lonely_wanderer

In for a penny, in for a pound. Unless you are extremely crafty, you don’t get to retire from this sort of criminality. Everyone who enabled you wants more and you have a semi-permanent metaphorical sword hanging over your head.

Despite the person you responded to playing the fool, I found this discussion very interesting. I had never thought about a built in queue as a solution here.

Erotica is a whole separate class of smut than porn (in the cultural sense, that we understand the term “porn”). It’s literally like calling a book a movie.

It’s also, on the whole, a much more ethical and engaging form of smut. I don’t really have an issue with the choices of consenting adults, but the (video and image) pornography industry is so seldom that.

I have thought about your position more and I realize I basically agree. More data isn’t strictly good, but in the right hands it is useful, and that choice should be left to individuals.

Also, it makes sense to me that, as technology improves and becomes cheaper, we should utilize it more. It may take time to come up with the proper process to maximize usefulness and reduce false positives, but it’s the path of progress.

I hope that in the future, humans consider it barbaric that we weren’t aware of things like cancer and tumors at the earliest stages, even if in many cases there’s no treatment necessary.

That’s funny, I thought you were referring to the Shaw quote [1], I had never heard that one from Heinlein.

[1] “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

I think there’s actually a difference between getting a battery of tests from a set of doctors (overseen by the government) tailored to your risk factors and a company trying to sell a fully body scan which they think you should casually get all the time.

A counter point: a fixation on medical diagnoses can be counterproductive to living a good, happy, and healthy life. My implication is that data will lead to self-diagnosis, when maybe it’s not necessary.

There’s a reason most people don’t get medical scans every checkup, they’re simply not necessary for the majority of (healthy) people.

The article contrasts it with a manufacturing process known as “shark skin.” I wonder if it’s entirely identical to the skin of a shark or a marketing term?

I am not saying the gambit is correct. I am purely trying to reason about what those in charge may believe.

If you know your enemy’s position strengthens with time while your position weakens with time, under a certain mentality, you attack now.

That scraggly tag team of allies, the US, China, Russia, and India.

I can only see two natural allies here (US and India) and clear reasons why Russia and China benefit from the current order, or at least are harmed less than the US.

I don’t think this argument really makes sense tbh. When you own the justice department and congress, what matter does it make? Epstein stuff was going to to stale regardless, as much as I hate that fact.

I vacillate between two potential rationales:

- there is a concerted effort to target and topple oil producers which China relies on as a form of containment of the Chinese economy. Venezuela, Iran, eventually Russia in a more direct way. The current administration is willing to accept economic pain for just about everyone because they see the transition from petroleum to green energies as the death knell for US superiority. They see this as their last chance to derail China, so they are taking it. It provides incidental value (like giving pre-text for increasing domestic repression).

- they thought it would be easy after Venezuela and Trump was flattered by Netanyahu and pressured by evangelicals into doing it.

I understand the point you make but I would counter that being happy doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of the world and injustice around you. It doesn’t mean that you condone it, think it’s good, etc. It does mean you probably avoid self-destructive behaviors like excess drug use, poor sleep, etc.

Many happy people are also agitators for change.

Not to say that happiness is a choice, but you can certainly make choices which make you sick with anxiety. It’s a disordered behavior to purposefully reinforce your sadness and anxiety about the world for no useful reason.

For instance, many people feel compelled to expose themselves to the horror of certain ongoing events constantly, via video. There are whole subreddits dedicated to it, on every side of most conflicts. At the end of the day, that is neither healthy nor productive, solely self-traumatizing. One reason this is a pernicious behavior is because it feels like there is righteousness in being a witness, but in reality it’s no different than self-harm.

I think the first step is admitting that, even with any incidental value you get out of these services, it is an addiction and you are addicted. I don’t say this with negative connotation to your character. Digital media has made me realize how powerless addiction makes one feel, even if one is well adjusted otherwise. The reality is you binge, much like a binge drinker, and wake up a week later with the app hangover.

The same thing happens to me and I think the OP provides one good solution: stick to mobile UI in a browser. Generally, increase friction wherever you can. This only really works if you can stick to the worsened experience and not crack/redownload the app. One way to tackle that is to perhaps set a daily or weekly reminder to purge the apps you have a problem with (or all apps you don’t need) from your phone. Maybe you will redownload them again, but giving yourself that extra moment where you can go to the App Store will surely make you quit halfway once or twice, then consistently, before you fall for the trap.

I have an inadvertent example. I frequented a website on my phone for a while that relied heavily on a certain file format for videos. I switched phones and (by accident) got a new phone that doesn’t support the format and would require me to download external apps to watch it. That friction of needing a third party app, paired with a decision to only use mobile websites when possible, meant by browsing time on that site dropped precipitously and I’ve now almost entirely cut the bad habit.

Another habit is screen time. It is easy to go overboard and delete limits but you’re setting friction points where you need to think about what you’re doing.