Not talking about obvious things like crime.
I mean things that people just accept as part of life.
Things everyone does, but when you really think about it, it actually makes no sense.
Buy a thing, it stops working, throw the thing away, buy a new thing.
Seems like nobody fixes shit anymore. And yes, I know, companies make things as unfixable as possible. But I’m a weirdo who would rather pay a lot to fix a thing than throw it into the ocean and buy a new thing.
My wife’s 4K monitor died a few months ago. They’d been pondering a new one anyway, so that forced the decision.
So I took the broken one to work and asked my electrician buddy if he could run a multimeter over it.
One 8p capacitor later and now I have a 4K monitor as well.
I have one of those digital measurement calipers. I dropped it and the screen went wonky. I took it apart, one of the zebra connectors had moved a bit. Put it back in place, put the thing back together and I’m back to measuring with it. Didn’t cost anything except maybe 30 minutes of time.
I love the feeling of fixing shit.
I got old-school calipers with a vernier scale because I was sick and tired of replacing the coin cell batteries in the digital ones.
If you buy a decent digital one, they actually turn off when you press the off button, and the battery lasts a long time. The cheap ones just turn the display off, and the batterty dies like every week.
These days, even if you pay more you still risk getting something that isn’t “decent” a lot of the time anyway, and I’m not willing to pay a lot more for something like Mitutoyo that actually has brand reputation.
Yeah I have like 8 different ones. I have a fancy Mitutoyo in a nice wooden box that I use on special occasions and a whole bunch of others that are more or less beat up. I use the digital one’s for quick checks on stuff like brake disc thickness, where it doesnt matter if its off by 0.05mm etc
We moved from repairing things to replacing things in one generation.
Probably half a generation even. When I was a kid fixing things was normal. I remember when all the small electronic shops started to disappear. Only to be replaced by mobile phone screen switch shops lol.
Repair used to be a normal skill. Now it’s almost a niche hobby.
Haha yup. Either a hobby or a way to make youtube videos. The amount of channels where people just fix things and they have millions of views is a good sign… I just hope it evolves into people starting to think about this whole fixing of things and not just watch youtube videos.
That’s the strange part.
Millions of people watch repair videos, but far fewer actually repair things themselves.
Yup. But if only 10% of those people decide to go fix a thing, instead of buying a new one, I guess that’s a win.
When our clothes washer broke, we paid a local pro to repair it for almost the cost of a new one. It was worth it to us, and I’d rather pay a local worker for their labor than a big box store for a new appliance. This was several years ago, and fortunately it’s still working.
Yeah I do that a lot. Luckily I have tools and some skills so I can do a lot of fixing myself. My current clothes washing machine was given to me, the shock absorbers had let the liquids out. I put some new O-rings in and a bit of hydraulic fluid. Its been working fine for 3 years now lol.
Yeah this. People cuss at the price of repair sometimes being even higher than a new product (which is a valid criticism) but you’re still more likely to be supporting a local worker rather than some faceless megacorp (though probably any spare parts might come from a corp, but at least some of the labor is rewarded as is due)
Thanks also for reminding me: planned obsolescence.
https://repair.eu/ is basically the group fighting that. They’re a huge coalition pushing the EU to force companies to stop soldering everything and actually give us parts and manuals.
It’s less “ranting on YouTube” and more “lobbying for laws” so your next laptop doesn’t end up in a landfill just because of a $2 fuse.
What I hate is that as much as I try to repair things, I just can’t do it because of companies not giving a fuck.
My monitor has been regularly having major display glitches, and I think it’s due to a cold solder joint, but my monitor is just glued and welded together in such a way where if I tried fixing it, I’d crack the screen and make it even more useless, so now I just have to… get a whole new monitor.
If you don’t mind how it looks, as long as it works, check out James Channel on youtube. Dude cuts circuit boards with a angle grinder etc. Goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to be careful… as long as you know what and how to fix. And if you have a lot of hot glue.
Capitalism.
Now there are all kinds of things people think of when you say capitalism, the free market, democracy (for some reason), etc.
But I mean the idea that the guy that owns the means of production should get the value produced by labor.
If you boil it down to that, it’s kinda crazy. You want to start a company digging holes, but you don’t have enough money to buy a backhoe.
Fred has plenty of money and can afford a backhoe. He buys it and makes you a deal, you can use his backhoe and he will own the company, you go out and dig holes and he will pay you a couple bucks an hour.
Obviously he has to charge the people that want the holes dug more than he’s paying you to make it worth his while, and he has to recoup the money he spent on the backhoe in the first place.
Fred will never pay you enough to live and save up to buy your own backhoe. After a while he’s made back all the money it cost him to purchase the backhoe.
So now the situation is this. A customer wants a hole dug, you come and dig the hole, and Fred, who has done nothing and already recouped all the money he spent to purchase the backhoe, gets most of the money. And that arrangement just goes on forever. When Fred dies, Fred Jr will inherit that backhoe, Fred Jr will have never spent a dime for that capital, in fact Fred Jr will have had a very comfortable life paid for by the sweat of your labor digging holes.
Fred Jr will get most of the value of your labor for his whole life for doing nothing at all, just because he happened to be Fred’s son.
This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.
And very serious people (often paid by those billionaires) will be on the news (or replying to this very comment) telling you how this is just the only system that makes sense. But listen closely when they do, they will always say it’s good because of free markets, or competition, or democracy or something that is NOT capitalism. Capitalism rarely defends itself by talking about why it’s good for the rich guy that owns the capital to get all the value, it always misdirects you to something else, a free market or freedom just generally. The freedom to pick between 10 different ultra wealthy companies that own everything and work to make them even more wealthy for your entire life.
it continues to amaze me that we can cure diseases, go to the moon, reflect on all of human history, and still the “best” we can collectively achieve in societal progress is elevating a select few while crushing the majority underfoot. The means of repression differs from feudalism to capitalism to communism, but the underlying failure remains constant: someone benefits, most do not.
The dark triad personalities have been a part of humanity for a long time. They’ve had time to use all their tendencies to shape the thing only for them
Hmmm.
I’m a self employed IT consultant.
On the plus side, I pay nobody except insurance, fuel, tax etc
On the minus side my earning potential is limited to the hourly rate I earn fixing stuff.
Am I still a capitalist in this case?
No, you’re just an expert. They’ve always existed – a master blacksmith would make a decent living before capitalism, much better than the common serf. Nobody’s against highly talented hardworking people making more money than average, I think we all agree they deserve it.
The capitalist would be someone like you bribing the state government to create a new regulation that your profession requires a special license and your company is the only one in the state with the license and you hire in all your competitors at a wage 20% what you bill them out at. Then on your deathbed you donate a couple million for the local hospital and you go down in history as an American Hero.
That’s why there are some capitalists hate crony capitalism.
If I have a lot of rich friends who need IT support and I get exclusive deals with them, making it impossible for experts like you to get freelance deals, and practically force you to work for me for a wage, that’s capitalism. I don’t know anything about IT. I get all the contracts thanks to my connections. You do the job and get a fraction of what you would have gotten if you were able to freelance.
I worked as a conference interpreter and it works exactly like that. We cannot directly contact the clients. There are a few interpreter offices. Clients call them, they call us. They get half the payment for playing telephone.
Thank you for understanding and clearly explaining capitalism (spit).
“erm… but don’t you know that we tried ‘communism’ (marxism-leninism) which is the only possible alternative to capitalism and it didn’t work? this means that capitalism is natural and inevitable and nothing can change or else we’ll end up with a dictatorship that’ll kill millions of people! 🤓”
trying to figure out if you got downvoted because a .ml got mad or because a not-.ml has bad reading comprehension
Lemme know when you convince a critical mass of people to adopt communism and I’ll get right on board with that.
Best I can do is offer you a 3000 page manifesto on how much capitalism sucks and why communism is a great idea :^)
Not caring about digital privacy.
People trade their entire private life for slightly better convenience.
My brother continues to use TikTok despite knowing all about the creepy spying shit they do. This kind of lazy apathy is going to kill us all.
I get this, most people don’t care about intangible things that don’t have a clear and immediate impact. Like digital privacy or climate change.
If someone is invading their physical privacy it feels more urgent and real. And tbf, most people live their entire lives without noticing consequences of lack of digital privacy.
In America it’s gambling and gambling culture. It makes everything trashier and brings out the worst in people.
I agree. Throw in the influx of gambling apps and the commercials that come with them, and what was once a den of degeneracy has become a trending hobby.
And this is coming from someone who pays a lot of online poker (for fake money) and enjoys occasional trips to the casino. I just don’t bring more than I can afford to lose and I walk in assuming I won’t bring any of it home.
Yeah it’s like anything else, majority of people can control themselves and enjoy responsibly but a decent minority cannot and it ruins families, whether it’s gambling, drugs, sex work or something else.
Criminalizing the users makes things worse, but allowing corporations to make billions off of it also makes things worse.
They should do something like it’s not illegal but corporations are banned from being involved.
Like, if you wanna host poker night with a few buddies, sure why not. Once you start forming an LLC and applying for bank loans to build a casino, then that shouldn’t be allowed IMHO.
We should start betting more specifically about the oligarchs and their families. Put money down for a pregnancy to end in death, a cancer treatment to fail, a kid to fail an exam, just whatever unbelievably callous shit I can think of to get people paying attention.
Pledge of allegiance in
That one got to me at a young age. Got in trouble for it. I just one day realized that I wasn’t reciting a song, I was verbalizing a promise and that nobody had explained to me why before they taught me to do it.
Yeah it’s wierd shit. A pagan friend of mine always thought that words that you ritualize daily are the same thing as a spell
That’s the premise of a lot of spirituality, concentration & recitation. Makes you wonder which god asks for that daily pledge…
Talking to computers. With recent LLM craze it really rubs me the wrong way when people try to reason with an autocomplete as if it is another human being. I also am weirded by others talking to voice assistants like Alexa and using text to speech. Could never force myself to do it, and consider it a form of lunacy, to be honest.
It’s funny how quickly people started treating autocomplete like a person.
What I find most absurd about LLMs is the providers’ business model, since it fundamentally cannot function without stealing the work of others.
The few times I’ve tried using an LLM, when it fucks up I viciously berate it. Had one actually end a session because it interpreted one of my rants as threatening violence. I only told it to write an email to its CEO telling that person how shitty a product they produced.
I don’t remember who it was, some youtube person, who said that he talks to chagpt when he goes to sleep. Like he goes to bed and starts chatting with the bot until he falls asleep. Thats completely bonkers to me.
I find people who find this weird weird
Filing taxes.
That’s mostly a American society thing though :P
Where I am, the government sends you a paper that has the tax %, you give that to your employer and they take the amount from your pay and send it to the government. If you have deductions you fill out a form and send it to the government.
People accepting a system where you must calculate your own punishment if you do it wrong.
where you must calculate your own punishment if you do it wrong.
That’s thankfully a US-specific insanity, though.
That’s why I use filing software, preferably if free. Nobody can fuck up a W-2 when that’s all you have.
Paying for our basic needs to stay alive and countries.
Don’t wanna starve? Gotta pay. Wanna stay hydrated? Gotta pay. Wanna stay out of the cold and sleep soundly? Gotta pay. I mean, it’s not like food doesn’t just grow on trees. It’s not like water falls from the sky. It’s not like a basic home wasn’t being sold be sears in bulk.
And another thing. Countries, properties, states, provinces, etc. People draw an imaginary line that we can’t see and everything in that line is there’s that no one can touch or use. “No! This piece of dirt is mine! I will charge you if you take one speck of my dirt!”
Absolutely insane.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment but you are veering close to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox
You can buy a piece of land in bumfuck nowhere and try to live off it. Or you can join a community that tries to do that (more realistic). There’s the whole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid thing
Problem is that most people want the conveniences of modern, globalist life, and many people don’t have a realistic choice.
Personally I try to find a balance between Buddhist non-attachment and making do with the life I got.
I get that we do need some restrictions on personal property. I wanna have a yard that I can do stuff on without someone trying to build a house 2 inches away from my back door or having a random person lay claim to my house.
I get that, but why countries? Why segregate two different people just because they speak a different language? Have a different culture? Sure, some bad apples might want to take advantage if we get rid of countries, but overall, I’d like to travel somewhere else where people do things differently instead of having to do passports, border guards giving me the third degree, and paying and paying and paying. We’re all part of this big rock floating in space. Why do we have to segregate each other?
but why countries?
For the same reason as personal property, just on a larger scale. You don’t want some rando to come and set up camp in your kitchen, so we draw lines on a map and say “this is your spot, you make the rules in your spot”. Similarly, we collectively don’t want some other group of randos to show up and tell us what clothes we’re allowed to wear, or that drunk-driving is suddenly allowed. So we draw lines on a map and say “this is our spot, where we make the rules”.
Of course, ideally, the whole world would agree on a reasonable set of laws and mode of administration, and countries wouldn’t be needed anymore. However, we’re pretty far off from that being possible. To put it on point: If we had no countries today, would you prefer the russian, Chinese, German or other set of laws and administration? How would you decide which to apply globally?
Yeah, I understand that. I just wish we didn’t need them in the first place. Like I said previously, we’re all floating on a giant rock in the middle of a giant void. It’s all we got for now. Why can’t we just live together and get along?
TIpping. Receptionists take crap all the time. Fire fighters risk their lives. Cooks slave in a hot kitchen. Garbage people take our garbage, and yet we chose to give extra money to the people who carry our food from the kitchen to our table.
In the U.S., saying “how are you?”every time we greet anyone. No one actually wants to know how anyone else is 99% of the time.
School shootings
Pretending there’s a magic, all-knowing man (Santa Claus) so children will behave.
It’s basically the first surveillance system people introduce to kids.
Until the parentheses, I thought you were talking about religion (and either way, same)
Flying across half the globe just to spend two weeks there for holidays.
Two weeks of escape followed by 50 weeks paying for it.
Holy cow, thank you. I have friends and family who are so entitled about travel and vacation it’s astonishing. They act like I’m the weirdo buzzkill for simply understanding that I can’t afford it.
I often fly to the opposite side of the world just to push some buttons. And in return I get these universal vouchers in digital form associated with my name, so that I can later exchange them for goods and services originating on the other side of the world.
Embalming our dead loved ones and burying them in a sealed box.
Seeing my grandmother’s stinking of preservative with visible stitching holding her mouth shut did not bring me peace or closure.
Compost my dead body, I promise you I will not miss it.
Funeral traditions are one of those things people rarely question.
But when you actually see it up close it can feel very unsettling.
Agreed. When I die, I want nature to feed on me as I has fed on it. Ideally I’d be buried with a bunch of nuts and seeds, and maybe a tree will use me as a nutrient source, but that’s gonna be a gamble and hard to ensure happens, so instead I’ll settle with being buried with a bunch of maggots and fungal spores.
Alcohol I guess.
Tasty poison.
It is weird, but not sure this is so much of a society thing than a biological thing. Even wild animals like to get tanked on fermented fruit.
Here in scandinavia it’s a common sight in fall to see more drunk off their asses, having eaten fermented fruit from the ground.
