As for my own opinion - I fully agree not to ditch it right now, unless you are super privacy-concerned.

If you are, and if you think Mozilla is a lost cause, then please, as a community, get together and organise a body that is financially and legally able to carry a FLOSS browser with its own web engine. Not saying this to be snarky or as a gotcha, I am just somewhat irritated by some people saying to ditch Firefox to then say the alternative is a Firefox fork with a team way too small to handle what is needed to maintain a browser project going into the future, if they couldn’t build on the upstream code.

Because if you don’t organise such an organisation, including eventually financially giving to that group if you have the resources, Mozilla will remain in the ambivalent position of trying to balance markets and ideals, with less and less of a bargaining chip on the ‘ideals’ side - and the web will continue to be further and further dominated by non-free software trying to make web standards more proprietary.

I mean, national weapons proliferation? That’s really not a concern with modern reactor tech, and they should know that. The article ignores the last 50 years of advancement in reactor design to present their arguments, and that really undermines their credibility.

The problem is: In real life, most nations want weapons potential as an added bonus to their expensive civil nuclear programs. This connects to the “Takes too long to build” and “Expensive” points.

Nuclear waste is also something, that even though ideas exist in spades, no one seems to have been able to solve. So I wonder: What are the real world hurdles, that have prevented all the talk of “we just need breeder reactors” or something similar, that I have been hearing for many years now, to manifest? Is the tech maybe not as easily implemented as thought? Is the cost/reward ratio too bad, so it would again connect to the expensive point?

Thing is: I am not fundamentally against Nuclear as part of a power mix, with climate change being the most pressing reality. But I think it’s often presented as better as it is in the real world by people that are highly intelligent and knowledgeable in the basic physics and theoretical engineering parts - but then usually don’t have answers for why, then, even states that don’t have large anti-nuclear movements don’t use it often, in real world circumstances.

Wenn das der Führer wüsste!

It’s fascinating, because the people behind him are genuine grifters and/or delusional ideologues, he can’t even make proper politics in the interest of capitalists. (Just in the interests of some individual capitalists, against the interests of national capital accumulation).

I know that this is the argument, and I agree in principle (no inherent worth), but people tend to forget: Money laundering, buying black market goods online, supporting illegal organisations internationally and speculating on something are technically some kind of worth. That’s why it still never crashed out to 0, imo.

As someone who was interested in Bitcoin at its very beginning (sometimes I wonder what kind of arsehole I would be now if I hadn’t lost my wallet back then long before the stuff was worth anything) - it took quite some time from its inception to cryptobros being a cultural phenomenon everywhere on the net. So the creation itself may be a bit too early.

But I think your point is still very much valid.

That actually sounds very much like my own motivation structure, and I had a very similar story of how school went for me. Add to that phenomena like me being able to actually care for myself and rapidly improving in just everyday tasks while I was in a relationship vs. now, where I can’t bring myself to get motivated to do basic self-care any more.

Not OP, but one thing that is kind-of a luxury here is maple syrup, which I buy infrequently as a treat - but so far, I had always bought the cheapest (US) variant I found here in Europe. Seeing that I buy it so infrequently anyway, I will go for a more premium Canadian one for sure next time I buy some.

Good luck, dealing with procrastination is hard, but it definitely is doable!

Oh and was it genki by chance that you tormented because lets just say I’m aware of there being torrents for it

Sadly, I genuinely don’t remember, was around 2010 or so, so quite a while back.

Oh, back then I totally also used… some websites I found on google. And, uhm… I think I remember printing out a torrented professional Japanese handbook, making a fancy folder to put it in and then… never actually using it. :D

As you can see, teenage/young adult me was very realistic and very committed!

All us former or present weebs that once learned Hiragana, Katakana, maybe 5 words and phrases, and basically nothing else, understand. (And the people actually speaking Japanese, too)

It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.

That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.

That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).

Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.

EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.

This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

Oh, neat, I remember borrowing money from friends to buy one shortly after release, and spending many months repaying it. My main thought process, besides it being a cool PC, was “the higher the statistics, the better the outlook for Linux adoption”. :D

Can barely believe it’s been three years already.

Something good keeps getting better, thank you all for your work!

The US is almost 250 years old by now, but your point still holds true.

He’s also been shown to be ridiculously susceptible to flattery and pomp, two things Moscow can provide in spades, with little cost to themselves. He also seemingly genuinely believes, that there is nothing more to politics but raw self-interest and primitive power displays, when there’s a reason your edgy teenage friend didn’t stumble upon some higher wisdom when claiming that about the world.

Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!

As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.

The knowledge of Pluto causes autism, clearly it is an elder God cognitihazard.