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Yeah, RDO is pretty much garbage. Blatant cash grab.
Yeah, RDO is pretty much garbage. Blatant cash grab.
Did you beat the game?
I agree with this guy that it may be the best Western ever written.
Collect 3,000 cells in this wide open world to collect your skins.
Buy 4,000 cells to get this custom pirate skin for your character.
I don’t really want to play adversity Olympics with you but since you insist.
My parents were on food stamps and going to food pantries when I was a kid. Father was an absent alcoholic and drug addict. I myself struggled with heroin addiction in my teens and 20s and ended up ruining my life - or so I thought.
I managed to climb out of that hole (using Obamacare and the support of my family) to find a whole new perspective on my life.
I was angry, bitter, nihilistic, and selfish. I was obsessed with how bad and unfair the world is, and it gave me every excuse to keep buying bundles and nodding into oblivion.
Once I got clear of the horrible opiate withdrawal and paid back the considerable money I owed - once I stopped wanting to overdose and kill myself - I realized how nice it is to be able to take a walk on a warm day and just check out the birds. I realized a cup of coffee and a sandwich is a blissful experience, especially when shared with a friend or loved one.
When I think about the eternity I will spend in non-existence after I die, I know that I have very limited time to enjoy this strange and beautiful trip I’m on. I know this little blip would be the envy of the non-existent. If ghosts were real, I bet every one of them would kill to come back and just feel the sensations of smell, taste, touch, and sound. Or to look at something pretty.
Like dude, I’ve had parts of my life that were fucking miserable. Please don’t tell me it’s so easy. I’ve just decided to enjoy it and practice gratitude. Whatever happens to me, I remind myself that it’s better than going through opiate withdrawal on a plastic cot and wishing I was dead while everyone was disgusted with me.
Life, on average, is much easier now than it’s ever been. The wealthiest men alive didn’t have access to basic over the counter medicine that we have today. If you die of some horrific disease tomorrow, you’ve still had a higher quality of life than most of the richest people who have ever lived.
You know why my ramblings about the beauty of life sound so corny? It’s because a lot of people have realized it before. Because it’s so often said that it sounds cliche. There is a reason so many people have come to these conclusions.
My advice to you is to touch grass. No joke. And if you don’t want to touch grass, go watch a movie that makes you feel awe. Go read a book that moves you. Otherwise you’re going to have your eyes opened on your death bed and wish you had lived differently. Happens all the time man.
Bidet attachment https://www.amazon.com/Bidet-Non-Electric-Mechanical-Attachment-Self-Cleaning/dp/B00P2XZDGG
And I grew up with window unit air conditioners. They kept a couple rooms cool no problem.
I don’t see how I’m talking out my ass.
I really love that you said test hamster instead of guinea pig.
I’m using this from now on.
I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It’s a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.
Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don’t. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you’d have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.
The world isn’t perfect but it’s better than it’s ever been in most ways. Even if we don’t survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I’ve already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It’s all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it’s really beautiful despite the miserable parts.
I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.
And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.
What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?
Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?
I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. I will tell him it’s nothing like that in reality and I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.
Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.
Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.
I teach lower income students and they love technology as much as the rest of us. They usually opt for used electronics and a lot of them are getting scammed into buying secondhand enterprise rigs that are converted into shitty gaming PCs, but don’t worry, you made some nerd’s day.
I think the camera will eventually be hidden behind the screen.
I have no clue what technology will enable that but I bet it’s coming.
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.
You’re only covered by it when you practice it.
You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.
Tiny Scanner for Android
As another commenter rightfully pointed out - you don’t get to be independent and isolationist at the same time.
Indigenous island tribes may have had this luxury for a time, but once your nation is known by another nation, it’s compete or die.
China and various other countries would immediately start filling the power vacuum. Your standard of living would drop immensely and your grandchildren would be consuming Chinese culture within a decade or two at most. The American dollar, America’s total dominance in science/culture/medicine, the spread of the English language - these could all be wiped out fairly quickly if America just threw up its hands and said we were done.
What you’re suggesting would be like Apple saying they’re going to take it easy and just stick with the iPhone 15 for good. The result would be an immediate power grab and some other company would pull ahead, leaving Apple so far behind they’d never catch up again.
As a devout lefty who thinks America and capitalism need a lot more checks and balances, I have to somewhat disagree with you.
When we talk peace, we are talking relative terms. And I suppose I should also add prosperity into the mix.
I think the West has enabled a period of relative peace and prosperity never before seen. And I think it’s getting, overall, better every day. Technology and capitalism, for all their evils, have lifted billions out of poverty and saved billions of lives.
Depends. He seems pretty out of it right now and I don’t know how much he would really accomplish. He’s also pretty old and unhealthy.
But if he comes back angry and the people around him are effective, then yeah we would start looking for other places to live. I’m not trying to live in a Russian-style handmaid’s tale.
I don’t think it’s dramatic to suggest Trump may actually put an end to our democracy though. Another Lemmy commenter summed it up best. They pointed out that we on the left may have disagreed with McCain or Bush, but we never once feared that they would seize power or leave NATO. We trusted them to at least keep the ship afloat and respect the basic tenants of our free and democratic nation.
With Trump, we don’t have that. All bets are off because he’s an unhinged narcissist. He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now. And he would do it for money, for negative attention, or just because someone told him he couldn’t. America has some pretty major faults but China and Russia are not ready to take the reigns. Say what you will about the West but we at least endeavor to protect human rights. I think anyone who isn’t trying to build on the current Western peace is incredibly dangerous in a very scary way.
For now.
And don’t forget, humans are also trained on the inputs of others.
The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.
As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.
But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.
You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.
Hardflip blunt to fakie
I would argue otherwise.
Wikipedia is incomprehensibly large. Perhaps the largest database of vetted human knowledge ever.
I know for a fact you can find inaccuracies and biased information if you look for it. But it’s rare relative to the amount of information that exists there.