Suicide rates increased in the U.S. to an 80-year high in 2022, with nearly 50,000 people committing suicide, according to federal data.
I agree he's too old, and I wish by now he would have mentored someone to stand behind to replace him.
It's not like we aren't already irreparably fucked, but losing having any rational voice in the Senate will feel like another blow to our corporate owned zombie of a nation.
That said, not like our single digit collection of leftist Congress people are able to do anything but spin wheels. The Neoliberals have more respect for their old guard Republican opposition than for people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
"Cancel D-Day or ve vill gas all ze Jews!"
Kind of an empty threat considering that's what you were actively doing anyway...
I imagine they would make excellent fertilizer.
Plays Circle of Life from Lion King
Because we the sucker peasants of the west have largely been propagandized by the owner class from birth into embodying this meme:
NEOliberals absolutely would. I'm not accusing the minority within the majority members like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez of such things.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775
Both parties literally put blinders on for places like Saudi Arabia because they're good customers for our military industrial complex.
If we can fight the owners to keep our shitty back breaking jobs and win, we should have fought the owners to rebuild our economy for automation profits to largely benefit the people from the bottom up.
If we the peasant masses even can win against the tiny owner class oligarchs, lets fight for the right thing. And if we can't win, well then it's all masturbation anyway and they'll do what they want.
It's irrational to fight for "we demand to continue to break our backs making your shit instead of robots so we can continue to subsist on menial laborer wages with broken backs!" in any event. That's some coal miner excuse for logic.
Externality: Noun - Capitalist term for "I already got your fucking money, so my mess is your problem you fucking sucker peasants 🖕🤑💰"
Automation isn't the enemy.
As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society's expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.
Arguing that we should "save" back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they're 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn't need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.
Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.
Please pick the former. There's no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.
"What an absolute disgrace! We must not allow this travesty to continue!
The Union of Concerned Scientists must be punished, in order to protect our beloved economy and the quarterly earnings of private shareholder portfolio staples like Tyson foods/TSN!"
-Neoliberals to fascists, probably
But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!
Thats why I choose to be a pessimist. It eliminates disappointment.
Expect the worst from humans and you'll usually end up being factually correct, you'll never be disappointed, and occasionally, if the moon and the stars align, you just might be pleasantly surprised about something at some point in your life, just don't count on it.
Optimism looks fucking exhausting when dealing with our gem of a species. Being let down most of the time and still putting on a smile for the next disappointment you won't expect 5 minutes later. Looks like masochism minus the sexual pleasure. Good luck with that optimists!
Woah there cowboy,
We're still closer to rival monkey tribes hurling our shit at one another as it exits our anuses than we are some benevolent civilization with noble pursuits like knowledge.
Don't worry, a few more pointless world wars and population decimations born out of glorified sociopathy, and our species might actually develop admirable priorities beyond tribal resource hoarding from the ashes.
When humans are no longer interested in keeping up with some Kardashian descendant, perhaps we will have stumbled into an age of reason. Seems like as good an indicator as any.
Human self-importance.
We think we're magic, despite the fact we aren't built for high g dogfights at all.
Kind of the same reason us being space colonizers is a pipe dream at this stage in our civilization. We can get a dozen highly trained peak human specimens to grow potatoes on Mars as a symbol, and I'm all for that, but not regular people. One mistake everybody dead, one cabin fever victim in the right position everybody dead. We literally can't even care for the almost infinitely forgiving habitat we evolved out of that's perfectly suited to our biology, and all that would require is stop actively, recklessly fucking it up.
The base game is prettier and more stable in my few playthrough hours with the update.
I miss mods, but this was a significant improvement to the base game imho, especially base visuals, and mods will come.
Honestly the last time I launched the game in an unmodded, un-community patched state, a couple years ago to be fair, it crashed every half hour or so for me from runtime errors, so this feels like a more stable bedrock on which to build.
Just one Bethesda fan's perspective.
At least one society is decent enough to take out their antisocial billionaire parasite trash...
Good thing we (the US) lost the war, or this lady would probably have her own team of lobbyists running their country.
The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference.
We hit one third of boomers being dead in the last few days.
George Carlin accurately diagnosing the core reason our species is failing in less than 2 minutes (interview)
YouTube Video
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This was in 1992. I like how George's example, that we only help one another after a flood, no longer even applies in the US, as you have people arguing some people from some places shouldn't be helped even after a natural disaster.
George Carlin - I Gave Up On My Species - George's GENUINE, eloquent perspective
YouTube Video
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George's comedy specials helped raise me from a young age when no one else was doing any raising. I consider him to be one of the greatest minds, social commentators, and philosophers of the 20th century, and I've yet to recognize a contemporary near his level. I'll always be grateful to have had the honor to see him twice before he died.
I see a lot of people enjoy his brilliant bits, but with the way the world is and where its going, imho in the name of enthusiastic greed, I personally find a lot of peace, and a lot less depression when I choose to aspire to George's genuine divorce and detachment from "caring about the outcome."
Enjoy the freakshow, folks!
Bonus: I've seen so many comments in his bit videos wishing for George's perspective on smartphones, well this was near his end (2008), smartphones were just arriving, and his opening words briefly address in passing what he thought about the latest tech obsession.
Suicide rates rose in 2022 overall but declined for teens and young adults
Berkshire Hathaway adviser Charlie Munger dies at 99
America's Freedom is a Lie
YouTube Video
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Optimistic Nihilism - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
YouTube Video
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In these trying times, remember that we all get to decide what matters to us. Don't let the selfish people in power destroying the world for profit and power dictate what should be important to you. Fools plan and the universe laughs.
What's your favorite hilariously dumb capitalist apologist deflection?
Being a pessimist is better than being an optimist or a "realist." Time almost always proves you correct, and very occasionally, you're pleasantly surprised!
It feels like being an optimist in this world must be absolutely soul crushing.
Greed has proven to be a more effectively harmful force against humanity than hatred. We should have greed crimes in addition to hate crimes.
Hatred often makes you want to hurt people, but people hurt peope in the name of greed more often, and not only with less potential for guilt, but is often the cause of delusional accolades and reassurance both from within oneself and from others.
Hypothetical:
A CEO lays off 10,000 employees that helped that company succeed, solely to increase earnings and not because the company is hurting, not only seriously hurting 9,997 people, but causing 3 to commit suicide.
A bumpkin gets in a fight with someone he hates the melanin of because he's a moron and kills them.
Who did more damage to humanity that day? They're both, I want to say evil but evil is subjective, they're both highly antisocial, knowingly harmful behaviors, yet one correctly sends you to prison for a long time if not forever, while the other, far more premeditated and quite literally calculated act, is literally rewarded and partied about. Jim Kramer gives you a shout out on tv, good fucking times amirite!
Edit:
Google is charging its employees $99 a night to stay at its on-campus hotel to help "transition to the hybrid workplace."
Google is charging its employees $99 a night to stay at its on-campus hotel to help "transition to the hybrid workplace."
If "No one owes you anything," then you also owe nothing to a society that works against you, including allegiance, civility, or pacifism.
A society in which it's everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn't run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with "well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha."