The average American feels an unmet need for connection. Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug. For a few minutes anyway. You don’t get the benefits of a real connection, just the dopamine. Pretty soon you feel worse, and the best way to stop feeling bad is to hit refresh or keep scrolling. I’m glad we’re finally looking at the consequences of social media for kids, then we can look at what it does to adults.

Also let’s remember how it was originally marketed: You start with the dose that matches your smoking habit, 18 or 24mg of nicotine per bottle, and then work your way towards 0%, and then you can just give it up. It’s how I quit smoking. I am pretty sure that few years of vaping was safer for me than the next 40 (well probably a lot less) of smoking would be.

I have that job now. It’s OK. I miss developing my skillset, being on a cutting edge, having meetings even. I’ve automated the tiny bits of my job away. So I do a side job (well, a couple) and read novels in my time at work, today I sat in the park over an hour just reading a book his afternoon.

Hoping to get my own business going again so I can sit at my house all day instead tho

Unless they’re parked legally I just push them over, away from the sidewalk. And someone else has started as well! They do a decent job of coming to get them and put them somewhere allowed, all in a row. But the app requires you to take geostamped photos so they have proof their riders are just putting them in the middle of the sidewalk and walking away, and they don’t care.

Flipside, they’re hella nice to grab to work if my car is down or if it’s just nice, and you could techically get across my entire city on them (stopping to swap I assume) so there’s a bit of democratization about them, but you’d be dumb to try that.

They should be free if they’re going to be letting them leave tomorrow’s e-waste on our sidewalks. Maybe we could all pay for them together somehow idk

The point of capitalism isn’t “make a widget/sell the widget/to a customer” anymore, it’s “create market value/sell the value/shareholders are the entire point.” The widgets are just a prop in a way, the customers an abstraction. If it’s making money, if it’s growing above 3.5, we worship it. If it’s growing at thousands of percent, then it’s a god who cannot be stopped. Everything else just supports this - government, social programs, people’s life and death and joy in between - that’s all an abstraction. Shareholder value is the only thing that matters.

This is why we must restrain capitalism with regulation, but it’s too late, it’s metastasized into its final form now.

They do have influence tho, and the average Boomer Betty Jane doesn’t take time to wonder if they’re legit comments, her brain’s mirror neurons automatically integrate this and compare her beliefs to it, invoking a deep and lengthy reconciliation process, all of which she’s unaware of. This is how community norms are changed, alternate realities exist. Which is all to say, the internet was a bad idea, we know that now.

The disease is late stage capitalism, the symptom is a mad dash to trade our natural resources for energy and pollution. The mad dash will continue as long as we’re bleeding humanity to keep the shareholders high and dry.

There is a theological debate happening for the soul of the country happening, and there has been for centuries. You can not want that to be true, but I find the more effective solution is to recognize that it’s there and try to empower the good ones to go in and have the conversations I most certainly am not going to have. Let them go argue about it on my behalf. Challenge laws using that strategy. We need the religions that have sway here to be good, friendly, just religions because they have real sway - the catholic schism has not been this pronounced in modern memory and it’s good the Vatican is issuing wholehearted decrees about very specific things and people. This comment was about Pete Hegseth, by the way, telling people he prayed to God for the violent destruction of his enemies. Yeah go Mr. Pope, tear that up. I’m here for it.

Only during specific times of the year, it’s a supplement not a main diet. If you notice your colony doesn’t have enough honey for the winter, or it’s a new colony, or needs medicated, then yes. Otherwise they should be eating their own stored honey made the way they like it.

“Letting the perfect get in the way of the good.”

Most people can’t stop working and/or travel to DC for endless protests, but they can go out on a Saturday afternoon.

If that’s the least someone can do, don’t tell them not to.

Yeah. There’s actually good evidence we were happier when we had a small choice of partners who we grew up with and then had to select from. Divorce rates were lower because people tried harder to make it work. Today we have the illusion of an endless scroll worth of partners so it’s easier to throw in the towel and start again, looking for that storybook romance Disney et al promised us.

Jellyfish are the ocean’s condoms. These are the ocean’s big punchy balloon things. Either way Spongebob is having a good weekend.

As the old saying goes anyway

You can’t put a shareholder in jail, they’re the entire point of the system gestures broadly

Yeah but the climate change wars will not go the way the Americans think they will. It’ll topple itself by sheer virtue of its geographic size once the real shit hits the fan, and the former allies will be there with puppet warlords ready to carve up the interior.

Is how I’m putting that in my “looking for in retirement” section of the ol’ Grindr profile

I am envious of shorter people sometimes, that just sounds like a DIY waterboarding situation for my 6’2 ass, but you make it sound really nice

I had one disable my car in rush hour traffic in another city on a roadtrip, they had no way to do anything to get me back up and running. I assume this is for those kinds of cases. I was taking up a lane on the interstate with a cop staring at me, trying to hum the little fucker back to life while a tow truck came.

And now they’re the only one banned from it.

That’s not the vibe the company has been giving so far. Their staff is way more philosopher heavy than MBA heavy. I am planning on their morality being flushed away if/when an IPO happens, because shareholder supremacy cancels out anything else. But so far, they’ve been an interesting case.

I know folks, my boss and his family, who - if it doesn’t come from a box, powder, and/or plastic bag, will not be eating it. It’s really sad and I eat whole food in front of him all the time in hopes…