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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • According to legend, Alexander the Great came to visit the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. As told by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my light.”

    One day while he was eating a frugal dish of lentils, he was challenged by the philosopher Aristippus, who, for his part, led a golden life as he was one of the king’s courtiers. Aristippus scornfully told him: “See, if you learned to crawl before the king, you wouldn’t have to settle for rubbish like this vulgar dish of lentils!” Diogenes replied: “If you’d learned to make do with lentils, you wouldn’t have to crawl before the king!”

    Big dick energy. Love this guy.


  • Your heart rate. Your step count. Your location. Your searches. Your browser history. Your call history. Your contacts. Your transactions. Your credit history. Your medical history. This is data that you didn’t choose to create or share, but that you exhaust in the day-to-day things you do.

    Surveillance capitalism has grown too unfathomably huge and ingrained to choose not to share this data; that would be akin to checking out of modern life wholesale in a lot of ways. Guarding this data takes not only the realisation that it needs guarding, but changing law and culture such that the parties that have to have all that data to provide you with services cannot take it from you to sell.






  • I agree that alternative app stores are definitely a boon and I can’t wait for the EU to nail Apple to the wall over dragging their feet on that. Competition is good and that 30% fee monopoly is bullshit.

    There are iOS terminal clients (I like Termius). The ROM thing, yeah… I installed /e/OS on my Fairphone 4 just for the privacy aspect, but functionally it’s not better or worse than what came in the box. There might be reasons to do it but utility-wise I don’t very well see the point in this day and age.

    I hadn’t thought of the developer license requirement to run your own software, I personally don’t do that but I can see it being a deal breaker. Thanks for your thoughts. :)




  • Seconded. It’s so baffling to me that we have seemingly forgotten the purpose of the economy. It is supposed to be there to benefit our lives and instead it is costing us everything. Some slave away on their knees building streets and others waste the precious few laps around the sun staring at lights in a box. We have the technology to give everyone enough such that the average person would only have to work a few hours.

    For a comparison in a very real sense:

    Prior to the Neolithic revolution, which put an end to our nomadic past and turned our species into agriculturalists, it took more than 50 hours of labor (mostly gathering wood) to “buy” 1,000 lumen hours of light. By 1800, it took about 5.4 hours. By 1900, it took 0.22 hours. By 1992, 1,000 lumen hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.

    We’ve put the cart before the horse on an unfathomable scale. A good life for all (current humans and future) is within reach but the economic system that has created this bounty has grown out of control and serves nothing but itself anymore.



  • There’s a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.

    In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we’re spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).

    Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I’m sure Big Oil won’t ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.

    So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn’t have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I’m just some dumb cunt.