maaaan! you must come from a country where the laws actually protect customers from the corporations rather than the other way around… otherwise you could never come up with such a naive statement.

this! the megacorporation receives 500k donations, which they transfer to CEO’s son’s “charity” that spends 99% of it on the said son’s salary. he buys another ferrari and the charity sends some flowers to a children cancer hospital.

yup. how is that not obvious to anyone is beyond me… some of those workers have contracts that would require amazon paying severance in case they would just fire them like so many other companies do. better make them leave on their own.

it could and did happen. I remember reading about 6 year old kid getting lost at the airport gate (i think it was in germany) only to be discovered when they finally looked for their parents in italy. just went away while parents were preoccupied with something else and looked like someone else’s kid while boarding the plane. as a parent travelling with small kid I can totally see that happening anywhere - kids can just walk anywhere with no questions asked as long as they are next to an adult who looks like they could be their parent.

that is an interesting idea. still… you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts… you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn’t help much.

you are right - it doesn’t have to be one or the other… I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don’t know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.

I was thinking about something like this but I think it’s ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:

1. you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.

2. you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots…) so that wouldn’t work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.

i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.

I went through depression before and I got out successfully. I know where I am and I know what I need to do to get out. I recognise that the biggest problem is self-delusion and all the cognitive biases that make me feel miserable and powerless… there is also a difference between subjective and objective reality.

I also tried a few dead ends on my journey and I can confidently tell you that the thing you wrote above is not only not helpful, but can be harmful to people that are in a bad place and cannot see through it. People that don’t know any better and spew bullshit like this (or worse, drank their own kool aid) are one of the reasons why it is so hard to get better in a world we have… so cool T-shirt bro, have a nice day!

mhm… and what if you just had a kid and moved away from helping family to a country which thinks that paid medical leave or reasonable parental leave are luxuries not worth having? have you ever tried to get more than 3h of sleep in a row while taking care of a newborn? good luck going for a run after that! if it also happens to be a winter you may need to wait until spring for that sunlight too. good that we at least have parental groups to socialize… unless you are stay at home dad that is, cause trying to talk about restarting your career after the break might not sit well in a group that mostly connects on how their childbirth went…

maybe they just didn’t get that idea yet… let’s start ceoGPT Inc. and ride the AI craze to riches. I’ll be the CEO.

but there is just no right or wrong answer to every question… sometimes it’s just about opinion.

sometimes these questions are trivial (which color of tie should I wear with this shirt) and sometimes they are literally life and death questions (should death penalty be legal)… and there will always be people with opposing opinions on them. “agreeing to disagree” is literally the best possible thing they can do to live in the same society.

I think I get the sentiment that you are angry at but there is nothing wrong with that statement. It just doesn’t mean “whelp, there must be some higher purpose those things are serving that we don’t see” and is more like “there are some awful people doing bad things” or “they just were living in a seismic area” or “they had some genes not compatible with their survival”… There are always reasons. Not satisfying or purpose fulfilling reasons, just reasons.

ceo is literally the only job that can be fully replaced by the “ai” at the moment with no loss of performance whatsoever

that is fascinating… do you have some longer easy to read source to learn about this topic?

also, you say those earning 100k in 1950’s only carried 20% of tax burden and now they carry 80%… what exactly is tax burden and is that number inflation adjusted? how big fraction of income distribution are we talking about?

it’s on youtube

imagine Shakespeare tragedy where everyone dies but as a narrated documentary. it’s freaking depressing…

but in space nobody can hear you cream

I understand your points and agree with them. For me the experience with support has been quite opposite though… I can always find a solution (or at least an explanation) with Linux (I can go all the way down the rabbit hole to the source code if I would be so inclined) but with Windows it’s always been just black magic rituals or random software from the internets that either work or tough luck.

Also the unconditional support for military (especially veterans) is a cultural point that many otherwise OK people have big trouble with…

Actually, I do… but do you really want the source or do you just want me to be wrong?