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.

Check their moderation history for a real ride. The sack of dead batteries advocates violence and racism all day and night, has it removed, then farms positive karma by posting dumb gaming takes. Just block and move on, these people are either paid to waste our time or get off on it, or both.

It’s like they got to the bottom of the rabbit hole, and decided “Eh, fuck it, I’m cool with it. Carry on.”

Oh you’re right, it was never about protecting children, it was about feeling special for figuring out a secret “they” don’t want you to know. When “They” come out in the open and just admit to it and show exactly who is doing it and how far it goes without secrecy, it loses interest for the obsessives and people missing things from their lives.

It was about the hunt, not the outcome. And this is an attitude that a LOT of people have about far more things than just Q-anon conspiracy, most liberals and leftists also have their own cars they chase without a plan for what to do when they catch it. Everyone has some storyline they’re engaged with and feel connected to.

And these storylines are deliberately being both seeded and capitalized on to keep a leash around the population and to keep people from unifying.

There are sadly, a lot of men in power who are also rapists the same way normal people eat breakfast.

If we don’t take collective action and start caring about our communities and linking arms with people we don’t agree with on everything, we are going back to a time when little girls are property of the state and have no future past “fleshlight for fat old fucks” or “baby machine.”

Sounds to me like just basic incest kinkposting.

The bottom-tier of all online psyops is just kink-posting by teenage guys who want to try to normalize whatever weird shit they’re getting off on. “My 18 year old sister is staying with me for a family gathering and we have to share a bed, is this normal?” “People say I’m way too close to my Llama because we tongue kiss and share a bedroom, but I think it’s cute and innocent!” “My wife’s best friend wants to sleep between us because convoluted and completely unrealistic reasons I’m going to gloss over, Am I overreacting?”

There are a lot of people and bots alike who use forums like this, Reddit mostly, but also smaller ones, to push narratives, to experiment in pushing narratives, to probe how easy it is to change perceptions among a select group of people about a topic.

It may not even be apparent what the goal is or why people or agencies are going through this much trouble, but there are complicated interconnections that a lot of people are trying to explore every day and set up intersecting narratives for tomorrow.

Not all of them are going to be at all successful, meaningful or even make sense. That’s part of it too, to see how people respond to almost random new narratives and topics becoming more prevalent.

Basically, trust no one, believe nothing. Go outside, make friends, kill your social media, be social in real life, exercise and stop spending money. If we all did this the bot-farms and corruption would dry out overnight.

This is why I’m honestly done taking any blame for the environment.

Why were you ever “taking blame” for the environment and what does it mean to “stop” doing so?

Serious question, because this sounds like the excuse my hick neighbor used to use for dumping used motor oil directly onto the ground so I wave fingers at this kind of rhetoric.

Just because corporations are the primary offenders, doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibility or accountability for at least the most basic measures. And more so, the accountability for allowing corporations is squarely on us as people who feed them massive amounts of money and then complain there’s no alternatives.

My suggestion for both helping the environment and ending billionaires is the one nobody wants to hear: stop spending so much money. Especially if you live in the EU or America, your money is the most valuable currency in the world, and every time you buy the latest model of iPhone or order Doordash, you’re harming the world and paying for the next CEO’s weekend getaway trip. Every time you pay for the newest game or go watch the latest movie, every time you pay for convenience, you’re feeding the system in a massive way.

It’s far to much to expect any kind of actual “revolution” to take place. We could literally cripple capitalism overnight with a general strike, but nobody wants the inconvenience. So the next best thing is we start hoarding money away from the grips of these liches and undead dragons.