I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)
The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?
I have all sorts of problems in my personal life. Mental and physical health are terrible. The few friends I have moved to other timezones and have jobs that make it harder and harder for me to even talk with them online much anymore. I’m too depressed and anxious to go out and get a job or meet people. I’m too depressed and unfocused to try to work on the art that interests me.
But the worst of it all is a feeling that even if I fixed all my personal problems, what’s the point when the world is this shitty and keeps getting worse? The planet is rapidly becoming unlivable and we’re never going to do anything about it because the power structure depends on the things that are causing the problem. People have less and less control over our lives as corporations gain more and more power through consolidation and technology.
I’ve heard people say that the world just isn’t suited to accommodate some kinds of people, but I don’t see how it accommodates ANYONE who isn’t rich and powerful. I think most people just do better at suppressing that feeling than me. Is anyone really healthy and happy working some awful job for low pay so they can just barely afford to live in an apartment they don’t own and eat food that’s slowly killing them?
As far as vegetables go, there are some specific ones that bother me then some more general textural annoyances. One of the specific examples that comes up a lot are non-processed tomatoes. Fine with sauces and ketchup and stuff like that, but actual tomatoes smell weird, they ooze, they’ve got seeds, they’re squishy, etc. This has been kind of a big problem because sooooo many sandwiches and things feature tomato as a major part of the flavor of the dish. I could ask them for no tomato, but then usually all that’s left is like lettuce and some other lower flavor ingredients. At that point I might as well just get something else. Just in general if I have to get rid of some ingredients from something I don’t know enough about what to replace them with to still end up with something that’s supposed to taste good together.
More generally, textures that make the food harder to eat, like there being tough/rigid bits, especially if they’ve got long shapes can be a problem. We get this spring mix for salads, and I kinda tolerate it, but the stems on some of the leaves can be really annoying. Green beans, snap peas, etc also have a similar problem, especially when they have those stringy bits. Then there are things that are just unpleasantly squishy. Then there’s some stuff I can kind of tolerate in some dishes, like bell peppers in a fajita, but I’d pick around them if they were in something I had to more actively select bites of like a stir fry.
It can be a bit tough to explain all the little ins and outs of it all. I kinda want to be able to find new varied/healthy things to eat and actually enjoy, but it’s been tough searching for things that don’t run into some random problem like these.
Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.
It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.
Biden, and any US president, is pro-military industrial complex. Anything that lets them sell more weapons and increase US hegemony is what their ideology is.
Oppressive systems passively inflict violence on the oppressed. Artificial lack of access to basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare hurts or even kills people. Getting over policed gets people hurt or killed.
The absence of war isn’t the same thing as the absence of conflict. The conflict is built into the structure of a hierarchical society. It’s just only felt by some. A war brings the conflict to the surface to make those who the system supports feel the pain of those who it does not.
The government could give in and create a more just society for everyone and the conflict would be resolved. The oppressed giving in only benefits those in power. They go back to passively experiencing systemic violence.
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Submitting to an oppressive government is not peace.
One of these “sides” could unilaterally peacefully end the conflict. For the other side choosing “peace” just means submitting to living under an occupying force as eternal second class citizens. insert mlk quote here.
Eh, the way it was written I wouldn’t have read it as sarcasm. Text and tone yada yada. That said, I’ve definitely seen people who seriously think like this.
Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.