Zink

Same, because I come from that world. Specifically the trumpy, angry, racist, paranoid, dunning-kruger overconfident american conservative world. That's the family I was born into.

I think my presence on Lemmy suggests my curiosity and skepticism and giving-a-shit-about-other-people-itis led to me clawing my way out of that toxic hole over the decades.

But for how much I can deeply relate to you weighing the priorities, I have no better answers for you. When you are in their in-group (especially thinking extended family) they can be loving and giving people.

I personally think there are two big drivers that don't get enough attention because it sounds like you're trying to insult them.

The first is ignorance. As in literally ignoring the world around you. Living on auto pilot. Out of sight, out of mind. They mentally check the box of "responsible people follow the news" by passively absorbing content from Fox News or one of their local Sinclair news channels. Propaganda works extremely well on them.

The second is the mental pain of undiagnosed mental and/or neurological issues. Treatable stuff like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. In other words I'm not just implying they are narcissists or have borderline possibility disorder.

In my corner of the world, the more conservative a person is, the more irritable they are all the time. It's like they are an animal with a thorn in its paw and don't even know it. I know what that existence feels like, and then you have all these evil forces in the world waiting to reveal who is causing your pain! Surprise, it's those others!!

Part of me judges them harshly. We're talking about middle aged and older people who have had the time to learn. But there's a huge part of me that knows that pain that makes you angry all the time.

What I come back to every single time though, is that every awful person that has ever existed has a sad story. Even if no other person did things to twist somebody into a monster, they had the bad luck to be born with a brain that gives them psychosis later in life, or whatever the situation is.

At some point you have to judge people not just by their actions but on the effects and outcomes of what they do. I can be polite to ignorant ordinary people living ordinary lives. But for high-level politicians that destroy lives by the thousands and millions as they take advantage of it, I really don't care how horrible their upbringing was. I mean I do, but it's only like 0.01% of the suffering we're talking about, and it's not the preventable kind.

What if you're an engineer who knows about Factorio and also knows a few things about your own psyche, and therefore have 0.0 hours played?

I guess it just depends on the scope. Since we were talking about giving way over a billion, I was envisioning the employees being set for life and having no concern for the continued operation of the business.

If we're talking about thousands of people, then I guess either option is pretty sweet. Either you keep your same job but now have equity and control, or you keep your same job under new ownership but see an extra $500,000 cash just drop into your checking account.

I took a look at the article and I got no impression of the employee count, but the dude who sold the company seems like the rare ultra-rich startup CEO business owner who is somehow based as fuck.

It sounds like starting companies is just what he likes doing, and/or is driven to do. I have to admit I'm a little jealous because imagine being a decent person, and first being told you have no rent or bills ever again, and then being given 1,500 Million Dollars to just give to people and causes you care about. That would be off-the-charts fun and rewarding.

(edit to add: the article may have been written in a misleading way such that he gave away less than half the money rather than over 90%, so maybe he's not quite so based. Still way ahead of the pack. Something I have often said is that in order to become a billionaire, you have to be the kind of person who can have $100M and still put in overtime because you aren't satisfied. It sounds like this guy at least works because he wants to and is thinking in the right direction)

Article snippet:

The 48-year-old is now building his third startup, a supply-chain emissions data company called Scope3. Still, he claims you’ll never catch him joining the billionaires club. “I will never be that wealthy. Even if Scope3 is immensely successful, we will give that money away.”

I've said stuff like that before, but I bet we can do even better. You don't just tax the extra money they make and be done. You publicize the great things the money does, and you give the people awards, titles, and attention in whatever way seems effective.

So maybe next year AWS keeps growing like crazy and Jeff Bezos's yearly "donation" is like 30 Billion dollars. He never sees that money, yet he still lives a billionaire lifestyle. The government uses that money to have schools offer every child in the country three hot nutritious meals per day, and some hallway in DC gets a plaque that says Jeff Bezos: Savior of the Children and the Future of American Brainpower. We all win in the ways we care about.

If it's ok for companies to psychologically manipulate and/or physically harm people in pursuit of profit, then it's ok for we the people to use the bottomless narcissism and ambition of the CEO class as an energy source.

Sell it, keep $100M, distribute $1,500M to the employees who built the company with you.

...sit on the beach with your former employees as just people, discussing who has the cutest little umbrella in their drink and laughing at the stock value of the global conglomerate that bought a business that no longer has employees.

I wonder if it's one of those things that works on any limb but the focus on the left arm adds some placebo effect on top.

For me, I am luckily always wearing rugged waterproof shoes so I've found that running cold water down your shins is super effective. It feels like I can feel the cooled blood flowing up my body, but I don't know if it's that or more of a reflex like goose bumps.

The back of the neck and base of skull are good too. And holding a really cold drink can on the side of the neck, like cooling the flow right into the brain where I need it (neuro issues exacerbated by heat) can be nice.

I'm going to have to try the left arm only within about an hour though. :D

It's not just a matter of the company's capabilities. Sometimes the customers demand it.

Very recently a group of moms I know was upset because their plans were weather dependent and the water park they were heading to only posted the closure on their official website and not on facebook!

Yeah we're all tech gods and they are dummies har har etc. And fortunately my work lets me work at quiet offices and at home. But I feel for the people who have to serve them, because the public IS filled with dummies, but many of them are just nice people who are trying to do business with you. And of course a large subset are cunts, which makes the ignorant decent people get much worse service.

This just reminded me about reading in an article how at some point Musk said he wanted to make X be the everything app. For many people, Facebook is already much further in that direction. That's where they get their news, text or call their friends, do their shopping, plan their events, doom scroll, argue with strangers, etc. They might never leave it if TikTok wasn't so deeply soaked into their neurons.

Needles to say, these people are exactly the type of conservative or recovering conservative people who should be far away from facebook. And I'm not excusing them. But I can at least understand the position folks trying to do business with them are in.

Similar situation here. I am still in my primary career as an engineer, but working on stuff that I enjoy and definitely not scheming to get into management or marketing or whatever it is that linkedin lunatics think an engineer with a business degree is supposed to do. (I had an employer with a really good tuition reimbursement policy so in the 2010s I got my engineering masters early in the decade then also an MBA several years after)

At home all my mental energy and learning efforts go into other things though. Hobbies and family -- things that I have consciously chosen to prioritize because they have positive effect on my health, both mental and physical. After I work on C and C++ code all day I come home and literally dig in the dirt, build physical structures out of wood, and tend to my animals.

The variety, having to-dos that you actually look forward to, the exercise, the fresh air, engaging all the senses, and just being outside remembering that we are part of the ecosystem and not separate from it... these are all incredibly worthwhile things.

They are worthwhile enough that I will spend money or go through some up-front discomfort to make it happen. For example, I have never liked being hot and I have medical issues that make me more sensitive to the heat more prone to skin cancer. I do 90% of my woodworking outside and we have been in a dry heat wave. So on top of things like sunscreen, a wide-brimmed hat that makes me look like a farmer, keeping the house as cold as possible for when I take breaks, or just spraying cold hose water on myself, I also bought myself a ridiculous 24"/~60cm commercial-use fan. It has a brushless motor and is continuously variable speed. At max power it uses 130 watts and sounds like a helicopter. :D

I occasionally get them and mine feel more black & white than color, the the jagged shape and the arc around the center of your vision is spot on.

And remember the jagged arc is always in your peripheral vision. You can't look directly at it and study the details because it moves when your eyes do.

Yeah, with conservatives here in the US the "quiet parts" often include something about it being preferable for other people to suffer or die than for me to lose some convenience. They just keep getting louder and louder about it.

Guys, guys! Take it from an American: Don't be like us. This is some shit our employers would do.

I know our lifestyle looked fun and enviable once we grew up and left the kingdom to live on our own. And it's not all bad, but mistakes were made!

With a single word in caps like that, I read it as yelling the word loudly.

The way it's used here, by a PR conscious intermediary, it comes across more like bitter sarcasm. Like he would not let them release the statement on his behalf unless they yelled Facebook's name when calling them out. It is similar to when a child tells their sibling they aren't allowed to do something, but they say it loudly enough so that everybody understands the parent in the next room hears it too.

Edit to clarify: It is an awesome move to call them out, especially to people who blindly just use Meta's stuff. I read my own comment and worried it would sound like I was calling the Facebook call-out childish itself. It is not. It is a very good thing to fight for a better world, especially when you have the fame or resources that give you a louder voice.