Indigenous Canadian from northern Ontario. Believe in equality, Indigenous rights, minority rights, LGBTQ+, women’s rights and do not support war of any kind.
I guess this is the model that governments are using these days to try to figure out how to save democracy
Figure out first how to destroy it … then you can know how to save it
But I think they’re going a little overboard in the first half of that process
Someone … or a new artist should just release a new version of the song with new lyrics every year
But to your question … I’m Indigenous Canadian, so from the day I was born, I’ve always been overwhelmed by the world because most of it, especially living in northern Ontario was a government that either actively or passively just wanted us to either disappear, assimilate, go away or just die.
I’ve always seen the world as falling apart. I remind my friends when we debate this stuff that the human species has been around for about two million years, a species that looks like us was around about 100,000 years ago and the most modern ancestor that could think, act and be like us is about 50,000 years ago. We’ve only just started our technological evolution about 200 years ago. So when you think about it, we are more designed as prehistoric cavemen and cavewomen who are easily scared of shadows in the dark or what happens after we die. We have only just taken our first step out of the cave we all used to inhabit. It’s going to take us a few more thousand years to get to the point where our brains can process and live with the modern world we created … that is if we last that long. In the meantime, we’ll just fumble along trying to become temporary Masters of the Universe on our tiny speck of floating dust in the galaxy.
To put things into perspective … listen to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Or watch the cartoonist Steve Cutts A Brief Disagreement
The thing that is pissing me off these days is not so much that the world is falling apart … it always has been for me … its that we are accelerating the amount of danger we are putting all of humanity … and for what? a little bit of profit and for a small group of people to say they can rule the world?
The biggest thing is control and censorship.
On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group … you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.
Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.
FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.
Bluesky as open as it’s supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.
The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.
AI is very useful and powerful as a propaganda device and a system to generate and disseminate disinformation, misinformation and non-information very quickly and very efficiently.
It was thought that the internet would do the same but that system only goes at the speed of humans and the whole system is regulated by humans … so as propaganda tool, it has worked better but not as well as predicted. Humans saw the the potential for abuse and fought back against it.
AI is like propaganda on cocaine … and there is very little to stop it other than our awareness of it … but the majority of everyone in the world don’t care to understand what they are watching is real or not. What that means is that AI is set to reshape how everyone thinks and how we all see the world.
Investors are like parasitic leeches to any business model. As soon as you add them, the business has to grow in order to satisfy the leeches who provide no benefit to the model other than to be attached to it. If you ignore the leech, they’ll drain all your lifeforce, so your only option is to satisfy them and feed them. Unfortunately, they are also ravenous creatures who are never satisfied. If you feed them a little, they’ll want more next time in an endless cycle.
Once you are infected by investors … eventually they will destroy whatever you created.
In that case, someone should come out with a quality phone and just slap Trump logos all over the damned thing and charge $2,000 for a $500 phone. Run the business until someone tells you to stop.
Sell Trump crap … it’s all crap anyway … make money on it if people are dumb enough to pay for this shit.
The only black jobs he understands include shovels and wheelbarrows
Or you can spray paint your old iPhone with gold coloring, slap a Trump logo on it and sell it on ebay to some unsuspecting MAGA fan for $2,000.
It’s not hard to copy Trump’s signature … you could throw that on the phone and charge $5,000 and tell everyone that you bought it at a MAGA rally where Trump signed it in 2024.
If they can grift … we can all grift harder
Burner phone … leave your main one at home … ABSOLUTELY DO NOT BRING YOUR MAIN PHONE
Set up your burner phone with one or two accounts to things you might want to upload to … encrypt as much as you can. Do not load all your social accounts … only log into the bare minimum. If you are organized, log into temporary or fake or secondary accounts if you can.
Start the day without any prior history, photos or content on the phone and keep as few contacts as you can … memorize numbers that are important to you.
Always be prepared to give up or lose your phone.
And as always … SAFETY GLASSES … bring a pair of industry rated CSA approved safety glasses (try to get a pair with a tint so you can pass them as sunglasses). Look for safety glasses with anything marked ANSI Z87+, sometimes written Z87.1+ (note the plus) rated or CSA Z94.3 rated are ensured to safely withstand a direct high energy strike.
… additional things if you want to do more
Bring a small new blank paper note book you can keep in a pocket with a small pen or pencil … you might be taking notes like license plates, name tags or names of people or places … its always faster to just write something down than in taking a shaky photo or tapping away a note on an app
Wear a big scarf … for guys or girls … a scarf comes in handy for all kinds of emergencies including using it as something to cover your mouth, dress a wound, tie something or cover something up.
Wear a good pair of running shoes … be prepared to run and be on your feet all day.
Bring a small backpack and bring a couple bottles of water and some energy bars … keep it light because you’ll be on your feet all day and if things go bad, you might be targeted if you have a large pack … plus an empty pack can be used to carry things later if you need to.
Dress for the weather … if its going to be hot, wear light clothing but if things go bad and you have to stay out over night or longer, bring a light jacket … if rain is forecast within a day or two, bring a small poncho
Cults and religion are the same. The only thing that differentiate them is time. If you have a systematic set of illogical beliefs that have been around for a few years or decades or even just one lifetime, it’s more likely to be called a cult. Give that group a lot more time and it will be called a religion.
As for your question … I don’t think it’s anything the opposite of religion / cult but rather which belief system. I think as humans, we will always come up with some sort of belief system because we will always want to. We’re just wired that way.
And to me the best belief system is one where we value one another no matter what, who, where, why or how. That includes honoring, respecting even those who don’t believe what you do. A belief system where we honor all life, human, animal and organic. A belief system where we do our best not to harm one another or any life around us.
If we could that, then following a religion wouldn’t be so bad because the belief system would be used to actually benefit all life.
It’s the same as Libertarian logic … they believe in freedom for themselves and themselves only without regard for anyone else, no matter the cost.
They just can’t believe that when people start losing their freedoms, that they will start losing it themselves.
Co-workers are like family
You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family
I’d rather spend as much time away from my co-workers so that in the long run, I can appreciate the times I have to be around them at work because I have to … not because I want to.
I do the same with my family (as much as I love them) … if I spend too much time with them, eventually, I’ll find reasons to not want to be around them and our relationship suffers … the less time I spend with them, the more I appreciate them and the more they appreciate me.
Instead of coming up with cheap gimmicks for your workers in order to save yourself and the company money while playing PR games with your workforce … just pay them all a bonus, give them time off and let them all decide what they want to do with their time and money.
I don’t really care about images on here all that much … I don’t mind them being lost if I lose my instance.
Most of the images that are shared are basically ‘one off’ images for a quick gag or as part of a conversation specific to that moment. And often that conversation or interact is a ‘one off’ event as well. Which means it was all meaningful when it happened and when it was read the few times it was noticed over two or three years but then it is forgotten.
If there is anything meaningful I come across that I think is important to me or something I want to keep a reference of or keep … I’ll save it or screenshot it and put it away in my own storage or data.
Otherwise, I really don’t mind losing all those other images I had created over the years … they already did their work when people saw them at that moment.
The only reason anyone would want to keep all that data is to archive it for historical reasons … or to monetize it by collecting a bunch of unique data, images connected to real people.
It’s human nature … the vast majority of people are very decent tolerant people.
It’s only a very small minority of the population that cause a lot of problems … and usually they’re the loudest most obnoxious a-holes. They are usually the ones who sway large complacent groups to follow them.
It’s only a few people in our world that cause us not to have nice things.
Commodore 64 … Same here … but it was with a family friend that I went to visit often … every time I saw them, we spent hours on their system. I remember sorting through all the ASCII characters to try to make a drawing on the screen … hours and hours of tip tapping to find the right character for the flag of England I was drawing.
They play the game as long as possible.
It’s like a religion at this point in history.
If you have enough people who blindly believe in the whole thing, no matter how absurd, everything continues to grow and expand. Once enough people lose faith, then the whole system comes crashing down.
Isn’t this the model Capitalist?
It doesn’t matter what they offer. It doesn’t matter what they build. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It doesn’t matter if it is beneficial or not. It doesn’t matter if it is ethical or not. It doesn’t matter if it is moral or not. It doesn’t matter if it is respectful or not.
All that matters is that it made money.
That is the sign of a true Capitalist.
Congratulations on winning that contest.
This all suggests that we keep producing, wasting and manufacturing things infinitely without ever recycling, reusing or re purposing everything that we are mining out of the ground. The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
If we keep running our world the way we are now for the next hundred yes … than yes, we are going to run out of everything because we live in an absolutely wasteful society that only runs in a way to produce things designed with planned obsolescence to break down in a short amount of time so that we can produce more junk to sell and drive a stupid economy to make a small group of idiots even more wealthy. The whole system is designed to run on making infinite money by producing infinite junk that doesn’t last long.
Yes at the rate we are going and the way we are producing things and the way we shape our economy and the way we base our manufacturing … we are definitely going to run out of everything.
We can change our economy and the way we produce and manufacture things - and get rid of this stupid structure of society of just endlessly making money for a small group of morons … or we can keep doing things the way we are now until we run off a cliff and destroy everything and drive our species into extinction.
Repetition … and repetition in multiple formats
Repeat what you want to remember
Repeat inside your thoughts
Repeat it out loud (either to no one or to someone nearby)
Repeat it with action … point, touch, move or just handle the thing or object related to what you want to remember
Repeat it by writing … write it down and note it
Then do the same things again and again … eventually over time, these things will get ingrained in your thoughts and actions.
Some processes take time to remember (like playing an instrument) but others take less time (like where are my damned keys!)