Spinal cord surgery https://www.distractify.com/p/why-does-elon-musk-have-a-scar-on-his-neck

$500 per week - 500x48=24k with 4 weeks of thankfully “unpaid” vacation

Real bill, but he’s trolling

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mississippi-lawmaker-introduces-contraception-begins-erection-act-rcna188938

I’ve sometimes thought, that if there is a purpose or reason for our universe, it’d make most sense to me that its some form of random number generator.

That said, I also accept that this whole thing, me as part of this universe, is just a happenstance. We happen. It happens. This happens. Now happens. Nothing more to it than that.

The happenings can be important to some, can echo, and harmonize, or create dissonance in the future, but fundamentally there is no guiding hand outside reaching in, and so what we make of this, and the actions we make, is just what happens on the skin of the here and now of this universe.

I do agree that no system is static. But I do not agree that because all systems are dynamic, that all systems must veer to public ownership or are regressing.

I do not believe that all products, markets, niches, and so on are in the interest, nor supported by the entire public, but that some products, irregardless of the public interest can still be deeply important or wanted by a minority of people. Thus they should have a route to still be created, but the public not obligated to support it.

In an example, Potentially over time that once niche minority product becomes of such importance and dominance that the public begins to gain control and wishes to support and dedicate public resources to it.

This churning is what keeps the system dynamic, but it also does not conform to some ideal where all products and ideas must be started and filtered by the public interest and consensus.

I have not yet, but i do plan to, thanks for the reading list, I will check into it.

At least at the moment and from what I know so far, I do not identify or align with Marxism or Communism, I do with socialism and i do not view socialism as some half step.

I don’t think I’d be “stopping” the progression, just that the progression is not towards some absolute idealistic end. (and to note in my ideal system, my individual ideals are secondary to the populations average), just that the natural maximum optimization, say of organizations type, an amount of organizations would be publicly controlled by a government, and an amount would be controlled by the employees themselves in a coop structure.

I think this makes sense as there will likely be products that a niche set of people want, but is not at such a scale that the government and the people behind it would want to dedicate collective resources towards it directly.

Fundamentally I believe the uniqueness and fickleness of people I believe will always outpace any collective structure, and so allowing for that to be represented in a society is key to success, and that entails organizations outside of collective-control which rely on consensus.

I do want a socialist system were all shares of an organization are either public ally owned or owned by the employees themselves, with no rent seeking capitalists involved.

I call myself a socialist but do not support a full horizontalism or full decentralization. I support partials of both.

I do believe that optimizations for quality of life and value and stability are rarely at the ends of the spectrums, but sometimes somewhere in the middle and subjective to democratic agreement and changing based on reality.

I want my system to be flexible to have times of more centralization, times of decentralization, times of horizontality, times of independent nodes, etc.

You’re 21, there is still much to be learned and experienced and healed. You have a lot of time to figure yourself and the world out.

Give yourself the time!

I can understand on some level the difficulties you face, I’m not sure if there’s any advice I can give that will translate, but my best is:

You don’t have to have it all figured out by now.

Make mistakes, take chances, be wrong. Give yourself the flexibility and oppertunities to understand what you are and are not. Just trial and error your hobbies, friends, activities, and jobs - eventually you’ll target or even accidentally bump into something that works for you.

It takes a long time to build yourself into something you like. But eventually it does happen, and its rarely into something you predict.

I loved going to the library’s giant shelf of encyclopedias and picking one at random and flipping through the pages and skim reading.

The books were heavy and had a distinctive smell, and occasionally someone tore out a page and then that was just lost knowledge.

If there was a speicific question, Librarians were essentially our search engine, you’d ask them a question, and they’d think on it, maybe even ask a couple follow up questions, and they’d tell you to come back in a little bit or even a couple days, and when you return they’d hand you a list of books to find and checkout/read to find your answer.

It wasn’t fast, but it made finding answers and factoids its own adventure.

I’m not really sure what you’re asking, but I will say, that most couple’s, be they gay, straight, or otherwise: do not like to talk about explicit details of their intimacy.

What happens in the bedroom are sensitive vulnerable personal moments. And its generally culturally taboo for strangers to ask and pry and expose those details.

Technically… yes

If you’ve only got a year left, do some wild stuff different from your current life, experience all the things you won’t be able to experience after. Do all the things that you’d say no to like traveling cheaply/hitchhiking/walking, falling in love carelessly, speaking freely, and even starving, and disappointing people.

There are no experiences once you opt out, so, yolo it unironically.

Potentially at some point you think it’s still worthwhile living, but, if not, at least you experienced as much as you could.

The sky’s the limit, most people don’t do things because of their long term effects and chance for death and harm - if you don’t have that limit - use it to your advantage

I eventually quit, I finally cold Turkey’d it, I combined it with quiting nicotine.

I’ve tried to quit many times in the past, but this time has been the longest at 5 months or so

The advice I have: Don’t plan to quit, at some point you’ll have the impulse to quit after it weighs on your head for a while, that’s when you just lean into it - in the spur of the moment, toss your stuff or put it away someplace that’s annoying to get it back out of. Be as fast about this as possible as to not give time to the little voice that says “one more”: catch your brain off guard.

Then importantly, ensure to not substitute your habit with something else, like binge snacking or another drug - just accept that you’re gonna be uncomfortable - and embrace the discomfort - potentially make use of a fidget toy - but I found success in just destroying the habit rather than replacing/redirecting it. It took a couple weeks before it no longer was on my mind.

Finally: don’t beat yourself up if it takes a couple attempts to break the habit, each time I quit I got better at quiting.

It took a few weeks before I felt like it was all out of my system, and I started feeling healthier and better and more productive and more myself, and now I actually decline weed when offered because I like my sobriety. Mama Ganja taught me a lot, and she’s taught me all she can, and no I have moved on.

Like seeing a young kid take up smoking cigarettes - how depressing

It stems from a conflict of need and want from what I understand.

The need for a national id and the refusal of the citizens for a national id. There was a lot of controversy about the SSN because it could be used as an id and the people didn’t want that being so privacy conscious, so they made the numbering system simple and that card fragile to show and dissuade that it isn’t a good id to get the SS passed.

But of course, there’s still a want/need for some kind of unified id across the nation - so it was used anyway

And thus we have a terrible id system: flimsy, deterministic, and mostly-unchangable

If you know the social security number of someone born in your hospital in the same day, it’s likely your ssn’s are right next to each other and could be guessed

At this point, I don’t think there would be much resistance to a national id, and it would be great for an update that is both securely random, and changeable so that leaking your SSN isn’t such a crazy risk, having it in a laminated card with a chip and electronic signature even better.

Some advice that has taken me over a decade to learn myself:

There are no rules, the titles are made up, the responsibilities and requirements do no matter.

Get what you can from your job, and once you get something do your Best even if that best sucks, and stay until you have gotten what you want out of the job, or realize you can’t or don’t want to do it anymore, and then start again doing something else.

Don’t ever limit yourself thinking you need to “level up” or something needs to get unlocked.

Learn by doing, try your best, you will make things that suck sometimes, but as you do more and more you should be making things better.

Off the top of my head

Potentially odeysee, peertube, or maybe even twitch, more likely I could see subscription platforms like patreon and nebula taking over

Potentially something entirely new, I don’t know

Reddit did that and then instantly multiple serious competitors began to siphon off their power users both out of principle and practicality, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

YouTube i think understands to not cross the line because if they no longer have a monopoly on mid to long form content their golden goose dies. People are already on edge after a long sequence of attacks against non-premium users.

Personally, If they do do that, and at least some amount of the channels I care about move to a different platform, I’ll happily move with them and cancel my YouTube premium.

I fucking hate Spring.

The quickest way to get a team of 10 contractors to turn 100 lines of basic code from a decent engineer into 2k, with 50 janky vulnerable dependencies, that needs to be babied with customized ide’s and multi-minute+ build times and 60m long recorded meetings.

Fuck Spring.