I definitely noticed that it's pretty seamlessly replaced Reddit for me at this point. It's been a decent source of stuff to read and there's enough of it now that I don't feel like I'm just seeing the same thing repeatedly.
I like reading articles and discussions, so it's nice to be able to have that without propping up some big toxic company.
I've begun blocking their communities in my accounts and I plan to defederate from them when i get home. Fuck em. Place is infested with exploding heads anyway.
Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren't in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they're in it to make money. Their actual 'business' is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.
You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.
Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there's no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we'll basically just suck it up because it's still healthier than soda.
Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.
The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.
What's it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?
All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there's a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we're there, where do we go?
If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who'd be on the losing end of that decision?
I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people's consciousness around labor. I'd honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there's anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it's the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.
We spent the five years training the model. Manually. With Captcha data.
Now we're teaching it not to run traffic signals, hit motorcycles or busses, or try to drive up stairs.