I’ve fantasized about doing something like this but putting in a nonprofit, foundation-based system run by a board of mental health workers, that was designed to actually bring people together. It may still happen. I don’t have the high barrier to entry it takes to start a social network so I’m starting from the other end and doing community organizing instead. Power to the real people offline, who aren’t trying to make a profit off our need for human connection.
Wanna know a secret… God didn’t even write that part. God’s version has him at a kmart in Toledo, Iowa buying the entire universe on a Saturday in 1997, at which point he installed it, but it did take several days because it was football season, but it was less than a week no matter what anyone else says.
I remember it happening, that was back when I still thought consequences might come to the rich. I have had all those silly ideas bleached from my mind now.
Folks who work in social justice will know the acronym “POC” but “p. of c.” I don’t usually encounter.
Are we sure it’s not “prince of caspian?”
This stuff used to bother me but then I observed nature and its cruel rules for long enough, and I realized that suffering is one of the few constants in life, one of the guarantees. Wasps that paralyze spiders for months so they can be eaten alive by their offspring, bird species where most chicks are left to stave to death, etc… yeah nature is just as cruel as humans can be, but at a much larger scale in perpetuity, and we’re a lot more efficient at turning that suffering into greater good that lessens the suffering of others in perpetuity. So, while I don’t condone or even like to think about baby monkey experiments, I will not bat an eye at lab mice being given Parkinson’s so we can observe and seek answers and cures.
I’ve already started production on a line of (still in stealth mode). I think I can do enough in sales - both direct to consumer and wholesale to shops - to patent it and then cover my mortgage and other bills. And hey, if AI doesn’t take my job, maybe I’ll finally get out of debt. Of course it could fail and I’ll be out the seed money, but I’ll also have hundreds of (product) to remind me of my shame, so, whatever.
It’s like when a kid grows up with an abusive father, watches his mom get punched and treated like an animal, and thinks “I’ll never be like that,” and then 15 years later he’s wondering how to make his knuckles less bloody when he teaches his wife a lesson.
Can you imagine how furious the shareholders would be if we built hospitals and water treatment facilities with their money?!
I shared an office with Frank Meeink for a week while he was in town giving lectures and speeches. Which only furthered my belief that redemption is always possible. Although since then Trump has been president twice, so I am revising that to “in most cases.”
Let’s let capitalism intervene until they’re all in a call center in India
And just try reading it over the phone to someone, especially a non-native-english speaker.
My personal email is first initial with last name, which I can simply tell them without having to try to spell anything out.
I have a state job tho, and there it’s first initial and middle initial and last name, why the hell… now I can’t email a colleague without looking at a sheet to find their middle initial. Stupid.
I got a hotdog at a food truck that appeared near my house a few years ago. I asked for just ketchup on the dog. She laughed and said “You’re a little boy! That’s OK, little boys get hotdogs too.” I’m like, lady I am giving you money right now, is there a version of this encounter where you’re not judging me?
Don’t look now but I think that lady’s hat is about to shoot him
He could have been President. He could have been a conservative but honorable and good president. I desperately wish we had Wes Clark instead of GWB or Trump, things would look a lot different.
Developmental psychology (Erik Erickson’s theory) teaches us that adults tend to go one of two ways as they approach and hit mid-life - generativity and stagnation. People who have a purpose, who are considering leaving some sort of mark or legacy, to contributing to society tend to fare better. They are happier and more satisfied as time goes on. Folks who become self-absorbed and preoccupied with their own comfort and convenience will then stagnate, which you can imagine is the cranky old person stereotype.
I do subscribe to this theory which is why at 43 I am running a non-profit I started, working to empower other leaders in my community, working on changing legislation for my community, working on building the community itself. I want to be the kind of person who is generous and kind and open-hearted, and be fulfilled. I don’t want to be the person who is counting the ways life did them wrong, using that as a justification to lick wounds and retreat from life, jaded and alone.
My boss claims it has “no effect” to choose where to spend your money.
I remind him, voting with our wallets is literally the only mechanism Capitalism provides for consumer ethics.
It’s Prisoner’s dilemma. When we think 5m people are going to take the action either way, we don’t think our singular efforts matter. But as there are 5m of us taking the action, there are 5m singular efforts that DO matter. If people just don’t give up on the idea.
Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/
Class warfare will be the foundation it’s all built on. Any tech developed for the moon, Mars, whatever - anything we gain in knowledge in return - is going to go to benefit rich fuckers, not you. One day there will be more space tourists. Rich people, not you. Maybe one day Man will even colonize another world. Rich people, not you.
I’m buying fireworks this summer, but they aren’t being used on the 4th.
If you wait long enough the government just does it for you
Betcha can’t just eat one
vertebrae