It looks so real

Holy shit I can read that.

It basically says “You’re not my brother, you’re my state!”

I thought this was a smaller-faced creature looking directly at the camera. I was so confused

What happened during covid was the forcible closing of thousands of small businesses. Corporations don’t cate about excuses they only care about opportunity. When their competition got forcibly closed by the government, their opportunity appeared.

We had major big box stores staying open while mom and pop shops were closed.

This wasn’t the market in action. This was the government forcibly closing these businesses by centralized decree.

The lockdowns actively killed competition. Competition is the natural check on greed in a free market. The market was enormously consolidated during the period when small stores had to either survive on their savings or perish, while large stores were allowed to remain open.

Removed by mod

The whole world is indeed in a bad mood and the reason is we’re all addicted to social media, which makes people miserable.

It’s impossible to fully patrol one’s territory in cyberspace. That means our hippocampus never sends the “all clear” signal which would allow us to relax from fight or flight mode.

As a result, the entire population of humanity is in an unprecedented state of hypervigilance.

Removed by mod

WW3 began in 2022

So then what does the green line represent?

You can’t fix society from the top.

Every person has to do their part to fix society.

The idea that societies can (perhaps only) be fixed from the top is a convenient excuse to abdicate one’s own responsibility for taking care of things around them.

What are your x and y axes here?

Quick! Somebody link to one thing the US government has said about China.

You lose points by googling, because everyone upvoting surely has seen the US government say something about China and knows where to find that document.

Having a life plan that works, that realistically and with some degree of certainty is taking me to somewhere that I want to go, and in the context of which waking up is an instrumental action furthering my progress along that path.

Without a good reason to wake up, waking up sucks. A good reason to wake up is a complex thing. A good plan for life is hard to make, but worth it.

I say this from the perspective of a history of massive depression.

A good reason to open one’s mouth is that there’s delicious food in front of you. A good reason to wake up is that there’s a plan for the day that brings you closer to the things you want in life.

If you have a hard time getting up, resolving that starts with making sure whatever thing you’re getting up for actually serves you.

I think the term “social” here refers to one’s peers. It’s the same idea behind the term “YouTube”. It’s a play on the term “boob tube” which refers to the television. So instead of showing you boobs, YouTube is supposed to be “TV about you”.

It’s the same idea as the brand name FUBU, which stands for “For Us, By Us”.

“Social” here is the same concept as in the word “socialism”. In this context, the word means “of the people”. Same as in the phrase “social causes” as a term for charity.

Yes.

No you can’t do that

Removed by mod

It’s so inefficient to have these different instances defederating from one another. We should prevent defederation and make it illegal to have redundant instances.

There should be a Chief Efficiency Overlord to make all this happen.

The reason corporate social media sucks is its monopolistic nature. “Instance wars” are why lemmy is better than reddit, which consists of exactly one instance.

I’m an uber driver. The pay is atrocious, but the work is super easy and I feel energized after a long shift. I may go back to tech, but in a talking job like sales or support. I’m just not built to write code all day.

I stopped taking all the stimulants at some point before being fired. Even after the panic attacks stopped, I still couldn’t get to a point where I could write code more than two hours per day. As a full-time dev I was expected to account for 9 total hours including 8 billable hours per day. It never worked out.

But I stopped taking the stimulants and discovered my productivity was just as high without them. Which with code means still pretty low. But any other kind of work I can go twelve hours without issue. I’m really productive so long as I’m not making precise and articulated decisions all day.

I’m an excellent driver, but the rules don’t change. Driving is the same set of rules every day, every road condition. There’s like maybe 150 rules to memorize and then all I have to do is implement them perfectly. As an autistic I’m really fucking good at that.

Programming is like doing construction, except:

• You never build the same thing twice
• The tools change daily
• The building code changes daily
• The properties of the materials change daily
• Physics changes daily

I’ve done a lot of different jobs and programming is easily the most mentally taxing. I always say if you’re doing the same thing twice as a programmer, you’re doing it wrong because you could have automated something.

I just can’t be that creative all day every day.