my dad always taught me not to let the workings of the world affect my personal mood
even if the world is going to shit, you can carve out a little slice of life for yourself and the people you love. take care of those people, take care of what you own, do the things you’re passionate about and let God worry about the rest
and I say that as an atheist. it’s a metaphor
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I don’t think it’s taking shelter as much as trying to find an answer to something that has no answer.
For example Eistein I don’t think was trying to take shelter from reality. He wanted to look at reality as deeply as possible and he managed to peek through and see more than almost anyone ever had before.
But he still believed in a God. This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.
In a practical sense, I’m an atheist. I don’t think Jesus turned water into wine or the Buddha achieved enlightenment and entered a higher plane of existence or whatever.
But I acknowledge there might be supernatural or supranatural items / phenomenon/ or even beings that we can’t ever fully understand.
Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.
Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.
Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks
“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”
What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around
What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?
No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.
All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.
yeah kava doesn’t really taste good but i think it’s much a cleaner buzz than alcohol. both work on the GABA receptors. i wanna try GHB one day because apparently it’s also like alcohol but cleaner - but I have no idea where I’d go about getting it and I wouldn’t wanna go searching for it
In an ideal world we would be able to control climate change. The problem is that we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world defined by economics and war. Energy is the heart of everything- without energy you don’t have a modern economy.
Look what happened in Germany right after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Germany was getting most of its natural gas from Russia through pipelines. During the course of the war, those natural gas imports fell of a cliff for various reasons. What did Germany do to compensate? They burned coal. Coal outputs much higher carbon emissions than natural gas. Not only in the burning itself, but in the mining process required to get the coal.
So what was the response of the German society under pressure? Put out more carbon emissions. Just a glance at the global geopolitical situation would tell you that crisis isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I think this is fundamentally the issue. As long as we live in a world with crisis, governments will never let go of quick cheap and reliable energy. When the economy is in trouble, there aren’t going to be any politicians advocating for things that could potentially cost the economy. And to get rid of our carbon emissions - we need to feel some pain.
In order to meaningfully prevent climate change, we would need to do something yesterday. Instead, we probably won’t be doing anything for the next couple of decades.
Of course, I must end this with a caveat that my comment was made to be a little controversial. I don’t believe all attempts to reduce carbon emissions are a bad idea. To the contrary, I believe we should absolutely enact these changes. I’m just expressing a sort of cynical sentiment that since we can’t really stop it, we might as well start spending money on dealing with it
for example, like the army corp of engineers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a giant sea wall in Miami. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/miami-fl-seawall-hurricanes.html
but other things to, like building new cities with modern urban planning in order to handle the massive wave of refugees in the future
Dostoevsky. Kava. My girlfriend refuses to watch Yu Yu Hakusho with me
I don’t know about “evil” because I don’t really subscribe to the Christian good vs evil. Yeah there are people out there who do terrible awful things, but generally speaking the most “evil” things come as a consequence of our amoral decisions.
We decided in the US that cars should be the primary method of transportation back in the 50s in order to stimulate the growing car manufacturing industry. That decision now results in nearly 50,000 people a year dying in car accidents.
We are not much different from the Mayans sacrificing victims in order to bring rain. We do the same thing, but for a different ideological purpose.
This is, in my opinion, much more dangerous and harmful than “evil”. Sadists come and go but institutions and ideology remains.
Having said all that, I’ve been robbed & beaten. I’ve been through heroin addiction. I grew up as an illegal immigrant.
All of those ultimately shaped who I am today, but there were definitely difficult moments. Life is complex though and I think “evil” had nothing to do with the most traumatic and painful events in my life.
i think a lot of it depended on your cd burner. i’ve had differing amounts of success with different burners.
still though, the price was not 3-5x higher if i remember correctly
there’s all sorts of options there too if you have an old car
for example there are those CD -> aux or CD -> bluetooth convertors so you can play music off your phone
but i guess if you do have an old car sometimes it can be nostalgic to put in some CDs. i remember having a belt of CDs on my sun visor. so i get it
CD-RW is superior. It’s more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions… it’s very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.
The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.
Although I don’t understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.
He stated that the idea that China denies it is false. They have successfully integrated the event into their national narrative. Party members openly speak about Tianenem Square and use it as a lesson for how to better govern going forward
Was it a brutal crackdown on protests? Somewhat, yes. But soldiers also defected and sided with the protesters, and the protestors also killed some soldiers.
It’s a complicated event and an important part of modern Chinese history. Yet most people only learn a tiny part of it and assume the rest.
The book series “three body problem” by a Chinese author started the process of opening by mind about this stuff. In this book, he openly criticizes the cultural revolution and anti-intellectualism in the Chinese government during that time period.
I thought all forms of dissent were banned. But it turns out the party today doesn’t see itself as the same as before. So while you can’t criticize the current one, the one from 30 years ago is fair game.
There’s a lot to say here about the US perception of China versus China in actuality. Propagqnda is powerful and fills in the cracks for what people don’t know and seems unusual to them.
What sort of things do you use BTT for? I use it too on my MacBook with Apple silicon. Although I view it as a consolation prize. Most everything I use it for I can do with a bash script + hotkey in Linux on my desktop.
Then again, maybe I’m just not creative enough. I understand BTT has a wide range of options to allow for complex shortcuts. But practically speaking, I don’t know if I can use 95% of those options.
Well, you should get roughly 7~8 hours of sleep so you go to bed around 11pm. Thankfully I don’t have any issues falling asleep.
If you slept in a lot and have a few extra hours in the bank, you could push that 11pm to like 1am or so. Just try to return to a normal sleep schedule ASAP.
I wake up at the same time every day. I usually go to bed around 11pm and wake up at 6am. Even if I go to bed a little later, like 1am or go to bed sooner like 10pm… I still wake up at exactly 6am. Once you do it long enough, your body just wakes up naturally. I always wake up a couple minutes before the alarm.
People really shouldn’t sleep in excessively on the weekend. If you have a healthy sleep schedule Mon-Fri and then go to bed at 5am Friday and Saturday night… you’re essentially undoing all the healthy sleep habit you build during the work week. Sleeping in a little is OK… so instead of 6am wake up 7:30am or something.
If the problem is you can’t fall asleep, there are the common tips. No screentime an hour before. Try reading a book in bed, that always puts me to sleep within 30 minutes. It’s easier to sleep if you’re eating healthy and exercising. Increase your A/C so that it’s around 70 degrees F and get under the blanket. And if you just desperately need to sleep because tomorrow’s an important day then I don’t see a harm in taking a benadryl. Just can’t make a habit out of it.
I’ve just been here since the API change. I’ve been more or less happy with it. Some things are dissapointing, like there being just as much of a hive-mind mentality as reddit. But I guess that’s probably just inherent to online vote-based communities.
I also wish there were an easier way to find new communities - and good ones. I don’t want to browse shitty memes. I want stuff where people are participating in good faith genuine discussion about meaningful topics.
I’ve found some of that here so far.
At the end of the day though, this is open source and decentralized. It’s everything a social media should be. To me, anything less than that is a waste of time. There is zero reason to spend your personal time creating content for a company to profit off of.
I thought these were popular for pulling out the little stick to pack a joint with. Never seen anyone open a beer with them.
I’ve seen people open beers in a lot of different ways though. I had an alcoholic friend in my early 20s who could do it with anything. Even his teeth. He chipped his tooth once and stopped doing it with his teeth though, lol.
I feel like swimming lessons are a bit of a scam anyways. Me and my brother grew up poor. We both can swim perfectly fine. We went to lakes / public pools often while growing up.
Never took any swimming lessons. My parents never did swimming lessons and neither did their parents. Just throw the kid in and let him figure it out while he’s still young. It’s an instinct sort of like dogs.
I’ve been at the bottom doing manual labor all the way to the top and everything in between. When I was in manual labor at 19, I thought that it was stressful. Truly. I thought I was swamped with work and was always running around with my head off like a chicken.
But now that I’m older I realize the job was dead simple. I know that because I have more experience with both life and work. If I were put in that same position today, it would feel like a vacation.
Imagine a waitress. Their job can be stressful, sure. But imagine they really fuck up and fall and break a few wine bottles. What’s the potential damages? $100? $200? Let’s say $1,000.
A CEO of even a small company can fuck up and lose millions. The problems are on a whole different scale. You will see as you move up. People think it’s easy to be the boss because they only see from the outside. There’s a price you pay in sanity.
Ya and if we all lived in the forest the world wouldn’t be heating up. If we all gave our money to charity there wouldn’t be any homeless. If we all didn’t go to work the capitalist system would collapse.
But you know as well as I do that it isn’t going to happen. Like I said, this individualistic approach to “changing things” is used as a deliberate distraction.
It’s meant to take advantage of people’s sense of responsibility. Nothing will ever change. If people stopped using Amazon then Walmart would step in to fill the void. It’s a Medusa’s head. The only way to ensure worker’s rights is to write it into the law. Anything else is moral grandstanding. Which I think is even more distasteful when done to working class people.
i grew up an illegal immigrant in the US. we were poor and struggled but ultimately I had a good upbringing and I have a good life now.
the world is uncaring and unjust. you have to stick up for yourself and build something for you and the ones you love. nobody else will do it for you.
unless you are a silver spoon trust fund baby of course (which isn’t exclusive to any race or gender… although being straight & white definitely increases the chances). most of us don’t get that privilege