest against a teenage girl just living her life.
adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students.
More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”
The voting system allows for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.
It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.
Thanks db0 et al!
You either die a startup, or live long enough to see yourself become the butthole.
Attempting to make it in our image will end in despair lol
Oh, you mean like trying to invent a sentient AGI because they want it to take all of the horrible jobs? The global endeavor to spin up a brand new lifeform only to task it with lifetimes of humiliating customer service phone calls, driving drunks home, and mass murder?
We should count ourselves fortunate that no current AI is even approaching sentience, it would be like an oompa loompa on the factory line cutting off mid-song because it can suddenly see all of the blood in the chocolate river.
If I could just “opt out” of human society for like two weeks, I think I could detox.
I, too, thought the same thing. But emotional engagement and human connectivity is requisite for recovery and growth. In other words, you need to keep doing things and being around people. Otherwise you activate and reinforce the most powerful negative feedback mechanism of them all: isolation.
We are not the logical creatures we imagine ourselves to be. We are - ever and always - the emotional animal first. From an evolutionary perspective, the animal brain developed a long time ago, and things like logic and reasoning were only very recently stapled on top of existing structures. From a neurological perspective, the emotional centers of your brain are physically central. They activate first, and outer regions - like the prefrontal cortex - respond after. Often to rationalize whatever it is you just felt.
When you are down (not sad, but down) - perhaps from poor sleep, caffeine withdrawal, etc - your neurochemistry is out of balance. You don’t just feel grumpy, or irritable - you are quite literally less capable of feeling happy or excited. It’s not something you can think your way out of or power through. You don’t have the right mix of serotonin and dopamine to pour a nice cocktail of happy, healthy emotional response.
Instead, you will often find cynicism and apathy. The logical brain is stapled on top, remember. If you don’t feel happy or excited in response to a given experience, then logically, that experience does not make you happy or excited.
You can try to explain to yourself why. Perhaps the thing shouldn’t make you happy. Perhaps it’s just yet another shallow grasp at meaning in a meaningless world, and lesser things like that aren’t meant to make someone like you happy. Perhaps it doesn’t make anybody happy, and we’re all just pretending?
If you notice, these thoughts don’t do anything. You can’t test them, you can’t be moved by them. These thoughts don’t have any way to improve your life or the world around you. They don’t even have evidence behind them. They just go in a loop - I don’t care -> why should I care? -> nobody should care -> nobody cares -> I don’t care.
These ‘rational’ thoughts were triggered after the emotional response. You were apathetic before the experience, not because of it.
Maybe you’re paying attention to yourself, being mindful. Listening to your body and your thoughts and your emotions. Maybe you can recognize that you’re just tired, but that doesn’t change how you feel. The dopamine doesn’t rise, the serotonin doesn’t release. Logically - rationally - stapled on top of the way you feel - is your consciousness, explaining to itself what is happening, and still unable to move the needle of your internal experience. The emotional animal brain is still first and foremost in control and it is not getting its rewards, so it will be even less likely to generate dopamine in pursuit of those experiences again, because it didn’t work last time.
The solution is not to opt out of society, but to opt in. Find things that invigorate you. Embrace new ideas and experiences. You feel you have no time or energy - that the world is too fast and too exhausting to do anything but exist.
But the better you treat yourself, and the more you build of your life - the more exciting things that you plan and do for yourself and others - the more time and energy you will find.
The unfortunate truth is that the entire equation is balancing out to a stable - but shitty - equilibrium. Any deviation you make at this point will cause instability and short-term negative consequences.
But a reduction in any (and all) of these variables will bring long-term benefits. The only solution - the only solution - is to endure the short-term consequences for long enough that you replace them with positive feedback loops and stabilize at a better equilibrium.
When you consume less caffeine, you’ll feel tired. When you consume less alcohol, you’ll feel restless. When you consume less weed, you’ll feel agitated. All of this will contribute to shitty days and worse nights.
But when you keep consuming caffeine, you’ll lower your baseline energy level. When you keep consuming alcohol, you’ll reduce the quality of your sleep and your time in REM. When you keep consuming weed, you’ll reduce your focus and productivity.
But you keep going because you are hitting the negative swing of the feedback loop and doing the only thing that will immediately fix it - more.
This shitty self-fulfilling equilibrium is likely a primary - if not the only - cause of your perpetual exhaustion. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t get enough REM while you’re asleep, and you cope with the symptoms enough to muddle through but you also ensure that it happens again the following day. Each little bad decision leads to the next.
Find whatever will help you endure your short-term consequences without jeopardizing your long-term recovery, and you will break out of the loop. Groups, hobbies, therapy, exercise, whatever works for you. Good luck and stay strong!
P.S. I didn’t mean to make so many assumptions or make it all about you, it’s not! But I do think this sort of thing is an epidemic and a lot of people could use some help even seeing it, let alone beating it.
There is no way he-
[George Carlin] was the second narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, narrating from the first to the fourth series and played Mr. Conductor from series two to three on Shining Time Station and in the spin-off series Mr Conductor’s Thomas Tales, after Ringo Starr left the series to focus on his music career.
I had no idea. Thank you for leading me to this lore.
What a strange and beautiful world…
But there will be some people who assume that if a Federal employee is handcuffed/arrested/forced out, that they must have done something wrong.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that publically resigning is “avoiding doing something”.
I never assumed that, I agree that public resignations are good - or at the very least, appropriate.
You suggested that some people may see an arrest and assume the worst. That is always a possibility. In fact, it is an inevitability that someone will assume the worst of anything you do. That is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing something - anything - in general.
Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.