I remember one old vet that used to show up every day as soon as the bar would open for his daily fix… It got to the point the bar refused to serve him

So he’d go to this bar during business hours to drink. And this went on to the point where they stopped serving him? Something is missing from the middle of this story…

VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.

One of the motivations from the comics doesn’t make sense anymore. Remember that Death revived Thanos because she thought it was unjust that more people are living now than have ever died.

That’s one of those cool sounding factoids that people used to throw around but which is now pretty well debunked. They _couldn’t _ go with that for the movies.

I love that title and have read it a hundred times. But I wish the writing didn’t veer into archaic high-falutin’ language like it does. Some realism and modernity really added something to Thanos in the movies.

He likes killing, and he likes thinking of himself as s benefactor who is just so much smarter than everyone else that he’s the only one who sees the solution, who can rise above petty emotions and do what needs to be done. Sure he’s killing trillions, but only to save them from something worse that would have happened (he reasons).

Most people wouldn’t mind killing someone if there was a moral justification for it and they could get away with it. Just look at how people react to videos of someone stealing a bike: everyone in the thread is ready to literally murder that person. Because they think they have justification. Well, Thanos thinks he has a justification too. And he’s murdered millions up close already - not with a snap - there’s no going back now. In order for his mass murder to be excusable there has to be a larger purpose to it. There has to be.

He’s a knot of different psychoses mixed together. Primarily narcissism plus homicidal tendencies. He’s fully insane, if that did not come across somehow. Totally pinched off from the rest of reality, living in his own self-reinforcing loop. He’s got a lot of power and that makes him more and more immune to reality intruding on his fantasies.

Logic doesn’t come into it. Not only could he have created more resources… he didn’t even think that populations would just grow again and bring everything back to the same place. No he’s blindly playing out the track he’s on. The only way out is forward, because he can’t justify anything behind him otherwise. When the universe isn’t grateful for what he did, and his fantasy of being the benefactor falls apart, notice that he is ready to destroy the entire universe and become god, because how else can he escape the crushing blame for what he’s done.

We’re living in an age where entertainers mirror their audience. They aren’t about escape from reality or ideals to dream of. They are about wallowing in reality. They excuse the sorry condition their audience is in. Frankly, I think they occupy a brain space that used to be occupied by having friends. We have all had stupid friends we sit around and do stupid shit with, right? Well, not anymore. Now you just watch this idiot on your phone. It’s depressing as hell.

Kind of the right thing thing for the wrong reasons. Helping people be able to function is of course the goal of a health system.

But like with everything, the government exists not to look after the interests of the citizenry but to create the right conditions for business.

I think I first figured that out when I was learning about the governments’ historic treatment of native Americans. They really only sent the army out to the frontier when there was a major business venture being harmed by unrest.

Cool, I see you’ve thought it through. Perhaps abuse survivors appreciate risks that they can control. Anyway it’s certainly a physically active and very stimulating sensory experience that gets people outdoors so I can’t imagine that’s a bad place to start in terms of mental health and healing. Wish you the best of luck with it.

I think yours is a wonderful story. SCUBA is amazing, and you can get deeper and deeper (no pun intended) into it and the gear.

As far as its therapeutic value, what are your thoughts on having people who have suffered a trauma engage in a sport that has serious safety risks? You need to keep your wits about you under the water and mistakes can be harmful. I’m glad this seems to have worked well for you but I wonder if it might be risky for a broad population.

What kind of hardware does this require?

I continue to draw inspiration from this scene. Even in surprising contexts.

At my work for example, where we develop software for consumers, people are very inclined to this A/B test mindset: “let’s try something and see if it tests well with users.” They act like all the answers are out there and we just need to try a million things until we discover them.

I feel differently. I think we should fixate on big things we KNOW would be valuable to our users, no matter how difficult they may be to accomplish, and COMMIT ourselves to those. If we set our best people on something it WIILL get done and we must have a mindset of MAKING it get done, not just “seeing if” it can be done.

Everyone always says “oh that’s so hard to do and we would invest a lot of effort before we could A/B test it and see if it’s valuable.” So they “try” small shit and look at the numbers, throw most of what they build away, and congratulate themselves for being “data oriented” and ”failing fast” and then they wonder why the product and business are suffering over the long term.

We need solutions that look like Lemmy in the public space to _decentralize_ power so we don’t run into this type of problem. I don’t think there’s a magical structure that fixes everything, and I don’t even necessarily think that capitalism has to be the dominant economic system in play, I just think we need to come up with ideas on how to reduce the power of those at the top.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is exactly what we are at Lemmy to do. Where capitalism produced Reddit, communitarianism produced Lemmy. The best effort of both systems is now live and the two are competing head to head. We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.

See, above:

In short, people tend to be motivated by profit

Only in a society that commodifies your existence and success based on the wealth you generate/hold Unless we’re changing the definition of profit to status

This is what I’m rebutting. So you see, it’s not shifting the goalposts at all. It’s staying on the topic of this comment chain. You trying to claim that humans have been majority peaceable is in fact drifting from the topic. If we’ve been majority peaceable but with plenty of profit oriented violence, that’s all that’s relevant.

The debate is whether profit appears with the advent of modern capitalism. I said people have been raiding each other for profit since the beginning of time. You failed to say anything that invalidates this.

Yay thank you for saying something instead of empty judgments. I think most of what you had to say is actually beside the point at issue, and to show how I’ll unpack this segment, which has a lot to say about this topic and what I am and am not saying.

every member of the group had access to the same nutrition and that evidence of violent skeletal trauma is significantly less prevalent than after the advent of agriculture.

Let’s go piece by piece.

every member of the group

Raiding is an inter group behavior not an intra group behavior so if this was meant to say “look humans were egalitarian they didn’t raid” it doesn’t say this at all.

evidence of violent skeletal trauma is significantly less prevalent than after the advent of agriculture

I believe this very much supports my point that violent raiding was a way of life. You said: there’s more violence after agriculture. Well, agriculture was the first time that anyone had valuable assets collected in one place: at harvest time. Agriculture freed up specialists to create items of value. More to take.

Of course hunter gatherers exhibit less raiding: first of all dramatically fewer people are supportable without agriculture so there were simply fewer groups available to raid. And hunter gatherers live largely hand to mouth so there is no stockpile to plunder.

Naturally as soon as there is something to raid, you see the evidence of that.

So what about anything you said do you think contradicts the claim that humans have commonly raided one another for spoils throughout history? Are you going to tell me that slavery wasn’t a thing next?

I think I need you to come to a point instead of just flashing your credentials. You’ve offered a lot of facts from the record but these must be interpreted. It’s that interpretation that makes you an archaeologist, not the shovel.

My claim is that raiding other humans and taking their things was common, because humans want something for nothing and will exploit each other to get it - long before capitalism and conspicuous consumption made it fashionable. I would also offer you the bear that eats the honeycomb, the snake that eats the eggs. A cow mows down grass because it gains more energy by doing so than it spends: ergo profit. Everything is about profit and most of it is savage taking.

Someone above wanted to claim that profit orientation is a modern aberration driven by capitalism’s status driven pressure cooker and that’s just garbage.

Your criticism is insubstantial and dismissible.

There’s a full-court press to discredit empathy as an ethos. So much so that even casual blogs and news outlets that don’t even have a horse in the race will still entertain the topic because it gets them the clicks.

In short: there’s a black market of people who don’t care whether it’s stolen and for whom that might even be an added glamorous thrill.

Come on. Even animals are motivated by profit: getting more out of something than you put into it. Profit doesn’t have to mean “shareholder dividends.”

It’s so naive to claim that it’s only society’s setup and status pressures that make us care about getting better things for less effort. As if that hasn’t been the aim of every individual AND every society since the dawn of time.

The easiest way used to be to just plunder people. Take their shit. Now it’s your shit. Easier and faster than making the shit. Woohoo.

Then trade entered the chat, and it was the first time that people started to think there might actually be a better way: that both parties could walk away from an exchange better off, and that it might be in each of their interests to keep the other alive.

You mean it’s not legally binding when Marco Rubio says “tch-tch-tch… now don’t you do that.”

Arizona, too. Not even one of the true asshole-of-the-country states.