Kirk

I hope you ate this with your hands!

I've been impressed with F-Droid's press releases. If they have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping this, they are certainly giving it a clear and concise effort.

At the risk of sounding like a conservative, most people do find meaning in doing work and would not be content to lay around eating and watching TikTok forever. Just because someone does not find meaning in laboring to make their bosses wealthy does not mean they don't find meaning in the work itself.

For example I think a lot of "low level" jobs would be quite enjoyable and rewarding if we weren't forced to do them in order to survive. I'm thinking things like carpentry, running a small grocery store or even waiting tables.

So to answer your question, yes, the Earth can provide far more than every person needs to live a fulfilling life because all we need is food, shelter, community and freedom to find how we can best contribute. Those things are not expensive or resource intensive. But they are kept from us and replaced with plastic things we don't need in order to further enrich a small few.

Climate change is actually a great example of what I was getting at, because it has a relatively simple and known solution, and humanity has possessed the technology to implement that solution it for essentially as long as we have known about climate change itself.

To put it in context of this conversation: climate change has only increased the "complexity of our times" for working class people, because the people with power and money chose this path. They could have been building windmills, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to power our electric cars, but there was less profit in that.

The mental stress of "ethical consumption" doesn't exist in a world of ethical production.

Siri is bad but at least it has natural language processing. I think it's so funny how CEOs have no idea how LLMs work.

Over a year ago Apple literally ran an ad showing off an "Apple Intelligence" feature that you could tell nobody at Apple ran by the actual engineers before deciding it was possible. It (of course) has still not been released.

Sadly, I don't think it will soon even matter if the leader is unpopular.

My conspiracy theory is that the Epstein stuff staying on the front pages of social media for long (despite tech CEOs all being strongly MAGA) was an attempt by the Peter Theil / Russel Vought faction to move on from Trump. Which if you think about it is even scarier if they feel they don't need him any more.

I don't blame them for feeling either, honestly. But I do blame them for what they do about it.

I agree with all you said, but I also think that "complexity of our times" is whitewashing what I would describe as an "intentionally stressful situation forced upon working class people by the wealthy".

I believe that humanity has the technology and resources to make our times feel quite simple!

The disappointing answer is that those performing the insurrection on Jan 6th, as well as those that would stand to gain, are more concerned with being in power rather than respecting justice and the rule of law.

Yes you nailed it. Kamala recently expressed sadness at the level of capitulation, saying she didn't expect it. A lot of us had a rude awakening in the days after J6 when we realized that lot of our fellow citizens did not take the lessons on democracy taught to us since grade school to heart.

He kind of was in a way. The 2016 primary featured a dozen Bush wannabes, and Trump just went on stage and embarrassed them all by pointing out all the things they did horribly wrong (war, healthcare, etc), he correctly identified what made Republicans unelectable nationally. People related to that anger.

Honestly the racism I (sadly) understand. But to see the support for him not only continue but increase after violently trying to overthrow the government was truly a shock. For a brief moment it looked like he lost the support of Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham among other "traditional" Republicans but within days it was back to business as usual.