If zines were delivered directly to all of humanity instantaneously and were an actual money maker financed by mega corporations, sure.

That enforces my point. Why should anyone care about some other person who, some may say, should have been spied on?

I think the reason why this may be something you’re wondering about is because we have given podcasters a larger influence in recent years. Not to say that’s bad, but it’s new.

Personally, I don’t consider podcasters or YouTubers, etc., trustworthy sources of information or honest dialog. I’m not sure that’s something that even exists anyway now.

There’s a much larger conversation to be had about where we spend our time and give our attention and why. The real news is boring so we turn to salacious clickbait that we often know has a bias to it. The more time we hand our emotions over to this content, then more it becomes part of our psyche. Sometimes we don’t have a choice but I still know a ton of people who are entirely clueless about politics. So, some people are making choices, for better or worse.

I see Kirk’s legacy the same as Rogan’s and Trump’s. These people are a reflection of our times. Something is very wrong in our world today and we’ve spent the last twenty five years shifting, metaphorically, from CBS Evening News to The National Enquirer.

This is the result of great freedom: a wild storm of ideas with equal opportunity to be expressed and heard. Not something that existed before the internet or having instant world wide communications in your hand or selling your information in order to maintain your attention with biased (mis/dis)information.

I just want to ask on behalf of people who don’t care about this, “why should I care about this”?

Because every time I bring up how much we’re being spied on by the government or Amazon or Google, et al, people just shrug it off. At best, they’ll admit it’s a problem - for people who should be worried about it. Meaning, “I’ve got nothing to hide”. If nothing else, Americans lack (or choose to reject) the basic concept of a shared society. If there’s a threat that the government is spying on people, we believe it’s the “other” people, not “us”.

Threats to our privacy is largely hypothetical for the majority of people. I’d even argue that the whole premise of privacy is no longer what it was just 15-20 years ago. I’ve even had people argue with me that they ‘want’ to be tracked so the ads they see are relevant to them.

So, I could see some Americans read this story and be in full support of this. They believe in a spy state as a means of protection. Ironically, these are also often the same people flying “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.

If you are of the belief that AI and anime-style erotica are a reality you are unable to escape, you have a very long way to go my friend.

Yes. I find anime-style erotic content to be super weird and gross. I think people who fawn over drawings of cartoons are suffering from and / or burying mental health disorders.
I don’t think your issue is with AI though. You seem to have some other issues that, outside of professional counseling, may be helped by changing some of your lifestyle choices and avoiding the internet. I mean, there are plenty of horrors in this world (war / famine), but the world itself (the one we call reality) is not a horror; certainly not one with corpses readily on display.
You seem troubled in a lost-control-of-your-addiction sort of way. “Waking up” is a choice you have.

I’m sure there are appropriate places for that. In this case, an “amusing situation” was posted in a forum called “Ask Lemmy” without a question. Could we also start posting pornography here? Can we post recipes? How to guides to perform magic tricks? When questions are no longer relevant to the Ask Lemmy forum, when the first rule of the forum is no longer enforced, does any line exist?

This is the shit that forced me to leave reddit. I guess I should just stop using the internet though since everyone just gets to post amusing situations (in your opinion - I fail to find minor annoyances amusing) anywhere and everywhere.

I’d look at her like she were an idiot and tell her to use the faucet in the tub.

Note that none of the words in the above sentence include posting this on the internet or asking what I should do because I’m a grown adult that can manage handling minor annoyances on my own. I acknowledge that this concept may seem foreign to people under the age of 25.

What exactly is it that you are Asking Lemmy?

Thank you.

I guess the part where I’m stuck is the current volatile state of this “currency” compared to the idea or the promise of it.

Should I buy BTC now or wait? Is it a currency or an investment?

If something is an investment, can it also “be money”? Like, if I buy a painting for ten grand then twenty years later its worth 15 grand, I suppose I could trade the painting for something of an agreed upon equal value or I could sell it for money with which I can buy things. This concept isn’t really how we’ve experienced money in my lifetime.

It’s this push / pull of crypto’s facade where I’m struggling. It’s looked at as both currency and investment at the same time. It doesn’t seem to have much value today to use as currency because as soon as you buy something you’ve lost money. I could take 100USD worth of BTC to buy a thing and tomorrow that hundred dollars could have been worth $110. It’s not possible to say something is “worth” .01BTC because that value will change tomorrow.

It seems it’s only worth something today because people are investing in the promise of it. We don’t know if it will ever really be used as a currency as you’ve described. And, if and when that day comes to pass, what will the value of 1BTC be worth? Should I just wait five to ten years to buy crypto to avoid the speculative market? Maybe I miss out on capital gains over a hundred thousand dollars - is that so bad?

Or, in your opinion, is it inevitable that this will be the world wide currency of the future?

I’ve been “fired” four times from my current job because my boss is a short fused maladjusted inhuman. What’s stopped me from being fired is that I ignored him.

I’m still the original owner of one of these 1982 Pac-Man consoles. Actually, I thought it was lost for decades but my aunt discovered it during a basement clean out and gave it back to me. Last I checked, it still worked. But the volume is so dang loud that I remember I always had to play with it outside.

What a world we live in where this is even a thought someone has.

You should know that little media is being made today that will stand the test of time. It used to be, that when someone was angry or proud or excited, when they were full of emotion that had to be expressed, they would write book or a song or paint a work of art. Now, those emotions can be unloaded instantly on TikTok giving the person the satisfaction they needed. And perhaps some people do still do this but you won’t know about it because the corporations that have historically funded such people full of emotions to express are now dumping money into works their board members know to already be popular.

I’ll add something that I’m personally struggling with. There is so much content available today that staves off any opportunity for boredom that I have little time to spend doing the things I know are more fulfilling. Like, when I get done work, I just plop on the couch and watch YT instead of taking a nap or reading a book or drawing. And now my attention span is shit so it’s a struggle to just sit still and do something requiring more than a few minutes of attention. I mean, I literally have a book called Dopamine Nation on my coffee table that I’ve yet to read more than a couple chapters of.

You and I may have two different problems but I think they’re booth seeking the same solution: rediscovering our humanity.

Thank you. I was getting worried that some pedantic twat hadn’t yet cherry picked my careful and specific wording.

The “meaning of life” is dependent on the scale.

On an intergalactic scale, practically nothing, unless you’re someone involved in some way in intergalactic travel (like Musk, potentially). On a planetary scale, your life as a political or corporate leader or humanitarian could impact generations of others. If you’re a doctor or lawyer, your life may impact tens of thousands or even generations of people. These are scales based mostly on space.

You could also look at a scale based on time. If / when the planet explodes, maybe someone like a Musk will be the only one alive today who genuinely has an impact on the human race long into the future. If you want to look at the time span of a country’s existence, someone like a Julius Cesar, a George Washington, or Adolf Hitler will have certain meaning for hundreds of years.

Your life’s meaning may yet to be realized. The point is to live your life day to day in a manner that has a positive impact on the lives that surround you. If you don’t have the impact of someone like political or corporate leader or someone like a Greta Thunberg, maybe the point of your life is to be a supporting player for someone else.

It gets difficult to find meaning if you live an isolated life. Without a family of your own, a fulfilling career, without traveling to engage with others outside your regular week’s schedule, it’s easy to say your life is meaningless. Because you haven’t made an attempt to give it meaning.

Your life doesn’t have to have meaning. But if you’re asking this kind of question and expecting someone to tell you there’s some inherit “meaning” bestowed upon you at birth, you’re not going to get a hopeful answer. That’s not to say you need to go out and look for it. It’s to say that “meaning” comes from the impact have on something, by choice or otherwise.

You’re gonna have to give me a source for that buddy.

Awesome. I appreciate this perspective.

Can you dig a bit deeper into the benefits for normal people that an irreversible transaction offers? To me, this seems like a detriment. Like, if I sell something on eBay and it turns out to be broken or fraudulent, PayPal can reverse the charges for me. Actually, I have a real world example of buying sneakers online that never arrived and had my credit card reverse the charges for me.

Thank you for being one of the few to take me seriously and offer a thoughtful response.

I can understand now the value of a token that represent some amount of effort that is limited in its supply. As “promised”, no other bitcoins will ever be made. So this alone makes it worth something. The fact that it represents some amount of effort achieved does seem to give it some validity. Although, IMO, certainly not $100k worth.

I’ll need to think this over some more and maybe update this post with some more thoughts on the future of the coin.

Thank you for a real answer like I specifically asked for.

The fact that Bitcoin does represent some amount of effort and that there’s a limited supply does seem to give it some value. While there is a theoretical finite resource of gold, it’s still being discovered. Which, theoretically, makes it less valuable than a predetermined finite resource. And, the US dollar continues to decline - almost by design during this administration.

How BTC is used today and in the future can continue to be debated but I’m satisfied in understanding it’s a limited supply of something that represents some amount of effort.

Violence is stupid. In some situations, it’s just an output for one’s rage. In other situations, it’s a battle of who is best equipped (hardware + intelligence). Neither of these address the core of the disagreement. Violence only beats the loser into submission. It does not change their stance on the matter.

Negotiation, on the other hand, ideally, at least gives all parties some gains and losses. It may not be the end of the matter but it’s generally a positive step and should promote some degree of respect.

Maybe we never had it, but I think we’ve largely lost the ability to be respectful and empathetic to others. Even though we find to be of the greatest evil, I think, should be given some initial respect to try to understand the emotional reality of their intent.

I won’t write it out, but imagine the worse crime an adult male could do to someone. Something so revolting that the only “logical” recourse is violence. This is an emotional response that does not address the problems that brought this person to such an evil act. By ignoring the problem and beating the person down, we are not able to understand how they got to this place or how we can recognize this path in others. This is a brief example for the sake of time. If you look at something like genocide, I think the process does scale up but too complex to write out for now.

I condone empathy for all because we all as a species benefit from it.

Edit: on second thought - violence used to preserve life may generally be acceptable.