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As a psychiatric nurse, during my work day I watch my screen for about 1 out of 8 hours. When I come home I like to spend some time behind the screen. I sometimes wonder if it is necessary that so many people work behind screens. Shouldn’t we get more people to work as nurses, teachers but also craftsman, handyman, etc. This may sound as a naive and romantic thought, and I’m sure a lot of the work behind screens is extremely useful and efficient. But still I wonder if we haven’t somehow lost focus of what’s important. Like we’ve started to think that we can solve everything behind the computer, while simultaneously things are falling apart, people are lonely and people in need don’t get help.

Interesting, care to explain?

I can only see ‘being a billionaire’ as ‘stealing from the population at large’. So you’re saying the biggest thief of society is still popular among 6% of democrats.

Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

Maybe billionaires should be filmed and streamed continuously, since their behavior has such a big impact on the world. If they don’t like it maybe we shouldn’t allow them to control such incredible assets. I’m sure billionaires have nothing sketchy to hide, right? What we will see is probably how they are hard working people who are not at all detached from normal folks. Right?

Ah, yeah that does make a big difference, and it also makes a lot more sense.

And here’s another beauty

“That’s what I mean. There— it’s— you know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” – George W. Bush

“The decision of one man, to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway…[I’m] 75.” – George W. Bush

Source: Wikipedia page on “Bushism”

I learned that just now.

I just use RSS feeds to follow YT-channels. It’s doesn’t seem any less convenient than a YT account.

Can’t be that much work, can it?

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

I vividly remember being over at a friend of mine, who for the first time had a members account on RuneScape and then we started doing level 1 clue scrolls on his account. We loved that game and from the point of becoming member the possibilities seemed so endless. Wasted far too much time on it ever since. Glad I don’t anymore. occasionally watch Limpwurt, a dutch youtuber, do incredible things with that game.

Or you’ll be arrested.

Voting rights aren’t handed out because of pragmatic reasons, but because of fundamental principals.You don’t get to vote because you’re able to make good decisions, you get to vote because you’re a human citizen of a particular country and on that basis alone you get to vote. It would be very difficult to objectively determine who is able to make good decisions. And even it that were possible, it would be difficult to decide where to draw the line. Of course that children don’t get to vote is completely inconsistent and the age that makes the difference is completely arbitrary. But to be honest, I’d much rather allow children of all ages to vote than restrict people beyond a certain age. Check out some Noam Chomsky interview of recent years, would it really be fair if such a bright mind was not allowed to vote?

Cynicism will definitely lead you to civil war. Go read up on the Spanish civil war. Their experience might come in handy. Political violence won’t help you get out of this polarized mess, it will drag you in deeper.

Open source government, eh? Don’t know if this would work completely but I like the direction.

Thanks for the reply. I’d argue it’s still worthwhile to speak out in a peaceful manner and hope that truth will prevail, but maybe you’re right and I am too optimistic