herrcaptain

You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.

I definitely recognize that video! I'm sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.

As to your comment itself - don't worry about being "too much" with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I'm used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I've also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.

It's late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @herrcaptain@geekdom.social ) or straight up shoot me an email ( herrcaptain@proton.me ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.

This is fucking precious.

As someone who adores rats, I absolutely hate how short their lives are. I'd love to keep some as pets but I couldn't emotionally handle having my heart broken every 2 to 3 years when one of them dies.

Oh, I know. I was being facetious in my earlier comment. For the record, I'm vastly in favor of legal weed and occasionally partake in it myself.

I'm truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.

I'm with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.

I mean, I'm so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth's population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world's difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.

I'm now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don't have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It's still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It's still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife's family to fall back on and have "temporarily" been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can't remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.

This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I'm getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don't want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that's the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.

We've all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.

With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I'm certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya'll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don't own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)

The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you'd never know it. They've gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It's a tale as old as time.

I like this but I can see them leaning into it and taking it as a badge of honor.

I see where you're coming from but that feels dangerously close to a certain other word I'd rather not use. I'm also not sure of the etemology of that word, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out it has something in common with the other one.

I've been trying my best for a while now, friend. I'm also trying to normalize treating having too much wealth as embarrassing. Like, it should fully be seen as a character flaw to have more money than anyone could ever use. I'm far from advocating for enforced equality, but there should be some limit to wealth upon which exceeding it is viewed as gross by the rest of us plebs. Those parasites certainly shouldn't be fawned over like so many people do now.

True. I literally think of that most days when I see older folks irrationally freak out at the smallest inconvenience. Not that this happens to most old folks, it's just really remarkable when you do witness it. It's really sad that they can't control it, just too bad about the ones who gained power and used it to fuck everyone else over.

Oh, I get it. I definitely didn't mean to imply that this doesn't fit here - just that the situation isn't quite as demoralizing as many posts in this community.

He did a good thing and was handsomely rewarded for it by others. The situation in question wasn't directly related to his financial plight. I'm sure I'm over-complicating it though. I'm just less bummed out by this story than I'm used to on this sub. Sooooo ... yay?

Why not both? Yeah, dams cause continued ecological damage and I don't think we should be building more of them, but let's leave them in place until they can be replaced with proper renewables.

But yeah, you're 100% correct that that shit should have been nationalized yesterday. Unfortunately all it takes is a conservative-majority (low-c conservative for an international audience) to re-privatize it and let their buddies buy it at a discount. That seems to be what's happening globally. I'm starting to think the best way forward for most things related to the common good are the formation of non-profits or worker's co-ops but that's a non-starter in something as large-scale as baseline power generation.