Niglodonicus

You could type in a text file, plug your phone into your computer, transfer the text file onto the phone, then copy the message into an email on your phone.

Yikes.

In any case, there's no reason to leave this up, it's just embarrassing (especially to your coworkers if someone decided to do some digging and figure out who is who).

What in the actual fuck?

A buddy system for curbing porn watching inevitably leads to the unfortunate and desperate scenario where you and your buddy close your eyes and swap hands.

Imagine how low it would be if all internet users actually employed ad-blocking of some sort. Honestly remarkable how many people, faced with the prospect of sitting through extremely annoying video ads, or having their search results and webpages cluttered with useless ads, do nothing instead of spending one minute to install the appropriate blocker. Obviously not everyone is aware these exist, but you would think their curiosity would lead them to find out once they get fed up with having their time wasted by having their activities interrupted constantly and having manure shoved down their throat.

I'm not referring to the intentions or what it was/is trying to do, but to the reality of its userbase and how they play the game and live their life. I mean, as a whole gaming tends to be similarly 'sad', but not to as large an extent as SL (in my opinion, of course).

I can see how it's a bit short and simply makes a claim without going into more detail, but clearly there is enough there for people to be able to reply and disagree and why (as the few of you replying to this have). I just don't see the point of flagging such a comment so that it can no longer be replied to. I think it's unfortunate that downvoting and reporting seem to be merged together on this site, since those are separate functions (downvote- this is a shitty take or I strongly disagree, report- this is a garbage rule-breaking post that needs to be removed).

As for why SL is sad, is because it offers a shallow alternative to RL for people for whom RL is either unaccessible due to economic conditions (hence the late-stage capitalism thing) or for those who just want to escape it altogether (but replace it with a frankly shittier version, as opposed to some completely different fantasy world where you can do stuff you couldn't do in RL such as the aforementioned WoW). Not to mention that vast swathes of the userbase are creepy perverts, but perhaps it is for the best that they've chosen to confine themselves there. Hence, the sum total of this is quite sad imo. In the early stages when it was a fun and novel type of thing and alternatives for similar things were much less widespread, my points don't apply as much, but in 2021, they absolutely do.

I use verizon prepaid, my plan is 5 gigs for 25 a month (which is plenty of data for me and a really decent rate rivaling walmart-type plans), and I just upgraded to the TCL 10 5G UW phone which cost me <$300. Runs like a dream, competitive with phones that cost double that.

Postpaid is basically a scam, the plans are just more expensive AND you're on the hook for X amount of years, in exchange for small upfront savings on a phone (but not even in all cases).

Serious question regarding my flagged comment in this thread since I'm new here:

What's wrong with it? Is it not ok to express that I feel a phenomenon is sad? Did I need to go into more detail about how the phenomenon arose? Is criticism of capitalism or our societal systems unacceptable?

I seriously hope enough people are still grounded enough in this reality to reject AR/VR bullshit besides as a fun playground like VRchat or what have you. Integrating either or both into daily life would be fucking godawful.

It's a lot bigger of an issue than merely the climate crisis. Regarding trying to prevent it (and related issues), we would not only needed to have started 50+ years ago (when it was already clear what was happening), but the incentives in our economic system just do not work in such a way to allow for all the capitalist decision makers to all collectively stop turning a profit. The system is somewhat like rolling a boulder up a hill, it must continuously push it up, or the boulder will roll back down, a little, or all the way. Once growth becomes imposssible/infeasible due to resource limitations, this will happen eventually anyway. But if the machine stops churning, it will simply happen sooner.

Regarding the various aspects of the unsustainability of our society and how it is reaching its limits, this wiki subsection is a very good read (and the rest of the wiki page as well, separated into concrete sections, and links to lots of source materials):

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/index#wiki_what_would...

I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.

Yeaaaaah, if our whole society could stop doing that endless unsustainable growth thing that would be great.

Show me a country where democracy properly, comprehensively works to constrain the cancerous appetite of capitalists. Yes, some European countries, or Japan, or some other outliers do it much better, but not well enough for their capitalism to be fundamentally different from that of the US.

Furthermore, on a global scale, the trends of increased energy demand, increased population growth, increased carbon emissions, increased ecosystem degradation, to name just a few of the main actors, are overwhelmingly positive, and hence these are global issues that affect the sustainability of the entire global society. It doesn't matter if Luxembourg or Sweden develops a socdem utilitarian net-zero utopia, they are just a blip on the radar. All of the third-world countries that the first world exploited over the past centuries in order to fuel their own growth & industrialism, are now all fervently contributing to the above trends, to the extent that all of the first world's recent attempts to dial back their consumption, emissions & so on are laughably futile.

The only possible way to change these trajectories would be for the majority of capitalists across the world to all drastically alter their priorities and how they operate, but this is absolutely not plausible, given that no corporation has ever not sought to increase its profit and growth every quarter; if they somehow hypothetically did, the system would come tumbling down and simply cause collapse even sooner.

What it does offer is a social support group for people who choose to be sober, and it does serve that role, and for that I can't fault it, and the core members are more fortunate, as you say, and use it as such. In particular this is effective because alcoholics/junkies tend to have a terrible friend group (all other substance abusers), and this gets better influences in their life.

But there is a huge rotating pool of mostly young people that are obliged to go, do not stay long, and often go back to their old ways. Overall, the program efficacy is in the single digits. I was such a person that went through multiple rehab cycles and periods of going to meetings, but ultimately I stayed sober of my own accord for quite some time, and these days I imbibe an occasional casual beer or toke, with no habit to speak of, but back in the day I used more than just about anyone I knew, to extremely unpleasant consequences.

Just goes to show their core tenet of 'once an alkie, always an alkie' isn't exactly true, and this is corroborated by a lot of other people. Furthermore, the 'once you've had one beer you can't stop' mantra is particularly damaging because some people entering the program internalize this belief, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy anytime they relapse in the future.

... are you a summary bot?

Yep. AA is effectively a cult, and while itself is not a profit-making venture, is pretty tightly entwined with halfway housing and rehab programs, which are a massive racket in themselves (offering little actual treatment and costing a ton), but which also have become a significant cog in the prison industrial complex machine.

A typical cycle looks like: person from lower class, dysfunctional family potentially already with drug issues, lack of educational opportunities or decent jobs leads to drug dealing, drug abuse develops concurrently, eventually leads to jail, which leads to rehab and/or halfway housing, which does not help the disease nor the person's socioeconomic situation, which leads to more drug abuse and crime, leading to more jail or prison now, and so on it repeats...

It's one of the larger issues that could reasonably be amended. The more fundamental issues regarding capitalist corruption, ineffective government, and unsustainable growth, while much bigger, are an effectively unsolvable side effect of our society's affliction, and furthermore apply to the entire planet.

You really think the way this case was handled (referring to the wrong person being arrested, repeatedly) doesn't have anything to do with racial bias?

This is an absolutely classic example.

Maybe, maybe because pointing out such a thing is evidence of a bigger problem (systemic discrimination & racial bias) that has been demonstrated to not be only exclusive to the realm of human investigators, but also in a lot of facial recognition software (that both trains on a disproportionate amount of black faces and is poorly able to differentiate between distinct black faces).

Poor article on the topic (Daily Mail, after all), but the prediction itself is probably approximately true. It's not really matter of if, but how soon. The conditions required to prevent such a collapse are not impossible, but so far seem highly unlikely.

Extremely based and succinct rundown of why crypto is trash and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, the original vision was noble and worthwhile, but like nearly every nice theoretical idea, it was co-opted into the capitalist ecosystem to be just another vassal of greed and corruption, with some throwback wild west vibes.

Sorry for assuming someone who fearmongers and parrots right-wing talking points to be right-wing. Ye olde 'enlightened centrist both sides are bad' position is problematic due to false equivalence- by saying both sides are equally bad and misguided, in actuality you align yourself closer toward the side that is objectively worse (and if I have to explain to you which is objectively worse and why, well then I'm not sure there really is any point at all to continuing this conversation).

Except the only people worried about it are conservatives who are being manipulated by all the usual right-wing fearmongerers. Please go read some neutral articles about the realities of 'cancel culture' instead of just swallowing Tucker Carlson's take on it.

Company (likely using at-will employment) fires employee after he (intentionally or inadvertently, irrelevant) starts a massive PR scandal. Wow, this must be that cancel culture everyone's been talking about, better get your pitchforks! These cultural marxists are getting out of control!

In overwhelmingly most of the cases where someone has been 'cancelled', their career has not noticeably suffered even one bit. Just look at Mel Gibson, dude has been unapologetically spouting wild shit at every possible marginalized group for decades and he's still got a bustling career as both actor and director.

If anything, this is the biggest argument of all against the existence of 'cancel culture', cause so far I can't find even one example of someone who's truly been cancelled, and furthermore, for something completely innocent and meaningless.

If people were actually being sent to gulags for saying something the government or general public simply didn't like, you cancel culture warriors would have a point. But... that's not the case, and that's not where this is going. Believing as much is an extremely tenuous slippery slope argument and just delusional levels of fearmongering.

There is absolutely nothing new going on, except the fact that more people these days are intolerant of bigotry and other vile behavior, and are better able to voice their concerns via the internet.

Just because society thinks that a phenomenon is real, doesn't make it real. See: flat earthers, other types of conspiracy circles, organized religion.

I'm not saying that 'cancel culture' is something else, because it isn't anything at all. What people refer to when they say 'cancel culture' is the normal functioning of society and/or the market in response to events, just in response to events they don't have a problem with. Then they paint it as a 'woke conspiracy' to silence free speech.

If someone loses their job for harassment or espousing problematic views, that's a workplace doing its job.

If a popular figure loses fans or affiliations because of their past actions, that's public opinion at work.

If a company chooses not to publish a book, or a group of people boycott a brand, that's just the free market at work.

The only instances I see where certain people cry 'cancel culture, boooo' is when someone faces consequences for doing something the overall public finds shitty (like being openly racist or a sexual abuser), but the group crying 'cancel culture' does not particularly care. You don't see the same people complaining that Kaepernick was 'cancelled'. He similarly faced consequences for what he did, but no such outcry. I wonder why, maybe perhaps because it is just one of many alt-right forms of newspeak used to manipulate its followers and stir up fearmongering, hatred, and division? No, that would be far too logical. Ditto for 'wokeism'.

'Cancel culture' is not an actual thing. There do exist instances where someone gets shunned or shitcanned for something they said 10 years ago, which is a questionable practice and not very common, but when someone is in a public facing position or otherwise position of power or influence, and does or says some heinous shit in the present, getting fired or having their show cancelled or what have you is not evidence of some wider 'cancel culture' to shut down free speech, it's absolutely normal operating procedure; society has always functioned this way. If you go into a church and start spouting 'God is a ball of spaghetti' you'll get shunned and kicked out, in 2021 or 1021, and no one's going to call that 'cancel culture'.

'Wokeism' is not an actual thing, either. Sure, there's a few nutjobs on the internet but they don't have any actual influence; absolutely none compared to conspiracy theorists, anyway. The reason corporations do stuff like Pride month or Black History month is pure marketing pandering to make them seem more human.

You conservatives sure spend a lot of time inventing boogeymen to invest your time into fighting. It is after all, pretty standard ur-fash protocol.

Watch out, a horde of unwavering crypto supporters who still believe that it can somehow disrupt banking and change the world are currently converging on this location.

Giant corporations that are allowed monopoly over a vital utility have predatorial business practices and charge exorbitant amounts for a subpar service, more news at 11.