It’s waxed and waned.
I remember when you had to log into everything, but there wasn’t much to visit. Then people started using the Internet en mas and selling ads was the market maker. So you didn’t need to log in, but you did get the most malicious JavaScript ever written trying to jam pop-ups under your cursor.
Now we’ve somehow managed to achieve the worst of both worlds
Oh no, that’s a trap
This is why I get all my computer supplies from goats.ex
Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.
I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.
We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.
eye-roll
Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.
Idk, man, but its a statement that gets you upvotes.
I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning
I feel a lot more anxious when a show dumps graphic violence or ear piercing screams on me with no warning.
Warnings tend to at least let me adjust my TV volume in advance. Much better than those YouTube clips or TikTok videos that try to blow out my speakers in the first five seconds
New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.
there’s a reason i coalition build best with religious anarchists while myself being an agnostic.
Very hard to be an anarchist and then recoil at a neighbor with superficial differences in belief. If you need homogeneity of thought for anarchism to function, but you reject a hierarchy of institution to enforce canonical doctrine, how is that even supposed to work?
there’s actually a ton of radical political thought in theology if you can get away from a hierarchically programmed preacher long enough to study it yourself
Sort of the secret sauce of the modern major religious movements. They are all, at their core, populist messages intended to appeal to wide audiences of working class people. The insular cults and sectarian country clubs do a great job of raising tons of money from a few gullible rubes. But they can’t stand the test of time without reforming back into popular theology.
I would say that any serious student of religion or history really needs a teacher (ideally more than one). “Just do your own research” is fine on its face, but inevitably you run into contradictions and conundrums that the texts alone don’t illuminate. A great deal of the Old Testament is written as part of a rabbinical dialogue, with different books and chapters and even verses intentionally challenging one another in order to spur meditation and debate. And plenty of Leftist texts follow a similar trajectory.
You don’t have to read Marx and Engels as somehow oppositional to Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Stirner. You don’t have to read Descartes as oppositional to Kant. All these philosophers can operate in dialogue with one another. Perhaps even in some kind of dialectic with one another.
But it does help to hold a certain set of common beliefs.
there’s a song i love titled Owed to a Hypocrite about how the politician and the preacher walk down the road hand in hand oppressing all us regular people
My favorite line from Game of Thrones is the Sellsword Riddle. The answer you give to the riddle says a great deal about what you think of political power and who ultimately wields it. And the deeper you muse on it, the harder it is to unravel.
please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…
I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.
A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”
I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.
That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.
But when you look at the actual price history
there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.
Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.
Fungible, portable, valuable.
It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.
It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.
It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.
Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.
The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.
The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.
At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.
Did you mean IUDs?
… yes.
Well There’s Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.