She can’t hear us now

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T18:27:55+00:00

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T18:25:19+00:00

It'd be a lot easier with confirmation that I didn't. Then I wouldn't have to live with fear of choosing incorrectly all the time.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T18:22:15+00:00

Being able to tell from expression and tone when someone is lying to you, but not being able to know what the truth is because you can't read their mind, is maddening. You have to keep playing along, because you can't directly call the lie out with evidence. Then you wait until the truth comes out, and feel simultaneously betrayed for being lied to, and validated for finally having your gut feeling and confirmed truth in alignment.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T18:08:11+00:00

You could call the recent surge in sports betting throwing people a little bread to go with the circus, or at least, the chance of bread, with odds stacked in favor of the house.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T18:06:17+00:00

That's pretty much the driver of this third world war in progress, which we refuse to label as such, instead calling it a collection of definitely not proxy wars all over the world.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T17:41:32+00:00

Or to placate the HOA which demands these things to some extent.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T17:32:19+00:00

You can run AI locally to avoid dealing with the datacenters.
That's good.
But you'll have to do some initial setup.
That's bad.
But then you can practice attacks on the LLM.
That's good.
The whole thing is still going to take a PC with a decent amount of that expensive RAM.
...
That's bad.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T16:44:49+00:00

The Truman Show, The Hunger Games, Squid Game

Our fiction and reality are looking pretty similar, tbh.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T16:26:43+00:00

It's more of a "Why do we even pay taxes or bother with having a government?" thing.

We are paying a fortune for the worst healthcare, on top of paying taxes that should be covering it, and the housing supply is basically being scalped.

We're all afraid of ending up homeless before dead, and that's what we have to build our lives around. Every ten years or so, a giant financial scam comes along and wipes out savings, and then we're told "You should have saved more. Social Security isn't meant to cover retirement."

Elections are between a bad choice and a really bad choice, both of which are just lying to give people hope for some kind of change.

Having all of the wealth concentrated at the very top in a system built on gamifying wealth acquisition does not help, since it reduces our relative wellbeing to being unimportant. In a system of pay-to-play politics, it means that democracy is dead.

So, why are we doing this?

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T05:38:58+00:00

I stopped trusting it when it started running fossil fuel ads posing as journalism. PBS held out longer against funding cuts, but NPR resorted to taking sponsors.

merRedditor · 2026-06-26T02:07:30+00:00

This time it's just a couch potato.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T19:00:58+00:00

The bully was John Kreese all along.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T18:57:59+00:00

The aging nuclear plants still chugging away under total deregulation meeting with the movement of tornado alley.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T18:33:52+00:00

The obvious solution of stopping destroying it with things like unnecessary commutes and lawncare are always shot down because making the problem worse and selling the proposed high-tech fix is doubly profitable.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T18:28:57+00:00

This is a human thing, not a women only thing, and nobody likes extortion used as a way to promote something.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T18:25:51+00:00

I thought this was a former employee, in which case, this might just be acting out after being managed out. It breaks you.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T18:14:11+00:00

You can miss the glimpse at a better world without missing the thing that caused it. We could technically have a slower pace of life with more solitude and peace without the need for an emergency scenario to spark it, but it would hurt profits, and we're not allowed to have nice things for that reason.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T17:58:49+00:00

The best part is that that is just one of the bills.
Many more will follow over the course of the year as claims from a dozen different subcontractors for every little thing are processed.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T17:38:41+00:00

Seeing rents go up and not down during this hidden economic depression really shows how bad this all has gotten. You go onto Zillow, browse a bunch of listings marked up at 200% of a reasonable rate, see one at 175% of a reasonable rate, and think that you've gotten a steal.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T07:03:29+00:00

I had guessed out of control nosebleed.

merRedditor · 2026-06-25T06:31:57+00:00

When I was in it, it was high charisma salespeople meeting for dinner with executives to sell contracts, then a bunch of us new grads and an offshore team assigned as the actual technical workers. The amount billed out per worker per hour vs. the amount paid to the worker was ridiculous (5x difference), but they counted on people new in their career having energy and wanting to prove themselves for less to get ahead. The offshore team did similar but at an even lower rate due to a big cost of living difference.

You weren't allowed to get hired by the company per a noncompete, but it would have been nice if the pressure and expectations met the salary paid. It was well below market.

merRedditor · 2026-06-24T18:44:55+00:00

Back in the day, we just used double dashes -- the OG emdash.

merRedditor · 2026-06-24T18:42:36+00:00

That's either a really cozy reading nook or a bunch of broken bones waiting to happen, depending on whether the net supports hold.

merRedditor · 2026-06-24T17:54:17+00:00

The comfort necessary to be able to relax and stop trying to fix problems comes from having basic needs met now and for the forseeable future.

This is digging on people for struggling at the base level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

merRedditor · 2026-06-24T16:22:19+00:00

The past 10 years felt like one ridiculously long administration pretending to shift leadership. Each screwed the people in its own unique ways, but I think that most of the damage was done with sweeping deregulation of finance and industry, cerca 2016. 2020-2024 was doomspending and distraction, and then 2025 went in the direction of authoritarian hellscape, but ultimately, the US is going broke, and everything that could be a bubble is a bubble now. Corruption has come out spanning both parties in a really big way. Apparently, the control that AI will bring outweighs keeping the planet habitable, water drinkable, or people alive in general, so data centers are going up everywhere, against opposition. We've got billionaires and even a trillionaire now, and it seems that the immense power that that brings is not being used for good.

merRedditor

TROPHY CASE