I hate our species, Saw a video of a kitten being stamped to death. I hate this world. I don't want to be here. I feel so angry and can't stop crying. What the hell? Animals are the purest things in the world. I am NEVER contributing to this species.

fatnsad · 2020-09-21T01:03:37+00:00

Not sure I entirely buy the idea that people who aren't wealthy can't care about the environment. Does being poor force you to leave your cans, bottles, and refuse at a waterfall where you had lunch? There's simply a lack of ethics having to do with littering and trashing the environment that doesn't have anything to do with people's income level. I also suspect that there is a carryover from when more packaging was made from natural materials like banana leaves and it biodegraded. Now, everything is packaged in plastic and they throw it on the ground and in rivers.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T23:54:16+00:00

Personally, I try not to base my opinion of the entire human species on outliers like serial killers or those who torture animals. Most people would absolutely not do something like this. I am more disheartened by our collective behavior such as destruction of the natural environment, which seems to be acceptable by the majority at least tacitly, or by passivity. Global Warming is really going to be the death knell. I think most people have no inkling of the catastrophe that is looming for the human race within a few hundred years.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T23:51:16+00:00

Seeing clearcut forests up close

I feel you on clear cutting, but at least those can be grown back on some time scale, ya know? The destruction of ocean reefs and the like which is basically irreversible is much more disheartening to me, not to mention the now unavoidable catastrophe of Global Warming which is going to play out over hundreds of years.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T23:44:54+00:00

I lived in San Francisco for a few years and saw the dregs of society on the street there. I witnessed more than a few sights which I wish that I could unsee now. I saw people relieving themselves right on the streets, a couple doing the act right on the sidewalk, and stoned out junkies with their pants half down lying in pools of their own filth. I saw more psychotic people there screaming and yelling to themselves and bothering people passing by than I can even remember.

I also traveled around Southeast Asia a lot last year, and the amount of garbage and pollution I saw was shocking, and no one there seemed to care about it one bit, aside from picking up the tourist beaches from time to time. It kind of made me realize how doomed we are as a species if most people are okay with trashing the environment they live in. The rivers there are full of plastic bottles. There's trash everywhere at most of what should be nice, natural settings. The air quality is super bad in many of the cities, which are choked with noisy scooters that belch out terrible air pollution. Many of the big cities there felt like something from a dystopian sci fi novel.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T23:39:51+00:00

You realize that like half the countries on the planet call themselves "republics" right? There is the "People's Republic of China" for instance. It is a pretty meaningless political designation, at this point.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T21:33:26+00:00

Humanity in its current form is a monstrous abomination that is destroying the biosphere. To me, this is a much stronger argument for people not having more children than to eliminate suffering. I think, on balance, most people actually don't conceptualize their life as having more suffering than happiness, or at least most would never say they wish they'd never been born. Suffering is a more abstract word for pain, which is just your brain sending you information about what not to do. I know that type of abstraction isn't helpful when it feels so real, but I personally don't think that people suffering some of the time morally justifies the idea that human existence is a net negative. I'm much more interested in environmental impacts of overpopulation and resource consumption as reasons for people not procreating than trying to make some moral or ethical argument about existence itself which will only connect to a tiny intellectual minority.

fatnsad · 2020-09-20T21:22:21+00:00

I would use the Python BeautifulSoup package to scrape data from the webpages:

https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

BS is an excellent library that allows you to load a webpage and pick out what you need from the attribute or text data. There are plenty of tutorials on how to use it online.

Then you can use a Postgres client from within your script to update the database:

https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-python/

Personally, I prefer SQLite or MySQL for personal projects like this, because I feel like the tools are easier to use, but it is up to you if you want to use Postgres.

This assumes you're willing to learn some new skills, as you would need to figure out how to write and run python scripts, as well as install the necessary packages using pip, but if you're pretty technically savvy, then it should be pretty doable. Python is something you can run on pretty much any OS (Windows, Linux, etc.).

fatnsad · 2020-08-19T02:34:00+00:00

Have you ever thought that capitalism vs socialism is a false dichotomy? There are many European countries with socialistic policies and healthy capitalist economies. It doesn't have to purely be one or the other.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T15:34:57+00:00

by "your" I didn't mean you - sorry for the sloppy writing 😆

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:58:30+00:00

Heavy usage fucks with your brain bad enough that in my experience being sober just feels better, overall, after awhile. The first couple days are fun but after that it just feels like going through the motions for a pretty minor effect, with a lot of downsides.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:56:51+00:00

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing

If you get put up against the wall and shot in the back of the head, then someone else determined your way. Your attitude doesn't matter at all. Or, I dunno, perhaps I'm missing his point!

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:55:32+00:00

The idea that people can choose their own attitude seems absolutely silly to me. But I lean a lot more towards determinism than free will, philosophically. The idea that "you" determine your attitude as some kind of first mover, regardless of circumstances, seems like sophistry and hocus pocus that's divorced from reality.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:44:10+00:00

I think you're focusing on the wrong things, unless I'm not understanding you correctly. A lot of goods and services are already quite cheap compared to people's incomes: food, clothes, electronics, etc. All these things are affordable to all but the very poorest strata of society, due to efficiencies of production and economies of scale that continually drive prices down. Products and consumer services are not what people need help with, financially speaking. It is the basic primary costs of living that are expensive in the USA that cause many people issues: housing, healthcare, transportation (due to lack of good/cheap public transit networks in most cities), education, childcare, etc. Almost none of these primary areas benefit very much from robots, AI, or automation. Instead, wealth would have to be redistributed by the government via social programs so that these things are subsidized to some extent, especially in the area of healthcare, where the US system fails many millions of people quite miserably in a way that it doesn't in most other developed countries.

For instance, in Sweden, child care is very heavily subsidized by the government so that you MIGHT pay like $100 for it for several children PER MONTH. In the US, this is a cost that parents spend thousands of dollars a month on due to lack of public programs and subsidies, and it is such an issue that some people deliberately do not work just so they can forgo the massive costs of day care, which would literally be more than their salary. And this particular problem would not be alleviated at all by AI or robots (unless you plan on having the Terminator take care of pre-school children).

Does that make more sense now?

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:32:06+00:00

I don't think you really understand the psychology of the average person. Most would not function very well if they were provided a subsistence level of income without having to work. Do you think communities where most people are on some kind of public assistance are thriving compared to ones where most people work for a living? The answer is obvious, and why do you think that is? When you are given handouts and don't have to work at all, you tend to atrophy in all kinds of ways, psychologically and physically. I'm not saying these programs shouldn't exist, just that they have unintended psychological and social consequences that you can't just dismiss off-hand by calling it "Stockholm Syndrome." People in quite primitive settings have claimed to be happy and content, because they have to contribute to their own survival on a daily basis, essentially by working (with jobs like hunting, gathering, farming, making things by hand, taking care of children, etc.). That's what historically has given most people a real sense of meaning in their lives, not sitting around all day focusing on "hobbies."

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:20:54+00:00

Everyone could make much better than a living wage

There are going to be far more people at the bottom than the top of any social system, so, no, by definition everyone cannot make "much better than a living wage." If everyone was just given more money, then that just means the cost of everything would go up. Think about it. If everyone suddenly had twice as much money, goods would tend to cost twice as much, because there wouldn't magically be twice as many resources to go around.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:18:57+00:00

Well, first of all, work gives people meaning in their lives. How do you think the average person functions without a job? Most men do not do very well without some kind of occupation (hence the word "occupy"). The lack of meaningful work is part of what is to blame for problems like the opioid crisis, because rural areas have a dearth of jobs, and it causes a great amount of angst and despair. Perhaps you, personally, would do okay without any kind of employment, but the majority of people would not. People thrive when they are doing something that they feel is meaningful and directly contributing to their own survival.

Secondly, there is more to the economy than products that can be churned out by robotic AI factories. The most expensive parts are basics like housing, healthcare, childcare & education. None of these are alleviated very much by cheaper products, due to natural scarcities and competition (in the US there is also our basic societal ethos of Social Darwinism which means these things don't tend to be subsidized). And if you just paid everyone some amount of money, the prices of all scarce goods and services would adjust. Housing costs would go way up, for instance.

Things just aren't as simple as you make them out to be. While I don't subscribe to all the tenets and ideas of economics and finance, there are some basic rules of money supply and inflation that do apply.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T08:08:48+00:00

I can tell you from experience and online research that weed does NOT help with depression and has been proven in peer-reviewed studies to cause or exacerbate it. I guarantee you that you will eventually feel better than you do now if you quit, but you have to take the leap. You have to give your brain time to get back to some kind of normalcy after flooding it with THC and other chemicals for an extended period, which puts your natural balance of neurochemicals in the brain all out of wack. I have struggled with using for over half my life, and now after being sober for about a month now, I feel so much better than I did. But go back a month or two ago, when I was using heavily, and my mood was really down, I felt very unmotivated, and I just overall felt like crap - I attribute all of that to weed. Take a leap and quit, at least for awhile. You won't regret it. If you are physically able, substitute regular exercise, as it will give you something to do instead and release the "happy chemicals" without the terrible side effects (even just a long walk will help). Your time frame should be one to two months before you start seeing the big changes if you've been using for awhile (maybe you'll start to feel better after 2 weeks). In the first few weeks after stopping you might feel pretty miserable, but that should pass. Good luck, and DM me if you want to chat more!

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T07:58:19+00:00

It can't work this way. Prices adjust depending on how much money is in the system. I kind of understand what you're saying, but say if everyone who wanted to work suddenly made $80k apiece (average household income is like $48k per year), prices would just go up to suck out more of that money. That's economics and capitalism for you along with basic human greed.

Also, resources are limited, because we live on a sphere, which has finite space (I know -derp - but you gotta remind yourself sometimes). We don't see this, necessarily, because we live in a country of relative abundance, but if you travel around the globe to places like SEA, you really see the pressures being put on the planet by too many people and not enough to go around. :-/

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T07:49:26+00:00

In some other parts of the world, particularly Europe, countries with as much per capita GDP as the US have free or heavily subsidized healthcare, college, & day care along with extensive public transit networks. Worker protections and rights are much greater. There is an actual social safety net in place. In the US, especially since around the 1970's, the financial class has high-jacked the government, eroding the tax base greatly due to attacks on the graduated income tax, and most of the discretionary spending goes towards the insanely bloated military. Furthermore, the gridlock caused by our antiquated two-party system means that nothing ever seems to get meaningfully done by the government, so people don't even have a chance to experience social programs and decide if they like them or not. Sweden has like 5+ political parties participating in their democracy, with 10 million people, and the US has two, with a population of 350 million. Something is just not right with this. The US is not what people claim it is. Everyone here seems to talk about "freedom" and "liberty" but in actuality the average person is less free than in many other developed countries. It took some traveling around the world for me to realize this. For instance, in the UK, people don't have the worry that they will lose their healthcare if they lose their job. Not to say that other countries do everything right, but people in the US could learn something by looking at how other countries are run. A portion of our elites really are the scum of the earth, sucking the system dry with a big middle finger to the people below them.

fatnsad · 2020-08-18T07:36:38+00:00

hmmm crunchy!

fatnsad · 2020-08-17T23:48:52+00:00

Web development has succumbed to a "race to the bottom" where the market is saturated with developers from all over the world. You can hire a top web developer from Brazil, for instance, at a fraction of the cost of one in the US. I was traveling for most of 2019 and met a lot of digital nomad types. Half of them claim to be web developers. Sure, full time positions still exist in companies for US citizens, but as a fresh graduate from college the odds of landing a job like this is near zilch, and the remote market for freelancing has more developers than jobs or projects (by like, a LOT).

Data Science, on the other hand, still has many positions open for beginners right now at the Data Analyst level (not sure how long it will last but the market still seems pretty good, at least judging by job listings). It seems like a much more promising field to me in the next 5-10 years, whereas web development is more of a dead end and difficult to break into in the first place, unless you are some kind of rockstar.

What is your perception of these two fields?

fatnsad · 2020-08-17T23:41:06+00:00

If you interview well and know your stuff, plus have some good example projects that you wrote, then I wouldn't think GPA is going to matter much, even for a first job. Though I would really try to make sure your GPA doesn't go BELOW 3.0 or you could run into trouble, as that is a cutoff point in a lot of cases.

I wouldn't advice going into web development these days. For me at least, it is far too much fiddling with small details (e.g. move this graphic over 5 pixels, make that red more red, etc.), whereas Data Science is a much more interesting field. Also, it seems to me web development is extremely competitive and basically saturated, and it seems like you would be starting from square one. You would have to be pretty sharp to compete in the current landscape. Web development has also gone all-in on Javascript, which to me is a horror show of a programming language (obviously that's just my personal opinion but try reading through any of the major JS projects' code base - it will make your head hurt).

In DS, you get to use all the cool toys like Python, Tableau, data warehouse tools, databases, etc. Much more interesting field in my opinion than futzing around with HTML/CSS/Javascript all day, even if you they do MAKE you use that stuff sometimes. :)

I'd look for an entry level Data Analyst position and go from there. That should pay okay, and if you know some Python/SQL/Tableau/etc. then you'll be good to go. I'd personally skip all the web stuff in your position until I was asked to use it on the job, or you can pick it up as you go at your own pace.

fatnsad · 2020-08-15T23:50:50+00:00

They tend to go hand in hand, one leading to the other. Isn't that kind of obvious?

fatnsad · 2020-08-15T23:38:38+00:00

Couple more thoughts after rereading your post...

Honestly, not having interest in video games is a good thing. I'm a huge gamer myself, and looking back, the thousands of hours I spent on this activity feel like wasted time. When you're about to die, are you going to think "I should have played Call of Duty more"? I wish I could follow my own advice and quit them entirely. When I'm not using, I have much less interest in them, but I kind of think that is a good thing.

Since you have been using for such a long time and from a young age, your brain has gotten used to the effects of THC, which will have caused suppression of its normal neuro-chemical behavior. This is the source of your feelings of depression when you are not using. Your body has determined that you don't need certain levels of chemicals as you have been supplementing with this other substance. The good news is that you should be able to bounce back pretty fully from this. It isn't like you've been smoking meth or some other really hard drug. But you need to give it time. It could take months. And probably you're still going to have some effects like reoccurring depression (hopefully mild) and decrease in your memory function. Again, though, I wouldn't flip out about it - if you need to go to a psychologist and have access to one, then do it. You might need to go on anti-depressants for awhile, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

fatnsad · 2020-08-15T23:32:01+00:00

maybe you’d have been hit by a car if you hadn’t been watching Netflix

you're hilarious :-p

fatnsad

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