I never said I thought everything was ok? My point is that things are not ok for reasons that have nothing to do with people being too stupid, it is a lazy lament with no foundation in reality in terms of describing why people are suffering.

Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.

I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.

Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.

Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.

The only real tangible thing is IQ

Look at how much work that sentence is doing! Damn, you just shut down several entire categories of science and culture devoted to understanding what intelligence is in all its complex varieties of form, well done!

It doesn’t matter where you live, we are all the same species of animal and the brain in our skull that we like to lament as stupid when we make general statements about the intelligence of the public around us is an extraordinary thing.

I get people’s cynicism and I am kind of annoyed people think I live in a fairytale lol, I just see humans around me trying to live their lives and being mediocre humans…. and the intelligence of mediocre humans is nothing to dismiss.

People are smart as fuck, conservative and hateful ideologies do make people behave like idiots but I mean I don’t fault the human brain for getting brainworms when the brainworms are firehoused (one might say trickling down at a rapid rate) at everyone by the wealthiest people in the world 24/7.

Also yo are you seriously looking for me to give you the average IQ of the population around me? This feels like two steps from getting out calipers and measuring people’s skulls to determine their intelligence. I agree, let’s NOT stick our heads in the sand.

If your child is too young to understand parody or irony (or just get that when you say “somebody copied your favorite character and is using them in a way that isn’t genuine to the character”) why the hell are they being exposed to…. Garry’s Mod?

None of this makes any sense.

Ok, the intelligence of the most average person I know is still plenty intelligent. I don’t only know geniuses or something, it’s just I don’t feel like the normal human beings I encounter on a daily basis are deficient in intelligence. What makes people awful is usually their beliefs not their intelligence.

The human brain is FARRRRR too powerful of a biological adaption to get manipulated so transparently in this way by imagery in one context with imagery in another. It is an absurd ask to say that people would be “dumb” enough for their brains to do this and no except in neurodiverse cases (which is cool!) the human brain doesn’t work like this.

Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.

Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.

I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.

It’s hilariously pathetic that a bunch of lawyers convinced the people at Nintendo to waste their time doing this shit.

There is zero percent overlap between janky Garry’s mod custom assets with Nintendo sales of their polished AAA games except to probably drive sales of Nintendo games to a degree.

organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.

https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.

I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?

I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.

An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!

No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.

https://www.spacemacs.org/

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEeStDz_imQ

Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?

Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.

Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.

If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?

Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.

It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).

Precision Murder

Let’s please call it what it is.

What?

I mean as long as UBI isn’t spearheaded by a bunch of libertarians who think they are bravely forging an unprecedented path forward towards creating a social safety net while ignoring the long history of social safety nets in different societies, and the entire left movement in the US that fought successfully for things like the 8 hour work day.

I think UBI can be great, but there are wayyyy too many libertarians into UBI to the point that the ruling class has a super clear route to catastrophically cutting social welfare programs across the board while saying “we don’t need these if we have UBI!”, making UBI completely insufficient, and fooling libertarians into taking the bait hook line and sinker because they don’t have political or historical knowledge about how social welfare in societies is actually achieved through organization of worker power to leverage against a hostile ruling class.

~30% of the US population are white men but according to that link 52% of mass shootings are perpetrated by white men. That is a ~22% increase over what you would expect if the US didn’t raise its white conservative men to be violent and hateful and specifically teach them they are the only types of people who are allowed to be violent or threaten the possibility of violence in public spaces.

How is this not evidence that white men are the most dangerous people in the US? Not in terms of being likely to commit a crime of desperation but rather to be an utter loser and decide to shoot a bunch of random people out of pure hate? White men might not be the most likely to hurt you in the US, but they are BY FAR the most likely to hurt you for no reason other than you who happen to be and what you happen to represent to them.

A man that feels he has nothing to lose is a dangerous thing.

Billionaires with nothing to gain but money for moneys sake are far more dangerous, it’s just they are going to kill your loves ones with crushing debt or an opioid prescription not a bullet.

Between 1999 and 2015, around 350,000 people died from opioid addiction related deaths in the US.

350,000

Guess whether any of the Sacklers went to jail who knowingly pushed opioid prescriptions in situations where it was dangerous or unnecessary based rational from studies conducted to purposefully sell more opioids?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319300096#:~:text=According to the CDC%2C there,counties from 1999 through 2015.

Bob Ihadababyitsaboy

Good good, I was going to say that clearly looks like a Russian spy device placed clandestinely on American soil right under citizens very noses but you have assuaged my fears.

I don’t understand, where is the part of this device that forces ads on you?

and if you were a true Scotsman you would be wearing a kilt and not those PANTS

Yeah fair I am sure there is almost as much sketchy shit in Chinese electric cars as American ones, I just can’t find the fucks to care compared to the threat of ecological and agricultural collapse from climate change.

Like seriously I know it’s more satisfying and intriguing to talk security, technology, software and geopolitics but really who gives a fuck. Literally none of this even remotely matters next to the existential emergency that is climate change.

So sure, cheap Chinese electric cars lets go who cares honestly, we don’t have the damn time to focus on making this into a Cold War Tom Clancy novel before we run out of shit like clean water to drink.