This is what the capitalist’s reverse mortgage scams they advertise 24/7 on Fox News are for.
And what a quintessentially stereotypical boomer thing to do too, basically leaving their paid off home to a bank for a pittance instead of their kid because fuck everything and everyone once they’re dead.
“Burn my trees upon death so no one can sit under them, and salt the Earth so no others can grow. Everything was mine and it’s no fair I can’t take it with me to supply side heaven.”
The global economy is the reason I can’t take civilization seriously, or even be on its side.
All I can do is appreciate the morbid gallows humor of it.
Billions of people self-flagellating on the false promises of a few thousand capitalist sociopath families. We were conquered by the modern contemporaries of the traveling snake oil salesmen of old. They’ve got most of the peasants so fucking snowed they don’t even have to run away to the next county after they poison you anymore 🤣
As humanity has found yet another way to pass the buck, it’ll be interesting to see the diminishing returns of LLMs as they begin to feed more and more on derivative content made by LLMs.
I made a deal with myself a long time ago, my primary value:
I’d rather know than be happy.
Reality is cold and bleak. We have so many social constructs meant to obfuscate that fact. I wouldn’t change my values, but they aren’t a path to a shiny, happy life, and blissful ignorance values are among the biggest reasons our civilization’s outlook is so bleak.
A CEO has no desire to see how those they laid off are doing months later, or the children they hurt polluting a water source, or their own current employee’s subsistence living conditions despite the revenue they generate. They should have to see the pain they’ve caused to line their pockets, as should shareholders who applied pressure in willful ignorance for maximum profit(bliss), but ignorance is bliss.
Which is why, though alluring, the bliss of willful ignorance is a dangerous and antisocial value to live by.
I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn’t exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I’m not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I’m talking about self proclaimed “developed” nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life’s purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn’t have it any other way.
You make a hardware store with knowledgable, helpful, well paid staff, ethically sourced quality products, and sell hammers for $20 because that’s what your buying power at your scale allows you to turn a reasonable, sustainable profit on.
Walmart pays overseas slavers to make 10,000 hammers at $1 each and they sell them at the new Walmart that just moved in for $7. Customers need to find it themselves because the employees correctly don’t give a shit as they’re paid shit.
Sadly, us peasants have proven, given the opportunity and out of necessity, we will support Walmart and their $7 slave labor made, slave labor sold shit hammer, before supporting a local business with ethical business practices selling a $20 hammer, even at higher quality.
Oh and after Walmart has put main street out of business with $7 hammers, they’ll raise that price to $18 and pocket the difference, as was the plan.
Integrity costs more to deliver than exploitation, and the less you have the less you can afford to support integrity in business. That’s why most of America’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, that degradation started far before Amazon and internet shopping started doing to Walmart what Walmart did to honorable entrepreneurs.
Americans sure do love a “great deal.” over time though, those great deals cost us all more than we could imagine. We never considered the inevitable outcome of those great deals we got by dealing with amoral, exploitative businesses. We were so short sighted that we just assumed that those amoral businesses willing to hurt anyone from employees to suppliers still had the customer’s best interests at heart. We thought we were in on the hustle with those $7 hammers, when we were just another mark.
I think you could drastically minimize any impact by doing the time travel in space and merely observing from high orbit, assuming your time machine has no form of exhaust, which if you have a time machine seems like a relatively small engineering challenge by comparison.
You might displace a few atoms in the void, but it’s the safest way one could go about it.