The divide between cultures and populations becomes highly apparent on sites like this, which attract a very select group.

Much like how they dumbed-down the original story for The Matrix, they decided that a romance with Death wouldn’t sell as many action figures, lego sets and app games I suppose. Gotta keep dem stories 2-dimensional.

A large percentage of “I need this drug/drink to function” people eventually face some measure of change in their lives that force them to start learning how to manage themselves without outside chemicals or medication.

It may be you, it may not be. The point is, don’t get set-in on “policy” because you may want to change your life and need to understand that the discomfort of change is only temporary and the brain rewires itself to new conditions.

It does get old after a while.

edit: I am fully prepared for the reflexive defensiveness that this topic produces. Please look up psychological addiction even if you feel offended by the very notion. Especially if you feel offended by the notion. Ask me how to get out if you’re starting to feel that trapped feeling and wondering if things ever get better.

I am not an expert per-say on AI, but I have survived economic collapses. Kinda.

Here’s what you can expect.

It will happen a lot faster and more sudden than you expect. It will be a few days of “uncertainty” and you will see reports on the market and spending and fear through investors, and then BAM everything goes deep red for a few days and then you suddenly get sent home from work.

Your job, no matter how skilled or stable or unrelated to finance or the stock market you may think it is- is NOT safe. In fact, service industry jobs are often the first to go, because when the market tanks and investors start pulling out money, one of the first, strongest effects we feel is that people with money immediately stop spending. If you install windows and doors, if you cut grass, if you clean or cook, expect people will suddenly start doing that themselves more and more. You may get laid off suddenly depending on how much reserve your company has.

There will be an immediate and overwhelming strain on state and city services. Unemployment offices, food banks, employment centers, and expect the media to create a LOT of hype around it to a destructive degree, there will be the same kinds of supermarket raiding like we saw with covid for no real good reason other than people feeling afraid.

What you should do now to prepare:

Have backup income plans. Even if modest, have some hustles ready to deploy. Get certified or see what you need to get certified ahead of time to do Uber and/or Lyft, people are going to be using ride sharing more because they won’t be able to afford to drive or make car payments. Think about other services people are going to need if they don’t have jobs - handyman work on the cheap, dog and pet care, unlicensed work you know you can do safely, etc. If you or your family can do art and crafts, set up an etsy market now before you’re strained, open it up to international customers.

SAVE MONEY, have cash savings as well as bank savings, have gold too if you can swing it. Expect any accounts that are tied to investments to be frozen or even wiped out, such as 401k’s and the like.

Whatever you can do to reduce debts and spending - pay down or pay off credit cards or cars if you can. Get your finances in order as much as you can, so figure out exactly what you’re spending and what your margins are.

Stockpile canned goods and basic survival supplies ahead of time like it’s the goddamn apocalypse. Seriously, have at least a month of dry goods and preserved food, you have some time (maybe) so start collecting canned food, sacks of dried beans and rice, toilet paper and soap, other supplies you buy regularly. This will give you a safety net if it gets bad, it’s one less [major] thing to worry about as you shift around your expenses and priorities.

Get information ahead of time about where your local DES/unemployment offices are, and what’s required to apply. Find out ALL the programs you can apply for, from, nutrition assistance to grants to stipends or tax credits for whatever your family situation is. You won’t get through on the website, it will be crashed with traffic, so be ready to go stand in line with your paperwork. You will get some number of months of benefits if you qualify (requirements vary by state) and most likely after some political contention, congress will pass emergency funding for extensions and stimulus checks. But it won’t last forever.

Go visit your nearest food bank now. Bring them some food and socks, get to know who runs things so that when it’s your time to stand in line, they know you already and have good associations.

We don’t really know how bad it could get. So get a gun. There may be civil unrest at some point. Our world is about two missed meals away from anarchy, or at the very least crime will increase and homes will get broken into, and police will likely be understaffed and overworked. You will be on your own.

Okay but that scene wasn’t Andor, that was Mandalorian.

Bur is just as likely to call out stupid behavior on the left, he’s not partisan. It just so happens the right is doing the worst shit right now, but he’s been vicious in attacking leftists in the past. As he should be.

What if you have it with a cup of coffee? Does that count towards the bean counter?

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it’s one of the best things we have ever had in the world. You should delete this dumb question, then go download it. Get it on a thumb-drive, and lock it in a safe.

Everyone should. We need to preserve the archives of information. You can hem and haw all you want about people being allowed to edit articles and the constant propaganda wars being waged through the most controversial pages, but it’s STILL the best we have.

Before this, people could just publish whatever books they wanted and that would become canon history for a thousand years. At LEAST wikipedia is largely self-balancing and so far not in the direct pocket of any one, single entity trying to control knowledge and history. For now.

Dividing it up into a cluster of biased, self-serving spaces would just harm knowledge and further atomize our world.

The vast majority of people who lean right are not individually as hateful as youtube and social media and most of the content algorithmically fed to us would have us believe.

Do they say horrible things around each other? Yes, they ramp up the rhetoric and make it seem like they’re absolute super-villains at times… but what we really miss in all this is how shallow their values are. They are not complicated people. They go with the popular sentiment but are so comfortable living in a state of cognitive dissonance that they will work all day with a team of black and hispanic coworkers, get along great, consider them true, best friends… then go home and upvote the most racist shit you’ve ever seen on facebook because it makes them laugh. They simply cannot make comparisons or connections the way the other ~66% of the population does, so they don’t see things like hypocrisy or inconsistency. They don’t see larger pictures. They don’t understand the concept of punching down.

As a group, they are our country’s biggest problem, a menace, a scourge upon the Earth who are enabling the worst, most malicious people to engage in plans of oppression we haven’t seen in a century.

But as individuals, we could reach almost each of them. They’re stupid enough to believe whatever we tell them and we’re afraid of them. The math is broken.

We have to get more social, we have to get more confrontational, we have to get less isolated.

I will get some rando lefties screaming at me that they don’t want to “compromise with their oppressors” and that’s fine. Don’t. I’m not making you personally, and if you get that insinuation that I’m telling you personally to do something traumatic, you’re part of the problem. For everyone else, I’ve changed the hearts of people with apparently “set in” bigotry simply by listening and talking to them. It’s not jedi mind magic, it’s just a skill that comes from engaging with people in real life.

While I get the concept, it’s kind of as realistic as Star Trek. We have a long, long way to go before people will voluntarily want to live in a system where your government owns the land, starting with developing a government that can be trusted and a society that doesn’t feel insecure about where they live or what safety nets they have. I don’t see that happening in the next several thousand years.

Should buying and selling homes be completely removed as a private institution then? What about land ownership entirely?

edit: when land ownership is controlled by a position of authority who decides who gets to live where and move where, congratulations, we’re back in monarchy. We can do this smarter without holding completely delusional values.

There are a lot of things I hope I’m wrong about, but I have seen over and over as far back as the earliest days on the internet, companies like AOL have given users the illusion of choice, the feeling that they have control over what they’re looking at and “installing” and that effect has been played with back and forth, from apple giving users a lot of control while also outsourcing app development to third parties to platforms like Steam who have remained stalwart allies to consumers. But even those spaces are somewhat gated and those gates got taller and taller as time went, and I think a lot of platforms would be very happy if they had absolute control over the content users have access to, and have tried to exert this control in many ways.

We wouldn’t have so many legal challenges and issues around monopolization, right to jailbreak, etc. if this wasn’t still a burning problem, so I don’t expect AI is going to be much different, especially since it’s so abstract and “weird” and not even programmed but almost shaped and grown and can still barely interact with computer apps outside of itself.

I guess time will tell if we get a whole a generation of people locked into corporate matrix worlds where they know the steak isn’t real but love it anyway, or if people find ways to train their anime catgirl companions to download, interact with or even simulate 3rd party apps and custom content and they actually become the tools we hope which help us, not just feed us advertisements.

I’m not saying it will be good, but it will be pushed as the next big thing and it will work enough to get people who are already locked into their ChatGTP waifu fantasies or using the thing to supplant their missing social lives in some way to jump over to it, bugs and all. Which is still millions of people.

I think actual AGI is years and years away, but the things the major companies will release in the near future will “simulate” general intelligence in a few clever ways, and as we’ve seen, the public doesn’t have the attention span to care about the nuance, they just want something that makes them feel special.

It will happen when the major companies produce some kind of magical formula that literally everyone wants and are willing to sacrifice freedoms just to have it.

THIS is the reason they are chasing AI so hard and trying to make it to AGI before anyone is ready or prepared. They want everyone to have their magical fairy whispering product placements in their ear and charming them into simulated relationships so that the users abandon all thought of having personal control and freedom to train the things themselves, to install their own upgrades, etc.

The next major “thing” we all carry is going to be some kind of AI that can see through your view of the environment and can whisper to you privately various simulated thoughts, observations and relevant info about the things around you. As well of course as “Hey look, Kohl’s is having a 35% off sale on jackets, didn’t you need one?”

This is their dream, this is why they have put so much into the tech. People are going to gobble it up if they can ever get there, and with that goes all semblance of autonomy, freedom or independant thought.

No, that’s a dumb fucking reply. I am saying that people were not happier under dictators, that’s not exactly gymnastics. Meanwhile, there are countries here and now on earth that have higher happiness levels who are more focused on community and culture and have social safety nets to back it up. That’s my point.

communist regimes

Already lost me there.

There hasn’t been a real “communist regime” there have just been a lot of dictators and despots using the label, and if you know history you should know this, otherwise it’s weird that you think the only alternative to life-destroying capitalism run amuck is straight up cartoonish, hollywood-invented, jump-suits and tank-parades-communism.

However I have traveled the actual REAL world and there are many, many countries where people do not prioritize throwing money at corporations and care about their communities and each other and they are much, much happier with less distractions, less luxuries, fewer stressors and more social engagement, and in many of those places they also have free healthcare and public transportation. You know, socialist policies that help people not have to struggle so hard to survive every day so they can spend time with their friends and family.

The only thing essentialist about us (and the only other explanations are essentialist) is that we’re highly social creatures, the point that we literally die without social contact like a goddamn lovebird or guinea pig.

The primary thing that’s gotten in the way of our social life of the past is the rampant increase in “luxuries” such as single-family homes, personal cars, computers that keep us inside, and the vast array of conveniences that let us survive with clicks and phone calls with strangers.

At its heart, it’s not complex. We buy things that are sold to us to give us the illusion of comfort, but comfort is not good for us, having community is what’s good for us and makes happier and have more balanced perspectives, and we’re suffering massively and experiencing national divisions because we don’t have a sense of community broadly.

Good, succinct explanation. There are some people dropping their life stories in this post, which should be a barometer for just how lonely everyone really is.

But yes, this. It’s all socio-economic. It’s capitalism ruining our world by forcing us to serve the system instead of having a system that serves us. It has been like this a long time, but if unmanaged, allowed to grow and consolidate beyond just the interests of a few companies here and there and allowed to turn into an all-consuming monster that takes away our politics, our social lives, our hopes and dreams, you end up with a very miserable population.

Young internet men when they discover there are actually more kinds of attraction than just sexual and the reasons for people’s behavior can’t be easily summed up with generic, thought-dismissing lines meant to pander to cynicism.

Work a moment in the logistics world and you quickly realize our entire world is a fragile system of interconnected shipping lanes and if anything even touches it wrong millions of people will feel the impact or even suffer or potentially die.