Chia cryptocurrency. My dad got into it, and the price was mooning. Gave me an excuse to build a new PC and learn linux, so I thought it was a worthwhile investment. Sunk a decent chunk of change into hard drives that I still have laying around, but I'm using several of them and have a sweet gaming rig that I would've built eventually anyway and had something to talk to my dad about. So basically, just out the cost of some drives. All in all, it was a calculated risk that didn't pay off but was still fun.
That may be true, I'm really not sure - and idk if it's really knowable. But it is definitely a motivation that exists. I just think we'd be better off without those motives and only with the good ones you outlined. As long as the profit motive, consumer culture, and media exist, I think we'll not be free of that sort of thing.
The main thing, I think, is that being conscious of those forces and of the degree to which business and other bourgeois interests shape our behaviors helps us to avoid their influence. I think most folks on Lemmy probably avoid more of that motivation than most.
And, to your point, i think the better, more wholesome motives will always exist - and it's important we let them thrive and don't overlook them.
That is pretty clever. Except it would already be dated since Trump attempted to get Pence lynched by an angry mob a few years back
It's commodified in terms of social media. Either "for sale" literally, if indirectly, through monetization (which is increasingly the goal for many people) or not-quite-literally in the sense of likes/social media attention. The act of dancing in this context, for instance, is no longer done as an expression of genuine emotion or to connect with people or express oneself, but instead being traded for clicks, monetized or not.
In that regard, even if not personally affected, I think that consumer culture can and has taken the purpose of human experience away from many and twisted it from experience as experience to experience as performance.
Edit: to expand on a dance being commodified: a TikTok dance has to be learned by consuming TikTok. That is the product: the content around the dance. Then the user further contributes to the commodification by entering their own content into the marketplace (TikTok). Whether the user makes money or not does not change the fact that this content is for sale by TikTok. TikTok gets more viewers and trades viewership for advertising revenue.
Damn. Yeah really good points all around
It's commodification. These things have been turned into marketable commodities for sale.
A huge part of capitalism is commodifying core parts of the human experience.
I kinda like it. Brutalist console
Baiscally, POTUS invited Zelenskyy to the White House for a meeting to discuss potential terms for a peace deal with Russia. In a press conference, Trump and Vance basically blamed Zelenskyy for the war, told him that by not capitulating to US and Russian demands, he was gambling with WWIII, said that Ukraine doesn't have any "cards" - that they can't have a say in peace deals involving them, and literally started yelling at him and lost any sense of decorum. All of this was after Zelenskyy proposed a version of Trump's "give us all your rare earth minerals" plan that involved US Ukranian mining partnership - so already a partial capitulation.
It was a... bad... PR and diplomatic decision. It weakens US leadership globally, further erodes soft power, is going to make China evaluate if Taiwan has "cards" in the way that Ukraine does not, etc. It was disastrous for US foreign policy and further marks a decline in its importance glabally.
It is not a thing. DEI is a corporate initiative to make sure non-white, non-male people are interviewed and hopefully hired. Has nothing to do with schools
Too autistic for this. Why would it be unsettling? Mercury is much smaller than the sun. If it was suddenly bigger in proportion to the sun, then I'd be unsettled.
Well of course I haven't read Marx. Communism's evil, duh.
Tye ne moi brat, tye moya oblast
You're not my brother, you're my province/state
(I don't know russian but I think that's what it says)