Don’t forget that he was elected as a convicted felon, and those felonies were largely committed in the process of cheating in the 2016 election.

This is yet another page, or maybe a new chapter at most, in the same old story.

I’m a medicated ADHDer and I treat coffee like just yet another medication.

I was never a coffee drinker (or medicated in general) until my 40s. But now I literally prepare myself a cup of coffee in the morning and at lunch time, the same times I take my adderall. The combination is working great, even if it doesn’t fix everything.

I agree with you, and I think weed really helped me even though I’m not using any right now.

Sometimes it’s extremely beneficial to be chemically pushed into a good mood and satisfied with just existing, when otherwise existence just seems to be misery and pain.

But it is not a permanent fix. It’s a band-aid while you find more permanent ways to improve your life. But band-aids can hurt to take off when you’re done with them.

And because of that, unfortnately, a lot of regular people also think the entire point of technology and wealth is to never have to do anything substantive.

This is what came to mind for me too.

It is so much fun to play co-op with my kid. Then I can act old and describe all the gaming industry references that only I get.

I’ve also been to Sweden two whole times, so I get to act all sophisticated and worldly while describing the real world Goatenburg.

Yeah. It would be sweet to live in a world that doesn’t keep proving the cynics and doomsayers correct.

That’s kind of an accurate way to describe a lot of society these days though, from doomscrolling to phone addiction to social media disinformation to surveillance and tracking and advertising.

One of the beautiful things about being able to run Linux at work and use Teams in a browser is that my status is decoupled from what I’m doing on my machine. Obviously if I’m in a meeting or chatting with somebody through Teams my status will reflect that.

I bet my most productive days have me away/idle for hours on end, lol.

I’m right there with you, but the OP mentions social media, and that’s all that shit is.

Our society has allowed the way many people keep in touch with one another to be via psychologically manipulative, attention harvesting, advertising machines.

I did already get myself some Surface Shield which is exactly that kind of lanolin based protectant, after also reading about some of the more hardcore stuff like POR-15 that I’d worry could trap water or hide damage.

I’ve used it a bit on my car near where I have some wheels removed to work on the brakes, and tried it on some garden tools.

Impressions are very good and I totally plan to cover the underside of my car with this stuff when finishing up work on it. Just not the exhaust I imagine.

DONE, lol.

I kinda want to get something with a manual transmission again, so it will very likely be a japanese brand.

I’m in the US where this is coming soon enough. My car is a 2012 which seems like kind of a sweet spot, but it’s not going to last forever especially with our winters and road salt and pot holes.

I didn’t plan to buy a new car any time soon but have been thinking about my eventual next choice. All this BS has me wondering whether it’s better to get something soon without the next level of surveillance, or wait a few years and see how bad it is in practice and how it can be disabled.

That 2012 I mentioned is fun to drive, has low mileage for its age, and is fuel efficient, plus I have renewed my love of working on my own vehicles after not doing so for a decade or two. I’m currently doing work on the brakes. Maybe I’ll just have to try to make it live forever, and not give any more money to the whole damn industry as long as possible. That’s the most economically and environmentally friendly option, after all.

I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.

What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?

The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.

I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.

Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren’t involved.

You love to see it.

Unfortunately, with the state of this country I could also see aggressive militarized private security getting more popular around this shit.

I wonder if there’s any chance of all the tech speculation helping to fund electrical grid upgrades (including grid scale storage for renewables) that actually benefit regular human society after the bubble pops.

Absolutely. I think many people would actually be surprised at how big regular old goldfish can get in a pond with adequate space, food, and water quality.

On top of being in the carp family, they can actually produce hybrid offspring with carp (koi), though I think those offspring are sterile.

Source: have koi pond. Have given away dozens of chonky goldfish to other pond people.

Yeah! I was already concerned that people’s eyes would glaze over and they’d skim the latter 3/4 of my message and miss some important connected dots.

Now we’ve all been trained to detect and reject AI slop for a couple years, so the whole “here’s the whole situation described in a single message” strategy is right out the window.

I even like using em dashes sometimes. :/

At least I don’t use emojis in place of bullet points. The more you know. ✨

The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.