herrcaptain @ herrcaptain @lemmy.ca

Posts

3

Comments

694

Joined

2 yr. ago

Well, while I was also mostly joking with that second comment, respect for calling me out on it. For the record, I do know that people have always been this stupid and that much of the US is ridiculously gerrymandered. If anything I was maybe projecting a bit as I suspect I got COVID a few years back and my short-term memory has been off ever since. It's been a point of concern for me as, I admit, it's made me feel more stupid.

I do think people are getting worse, but in reality I blame misinformation campaigns for that.

The one thing I will (politely) disagree with in your comment is your characterization of pot smokers being hard left or disengaged with politics. I think it's much more universal across the spectrum than you're suggesting. Now that it's legal in Canada it seems like everyone uses it to some degree. That's an exaggeration but I'm continually shocked by some of the people I know coming out of the woodwork as users, and many are not even close to hard left (and are engaged in following news and voting for the party I loathe).

Anyway, respect again for sharing your opinion and I'm truly sorry if I offended anyone with my earlier comment. I'll leave it up for the sake of posterity.

I know what you mean there as well. I was always very arachnophobic but over the last few years have mostly gotten over it by treating the spiders in my house as something like hands-off pets and giving them names. Jumping spiders are amazing little creatures but, yeah, the lifespan makes them a non-starter.

If you like sci-fi, check out the Children of Time series. It's about a race of uplifted jumping spiders. The author does a great job of building a concept of their society based on their current characteristics as a species.

Well, I've favorited you here on Lemmy and will make sure to keep in touch. I wasn't sure there was a DM feature, but looking in my app it appears there is, so I'll do that in the coming days to check in.

No glowing trees in my dreams, but a good sleep nonetheless so thanks for that!

You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.

I definitely recognize that video! I'm sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.

As to your comment itself - don't worry about being "too much" with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I'm used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I've also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.

It's late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @herrcaptain@geekdom.social ) or straight up shoot me an email ( herrcaptain@proton.me ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.

This is fucking precious.

As someone who adores rats, I absolutely hate how short their lives are. I'd love to keep some as pets but I couldn't emotionally handle having my heart broken every 2 to 3 years when one of them dies.

Oh, I know. I was being facetious in my earlier comment. For the record, I'm vastly in favor of legal weed and occasionally partake in it myself.

I'm truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.

I'm with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.

I mean, I'm so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth's population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world's difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.

I'm now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don't have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It's still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It's still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife's family to fall back on and have "temporarily" been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can't remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.

This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I'm getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don't want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that's the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.

We've all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.

With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I'm certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya'll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don't own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)

The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you'd never know it. They've gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It's a tale as old as time.

I like this but I can see them leaning into it and taking it as a badge of honor.

I see where you're coming from but that feels dangerously close to a certain other word I'd rather not use. I'm also not sure of the etemology of that word, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out it has something in common with the other one.

I've been trying my best for a while now, friend. I'm also trying to normalize treating having too much wealth as embarrassing. Like, it should fully be seen as a character flaw to have more money than anyone could ever use. I'm far from advocating for enforced equality, but there should be some limit to wealth upon which exceeding it is viewed as gross by the rest of us plebs. Those parasites certainly shouldn't be fawned over like so many people do now.

True. I literally think of that most days when I see older folks irrationally freak out at the smallest inconvenience. Not that this happens to most old folks, it's just really remarkable when you do witness it. It's really sad that they can't control it, just too bad about the ones who gained power and used it to fuck everyone else over.

Oh, I get it. I definitely didn't mean to imply that this doesn't fit here - just that the situation isn't quite as demoralizing as many posts in this community.

He did a good thing and was handsomely rewarded for it by others. The situation in question wasn't directly related to his financial plight. I'm sure I'm over-complicating it though. I'm just less bummed out by this story than I'm used to on this sub. Sooooo ... yay?

Why not both? Yeah, dams cause continued ecological damage and I don't think we should be building more of them, but let's leave them in place until they can be replaced with proper renewables.

But yeah, you're 100% correct that that shit should have been nationalized yesterday. Unfortunately all it takes is a conservative-majority (low-c conservative for an international audience) to re-privatize it and let their buddies buy it at a discount. That seems to be what's happening globally. I'm starting to think the best way forward for most things related to the common good are the formation of non-profits or worker's co-ops but that's a non-starter in something as large-scale as baseline power generation.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but could legal weed have been a bad thing? That brand of fuckery is getting increasingly popular here in Canada too.

Slightly more seriously, I wonder if Long COVID really is messing up people's brains to this extent. People who would have been on the fence about voting for someone like her before COVID were also the most likely to intentionally avoid protecting themselves from it. Are future historians going to look to that as the catalyst that collectively broke our brains?

Edit: to clarify my initial joking comment about legal weed, I'm super in favor of it and have been for a very very long time. The "brand of fuckery" I refer to as getting more popular in Canada is a reference to the Boebert/Trump-style populism that's been invading our country over the last decade and to which our almost definite next prime minister subscribes. I was merely joking that perhaps Coloradans are smoking too much, leading to decisions like re-electing Boebert, and perhaps that's also why we Canadians are making poor choices in this regard.

I don't care about the downvotes for my vague post - just want to set the record straight that I think weed is good, and putting people in jail for using it is bad.

I'm sure your question was rhetorical, but for those listening from the back: Decades of intentionally under-funding public education, for a start.

Okay, but how about we still go with the subcontractor, but ... Hear me out here ... We call it AI and the subcontractor actually works in India for pennies on the dollar? Pivot to that and you've got my investment.

• Every venture capitalist right now

Thanks! Their story is interesting in and of itself (in its problematic way suited to the era), but I do try to give it my own flair.

^ This person audio-engineers.

No judgement - just from reading your comment I definitely get this vibe. I get it though. Most wireless stuff is either going to be heavily EQed consumer trash or overpriced audiophile stuff with all the latest buzzwords. There just doesn't seem to be much of a market for reference-grade stuff in a wireless format.

Not that I could justify spending a bunch on good headphones though, so I've settled for a low-end pair that sound acceptable for what they are.

From what I remember from writing an undergrad history paper on these dudes, it was used for lots of things such as a treatment for chlamydia (or another STI - I don't remember exactly). These dudes were banging their way across America, especially the black slave they brought along as apparently the locals thought he had big magic.

I'm not condoning any of this sort of colonialism - just clarifying that these dudes probably single-handedly introduced some new STIs to whole populations, and they were dragging their leaky mercury-riddled dicks along in their boats.