I’m here for it. The purpose of protesting is not to wave signs around in a way that is convinient and easy to ignore. Protests are supposed to disrupt things, to get the attention of people in power. There’s supposed to be an implied threat: “Look at all these upset people who are willing to break the law. Be a real shame if they went from blocking traffic to dragging oil executives out of buildings!” A polite and legal protest may be great for movement building, but it’s ultimately the same as asking nicely in terms of power and demands. His only mistake, the way I see it, was not bringing more people with him.

Powerful people need to be more scared.

It’s recognizing that any cash the sovcit manages to make multibillion dollar company lose will just have that company pull it out of the pockets of the people that do pay their bills.

This relies on the assumption that credit card companies are not already extracting as much value as they can from those bill payers. If they thought they could get away with raising rates on people without turning enough away to make it a net loss, it seems to me that they would have already.

I mean, good on her for being anti-war and wanting to release political prisoners I guess? I have no clue what she was expecting though. Trying to run against a dictator in a sham election seems like maybe not the best way to effect political change, not to mention dangerous.

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said “T-Rex” were lame, but “Iguanadon” would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said “Pachycephalosaurus”, which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren’t anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided “fuck it” and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate’s degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it’s the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven’t looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

Because, goddammit, a better world is possible! A lot of the time shit sucks and everything is expensive and I wanna just go to bed and never wake up.

But most of my problems are problems millions or even billions of other people struggle with, and those don’t get solved by opting out of life.

What’s more, those problems are man-made. They’re the result of systems designed by mortal men just like me.

So, I stay alive. Because the only way to out-vote, out-number, overpower, and / or annihilate those bastards is to be alive.

Sounds like a good reason radically restructure (if not entirely dismantle) those companies.

We should make medicine to treat sick people. We should build houses to shelter the unhoused. We should grow food to feed the hungry.

The fact that most companies currently responsible for food and housing and medicine are primarily motivated by shareholder value instead of effective community service represents a structural conflict of interest.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.