I absolutely agree, although I wonder if it’s sorta like “hypervigilance”. Vigilance and keen observation are fantastic!

But there’s also a point where it interferes with your life because it’s freaking exhausting and you just can’t…stop…noticing…every…little…thing…

Maybe that’s what they mean, assuming in good faith they’re not being all 1984 about it…

Although it does feel like the mental health “industry” trend of pushing the onus on the individual who, may simply be reacting normally to a completely chaotic, absurd, often bleak environment.

I think “it’s human nature” is an excuse made by the ruling class to quell challenges to the system that benefits them.

Sociopathic hoarding and anti-social manipulation is an abberation that our system artificially elevates and rewards.

If we were culturally more hostile to attempts to rent out our lives and natural resources back to us, and didn’t put zero-empathy profit hoarders on the front of magazines, things could be better.

I agree with you on group sizes though. When people are treated like hyper-specialized insects with ID numbers instead of identities, funneled into highly-specialized roles, every one a stranger to the other, something has gone horribly wrong.

Trim federal spending, go into deflation, and drive the buying power of the currency up. This would allow people to pay down debts while maintaining standard of living.

My problem with this logic is the same problem I have when suited clowns claim they’ll just raise prices on everything 300% if the minimum wage goes up by $2.

Say we “trimmed federal spending” (which is kinda its job as an entity, to spend towards the people, ideally), and somehow magically our already-printed simoleons became worth more per dollar…

What, besides intense federal regulations, would prevent bosses from just spinning this as some kind of crisis, and making it an excuse to pay us less because “each dollar is worth more now so you’re making too much”?

“Entitlements” and “hand-outs” are necessary not because people are lazy, but because from a business perspective, jobs aren’t worth doing anymore , but we do them anyway because we’re forced to, if we want to participate in society at all.

TL;DR:

Basically, the solution is to tell the rent-seeking neo-gilded-age robber-barons of our day “Fuck you. Pay me.” If they actually paid a fair wage for the profits their employees generate, we’d be able to “pay down debts while maintaining standard of living, and allow for a reduction of dependency on hand outs - which would allow for a further reduction in government spending.”

That was a brilliant read.

I appreciated the nuance, and it even added a lot of perspective to the notion that Adam Smith’s “capitalism” concept was not the evil and inhuman machine we experience today.

I’ve noticed this move to “technofeudalism” everywhere but didn’t have a name for it. It’s exhausting seeing how many services, products, businesses, whatever, all simply want to coast on monthly payments and lock-ins for what amounts to merely keeping the lights on.

The PetsMart thing was insidious. This surely solidifies the definition of “human resources”: Seeking to control people as “assets” that generate profits like (proprietary) batteries.

It seems it should be a priority goal to undermine the corporate and wealthy’s dominion over “assets.” They’d be terrified of this, as they might actually have to do something besides acquire everyone else’s hard work for a change!

Never heard of Qidi, thanks for sharing that! Bambu concerns me, frankly, from the “too good to be true in capitalism-land” standpoint.

They’re obviously pretty quality built and do a great job off the shelf, but the closed source software is iffy to me too. I think some are suspicious they just don’t want to reveal they’re basically running tweaked Klipper lol. I’m lured by that temptation of not having to tweak and fiddle for weekends prospect too, but if I can’t touch it at all or know how it works, my Ender3v2 still seems more appealing!

I’m concerned if other companies don’t seriously step up their game, Bambu will reach market saturation and then go for the" enshittification rug pulling to impress investors" special.

Anyway don’t want to be too negative, clearly people are enjoying those machines. But the maker community definitely needs to be ready to raise a riot if Bambu starts taking notes from HP / Apple / John Deere. :)

Yeah, it’s not bad! If it’s got a good clean view it can tell you when things start to look a little sus before disaster strikes haha.

It’s even self-hostable, and a modest dedicated graphics card can be used to run the LLM completely locally. I haven’t been able to get that running on my server yet though. (Nvidia drivers. Agh)

Otherwise they’re pretty “freemium”, which is understandable.

I’ve been out of the game lately though. :)

It used to be Spaghetti Detective, but they wanted to be trendy so it’s “Obico” I think now lol

I extremely miss Craig Ferguson…

Okay you SCARED me there. He might not do “late late show” anymore but he’s still around. :)

I got to see his stand-up live once and he was hilarious.

They say it’s a Gates’way to things, most unnatural…

“Everything’s shiny, Cap’n, not to fret!”

“You told me these packages were supported for another 6 weeks!”

“Your last Pacman -Syu was 6 months ago, Cap’n!”

“My OS don’t crash. If it crashes, you crashed it!”

The first thing was probably a set of earrings when I was a really little guy. I handed them to my mom when we got home and she was shocked at what a smooth swipe I pulled and we immediately went back to return them. So much for my thoughtful gift! Hahaha.

I also recall this thing at my very conserva-religious elementary school, where people set up a little market selling things as gifts and such. I was given some money to go buy presents for people, but nobody told me how to pay for anything, and I assumed it was like a big box store where you pay at the end.

So here I am like, what, 6 or 7 maybe? Going from table to table and just yoinking knick-knacks into my little bag. Nobody stopped me or otherwise corrected me. I still don’t see anywhere to “check out”! I end up just leaving, basically.

Cut to me waiting in the lunch line and just getting straight up shaken down and accosted for cash by some authoritarian staff types. I just handed them the bag of spending money I’d been supplied with and I don’t really remember what happened after that. Looking back though, those people were very mean to a confused child under 10, treating me like some deliberate criminal mastermind of petty-thievery lol.

That’s really neat but also seems like it could be quite dangerous in a lot of use-cases!

I hear these isolated stories of bravery and no-BS defiance of corporate overlords, and for the longest time I’ve been thinking:

How do we start an organization that could train people to handle these jerks like you did, and plant these newly educated, hardened, prepared badasses-like-you in every organization in the country? These C-suite pricks need to be made famous, treated to detailed records and long memories of their every lie and falsehood toward their workers.

I’ve learned professional union agitators are called “salts” which sounds awesome, but their impact isn’t very well understood or recognized, I think.

$1 billionaires brag about their “intelligence”

They say “intelligence” to make you think “smarts” when it’s really “membership to a market manipulation and insider trading club.”