kava @ kava @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I think it's an interesting thing. My parents had me at a much younger age, with much less money, in a country with a much more chaotic economic situation.

We had a peak of 10% inflation in my state (Florida) in the last couple of years. The year I was born, my country was going through 2,000% inflation.

Yet my parents provided regardless and here I am, just fine with my little brother doing just fine as well.

So I think ultimately if me and my girlfriend really went for it, we would make it work. But she wants to have a mortgage, be able to pay for nannies and daycare and whatnot. We're just not there yet.

I agree with you that the economic situation needs to improve. It's like the powers that be are actively trying to suppress the population growth.

I think it's a combination of both things. He had a specific set of traits and was thrust into a specific position, like you said by the material conditions, and his combination of traits allowed him to make the best of it in such a way that he made meaningful change in the world.

But still, I think you make an important point. Really, I was trying to be facetious.

everybody can't be a doctor or lawyer. you need someone to clean toilets, dig holes, and carry cement.

some people don't have the capacity or the willingness to do anything else. i work in the underground construction industry. there are a lot of illegals working digging holes and they're perfectly happy with it. they can't speak english, they can't work a computer, and they don't want to learn.

nothing wrong with it. other people, however, move up quickly. there was a girl we hired fresh off the boat. couldn't speak english and started off essentially digging holes for $1000 a week. she was sharp minded, however, and quickly started helping with the administrative tasks on the job sites. we gave her a raise and a promotion to crew supervisor. we gave her a laptop, she learned english quickly and eventually became a foreman and by the time she left us about 2 years later, she was making nearly 3x her original salary. she updated a lot of the systems we had and created daily reports for our clients. something we weren't doing - she just thought of it and it was a big benefit to us.

she ended up leaving to join someone else starting up their own company. she was able to get a big picture vision of the operation. some people cannot see past their job role

we have people that have been digging holes for us for the better part of a decade. they get paid their wage, they pay their bills, and when they get home they drink their beers and are happy.

it's just the way it is. nothing wrong with it. i think it's rude and demeaning to try and imply these people need to somehow get a better position or move forwards.

all i'm saying is if you're in a position where you can do more, do more. you'll get paid better and work less. and you'll find it's like an upward spiral. the more you do, the more things you'll be given the opportunity to do. then you can leverage that into better opportunities

If I were a Martin Luther King Jr or something maybe I could lead a mass movement. Unfortunately I'm just a notch above mediocre.

I think this discussion is actually an interesting one though, and they've been talking about it since biblical times. There's a part of the New Testament where Jesus is preaching and a rich man comes up to him.

"Jesus, I want to follow you. What do I need to do?"

Jesus says

Sell all of your possessions, give all the money to charity and then follow me.

Essentially, disconnect entirely from the system and give up all your luxuries. The rich man cried. "It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to fit through the eye of a needle"

We like to think we are poor but even just living in the bottom quartile in a Western country we are part of the richest people in the world. Are you willing to give up running water, electricity, electronics, a car, eating meat, etc? I'm not. I'm not going to heaven, but I'm also not losing sleep over it.

i don't think the system is fair or ethical. if it were up to me, it would be different.

but the system isn't fair or ethical and i am forced to live in it, so i'm going to live in it in such a way that puts me in a better position.

yes, the majority of the population gets fucked. if you are asking for my advice though, i'd say position yourself in a way where you are not that majority

if you have a politician i could vote for that would actually change things or some sort of organization i could support then i would support them

i didn't lose my taste, but my brother did. he ended up getting it back after a few days.

long term effects of the pandemic? working from home is normalized and i love it

work smarter not harder

my dad was an immigrant (technically so was I but I was brought here at a young age) and didn't speak the language. so he did manual labor jobs for a long time until he felt confident enough to try his luck at his own business. now he works much less and makes much more.

leave the manual labor for the people who can't do anything else. if you have skills, put them to use

something that is objectively unnecessary but gives comfort or at least the illusion of comfort

i think of it like the laws of diminishing returns

think of a shitbox $3,000 used car. assuming the engine is more or less running, you get like 80% of the benefits of a car

it gets you from point A -> B - the primary purpose of a car

then you spend another $10,000 for a $13,000 5~6 year old Toyota or something. now you have A/C, that gives you an extra few % benefits. You get a carplay so you have a nice little screen for a GPS, another few %. you get a key that unlocks your car, etc.

so you went from 80% to lets say 90%. but that base 80%, getting you from point A -> B hasn't changed.

that extra $10,000 bought you 10% extra

then let's say you spend another $100,000 for a $113,000 car

you get all the benefits of the previous cars, but you maybe can speed up a little faster. you have heated seats. you have a sport mode or something.

that extra $100,000 bought you another like 7% so now you're at 97%

Luxury is that last 20%. The closer you wanna get to 100%, the more expensive each % costs. This is a status symbol

Because the majority of internet connections these days are from a mobile device. And if you want to reach the average person, you have to be where they are looking.

I think it's really a shame that mobile OS's are so locked down that the only real way for people to download things is through some centralized app store.

Make more money. Your income should be going up over time in line with inflation. This is easier if you don't work a dead-end job and are willing to change jobs every once in a while.

Basically if you work in a retail or food service job, your main priority in life should be to get out of that industry and into something else. Even something as simple as working in a warehouse or construction will get you a lot more $$$ with much more leverage for raises and forward-moving promotions.

Me and my girlfriend both work full time and we are able to more or less easily afford rent and food. It helps to have two incomes. Although I will say, it's sad that she got pregnant with twins and we ultimately decided we couldn't keep them because of the financial situation. I wanted them but she didn't feel like we were financially stable enough.

So yeah, people gotta learn to live like it's a third world country. It's not the 1950s anymore where everyone can work whatever job and make ends meet.

i think a lot of it depended on your cd burner. i've had differing amounts of success with different burners.

still though, the price was not 3-5x higher if i remember correctly

there's all sorts of options there too if you have an old car

for example there are those CD -> aux or CD -> bluetooth convertors so you can play music off your phone

but i guess if you do have an old car sometimes it can be nostalgic to put in some CDs. i remember having a belt of CDs on my sun visor. so i get it

You start allowing this type of sexual content and the place turns into a porn site. It's what we saw, where you scroll down the more popular streams and it's all sexual content.

Especially on a website with a lot of young people, it just isn't right. Leave that stuff for the cam sites.

CD-RW is superior. It's more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions.. it's very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.

The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.

Although I don't understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.

Vape is very little maintenance. They even came out with disposable atomizer tanks. So I paid like $50~ or so for the battery which you charge with those big batteries they make ebikes & tesla batteries out of.

The tank works for a few weeks and then you buy another one. Much easier than going to store to buy ecigs all the time

He's got the confidence of a frat bro. He talks clearly, loudly, and quickly.

Ramaswamy is dangerous. He's not going to win this election, but the fact that he's gotten so much attention is dangerous. I remember at the beginning, during the first GOP debates, he was all smiles and positivity. His poll numbers started going down and now the last interview I saw with him he starts being aggressive and yelling. I think he's trying to go the angry dictator route now and it's a bad sign that these types of politicians are getting attention.

Fascism is right around the corner

And Democrats were eviscerated in the following midterms because it was seen as too far left.

They were eviscerated because it was a lukewarm attempt at healthcare reform.

Obama didn't even dare say the words "universal healthcare" once - something that majority of Americans supported at the time. The words "public option" was only said during his election campaign. As soon as he won the election, he downplayed it and pretended like it wasn't important. He could have easily put pressure on these senators by giving public speeches, running a campaign to try. But he didn't. And nobody will. Because that's not actually something any Democrats as a whole want to pass. It's not just the Manchins. Why aren't the Dems as loud as the Republicans? Why don't they say crazy things? The Republicans get things done. Look at the Supreme Court.

The fact is, the Democrats are a conservative party. They don't want change, they don't want reform.

The 3rd party as we know it today is a joke, I agree. But again, I repeat, there was a real movement in the early 20th century to have a socialist/communist presidential candidate. All it takes today is a real grass-roots movement that spreads online and we could elect someone who actually wants to change things for the better. Look at Trump essentially pulled off a coup against the GOP. Real change for the better is possible, but it will never happen going through the DNC.

Biden is Not going to do that

the modern GOP is a death cult. the modern democrats are a corporate theocracy

choose between psuedo-religious fascism or fascism that lets you wear a little rainbow pin on your shirt

we're headed towards fascism either way. look at europe, already censoring protests. look at our American websites like reddit and twitter, banning and silencing pro-palestinian accounts. they're using the techniques they learned during COVID to "fight misinformation". You cannot stray far from The Narrative

the scope of the information you will receive will continue to get smaller and smaller and more and more people are getting filtered into echo chambers

we need to wake up before it's too late, the noose is tightening. a modern fascist state with the surveillance technology that we have (we can even read minds now) is not going to be pretty. add in an economic crisis, another world war.. it's the 1930s all over again baby.

i wish orwell was around to see it

i didn't say i'm not going to vote. i'm leaning towards 3rd party.

if enough people voted 3rd party, we could break free from this quasi one-party state we have

in the early 1900s we actually had a socialist/communist presidential candidate get over a million votes

it's possible if people stopped towing the democratic party line. they are not our friends. they will do the bare minimum necessary and oftentimes they won't even do that, just promise to do it. i've been waiting for immigration reform my entire life. NADA is the total value of what has come out from Democrats beside's Obama's DACA which was a stopgap measure. we've had democratic majorities multiple times since then. how many times could they have put abortion into law? how many times could they have gotten in universal healthcare?

it's a joke. they don't actually want to do anything. we have 1 party and 2 factions. business faction A and business faction B.

and now Biden goes out and gives Netanyahu a big hug after Israel announced to the world they were about to slaughter tens of thousands of civilians?

What world do you live in where this is OK? What kind of men does our country breed? It's ridiculous

what, are you gay or trans or something? newsflash

you have it 1000x better than the tens of thousands of palestinians getting mutilated and killed. i don't see tens of thousands of gays being mutilated.

you even have it 100x better than the millions of illegals and asylum seekers in this country, of which both candidates flashes their wrinkly middle fingers to

you lose credibility when you exaggerate like this. yes, gays and trans should be treated better. yes, the republicans are more hostile than the dems. but it's not genocide, not even close. if you care so much about genocide you in theory should not be voting for someone who is actually endorsing genocide

first they came for the jews, and i did speak cause i was not a jew... etc