I’m right there with you, but the OP mentions social media, and that’s all that shit is.

Our society has allowed the way many people keep in touch with one another to be via psychologically manipulative, attention harvesting, advertising machines.

From inside, “Made in the USA” feels like it’s going to be us chained to paying 2x the cost for wildly inferior products. See for example, cars.

I did already get myself some Surface Shield which is exactly that kind of lanolin based protectant, after also reading about some of the more hardcore stuff like POR-15 that I’d worry could trap water or hide damage.

I’ve used it a bit on my car near where I have some wheels removed to work on the brakes, and tried it on some garden tools.

Impressions are very good and I totally plan to cover the underside of my car with this stuff when finishing up work on it. Just not the exhaust I imagine.

DONE, lol.

I kinda want to get something with a manual transmission again, so it will very likely be a japanese brand.

I’m in the US where this is coming soon enough. My car is a 2012 which seems like kind of a sweet spot, but it’s not going to last forever especially with our winters and road salt and pot holes.

I didn’t plan to buy a new car any time soon but have been thinking about my eventual next choice. All this BS has me wondering whether it’s better to get something soon without the next level of surveillance, or wait a few years and see how bad it is in practice and how it can be disabled.

That 2012 I mentioned is fun to drive, has low mileage for its age, and is fuel efficient, plus I have renewed my love of working on my own vehicles after not doing so for a decade or two. I’m currently doing work on the brakes. Maybe I’ll just have to try to make it live forever, and not give any more money to the whole damn industry as long as possible. That’s the most economically and environmentally friendly option, after all.

It is one of the worst parts of US culture and one of the greatest accomplishments of capitalists’ propaganda that we generally see the rich as noble and admirable while the poor are evil and disgusting.

Not to be all US-centric about it, but that’s where I live and I think this place’s reputation speaks for itself.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I remember hearing a lot of references to “The Bicentennial.”

I keep thinking we need an overhaul where volunteering to be a public servant at a high enough level also means volunteering to surrender all your assets and be barred from owning anything significant for life. You get a stipend that you can spend on food, hobbies, travel, and entertainment, but that’s it. You get housing and transportation paid for (or maybe you can own your residence and car) but no businesses, no stocks, etc. I guess you get a pension or salary for life or something.

People have demonstrated that they generally cannot be trusted to balance governmental power with conflicts of interest. Sure some people can, but ordinary voters picking from candidates filtered for “actively seeks power” have a crappy track record. Here’s hoping politicians like Mamdani can teach the voters a re things and start to turn that around.

This shit is just so openly racist, xenophobic, and hateful because on paper it’s against the country’s interest. I’d suggest he’s just another kompromised asset being leveraged to dismantle the US empire, but we’ve also known him to be a piece of shit for a long time.

Pretty much all developed nations are facing birth rates far below the maintenance level.

The United States is well below-average in population density. Many areas do have too many people, but anybody with experience in the midwest knows that we have a lot of usable land with very few people on it.

Even if these ghouls kept all of their irrational fears and hatred but were granted a few rational brain cells to plan for the future, they would see that these people they want to remove and keep away are valuable resources. I’m sure they have grand delusions about how they’re gonna ban contraception and sex-ed and abortion while having a steady stream of fertile 14 year old girls wheeled into their compound to rape and create their future factory workers, but it ain’t good work.

I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.

What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?

The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.

I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.

Our lives are filled with things we don’t “need” that we are not going to do away with any time soon.

Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren’t involved.

You love to see it.

Unfortunately, with the state of this country I could also see aggressive militarized private security getting more popular around this shit.

I wonder if there’s any chance of all the tech speculation helping to fund electrical grid upgrades (including grid scale storage for renewables) that actually benefit regular human society after the bubble pops.

Absolutely. I think many people would actually be surprised at how big regular old goldfish can get in a pond with adequate space, food, and water quality.

On top of being in the carp family, they can actually produce hybrid offspring with carp (koi), though I think those offspring are sterile.

Source: have koi pond. Have given away dozens of chonky goldfish to other pond people.

Yeah! I was already concerned that people’s eyes would glaze over and they’d skim the latter 3/4 of my message and miss some important connected dots.

Now we’ve all been trained to detect and reject AI slop for a couple years, so the whole “here’s the whole situation described in a single message” strategy is right out the window.

I even like using em dashes sometimes. :/

At least I don’t use emojis in place of bullet points. The more you know. ✨

I thought this same thing.

The cherry on top will be the medical examiner afterward pointing out that he could have been saved if medics took swift action instead of everybody in the room pretending to not notice he was “asleep” again.

The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.

Lookin’ good!

No joke though, I currently have my sewing machine sitting in front of the secondary PC in our family room. I have found sewing to be up there with other non-tech hobbies like building things with wood, digging in the dirt, and taking care if my animals as far as brain health and sensory satisfaction.

I’m a middle aged cishet dad of a boy, too. I just bought the thing last year for some fun crafty projects we had in mind.