Don't fall for the simple explanation. Both answers are true. The objectives are all about greed and betrayal, but the means are still heavily driven by incompetence. Just because someone is a criminal does not make them a competent criminal.
And a great many tools have a brief period of excitement before people realize they aren't actually all that useful. ("The Segway will change the way everyone travels!") There are aspects of limited AI that are quite useful. There are other aspects that are counter-productive at the current level of capability. Marketing hype is pushing anything with AI in the name, but it will all settle out eventually. When it does, a lot of people will have wasted a lot of time, and caused some real damage, by relying on the parts that are not yet practical.
I don't play computer games and I rarely buy commercial software of any other kind. The majority of my computer time is spent using FOSS applications. I try to give at least a few dollars every month toward each tool that I use on a regular basis. Among other things, I contribute to Lemmy, Voyager, and the Lemmy.Ca site. Overall it amounts to supporting more than a dozen projects for a total of around $50 per month.
I wish I could afford to do more, but I try to do what I can. Some projects are part-time and some make up the primary income for the developers. All of them are contributing their time without demanding payment to make our lives better. They deserve our support, in whatever form we can give it.
Various factions would like us to feel isolated and helpless so we can be manipulated more easily. All of the things you mentioned still exist and have meaning, but there are alternative meanings being pushed at us. And we not everyone has a community or family in the traditional senses anymore.
If you want to be a member of a community, you can. There are many available in most places, and there are more on the internet that are not limited by location. Find a group of people with common values, common interests, or anything else that ties you together and participate in it. Humans evolved to be social animals.
Human interconnections are a threat to the power that be. Individuals are easy to deal with via manipulation, intimidation, or incarceration. All of that becomes harder with groups, and the larger the group, the harder it is. That is also why we see so many efforts to subdivide us by race, culture, nationality, generation, education, income, religion, gender, gender preference, sexual preference. The less unified we feel, and the more we view the people around us as "other" instead of part of our community, the less able to we are to band together to form an effective threat to the ruling class.
I think your assumption that personal gain being the main driving force behind everyone's behavior is flawed. That may be true of humanity in general, but it is not true of a great many individual humans. Mental health is a multi-axis spectrum and very few of us are right in the center. There are many factors that can push people to do things against their best interests.
That's a very good list. I just threw out the first couple that came to mind, but it is worth calling out the organizations that are still trying to do real journalism.
I give small sustaining donations to NPR, ProPublica, and The Guardian. I hope to add a few more when I can.
Lots of little tools. Various kinds of pliers, drivers, cutters, magnifiers, lights, and a couple of marlin spikes for good measure. Also, a ruler, a tape measure, and a caliper, for even better measure.
The Democratic Party desperately needs to be disrupted. Their social agenda is generally decent, but they don't seem willing to really push for it. Their economic agenda has mutated to where they support the oligarchs over the workers every time. They are still a lot better than the Republicans, when that's the only choice, but we deserve better choices. And we can have them. Hogg is not only doing the right thing for the general public, he is also doing the right thing for the Democratic Party. And by that I mean the Party, not the people running the Party.
If there were any trust in the DNC to preserve, this would be a different discussion. They look after the interests of Democratic incumbents, not Democratic voters. Hogg is doing the right thing and I hope he succeeds.
Yes. Things will get better. We don't know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.
You got here ahead of me. Meshtastic has some limitations, but in a relatively populated area it works surprisingly well. GPS trackers using Meshtastic require far less power than their cell-phone equivalents, which means they ca be smaller, longer lasting, or some of both. They can also be a good bit less expensive. Meshtastic takes a bit of learning, but it isn't difficult and there are plenty of resources.
Ignore the self-righteous advice and take are of yourself first. We can't fight back against oppression by sacrificing ourselves when it accomplishes nothing. That just means one less person is available to fight back when it does matter. The stakes do matter. They're not asking you to kill people.
In the middle- to long-term you should think about how to deal with the larger problem. To avoid situations like this you may need to develop new contacts, find similar wok in other sectors, or even find another kind of work. Those are things that will take time and planning, so work on them while you do what's needed to keep yourself going.
Always do what you can and look for ways you can do more, but make sure any sacrifices you decide to make are worth the likely results.
Curious Canid @ Curious_Canid @lemmy.ca Posts 9Comments 621Joined 2 yr. ago
And they were more interested in taking video of it than stopping it. If this wasn't staged, they need a refresher in Self-Preservation 101.