People that work at microsoft could stop this. With means gentler than “Crack open the CEO’s skull with a hammer”, too.

I don’t use Spotify. It feels kind of soulless.

Bandcamp was the best, I think. They’re still around, but their future is uncertain after being bought and sold. They have human written posts about like “the best doom in Texas” or “what’s new in punk”.

Whenever I talk to people that say they like music, and I suggest they buy albums instead of renting them from Spotify, they look at me like I’m crazy. They’d rather sell their soul for a little convenience. (And these aren’t poor people or teenagers with no money. I worked in tech and all my peers were six figure salary. They can afford to buy three albums a month for $18. Which frankly isn’t much more than a subscription, but then you get to keep something and eventually have a huge library)

Yeah this feels like another thing that’s downstream from low wages.

Movies are a luxury. If most people are struggling to get by in debt, they’re less likely to splurge.

It’s too bad there’s not a strong religious left that was into, like, flipping over their tables and beating these guys with whips.

I tell people I have a 24 hour SLA. I’ll respond to messages within 24 hours, barring circumstances like a trip to somewhere remote or illness. Likely sooner, but that’s a bonus. No one has ever complained.

I just hate the feeling that someone could suddenly message me. I hate having to pull out my phone because a message has arrived and I have to respond. I hate having to look at it every few seconds when I am trying to do something else, because someone messaged me.

There’s probably a nicer, more effective, way to say this, but: stop doing this. You don’t have to respond. You don’t even have to look. Put your phone on silent. Leave it in the other room.

Zuckerberg put in his will “Anyone who kills me gets a billion dollars”. Bold move, but apparently legal!

I don’t think “This other, largely unrelated, problem is bad so we shouldn’t do this thing” is good reasoning.

I don’t think in the real world, in all places (or even most places) all the stores are in a cartel. Where I live, there are several large supermarkets and a handful of smaller groceries all within walking distance. They are not a cartel. They compete. You’re just making stuff up for some weird dark fantasy of yours.

Furthermore, if there was a monopoly, and we have the political might to implement UBI, I dare say we’d also have the political power to do a tried-and-true popular move of breaking up monopolies.

If there’s only one grocery store, maybe. But that’s a monopoly, and that’s going to be shit no matter what. Ideally you have multiple grocery stores that compete, and if one raises prices the other will take their customers. (If they all coordinate to raise their prices, that’s a cartel and that’s also bad.)

So you’re not really exposing a problem with UBI, but rather with unregulated capitalism.

We should get rid of the republicans. We know who they are and where they live.

That person is stupid. Like, profoundly. They cannot escape their self constructed cage of emotions.

I’m so tired of emotionally stunted, intellectually incurious, fools ruining the world for everyone.

If those two shitheads said we should drink more water I’d check with other sources first.

Fuck them. I hope they both die for what they’ve done

I don’t drive anymore because I live someplace with transit and sidewalks, but when I drove I always signalled turns. Low effort, high safety.

I didn’t realize until adulthood that some households don’t really prioritize music. My parents were always playing and telling me about the music they grew up with (classic rock, because I’m old and they’re older)

Every once in a while I’ll meet a peer who’s like “oh yeah we didn’t have a lot of records” and I’m like oh that checks out with you not knowing the velvet underground

But I try not to be a jerk about people not knowing stuff, because no one needs that.

This is true. People are bad at crisis and it’s not something a set of skills you can easily practice. I do think some hobbies probably help- some stressful video games, some sports and sporting-like things like paintball- but on the whole a lot of people live pretty simple lives where the most surprising, stressful, thing to happen is they almost burned their microwave popcorn. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it leads to disappointing behavior

Eventually someone is going to shoot some DOGE agents dead and I won’t be mad.

When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair.

This is an interesting point I’d thought about before but never articulated.

I think it was part of why I didn’t gel with one of my old DND groups. They’d sometimes be faffing around doing “funny” stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the “use your resources wisely or perish” mode of DND.

I don’t think retail theft is as big as retailers claim ( https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html ) , but even if it was it’s still not even close

In 2012, there were 292,074 robberies of all kinds, including bank robberies, residential robberies, convenience store and gas station robberies, and street robberies. The total value of the property taken in those crimes was $340,850,358. By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. Further, the nearly $1 billion successfully reclaimed by workers is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/

If you need help visualizing scale, revisit https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

In another thread someone was saying that conservatives follow a worldview of “whatever works for me right now”. There’s no internal consistency or facts. This explains a lot. It looks a lot like being stupid, but i think is something slightly different

In my heart, I want all the billionaires and republicans dead removed from power.

Realistically, I’m not sure what we can get. Even if we regain control of the legislature, much damage has been done that cannot easily be repaired.

Pay people more work and have them do dignified jobs (ie: not making them pee in a bottle) and you’d have more people working.

Treat people like shit and crash the global economy, not so much.

But it’s not like conservatives care about making sense of being consistent. Hang mike johnson.