Libra00

LOL, indeed. I grew up in Oklahoma so I recognize that twang. :P I worked for years to get rid of my southern accent.

I fucking love Emperor TTS, that shit was hilarious, I’m gonna have to check out the WoD stuff.

LOL, my best friend’s mom had a little Shih Tzu and one time when we were over there for dinner she had just bought him this HUGE red stuffed bull-thing that was like 4 times his size, but man it didn’t even slow him down, he just went for it right in the middle of the living room floor in front of everyone. Poor pupper kept falling off and having to roll over on him and shit. Friend’s mom was mortified, but the rest of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe there for a minute.

Huh, I had no idea. Totally works for the other video tho, cause that shit cracked me up.

Kin ah pet dat DAWG??!

I don’t appreciate that one oligarch is better at lying to us than another one, that kinda makes it worse in my mind. Instead of telling ourselves comforting stories about how generous these societal leeches are we should be telling ourselves stories about how much better everyone else’s lives could be if they didn’t exist.

There’s an estimate floating around that it would cost about $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US. Whether or not that’s an accurate estimate, there is an amount that could do it, and every day that billionaires wake up and choose not to do it they choose evil.

If your standard for ‘a good example’ is being a bit more creative with his tax-dodging PR stunts than other billionaires, that’s a pretty low bar. A better example to set would be to not exploit people to accumulate wealth in the first place. It takes a whole lot of people like you and me staying poor to make Bill Gates that rich.

but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.

Bill Gates has a net worth of ~$168 billion. Even if this isn’t just PR intended to launder his image, even if he does in fact give away 99% of that, it will still leave him with $1.68 billion dollars. Even if he ups that to 99.99% that’ll still leave him with $16.8 million, which is still rich by anyone’s measure. Bill Gates’ idea of ‘not dying rich’ is radically different than yours or mine; he was never not going to die rich.

Hmm, obvious troll is obvious. My apologies for assuming that you were merely confused rather than confused and malicious. I won’t make that mistake again.

Joining a book and 2 movie clubs was one of the best things I’ve done in recent years. The book club sadly fizzled cause people didn’t have time, but we have a bi-weekly movie club where we pick complex, difficult movies and talk about their themes and such, and a monthly kung-fu movie night where we just hang out and watch silly movies, and they’re the highlight of my online week.

You know any discord servers for readers of sci-fi? I’ve looked around a couple times and the ones I’ve found are either tiny and inactive or huge and have way too much going on.

Find a discord server with some folks you share interests with and talk to them. I joined a ~300-person gaming/tabletop community a couple years ago and while I don’t have any really close friends among them, they’re great to chat and hang out and play games with. I’ve taken to spending the last couple hours of most days just hanging out in voice with people and shooting the shit, it’s great.

(Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism)

I’m not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you.

People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended).

…what?

What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you’re making about me criticizing capitalism means I ‘blame [it] for everything’, this tirade you’ve launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation.

People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies.

Please allow me to reiterate: …what?

Capitalists didn’t build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this… vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism’s chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It’s the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they’re lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps.

That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics.

I’m going to go ahead an assume that ‘the problem’ has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to ‘ape (or any other animal’s) power dynamics’ than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want.

Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed

So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how:

LOL no.

Also, do you remember when I said this?

‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin

You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires?’

Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.

I meant backpedaling in the journalistic way of ‘Oh you seem to actually know more about what you’re talking about than I do and have a lot to say on the subject, I should, uh, redirect to a different topic where I can catch you out for that sick sound bite’ or whatever. Maybe that’s not what was going on in that interview, Iono, I haven’t seen it.

Funny how every time anyone talks about replacing capitalism everybody trots out the examples of innovation and competition as things we would lose. Meanwhile capitalists are over here doing their level best to sabotage innovation and buy or legislate their way out of competition so they can remain complacent in their dominant market position. ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin when they’re actively undermining the purported benefits of their wanton exploitation and delivering nothing but stagnation and enshittification.

I’m gonna guess a whole lot of flustered backpedaling amounting to not a lot of anything, but I’m willing to be surprised if someone wants to dig up the video.

I got caught stealing cigarettes.

I was like 16 I think and a delinquent to be sure, but not a very smart one. I was out of smokes and went to the grocery store to get more, grabbed a pack off the shelf, then realized the woman who usually kept an eye on the smokes wasn’t around so I started eyeing those cartons. I shoved 4 of those fucking things into my jacket, it was so obvious it was funny, and naturally they caught me on the way out and called the police.

I was also drunk at the time (listen, it was the 80s, it was a different time…) so I ended up having to take some bullshit 6 week class and go to AA meetings for 3 months which sucked, but by far the worst was when the police walked me up to the house and it was clear that they had already talked to mom cause man she was pissed. I don’t even remember what the punishment was, but instead of yelling at me or lecturing and guilt-tripping me she just sat there not even looking at or talking to me for like an hour, and that was the worst.

I think there is no evidence. Witness testimony is not it itself sufficient evidence to convict someone of a crime, why should it be enough to convince you that physics-defying aliens exist in the universe and somehow, for some reason, came all the way across the galaxy/universe/whatever to… what… fly around and make pretty patterns in the sky?

Do I believe there is other intelligent life in the universe? Yes, statistics alone suggests there should be.

Do I believe it’s making crop circles and buzzing F-18s for giggles? Almost certainly not.

Do I believe some guy saw absolute incontrovertible proof that aliens exist and somehow both failed to acquire any of it to present to the world and failed to be credible enough to be arrested or otherwise silenced by the people who care a whole lot about the leaking of classified info? Absolutely not, not under any circumstances.

If aliens exist and are here and you’ve seen them then the best advice I can give you is next time grab a fucking button off a control panel, a blood sample, a piece of metal we don’t know how to make, like literally anything, because we’ve been drowning in bullshit witness testimony on this subject for most of a century now. I don’t care how credible you are, If 99.99+% of people who talk about aliens are crazy/hoaxers/attention-seekers/etc, the odds are pretty good you’re not the <0.01% who is totally legit. So without some actual, physical evidence I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’re a crackpot regardless of your credentials.

Heh, I worked in IT for many years, I remember the days of obsessive wipes of Windows machines to restore ghosted drive images because users couldn’t keep from installing malware or other bullshit on their system. One guy I had to wipe it every day for a fucking week straight to get the message across, and only then because he came whining to me about resetting his machine again and I got fed up and gave him what-for.