7 years ago I got introduced to this really small local artist by a friend who had just a handful of songs on his YouTube channel, but they were all incredible. I could listen to music while I worked but it wasn’t super practical to have my phone out for it, so I always converted songs from YouTube to mp3 and downloaded them to put on my mp3-player. I did that with this artists songs as well. A few years later, I wanted to show another friend this music, and the whole channel was deleted. Sometimes I wonder if I and the artist itself are the only people who have a recording of his songs in the world.

You’re right, to some extent, but you have to ask yourself why neoliberalism took hold and gained power. The problem with social democracy, even though it’s the best version of a shitty economic system, is that it’s still capitalism and at some point greedy assholes are going to want more, and will start influencing politics to get what they want. That’s why neoliberalism became a thing, despite the succes of social democracy/embedded liberalism for the 99%, because there still was a 1% with much more power and influence. Neoliberalism was a planned and calculated attack on social democracy decades in the making by groups like the Mont Pelerin Society and individuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Reagan was just a public symptom of this disease under the surface. If you keep capitalism in place in any way, it will always eventually trend towards it’s natural endpoint of 0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way.

I almost never go to the theater but I just checked and here in the Netherlands it’s €13,50 for 2D and €16,50 for imax. That’s crazy. The last time I went to see a movie in the theater was somewhere at the end of 2019, and it was like €10. That’s a 30% price increase in under 4 years, christ.

Nothing beats sitting on my own couch in my bathrobe with one kitty on my lap and another snuggled up to me at my side. Don’t have to go out of the house, snacks are cheap. You’d have to pay me money to go to a theater, and a hefty amount at that.

He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.

Or he got assimilated by the Borg. No longer an individual lol

I maybe check facebook once every few months, and that’s only if someone sends me a link to an event. And it seems like almost everyone has left or is at least not active. A few years ago (well, maybe more than a few, time flies) I was pretty active and my feed would be full of my friends’ status updates. I would actually see what they were up to if I went on Facebook. Now only a handful of my Facebook friends are still active, and they’re all 35+ and have their own business or project of some kind that they want to share updates of. Not mlm since they’re all hippies; things like a community garden, handmade stuff, musicians, but still something to promote. It takes me 30 seconds to see everything. Most of my Facebook friends haven’t posted anything in years or months, just like me.

It is difficult and not that black and white (pun not intended). I would personally say that for external factors it is skin color. Like how other people perceive you. That’s why the term ‘white-passing’ exists. But for internal factors it is different. Like, for example, I am a quarter black. But just like a lot of people who are a quarter black or anything, I look white. So to other people I am white because they can only see skin color, but I know that’s not the whole truth because I know my family history. But I am still given privileges in society purely based on the fact that I look white that people with darker skin don’t get. I have fully black friend and when we were in high school (didn’t know each other back then yet) we both skipped school so much that we got in trouble with attendance laws in our country. We did the exact same thing, and got community service, but I, as a ‘white’ girl, got to spend it helping out a library, while he, a black young man, had to pick trash at the side of the road.

It is to some extent also influenced by ethnicity, more so in the past than now, like how Italians and the Irish weren’t considered white when they immigrated to America by the people of English descent. But because of the history of colonialism and slavery by majority white countries over majority non-white countries, it has almost exclusively connotations to skin color now.

Of course, ‘race’, in the biological sense, doesn’t actually exist in humans. We’re all the same race, homo sapiens. But we still use the word race today as a shorthand because historically, when people didn’t have as much knowledge about biology as we do now, people did actually think the different skin colors were different human races. So, biologically, neither white nor black nor Latino nor Asian nor whatever is an actual race, but socially, societally speaking, it is a useful shorthand for skin color because of difference in treatment, privilege, education, income, etc etc that comes with it from centuries of oppression, colonialism, slavery, exploitation and (‘scientific’) racism.

You could do that. You could also make it a bit more nuanced, where the pool of people only consists of people doing non-vital work. So maybe doctors and nuclear engineers and firefighters and teachers could be excluded, while only people doing non-vital work get rotated in, and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if one person is missing for a couple of weeks or months. Nobody is gonna die if you have to wait a bit longer to get your hair cut or your house painted or to see that new movie, and there would be an understanding that you have to wait a bit longer because important work is being done. You’d also have so many people who are freed up from useless or destructive work like ceo’s, finance, middle managers, marketing, etc that maybe you wouldn’t even notice if someone got rotated in, because everyone else could just pick up like 3 extra hours a week for a little while.

Not everyone has to be passionate about it. You could devise a sort of lottery system for jobs that can’t be automated and suck, where everyone will have to do that job for a set amount of time. People do these jobs for 40 hours a week now because they know it’s necessary for their own survival, so I personally don’t feel like it’s far-fetched to think that people would okay with doing a certain job for way less time a week, knowing that in a few weeks or however long they’ll never have to do it anymore because their name is now gone from the lottery pool, because they know it’s necessary for the survival of society (and thus also themselves).

Hm, I love the Platform, watched it twice, but I really wouldn’t place it in the category of Cube or Squid Game. They aren’t playing a game. It’s much more similar to Snowpiercer.

Lmfao

I stopped using it because apparently it had been abandoned by the dev, and switched to Infinity because it’s extremely similar, but I loved Slide too. Will definitely use this.

Ha, I come from Infinity and I also keep trying to swipe on stuff out of force of habit. Would love some more options regarding or else other apps to get a hit more variety in the future, but I get this is all still in its infancy.

I did xtc a few times and it profoundly changed the way I viewed myself and the world. I was very lonely and extremely depressed, and it helped me see that my intense self hate wasn’t based on anything and wasn’t justified. It also gave a huge boost to my empathy for other people, especially my cognitive empathy which I struggle with as an autistic person, and made it so I could actually open up to other people. The first time doing lsd it was like a nuclear bomb of empathy and understanding and perspective went off in my head. With both substances though, consequent trips were fun, but never as profound as the first (few) time(s), and I lost interest. I knew a bunch of people who did massive amounts of either or both every weekend. Can’t say I understand why, they must get something different out of it then me.

Then I discovered amphetamine and had a massive struggle with that for 8 years, lol. Different brains react very differently to the same substances.