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Cake day: October 30th, 2023

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  • As a psychiatric nurse, during my work day I watch my screen for about 1 out of 8 hours. When I come home I like to spend some time behind the screen. I sometimes wonder if it is necessary that so many people work behind screens. Shouldn’t we get more people to work as nurses, teachers but also craftsman, handyman, etc. This may sound as a naive and romantic thought, and I’m sure a lot of the work behind screens is extremely useful and efficient. But still I wonder if we haven’t somehow lost focus of what’s important. Like we’ve started to think that we can solve everything behind the computer, while simultaneously things are falling apart, people are lonely and people in need don’t get help.





  • If you have a lot of money

    • you contributed a lot to society
    • you took a lot from society

    If you’re a successful businessman and you want to contribute, perhaps you could lower the prices of your products, perhaps you could give shares to your employees who do all the work. Not only is it efficient for them to have a stake in the company, it’s also only fair. Not doing so is unfair. We won’t celebrate your ‘success’, a successful thief is a thief nonetheless. You doing so-called ‘philanthropy’ won’t do any good either. Money is power, you exerting your power over us isn’t the moral thing to do. It’s still wrong to the core. Sure, people voluntarily giving money to all sorts of causes is a beautiful thing, but only if money is reasonably distributed among people in the first place. If you take money from society on a large scale and then exert this power, than undoubtedly your views and interests are disproportionately represented. Your intentions are dubious, because if you intended well, why did you keep all the money and power for yourself in the first place? It’s likely that you’re a power hungry maniac. But even if you’re somehow naively unaware of this and truly have the noblest of intentions with your philanthropy, then it’s still a ludicrous idea that this would be an efficient way to distribute money. It’s quite obvious that if everyone got a say in where the money goes, that the distribution of assets would better represent what society deems important. It’s only logical that if you get to distribute the money, it will go to things you deem important. If you think that makes sense, it can only mean that you deem yourself wiser, more moral, than all of humanity combined. It means you are a narcissist. It’s not unlikely that you are, people who are successful money-wise, often think that life it a money-game and they’re the winning players. And they have won because they work hard and are clever. The thing is, life isn’t a money-game, people have moral compasses and strive towards others goals than making money. And even if it was a money-game, you’ve not won because you’re so smart and hard-working, it is in a very large part due to your luck. That’s not an allegation, it’s a logical fact. People don’t have the same starting positions. Being a billionaire is morally wrong, even if you give all of it away later in life.













  • But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

    The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

    So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.


  • Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

    (not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)