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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2026

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  • If you want a serious answer, let’s start with the fact that humans are inherently xenophobic. Hundreds of thousands of years ago humans who didn’t defend themselves from other tribes that looked a bit different from them got plundered and died of starvation. Xenophobia got nurtured in that manner for tens of thousands of years.

    In the modern age there is little to no reason to hate people who’s ears are tilted in a slightly different way than your’s, but the mechanism is still deeply ingrained in your brain and wants to be useful. So it starts working the other way. We find those who we don’t like and start finding coincidental traits in their appearance that are common between them. Now instead of disliking people by views we start disliking anyone who has these traits, then the confirmation bias kicks in.

    There are stupid and evil people, but these adjectives discribe what’s going on inside their skull, not outside. Works the other way, too. However beautiful the person looks like, they may very well have views of the biggest piece of shit you ever met.





  • Pretty much.

    Imagine you have 3 employees working 6 hours screwing screws. Suddenly you find out about a magical screwdriver that makes them finish their 6 hour shifts in just 2 hours. The fair thing to do would be to buy 3 screwdrivers and make your employees work shorter shifts for the same money. Maybe give them a proportional raise and make them work 4 hour shifts.

    But if you think in terms of maximizing profits, of course that’s not what you’ll do.

    Instead, we fire two employees, cutting our costs, buy only one magical screwdriver, cutting our costs again, double our last employee’s salary, which is still less than what we paid our 3 employees, but if the remaining employee is not looking at a bigger picture, they are happy (100% raise!) and then we make them work 8 hours instead of 6 (you are getting much more money now, right?)

    All in all, instead of benefiting the working conditions, an introduction of a better tool lead to more money in the pocket of the CEO, two unemployed screwdriver drivers and one that screws four times the screws for only half the money per screw.

    Profit-driven economy is just slavery with extra steps.




  • There is no way to tell a story about a country without talking politics. The only thing that differentiates one country from another is how they do things. These “ways of doing things” are called policies. Deciding on which policies are good and which are bad is known as politics, fairly straightforward. If you are not talking about politics, you may as well not talk about the countries in your story.

    As for your question, of course you can write a story in a way where there is an abstract faceless “higher-up” figure, we’ve seen these, but the moment you try to create an actual character to represent the government, it will unavoidably get political when you see that character interacting with others in the story.



  • I usually don’t go out of my way to explain privacy to people, but I have to explain to almost every new acquaintance that I don’t have to have a particular reason to refuse being in photos. One of the most egregious cases went in the line of “I hung out with that kind of famous guy once and he asked me not to post pictures of him, I can understand that, but why would you, a nobody, refuse being in pictures!?”

    Saddest part is that even people who agree to not take pictures of you without further explanaion will usually throw quips at you every time there is a camera nearby.







  • I’m sorry you are working in such conditions, I hope you get better management that actually understands how much data one person can process.

    I’m not sure how your story is at all relevant to what I said.

    I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t live in the US, I don’t need one. The lead in gasoline example was just the first thing that came to mind that fit a “technology that is profitable and useful, but kills people” description. Please pay attention to the road while driving instead of perfoming mental math exercises.

    I would also like to ask you to think about what exactly you are arguing for right now, as I’m starting to think that our understanding of the value of human life differs quite a bit.