DreamerofDays

They also say to do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. They say lots of things, many of them contradictory.

I think your advice of intentionally setting aside time is wise, though. I believe that too often we take for granted that things will just happen, and also overestimate the chilling effect of “not being spontaneous”.

All meaning is constructed meaning, and, to quote Shakespeare, “there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

We decide, collectively, and as individuals, what is positive and what is negative. We invent for ourselves, whole cloth or adopting from our elders, meaning in life, the universe, and everything.

That doesn’t mean they are without worth. The world is altered daily through the things people imagine. Money is an invention, its value existing in the collective imaginations of those who use it. Maps are not the lands they represent, but their cartography influences where people live, work, and travel. Numbers and maths are inventions— languages invented to describe the universe and its movings, but the universe moves without needing to know them…

… nevertheless, with those invented languages we orbit distant planets with artificial satellites, and create the wonderful bit of nonsense that allows us to communicate here.

We choose to find meaning in the world, and then we choose the meaning we find there. Ultimately everything else can be winnowed away, but that. I believe we have value because I choose to believe we have value, and I weigh the good of the world with the bad because I actively choose to continue to see both. It isn’t easy all the time, and it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. But it’s what I want for the world, and what I want for me.

That seems like a convenient excuse for him to bear less, or none of, the guilt for his actions.

Does Agent Smith have autonomy?

Another way of thinking about it:

Numbers offer a sense of scale. As numbers go further left from the decimal, they get bigger and bigger. Likewise, as they go right from the decimal, they get smaller and smaller.

If I’m looking with just my eyes, I can see big things without issue, but as things get smaller and smaller, it becomes more and more difficult. Eventually, I can’t see the next smallest thing at all.

But we know that smaller thing is there— I can use a magnifying glass and see things slightly smaller than I can unaided. With a microscope, I can see smaller still.

So I can see the entirety of a leaf, know where it begins and ends, even though I can’t, unaided, see the details of all its cells. Likewise, you can see the entirety of the line you drew, it’s just that you lack precise enough tools to measure it with perfect accuracy.

so I just feel like I should be able to live my life and not have to worry about all this. Why can’t I?

Are you seeking permission or explanation?

I hold similar views(obviously), but I find something comforting in it. Like, rather than living in a ruined paradise lost by us or our parents, we live in a complicated world where we share the work of trying to make something better with our ancestors.

(Of course, we also have to figure out how to do that, and, in a complicated world, that can be challenging and lead to conflict)

More likely it was when they were kids and without adult responsibilities, or narrow/whitewashed views of the past(as from stories and shows from before their birth)

You are so wound up in a rote shutting down of OP that you aren’t listening.

• Nazi = antisemite
• antisemite ≠ nazi

One can be antisemitic and not be a nazi. The pogroms that harried my ancestors were not practiced by nazis. The expulsions of Jews from various countries over the centuries were not practiced by nazis. The “no blacks, no dogs, no Jews” signs my grandfather saw were not put up by nazis.

Antisemitism is a thing we’ve been living with for a long, long time. I would appreciate it if you didn’t condescend to tell us how you know better about who does or can hate us.

The current situation is certainly making that clear.

It’s an uncomfortable time, certainly. The left seems to think we’re monsters, and the right has a weird fetishisation thing going on. Neither one feels good, and it ends up feeling very isolating.

A nazi is an antisemite, but an antisemite is not necessarily a Nazi. Downpunxx never used the word “Nazi”, and the two are not the same. Plenty of non-nazis over the years have persecuted or tried to kill us. Hitler didn’t invent the idea.

Additional points for having the panels work according to the original scene.

Solidarity and ownership… fellowship… it’s beautiful.

That this collection of people who are so often omni-belligerent have found common cause is wild to me

It’s not like C-level folks aren’t cashing in well before their companies are profitable. They put on executive clothes and live executive lifestyles, either because it’s what they want or because it’s part of the theatre put on for investors.

I feel confident in the assumption that most users wouldn’t begrudge a company a modest profit off of the content they produce uncompensated on their sites. But it’s an unwritten social contract, and therefore ripe for abuse.

Some of it is born of users not realizing the value of what they give to the corporations— their data for mining, their engagement for attracting and maintaining even more users to the site. Some of it is born of the explicit contracts being written solely by one side(the execs).

This.

Put more explicitly:

• 3rd party apps bring more people to the site, or keep them there longer.

• Those people create content in the forms of posts proper and comments— hell, even down to just voting— that feeds the site engagement for users through 1st party interfaces(the ones getting ads), keeping them there longer, and seeing more ads.

• Better moderation tools help mods keep online communities healthy, and the kinds of places we are happy to spend unhealthy amounts of time on.

Many players make an orchestra. Not everyone is a soloist, and some are just hanging around for their moment to strike the gong.

A healthy community is going to have lurkers.

Dropout (via Sam) also explicitly stated around the time Netflix was rumbling about cracking down on account sharing that they’re cool with it. So if you can afford to pay for the subscription, that’s great – it helps support some fantastic content and the people who make it. If you can’t afford to pay, but have a friend or family member who has it and is willing to share(or are the person in the position to share), that’s also good.

Most, I would wager, weren’t motivated to do it for Reddit. They were motivated to do it for their communities that happened to be on the site.

Moderation— particularly volunteer based moderation— tends to be about the bonds moderators have and develop with the users they interact with every day. Admins are a mixed bag: some of them may have sympathy towards the mods, but ultimately their livelihood is tied to the company line.

A lot of the internet is built on free labor. A lot of that we have been willing to let slide. That willingness ends when the quantum of respect doesn’t get paid for that labor. I don’t know how someone continues moderating on Reddit at this point; barring a big turnaround(and possibly the ouster of current management), it feels like the move should be to migrate their communities elsewhere.