Nah, I wrote that and this sober dude, just as I spend the vast majority of my waking time.

The point is that these very real problems have no solutions but somehow the only thing we can do in these threads is handwring and concern troll people coping with them.

There is lots of online encouragement to live a long, sober life in an unaffordable, polluted hellscape.

I’m not attached to a bottle, but having a beer at the end of a long day provides a lot more relief than podcast bro pseudoscientific bullshit about meditation and wellness which is the only alternative on offer. (Because we live in a country where everything is purposely broken and the only way sold to fix it is for each of us individually to be perfect.)

We have locked everything anyone needs to live a decent life behind a massive paywall, make a habit of eliminating any way besides debt to make it over the massive paywall, and then scientists do research on people’s coping mechanisms so that others can use that as a way to feel righteous condemning a stranger’s habits.

Notice how you didn’t spend a moment discussing where relief for any of the very real problems I mentioned is coming from because you likely know it isn’t.

Yep, it sucks. But it turns out there’s a non-stop drip of terrible fucking news, the planet continues to get hotter with more wildfires every year, my well-paying career in software might be soon over due to the advent of AI coding, I’m working for the worst company I have ever worked for and with one of the worst bosses I’ve ever seen, the president is getting shows critical of him cancelled in order to approve sales of all major media platforms to his fascist friends (and fail sons), the cost of everything is skyrocketing, social security looks likely to collapse before I can ever collect it, and there does not appear to be any relief in sight for any of this.

Maybe I don’t need to go old and healthy at 80+.

It’s obvious that drinking isn’t good for you, but it was just as obvious that smoking isn’t good for you and that didn’t keep my grandparents from doing it until it killed them — and nicotine barely gives you any buzz at all. We all gotta go some time.

Jesus fucking Christ is Vonnegut’s Player Piano actually becoming a thing?

it’s not just the retail investors holding the bag. It’s anyone with a retirement fund.

I was thinking retail investors — whether individually or through an index fund — covered both. If you have any control over your retirement funds though, you can use that control to get out of the stock market if you want. So it isn’t anyone with a retirement fund, just nearly anyone with a retirement fund.

He didn’t make it into the s&p 500. NASDAQ bent over and opened wide though.

CEO says a thing journalism!

What is Trump hiding?

The Office (US) pretty much killed laugh tracks in US sitcoms.

Karl Pilkington was the funniest one out of them in my opinion. Derek went down in flames when he left the show.

Finally, after those investors decide it’s been a good run, they cash out and the bubble truly starts bursting.

This time they wasted so much money that they’re trying to foist the bad investments on retail investors with overblown valuations and IPOs before cashing out.

I’ve never gotten a job for which I sent a thank you letter. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I think it may come across as desperate.

Almost but not quite. If he would’ve stayed here and faced the music then it’s an unqualified yes, but his fleeing to Russia and hiding out there makes it no cigar to me.

I understand that he still was brave and gave up a lot to expose the information, but I think it may have had more impact, and would’ve been more heroic had he stayed here.

I could almost see an alternative history where he surrendered and then a whole political movement was born with him as the focal point.

Edit: Downvote all you like but my opinion remains the same.

I think in five years — if the tools manage to stick around — finding coders that can work without AI assistance will be like finding skilled assembler developers.

EDIT: Yep I’m definitely a bot because I typed an em dash. You can be a bot too on Ubuntu by hitting control+shift+u and then typing 2014 (the last year of semi-sanity in US politics).

To put it in terms of your analogy, it’s one thing to use Mengele’s research after he’s been stopped. It’s another entirely to give his research funding when he’s actively running the program.

One is making use of knowledge that comes out of terrible things, the other is complicity that borders on collaboration.