If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
If I’d had to bet whether this was The Onion before clicking this link, someone would be breaking my knees next week.
This timeline is absurd.
As a designer, programmer, and music engraver/editor, I've always paid for all media I've consumed because I've strongly believed creators deserve to be paid.
But after the Napster, Ticketmaster, Netflix, and dozens of other egregious examples of corporate sadism, I’m proud to sail the high seas now.
I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.
So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
If the US was actually a meritocracy, I’d be rich. I built my career in comp sci and UXD from nothing. I left school in 9th grade then taught myself programming in multiple languages – BASIC then Perl, Java, C, and on to C++, C#, ObjC, JavaScript, and markup languages, – and UXD including related important fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy), and worked my way from a delivery driver to cook, to assistant mgr in retail and restaurant to manager (to make ends meet whilst learning) to programmer, to assistant lead, to PM assistant, to project manager, to designer, to lead designer at a company where I had more than 10 million users and was submitted for an Apple design award for my design.
Then I got sick with a genetic disease for which there’s no treatment or cure. Now I can no longer work and as a result, I am destitute, my savings are gone, and I have nothing but social security and Medicare, which is horribly broken. I can’t afford housing, and have to choose between medicine and food.
This is in the US, obviously. I have plenty more to contribute – my mind still works fine – but I can’t contribute in this system because I can’t reliably work.
I am fucked. I can’t afford to live anymore and, regardless of what I could contribute in a system that might allow me to, I am stuck doing nothing and slowly dying because this system is designed to fuck me as hard as possible.
This is not a meritocracy. If it was, I would not be in the position of choosing whether to eat or buy medicine.
e2: and we wouldn’t have a complete moron making billions by stealing the work of others (people like me) then just casting them aside like they’re nothing. Yes, I mean that absolute shitbag poser, you all know his name.
Sorry for all the edits, this pisses me off.
e: I also wrote a scifi novel that I can’t market because I’ve been too sick. Because I’m so desperate, I’m going to mention it here – I could use a couple of reviews. Based on current reviews, it’s not bad: Blue Are the Hills by Lilly Piper on Amazon, if you’re into dystopian fiction. I’ve tried to market myself as much as I can, but it’s hard. That’s why my Lemmy icon is my face – not because I’m a boomer, but because it’s my branding.
… another blows out at 20,000 ft?
‘Taco Bell isn't even good’
Yeah I know. Sometimes the raccoon inside of me craves garbage. Leave me & my Crunchwrap alone.
Of everything I said, that’s the part you decided to focus on?
e: not that trump had said he’d glass the region to build hotels?
I just left a conversation with my 88 year old dad less gratified than a similar conversation with him 8 years ago. He’s recently fallen in love with a very conservative woman roughly 15 years his junior, and I’m feeling pretty bad about his leaning.
Many aspects of our conversation disturbed me. I’m feeling far worse about our societal situation than I did after our conversations 15 years ago. I don’t know what’s changed in that demographic, but it’s not good.
So this is weird: my ancestor in the US in the early 1600s tried to sell Bronks Farm (now the Bronx) to foreign investors and got his left ear cut off, hanged till nearly dead, then banished to New Jersey. That was apparently a punishment at the time.
You’re lucky – an overhead cubby and 3 drawers. Plenty of places to hide booze.
The basis for my theory:
If we developed warp drive, genetic manipulation, and transporter tech, I’d reckon even before that we’d first figure out how to make dogs live for hundreds of years. Because that’s easier and of course we would.
I’ve seen people post that it must have been like Porthos v9 because of the time difference, but there’s no way that dog didn’t outlive Archer by decades, because if we’re going to do anything good as a species, it will be making sure our dogs outlive us.
So Scotty lost the OG Porthos.
e: better phrasing
Much more is relative.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.