The economy literally is a mess. It’s not ‘vibes’, it’s the resources available to the average working American versus the costs they’re facing.

The reason there’s a disconnect is that the economic measures are all designed by and geared toward the owning class. Wages are still stagnating, rent is still skyrocketing, and food still costs an arm and a leg. Energy bills are still ridiculous and increasingly hot summers means more air conditioning. Chasing after quarterly profits means a constant diminishment of value for consumers. We can’t even get 24 hour egg mcmuffins anymore.

Maybe boomer retirees are confusing the math more than it would be otherwise? But what’s broken here isn’t people’s perception of an economy that’s good actually, it’s the measures of an economy that involves extreme (and growing) wealth inequality.

I quit eating meat for a year once and it was pretty shit for my mental health. I do try to avoid the worst of factory farming as much as I can, though. Organic eggs (in my state regulations on organic eggs include a number of anti-cruelty measures), minimal chicken to reduce the death to meat quantity ratio, things like that. But also, I personally don’t feel as though the suffering inflicted on insect populations or rodent populations, or the damages of large scale farming, or the cruelty involved in transporting bees for pollenation are particularly okay either. I’m not really sure there’s such a thing as effective veganism in modern society unless you’re growing your own food at home, and I don’t have the energy, financial security, or access to land for that.

Nearly every product we consume leads to suffering and destruction. I don’t think being short of the point where you’re willing to radically change your lifestyle means I should deny that, though, even if all my spoons tend to be spent on shit like dragging myself out of bed and ensuring air quality that triggers my asthma and allergies as little as possible.

Humans are a mess. There’s a substantial cost in physical and psychological resources and energy to dwindling the impact of that mess, but there’s very little cost to at least acknowledging it and advocating for growing as a species.

Whether this is good or terrible honestly kind of depends on how they define social media. Is discord social media? Are forums? Is Reddit?

Arguably nobody really benefits from exposing children to feeds full of toxic and angry adults, but that doesn’t mean no communities should allow children. Like, there’s nothing wrong with kids dipping their toes into the Internet and learning and growing from it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to just hand them the keys to the worst elements.

Also like, I prefer adult communities over all age communities by a long shot.

Whenever I read about football now I just want it to be John Bois scifi college football from 20020. I would follow the shit out of that.

This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.

The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.

There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.

For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.

It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.

Did this person really just typify Thatcher as defending her country from male aggression from elsewhere?

A lot of what’s said here makes sense but… seriously? Thatcher? That’s who we’re pointing to as a good example? Yeesh.

I’m not vegan, but I find it absolutely wild that anyone thinks being kind of annoying sometimes comes anywhere near the level of moral or ethical bankruptcy involved in being complicit in the mass torture of animals for the sake of convenience. Like, okay, yeah, it’s not like we have the option of just deciding on behalf of powerful capitalists to just end factory farming. But deciding to at least try not to participate in it by changing your diet is at least something.

Don’t worry about being a “good vegan” if that means having to tiptoe around the fact that the rest of us fuel immense suffering both monetarily and through social normalization. You’re trying, and that’s great.

They’re bound to run out eventually, right?

Glad to hear about 0patch being an option.

I thought you were going to say they would be happy to drive their smoke belching pickup trucks off a cliff and became briefly enthusiastic about the idea.

To be fair, human thieves can also churn out a plagiarized album of uninspired trash with no emotional content fairly quickly if they’re brazen enough about it. ‘AI’ scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a relatively high operating cost. It won’t last.

To my understanding Les Pauls really don’t stay in tune very well. Pretty, though. When they’re not plastered in nationalism.

How, exactly? What are they going to be able to do to save them from all of their produce rotting in their fields as it goes unharvested? That’s not really something you can fix with a bit of a bail-out. Even if they just hand them buckets of cash, they’re going to have a food shortage to contend with.

It’s generally easier to destroy something than to create something, and it’s easier to consolidate power than to take it when you don’t have it. Also the left tends to be principled, while the right tends to be focused on gaining and keeping power. There are things conservatives would happily do that are strategically valuable that we typically just straight up wouldn’t even if it meant a win.

If you want to build up social services and fight for the rights and well-being of common people, you have to be able to make pretty broad coalitions while also figuring out how to actually make things better and convincing people that you know what you’re doing. If you want to win power without caring about anyone else, all you have to do is ally yourself with those who already have power and not speak up when they hurt others.

The flip side, fortunately, is that eventually all that self-serving power ends up being used to elevate smaller and smaller groups of people as it’s consolidated. As resources and influence collect at the top, more and more people suffer as they’re left behind. Eventually the number of people harmed has sometimes been enough that it naturally begins to form the kind of broad coalitions needed to overthrow the most obvious sources of corruption and suffering, but keeping those coalitions once the immediate danger is over is another matter entirely.

It certainly doesn’t help that authoritarians seem to have gotten better at disruption and disinformation. Polarizing society in the way that we see with bot farms run by Russian and Chinese intelligence in the past few years means most of their work can be done without much actual precision. Get everybody angry and get them to disagree on what’s going on in the world and they stand a lot less of a chance of coming together to oppose entrenched power structures.

There’s still a clock on the whole thing, because they’re making the situation more dangerous for themselves by increasing instability, and eventually it’ll probably bite them in the ass. But, will it happen by the time the current crop of powerful authoritarians are dead? Eh… Maybe? Who knows?

Unfortunately we also have a clock running as a species, and if we don’t figure out how to get around these atomizing disinformation systems and start to dismantle all this consolidated authoritarian power (both in governments and economically), we may not have an opportunity to wait until we reach a critical mass of suffering.

Also, like, it would really suck to have to live through the process of getting there anyway.

The best we can hope for, as far as I can tell, is some alternate means of wide-spread awareness. Some kind of movement in art or music might be helpful, if it can be extricated from the existing economic and social power structures. Basically, something like what the counter-culture was trying to do in the 60s, or what punks were doing coming up a little closer on the turn of the century.

The power of those coalitions was pretty temporary, though, and both seem to have been co-opted by people who, once again, just wanted to consolidate power for their own ends. The extent of their impact is debatable, but I have a feeling we need something substantially bigger than either of those movements.

You just need more monitors. Then you can let YouTube do its thing without really paying much attention to it and get on with your life on the other 2 or 3 screens.

I would be stunned if the DoJ knows the difference between Chrome and Chromium.

I mean, they’re steeping in environments online that aren’t really very age-controlled. Log into any free-to-play or public server game with voice chat and give it a listen. It’s just a bunch of literal small children screaming racial slurs. They might not all be in environments like that, but enough of them are that it’s definitely going to substantially alter their experience.

They have a level of practical autonomy that we couldn’t have dreamed of with little to no oversight that at this point is decades entrenched. Outside of adult-only spaces the Internet is basically Children of the Corn. Even the ones who aren’t wrapped up in that nonsense have to contend with the ones who are, and none of them are going to have the emotional maturity to really deal with it properly.

How could we not expect rude children who grow up to be callous protofascists and narcissists?

Isn’t TOR kind of shady? Like, mixing your traffic in with a bunch of malicious and potentially actually illegal with good reason traffic?

There’s a joke about them being armed, and maybe another about them not being armed? It’s hard to tell from the tone of the article. Do these things have guns?

I get that it’s important to document this stuff, but to me this headline basically reads as: “Breaking News! Ocean Extremely Wet! Also Salty!”