Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

Yeah. It’s more like:

Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.

Well I’m convinced. That was a surprisingly well reasoned video.

Does “nothing” “exist” independent of caring what there is nothing of or in what span of time and space there is nothing of the thing?

There’s always been “something” somewhere. Well, at least as far back as we can see.

$10 million easy. Sure maybe you could get more if you were going back in time and insider trading on everything. But $10m is already enough money to live a comfortable life, especially if you just invest it in something safe. And that way you don’t need to go through school and puberty again.

I have all sorts of problems in my personal life. Mental and physical health are terrible. The few friends I have moved to other timezones and have jobs that make it harder and harder for me to even talk with them online much anymore. I’m too depressed and anxious to go out and get a job or meet people. I’m too depressed and unfocused to try to work on the art that interests me.

But the worst of it all is a feeling that even if I fixed all my personal problems, what’s the point when the world is this shitty and keeps getting worse? The planet is rapidly becoming unlivable and we’re never going to do anything about it because the power structure depends on the things that are causing the problem. People have less and less control over our lives as corporations gain more and more power through consolidation and technology.

I’ve heard people say that the world just isn’t suited to accommodate some kinds of people, but I don’t see how it accommodates ANYONE who isn’t rich and powerful. I think most people just do better at suppressing that feeling than me. Is anyone really healthy and happy working some awful job for low pay so they can just barely afford to live in an apartment they don’t own and eat food that’s slowly killing them?

Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.

You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.

As far as vegetables go, there are some specific ones that bother me then some more general textural annoyances. One of the specific examples that comes up a lot are non-processed tomatoes. Fine with sauces and ketchup and stuff like that, but actual tomatoes smell weird, they ooze, they’ve got seeds, they’re squishy, etc. This has been kind of a big problem because sooooo many sandwiches and things feature tomato as a major part of the flavor of the dish. I could ask them for no tomato, but then usually all that’s left is like lettuce and some other lower flavor ingredients. At that point I might as well just get something else. Just in general if I have to get rid of some ingredients from something I don’t know enough about what to replace them with to still end up with something that’s supposed to taste good together.

More generally, textures that make the food harder to eat, like there being tough/rigid bits, especially if they’ve got long shapes can be a problem. We get this spring mix for salads, and I kinda tolerate it, but the stems on some of the leaves can be really annoying. Green beans, snap peas, etc also have a similar problem, especially when they have those stringy bits. Then there are things that are just unpleasantly squishy. Then there’s some stuff I can kind of tolerate in some dishes, like bell peppers in a fajita, but I’d pick around them if they were in something I had to more actively select bites of like a stir fry.

It can be a bit tough to explain all the little ins and outs of it all. I kinda want to be able to find new varied/healthy things to eat and actually enjoy, but it’s been tough searching for things that don’t run into some random problem like these.

I’m basically a hermit.

For me, I don’t support what Russia is doing. I just don’t want to further empower the US military industrial complex. Every couple of years there needs to be a new evil enemy for us to be scared of so that the money can keep flowing into weapons and so that we have excuses to extract value out of other countries in conflict. It’s obvious we don’t do this for humanitarian reasons or we wouldn’t be allies with countries like Saudi Arabia (or see the entire history of US intervention since WWII). Whether Russia wins or loses the war, people in Ukraine aren’t winning, they’re just seeing which imperialists are going to be exploiting them for the near future.

In the abstract I don’t oppose assisting countries against imperialist aggression with military force. But playing into US warmongering doesn’t really do that and in the process is further making the world a worse place.