I can only imagine 50 years from now, when climate crisis is in full swing, there are no more salaried jobs for people without extreme, cutting edge technological specializations or PhDs, and people are doing shit like menial servant work or acting as delivery drivers for 16 hours a day for the ultra wealthy just not to starve, you’ll have some 70 year old zoomer politician that introduces a bill to legalize prostitution in order to open up “new sources of income for struggling Americans” while quietly including a clause that effectively creates death camps for the poor. Conservative Americans will praise the bill on the basis that it’ll get rid of “welfare queens” and create more economic opportunities for the people who don’t get turned into Soylent Green.
50 years after that, America is littered with the hollowed out ghost towns of long abandoned suburbia. The coasts have been destroyed by flooding from the melted ice caps. Automated workers outnumber Americans 10 to 1. There are around 30 million Americans left in the continental United States. Almost all of them are literal slaves after slavery was re-legalized. Almost everything is owned by a handful of incredibly powerful families. Virtually everyone lives in or around Chicago. Whatever hope people once had for a better future is a long distant dream of a bygone era as the world slowly dies and the people who are left simply persist without ever truly living.
There were more natives in the Americas and Caribbean when the European settlers arrived, too. Only one side had way more advanced military technology and no scruples around genocide and slavery.
If Tesla has given up on fully self driving cars, wherein driving is a much simpler mechanical activity to replicating the full breadth of human construction tasks, then I don’t see how people are expecting tradecraft to get replaced by Mr. Fixitron anytime soon.
It’s a lot of fun. I remember taping it on VHS back when it was still airing on t.v. I would pause the VCR when commercials started so that it recorded episodes mostly unbroken.
I always find it funny: the internet is a lot softer and more inclusive than it ever used to be. Explicit sexism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, etc. are treated with zero tolerance most places. But straight up ageism? That’s the last truly accepted form of bigotry. Because getting pissed at a group of people who will be dead soon for not fixing all the world’s problems is easy when you’re young. When Gen Z gets to be 40 and there are no more Boomers but nothing is still being done to address the world’s myriad problems, I like to think there will be some self-reflection on the nature of the world in which they live and the innate difficulty of addressing complex problems driven by societal inertia. But we both know there won’t be and they’ll probably pivot to hating Gen X and Millennials. Or maybe they’ll go the other direction and blame young people.
I understand it’s fun to blame boomers for climate change, but this was something that started before their generation existed and it will continue to be a problem after they’re gone. You can also blame them for inaction in addressing it, but given that the only real solution is an extreme degree of collective austerity across multiple civilizations, which is something innately at conflict with the expansionist nature of capitalism as an economic system (something which also predated boomers and which will continue to be a problem after they’re gone), then I would say that if you expect the problem to start being solved as soon as that generation is dead and buried, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Right, but there’s no more harm that could come to you after you’re dead, so being an organ donor wouldn’t really qualify in this context. Your organs being donated after death diminishes you in no way and also potentially enriches the lives of others.
This situation kinda reminds me of John Locke talking about slavery. He says that for some rights to be truly inalienable, that people themselves should not have the ability to willingly surrender them, such as by willingly selling themselves into slavery. Now, yes, John Locke owned stock in a slave trading company, so he’s a hypocrite in that regard, but I digress. I feel like this is one of those things where people shouldn’t be allowed to physically sell parts of their body for consumption, as “not being eaten by other people” is one of those inalienable rights we should have as a society.
IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It’s shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don’t really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.
One thing genuinely confusing is having people reply to a comment I made from a federated instance, and when I try to reply to their comment, I get taken to the reply in the context of the lemmy instance they commented in, not the one I commented in. For example, if I’m on Beehaw and someone from lemmy.ca replies to my comment, and I want to respond to them, what I’ll typically do is click on the button below the comment that shows the context of the conversation, because I comment a lot and don’t always know what comment I made that someone is replying to. When I do that, it takes me to lemmy.ca, which I can’t reply from, because I’m not on lemmy.ca. This is confusing, because this routine thing pulls you into other parts of the fediverse that your reply might exist in, and which other people can see, but you can’t comment on that instance because you don’t have an account there. But if you go back to your own instance and find your comment through your profile, you can navigate to a reply someone from another instance made and reply to them as long as you’re still on your instance. This is both cumbersome and, to a new user, terribly disorienting.
No, not stupid. Insane. The definition of insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again and expecting shit to change. That is crazy.