This response is so boot-lickingly simplistic and lacking in context and nuance. I wish I could get to live in the world where this blanket statement just made everything okay again. It’s almost as if you actually have no reasonable counter to the points raised by the commentor.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anais Nin
The bidet will pay for itself in 6 months.
You misspelled “the very first time you use it.” 😁
I don’t quite get why the shitrag NYP thinks this is shocking. Okay, some people might be all concerned about their final disposition, but dead is dead. Piss on my corpse, use it for a punching bag and target practice, light me on fire on someone’s porch as a sick prank. IDGAF, because dead. Actually, it would be hilarious if someone got to do stupid, funny shit with my corpse. Too bad I wouldn’t know about it.
The really fun bit: in order to smell anything, you necessarily have to snort in molecules of that substance. It’s a happy little thought whenever passing a sewage treatment plant.
Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.
But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.
It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.
My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.
Came looking for this comment. It’s absolutely critical to know thyself, and understanding one’s attachment style is one of the easier bits of self-knowledge.
One of the most accessible books on the topic is “Attached” by Levine and Heller. For me, that book was such an eye-opener. I read it as my second marriage was imploding, and I was grabbing at everything to try to save it. The example conversations for my and my ex’s attachment styles were uncanny. I kept getting the feeling of “were y’all in the room with us for that argument?”
I am also a bicyclist with three different bikes. One watch replaces three bicycle computers. I can track performance metrics, longevity of components, and service intervals… for all of my bicycles.
My watch also has functions for sailing performance metrics, kayaking, hiking, running, and lots more sports.
That’s ignoring the other watch functions: timers, find my phone (great for when the phone slips between cushions and I didn’t notice), compass, barometric trends, notification filtering…
My partner has the same watch. The longitudinal health stats from her watch was one of the key factors in getting her health complaints taken seriously. One medical facility completely, repeatedly dismissed her concerns as “nothing serious.” Turns out she had Stage-IVb cancer (now recovered).
“Nonviolent Communication” by Marshall Rosenberg.
The lessons for communication and non-reactivity will pay dividends in every aspect of your interpersonal relations. Work, friendships, romantic relationships, even dealing with customer disservice.
I misspoke, and you raise a good point. I meant gift economies, and that error is on me. And those are pretty well-documented. I’ll stick to my firsthand experiences:
As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster’s sucking hunger.
You are confidently incorrect on this. Currency == money. Money is, for we hoi polloi, a barely consentual conversion and exchange system for our labor, hypothetically allowing us to convert our labor into readily fungible exchange units. Money, at the Capital Class level, is debt, and therefore control, i.e. power. Money is just how they keep score.
There are plenty of barter gifting and Communist (“from those of ability to those of need”) economies, just on scales that fly below the radar of most economists. Your sweeping assertion leads me to believe that you may simply be ignorant of those non-monetary exchanges. Would you be willing to add more context to your assertion?
Edit: I misspoke; crashfrog raises a valid point, and I meant gift economies.
Wampum was used by Eastern Costal tribes as a storytelling aid.
In the Salish Tribes, dentalium shell necklaces were used as a status symbol/indication of social rank. Some tribes used the necklaces as a type of currency, but I’ve only heard the “some tribes did this” part; never anything about which specific tribes used dentalium as currency.
Obviously, anything that holds perceived value can be traded.
Source: went to junior high in a school that taught two full years of Haudenosaunee (also called Iroquois) history.
Salish source: I’ve been a volunteer naturalist in the Puget Sound for eight years with an annual training requirement, with entire days allocated to history of the original Salish tribe for the area where we’re working.
The Salish Tribes existed in the PacNW for over 13,000 years without money.
I see Robert Evans, I upvote. Really folks, Jobs was such a piece of shit that he got a 4-parter of coverage on Behind the Bastards. Highly suggested. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc&si=xGHOjTXfizCplLDp
I see a lot of specific examples, but here is a good engineering guideline: do not skimp on physical interfaces. **Anywhere energy is changing form or if it touches your body, don’t skimp on those. **
For example
Quality usually means more money, but sometimes one is able to find a high quality and low-cost version. In my experience though, trying to find the cheap version that works well means trying so many permutations; it would have been more economical to just get the more costly version in the first place.
Religion now throws a null pointer exception?
It absolutely happens. Most of my long term partners were that “sparks at first sight” energy. In high school, my first girlfriend and I saw each other from across the bus waiting zone, and it was on. Even our parents were blown away by our chemistry. Unfortunately, she died of acute lymphocytic leukemia two years later. My first wife and I spotted each other from across a nightclub dancefloor. I thought she gave me a fake phone number, but turned out to be real. I was on a bike tour, stopped at a winery, and met an amazing woman who became my second wife 18 months later.
But here’s the problem with that instant connection: it’s almost always a very bad sign. Those instant sparks are indicative of non-verbal cues that both people fit a mutually faulty template. For people who have unaddressed trauma, that template is just waiting to be matched, and it produces disastrous results in the majority of relationships. John Gottman at University of Washington has studied intimate interpersonal dynamics in depth; he and his lab have literally written the book(s) on how to have healthy, fulfilling relationships. Spoiler alert: instant attraction should be a red flag for about 99% of the population.
But yeah, get professional help.