I have always taken the metaphorical red pill when given a chance. I would rather live in pain and suffering knowing the truth, than living in ignorance and happiness.
And I don’t mind being ugly. I’m a misanthrope anyhow. Being ugly just means you are more likely to be left alone.
No, I refuse to look away from facts and reality. I read the science before the IPCC gets to it and “politically massages” it into useless pablum. I listen to those who actually do climate science as a day job… and most of them have started calling themselves “climate pathologists” and are refusing to bring children into this world, because to intentionally bring children into such a future would be to inflict malicious cruelty onto those children.
A blissfully naïve ideal, considering the rightward shift of almost all governments world-wide. The political right depends vitally on creating an ignorant, illiterate, and uninformed electorate who breed like rabbits… you really think that they will willingly fund education and healthcare of any effective kind?
Right now, our best bet is to stop pumping out innocents who will only know a life that is brutish, cruel, and (once civilization collapses) short. They may have a decade or three of modern conveniences, but anyone under the age of 30 will likely die long before they would otherwise experience a natural death.
I am not talking about taking yourself out. I’m talking about not adding to what will be a very big problem within the next two to four decades.
The only reason why we have reached 8 billion is because of industrialized agriculture. Climate change - via chaotic weather - will make agriculture in general impossible. When agriculture at scale ceases to be functional - and the collapse of the AMOC will make one of the bigger impacts in the middle of this century - the ability for humanity to feed more than a billion or two will cease to exist. Humanity will tear its entire infrastructure apart in a desperate bid to live another day. Anyone who wants to subject their children to such horrors is not a person who cares for their children.
We are already exceeding the “worst-case scenario” that has projected a likely extinction of humanity within this century. Why add innocents to the potential misery and suffering?
In Canada, the CBC has the least amount of bias of any domestic news source.
Going International, I would say AP, PBS, NPR, Reuters, BBC.
10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.
Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.
Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.
But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.
10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.
Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.
Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.
But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.
Fund a sterilization program for young people who have come to understand the future that humanity is hurtling towards, and who want to avoid bringing a child into such a brutally cruel future.
Both my niece and nephew have sworn off of children, as they have good educations and have fully understood just how badly humanity is fucking itself over. They’re just trying to find doctors that will do those procedures on people under 30.
Shoveling cow shit, grain, silage, and tossing 50kg/120lbs hay bales nearly every day growing up as kid on a farm got me started on ruining my body early in life. 12 years as a toolmaker standing on concrete 10 to 12 hours a day and lifting heavy pieces of steel, Then 15 years spent dragging 115+kg/250+lbs patients up from basements and down from upstairs bedrooms as a medic has done little to nothing for my back either.
While stretching and certain exercises could have helped greatly with that, it’s also not something that would have been available to us in our youth. It’s only been in the last two decades that kinesiology, stretching, targeted training, and other body-movement sciences have started becoming widely available. And that doesn’t help anywhere near as much after the fact.
My condolences on the current state of your meat vehicle.
Just shy of 2m tall myself, and I don’t seem to have any of your issues, even nosing into my sixth decade on this rock.
About the only thing I could complain about is the family orchard tractor, which is Chinese-made, and seems to have been designed by someone a full 45cm shorter than I am. But that’s about the only thing I have cause to complain about. Some appropriate warm-up exercises and my knees are fine even after a few hours of vigorous pedal-pumping at inappropriately pretzeled leg angles.
Knee and backpain
Some people lose the genetic lottery in this regard, true, but unless you are elderly, most people can avoid back and leg pain by exercising, stretching, and taking care of your body.
standing out in a crowd
Counterpoint: finding the person you are looking for in a crowd.
needing to slightly bend down vor everything in most standard kitchens.
If you are under the age of 35, I fully acknowledge how the deck of house ownership is stacked against you. But once you own your own home, you can… remodel. Kitchens also come in Big & Tall designs, and not all short(er) spouses mind taller countertops. The kitchen that came with my house is sized perfectly for my wife, and yet she finds the height that woukd be ideal for my height to also be more attractive for her as well.
Unless you have a passion for cramped supercars or exceed the height of most door frames… why? The ability to reach the top shelf and things placed at height is just so invaluable. And provided you take care of them, knees and hips still allow you to rummage through things on the down low.
Now, if you’re so tall that you routinely crack your forehead on door frames… yeah. I could see why. But then the question becomes, what is affecting your coordination such that it prevents you from earning millions by throwing an orange ball through a netted hoop?
I created a bunch of blogs myself, did all of the development and design myself, managed the servers myself, and wrote all of the content myself.
Sure sounds like labour to me.
And there is no requirement for labour to generate income immediately. A majority of labour is front-loaded, with income being back-loaded.
I still have one of them, and I receive around $60 per month from it despite the fact that I haven’t touched it in over a decade.
Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still “labour”. Because sure as shit you’ve been doing these things… no hosting provider is going to let you go 10 years with zero updates or patches to the website or the underlying framework that allows the website to run. Because failing to do that is how entire hosting platforms get rooted and infected with malware.
6 years of age would put me in 1978.
There is a lot I could do from that point onward, that would make $10M look like spare change. Like investing in Apple, or working with Tim Berners-Lee to more effectively launch an Internet that could better resist corporatization and enshittification.
someone without insurance rear-ended my vehicle but I chose not to pursue it because then my own insurance rates would’ve gone up.
Somehow, this sounds deeply wrong. Your insurance should cover you regardless of what happens. If it’s an act of god, the insurance company should just swallow those costs. If it’s caused by a third party who is not their customer, they should go after the company that insured the other party, or the other party directly if uninsured.
No matter what the circumstances, if you are not at fault you should never see an increase in your rates, no matter how catastrophic the damage or the costs to make it right.
Agreed. There are only three modern/common communications channels which are truly synchronous:
Everything else is asynchronous, and does not necessarily involve an interruption or a disruption of your time - you can get to it when you want to, within polite reason.
And with the fragmentation of our attention due to social media - to say nothing about the broader nature of our modern culture - being able to handle communication asynchronously is becoming very important to people.