Go into your watch history and delete all of the rage inducing videos. YouTube generates recommendations directly from your watch history (as well as subscriptions etc).
Then subscribe to channels you really like that don’t enrage you! I highly recommend hobby-focused and science-based channels. There are tons of them out there and they have great content!
McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. I googled them all with the word brioche and there was news for all of them.
Thank you. Brioche buns are an abomination used by the fast food industry to trigger sugar reward signals and make their burgers just a bit more addictive. They’re not used with any good intentions whatsoever.
Every kind of hobby ultimately rests on some different kinds of reward mechanisms. Whether it’s the thrill of winning at a competition, the excitement of discovery, or the satisfaction of accomplishment, these sorts of positive emotions are what keep a hobby interesting and engaging for us. Collecting is no different, and this is where I believe the problems start.
Collecting as a hobby gets its main motivator from acquiring rare stuff. While there is a learning component to it (learning about all the stuff that’s out there, the history, why some things are rare and others are not, and what fair market prices are for everything) and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment (from gazing at a completed collection), the main drive that keeps people engaged is the excitement of unboxing and taking possession of new and rare item.
Unfortunately, this is an extremely fleeting and hollow emotion. It can last as little as a few minutes and rarely lasts more than a few days. In the long run, I believe this is what leads people to lose interest in collecting: they simply run out of rare stuff to obtain and thus lose the excitement they once had. Some even get so frustrated and disillusioned by collecting that they go out of their way to destroy or sell off their collections, often experiencing an enormous sense of relief afterwards (but potentially also a sense of loss and regret).
Contrast this with hobbies based around making or fixing stuff: making wine, brewing beer, gardening, cooking and baking, repairing old clocks or TVs or computers, restoring old cars, woodworking or blacksmithy or hobby machining, making jewellery or clothing, programming video games. These hobbies all differ from collecting because they’re focused on learning and personal growth. For example, there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to pick a few jalapeño peppers off the plants you raised from seeds, but the ultimate driver is the thrill of learning how to better take care of plants so that next time they grow even bigger and healthier than before!
Likewise with a repair hobby such as fixing old clocks: each one you come across (and there is some overlap with collecting here) has a unique history with a unique set of challenges to overcome if you are to get the thing repaired and running again good as new. But it differs from collecting in that the biggest satisfaction arrives at the end, when you complete the repair, rather than the beginning when you unbox the clock.
Some of the other making/crafting/food hobbies also provide additional satisfaction when you’re able to give away or sell your creations to friends and family (or strangers at a farmer’s market or Etsy shop). Having another person be happy as a result of something you learned how to do is incredibly rewarding in ways that an obscure collection may not be. It can be quite a downer to have others fail to understand what’s so interesting about your collection and even painful if they tell you they think it’s a waste of time and money. Of course, ultimately this reward/consequence of a hobby depends greatly on your relationships to other people and how much you care (or not) what they think.
It’s a stereotype. It’s designed for mental shortcuts. But then it also casts a much wider net than it ought to and ends up harming innocent people.
It really isn’t. Lots of people who listen to Joe Rogan don’t work out. Lots of people who work out don’t listen to Joe Rogan.
I do neither, though I am planning to start working out to lose some body fat and try to strengthen my bad ankle.
Then why mention it?
There’s nothing toxic about working out and getting strong, taking supplements etc. As long as you’re not harming yourself or other people then I see nothing wrong with it.
Intelligence is important, but I think even more important is curiosity and an open mind. There are lots of really smart people who are also closed-minded insufferable know it alls. And if they’re not curious about learning new things, new perspectives, and exploring this amazing world we live in: then what even is this all about?
Can you do one of these for Windows 3.1 or 95? That would be sweet!
Honestly, I hate steam (the client) so much. I have a fair sized library of games that I never play because it’s just torture to me to start that abomination of a program. Why the fuck couldn’t they give it a simple, clean, elegant, native UI that doesn’t treat my battery with wanton disrespect?
Hey kid! You gotta get me outta here!
I’m not hellbent on punishing people and I’m not lacking in compassion. I have a great deal of compassion for good people who are genuinely suffering and worse off through no fault of their own. I have been volunteering for 7 years as a tutor for newcomer families (mostly refugee families from Somalia).
These families are far from what I’d call free riders. They are tenacious and eager to contribute to society. They also happen to have a very strong community, unlike the neighbourhood I live in (more on that later).
The ruling elite aren’t the reason it won’t happen. The disappearance of local community is. I’m only 40 years old and yet I’ve noticed a DRAMATIC change in the neighbourhood where I grew up (and still live). When I was a kid everyone was kind and friendly. There were tons of other kids around like me.
Now there are hardly any kids around. I go for a walk and all I see are people my age or older, usually walking a dog with a scowl on their face. Society’s institutions are gone or moribund. Hardly anyone is friendly. Everyone is just looking out for themselves and treating their neighbours with cold suspicion.
This isn’t just my personal feelings or my weird neighbourhood. It’s everywhere and people are talking about it, if not always in the spotlight.
There are just so many people who are only in it for themselves and wealth has little to do with it. It’s the lack of community bonds. I would love to hear how a change in the political system could fix that but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen.
What you’re talking about, with families, communes, or other small communities, IS STILL WORK. It might not be compensated with money but it is compensated, usually with social capital or reputation. I do things for you and then maybe some time in the future you return the favour. All money does is allow me to (pardon the pun) cash in that favour on my own terms and potentially with someone other than the person I originally worked for.
What’s the problem with these informal economies (favours for favours)? They do not scale! As soon as the community is large enough that not everyone knows each other (the networks grow too large) then you run into the problem of being unable to punish free riders. If you do a favour for uncle Ted and then later uncle Ted refuses to lift a finger for you, you can punish him by telling the rest of the family that he’s selfish. However, you walking into uncle Ted’s office and telling his boss (who doesn’t know you) about it is unlikely to go over well.
“If I didn’t need to make money to live” is a non-starter. If you built a huge society with free food, housing, health care, internet and all that for everyone (all needs met) then you’d get millions of people choosing to smoke cannabis and play video games all day. The only way to get “free everything” society to work is with extremely small groups where reputation and social capital stand in for monetary compensation.
Lastly, I need to make a point about the individual and their choice to work for free for others or not. Take the example of an artist (say, a digital painter). They may be happy to stream on Twitch and give away all the art they create for free (with their Patreon revenue covering their living expenses). However, how likely do you think they are to take on a huge commissioned video game project for free? I’ll tell you: extremely unlikely. The free art is the art that the artist wants to produce. Commissioned art that follows narrow requirements for (say) character designs, settings, etc. is completely different: it’s work because it’s not the kind of art the artist chose to make.
“nobody will work if they don’t earn money from it”
No, it’s just a tautology resulting from how work is defined. Anything you do on your own time (not paid) is by definition not work. It’s a hobby, a chore, volunteering, etc. By contrast, anything you’re paid to do but would stop doing if you stopped being paid is work.
Looking after a sick relative may feel a whole lot like work. The difference is that if you don’t do it, who will? Asking a stranger to care for your relative for free just isn’t done. That’s why it’s work if you’re a hired nurse but not work if it’s your relative and you do it for free.
You can do this exercise with anything. Go to a restaurant and you expect to pay for your food after you eat. Go to eat dinner at your mother-in-law’s place and you don’t expect to pay. In fact, she’d likely be baffled at best and insulted at worst if you tried to pay her for your meal. Cooking food for strangers is work, cooking food for friends and family is not.
Anyway, don’t you think there’s some validity to the original statement? Why would you expect strangers to cook for you and care for your sick relatives for free? Note that even if you’re not paying them but someone else (possibly the state) then it’s still work.
GICs then!
Edit: looks like GICs are only guaranteed up to $100,000.
But honestly if you consider stocks and bonds to be gambling then you could really argue that buying anything is a gamble. Buy $100 million worth of onions and the price will go up due to scarcity, then try to sell them. Someone actually did this years ago and made a ton of money while bankrupting a lot of farmers and investors. The government responded by banning the trading of onion futures!
All this is to say it’s actually impossible to fulfill the genie’s rules if you take into account market fluctuations on the price of anything you buy.
Perhaps Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I’m sure he managed to squirrel away some of his wealth and now lives comfortably in exile, albeit with a huge bullseye on his back. But if your standard is “lose 100% of their wealth” then that almost never happens to anyone, even working class people who declare bankruptcy due to overwhelming debts.
Does Muammar Gaddafi count? He lived like a king with an anime-style cadre of elite female bodyguards, being essentially the emperor of Libya. He died after some soldiers dragged him out of a ditch and summarily executed him.
Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.
Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.
There’s ample evidence to show that no one learns critical thinking in college. At best, you select for people who are better at it.
Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.
Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.
Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.