Just passing through.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Be careful about the things one does in response to being insecure. Some people react to the prospect of rejection by giving people a reason to reject them, so that the blow will be softer. That’s obviously not a great idea.

    It’s alright to not be super talkative all the time. Reading up on social norms is probably a good idea if your have autism and find them challenging.

    Think about first impression. Keep a good personal hygiene, try to wear clothes that make some sense, try to keep a good posture while not being too “stiff” - let your arms swing while walking and all that. There’s a bunch of these tiny things we do that change our perception of each other, and it can be good to be aware.

    Keep in mind that you’re probably not dealing with a unitary group of people. You’re probably not the only person who doesn’t have friends yet. And some people will always not like you no matter what - if you have too many friends or are too charismatic, some people will dislike you for that as well. It doesn’t matter that some people don’t like you, what matters is to find some people one can get along with. Chances are there are people out there with a lot in common with you.


  • It’s not really that different from what has already happened - we need fewer workers in the economy due to technological advancements, and jobs that were common 50 or 100 years ago don’t exist any more or are much more rare.

    It’s a problem of distribution. Capitalists used to depend on buying capital, which gave workers some share of their money by default. In countries where capitalism worked better, the proletariat successfully organized, giving workers a position of power vis-a-vis the capitalists and improved their conditions. Hell, in some countries the situation even got bearable for a little while, helped along by the exploitation of foreign work forces.

    As the capitalists replace more and more workers by machines, money stops flowing, and the position of the proletariat is relatively weakened.

    In theory, it’s not a difficult problem at all. In democracies, the proletariat can simply vote to tax the rich, making money flow downwards and ensuring their rights and welfare in the same way as when they had to sell their labour.

    One could also go full on communist, remove private incentives in form of capital gains, and collectivise the means of production. This would require massive political organisation and a lot of goodwill from humans put in power, for which mankind has a terrible track record.

    Taxing the means of production and the capitalists, however, is not particularly difficult. It’s been done with great success on many occasions.

    The problem is that the capitalists have a lot of influence, and they’re not interested in letting go of their money bag. Disproving the point that they got wealthy by having any form of heightened intelligence, they’re too dumb to realize that if they leave behind nothing but a destroyed hellscape for the rest of humanity, their lives aren’t going to be very pleasant either. Humans tend to be happier in more egalitarian societies, yet the capitalists are hell bent on gathering more for themselves, buying media channels and politicians in the pursuit of effectively just making everyone else poorer relative to themselves.

    So we’re fucked, not because of the distributive effect of technological advancements per se, but because we’re collectively incapable of successfully organising for continued wealth distribution. And all the technologies used to replace workers comes at a high environmental cost, making our time horizon to find solutions increasingly limited.






  • There’s a bunch of really badass people doing interesting things and discovering new things well into their 70s. The grandfather of a friend of mine picked up orientation running in his 80s - he’s now the national champion of his age group.

    I think more than age, what one has to overcome is the reluctancy to try new things. I think this is natural to humans at any age; the difference is that when we’re young we’re forced to try new things as few things are now new. The more experienced we get the easier it is to fall into old habits, and he who’s not busy being born is busy dying, as Dylan said.


  • I like the choose your own adventure element. If you want strong content moderation you can go to Beehaw; if you want something more catch all, Lemmy.world is good; if you’re a Stalinist, you have at least three solid options.

    The instances talk to each other, but many fulfill slightly different functions.

    At Reddit, it seems the stupidest posts often get thousands of upvotes. Here, they’re lucky if they get 50. So that makes me feel less crazy, I guess.