What would count as a definition for you?

What is an address broker?

Cutting down the Amazon rain forest, mistreating your workers, mistreating animals, perpetrating genocide, driving a country into fascism, to just name a few. There’s probably more stuff I’d consider evil.

Here’s a rather specific example of greenwashing I had to do with, of the kind that’s a bit silly and very wide spread and almost impossible to avoid, but has a huge impact on where I live: I was doing a translation for a paper producing company. Their brochure was describing how they were caring for the forests that produce their paper and how they were championing the protection of the environment. They made it sound like they were planting and caring for some kind of fairy tale forest full of wildlife and biodiversity. The reality: all they ever plant is eucalyptus monoculture that by now covers half of the country and is one of the main causes of wildfires getting worse every summer.

Another example that I do not have personal experience with but that I imagine must be very difficult to navigate is being a programmer and working on some tiny snippet of code for something that has the power of causing unimaginable harm to society - like most of financial and stock market stuff, or election winning manipulating algorithms.

Water is a limited resource and even tech like desalination doesn’t solve anything if you have nowhere to put all the salt. As long as our tech includes BS like water-guzzling data centers to run AI for creating stupid fake cat videos there’s not much hope. We’re monkeys with technology and some species wiser than us should probably take our monkey toys away because all we use them for is causing more damage.

Technology =|= Civilization

Humans are nice to each other as long as they can afford it. Limit their access to clean water and food and they will turn into bloodthirsty monsters, like any animal will do.

The entire list of mental disorders is made up - people have just grouped certain symptoms together and gave them an invented name. This can be useful for categorizing and treating people, but ultimately your mind is your own and nobody can really say what’s going on inside. I have diagnosed myself and find categorizing myself as autistic useful - although I hate the idea that whatever goes on in my brain is considered a disorder, so I prefer the term neurodivergent. I’d use official diagnoses where they are useful for getting help and support, but always take them with a grain of salt. Psychiatry is not an exact science and both diagnosis and treatment are often not much more than trial and error.

Be especially careful when you are a person who has every reason to be angry about something in their life and someone tries to diagnose you with something like “Is-angry-for-no-good-reason” disorder, as it used to be the case of women suffering from ‘hysteria’ and abused teenagers getting diagnosed with personality disorders.

My kitten is called Maxim Schnorky. According to him a certain amount of ethically doubtful compromise is okay if that keeps the cat food coming in.

The sudden lack of slrpnk made me sad, and inspired me to post and comment again after just lurking for a very long while. Thanks, admin team, for sorting out the problems so quickly and keeping this space up and running!

Our current treatment for such types of depression are essentially still in the stone ages. Throw something at it, see what happens, adjust as needed.

I know, and I guess watching a loved one being slowly destroyed by the trial and error that is ‘modern’ medication made me want to never consider it no matter how bad i felt - so this AI thing seems to be an even more dangerous trial and error method, because it seems even more invasive and less tested than the medication that’s available now. On the other hand I’ve found self medication with plant medicine (yes, it’s weed, weed, and more weed, but also quite a few other herbs I collect myself) quite efficient and safe. I’ve managed to keep myself going for a few bad years and have now reached the point where I went off it cold turkey - something my loved one never managed to do once he was hooked onto the meds. All done on my own terms, no doctor pretending they know better than me, giving myself the time I needed. So that’s for a true stone age method, and given the fact our bodies are still working the same way as they did in the stone age I feel it might be safer than any novelty they have come up with in the last decades. Probably that’s a controversial take on this, and I don’t expect this to work for everybody (you need to have lots of time to be able to afford to rest and relax and have access to unlimited amounts of plant medicine).

Horror might be more entertaining than depression, but the sheer idea of letting some techbro implant shit in my brain is so ridiculous, I’d probably try DIY lobotomy before I consider the AI option.

As someone who is literally living where others go on holidays while depressed let me tell you my depression is very much a response to the world being a rotting shithole. I am not sad because my life sucks but because so many others are suffering and I feel powerless to change it. The narrative of ‘chemical imbalance’ is a very reductive and misleading one.

The feeling of powerlessness and disconnect also points to the cure I find for myself. Instead of implanting experimental BS inventions into my brain I try to be a force of connection, community and hope for others. There is very few things I can do as a single tiny person, but in these very small things lies the power of change for the better.

Thinking about AI trying to fix my brain cured my depression, thanks.

That’s a nice way to look at it (hmm well maybe not nice, but very useful).

I was forced by my idiot ex husband to go to a wedding of family I didn’t even know while one of our horses was at home dying of colic. Spent the day crying, was stared at disapprovingly by strangers and ended up eating some pink dessert with surprise salmonella. Returned home to a dead horse and three days throwing up with diarrhea.

I hate weddings and only have been to two including my own, so that would leave my own as the best one, getting married to the above mentioned idiot. Just us, our kid and my parents at the civil registry, then burger king. Fuck weddings, for real. Best day of my life my arse - I’ve always thought how awful that sounds because it means it only gets worse from there (and it did).

I could still mention a third wedding I refused to go to because idiot husband was too drunk to drive us there safely. Had to flee with the kid and hide at a friend’s place for a week to escape his rage (shouldn’t have returned, but was talked into going back by that ‘friend’ and the idiot).

Weddings trigger the shit out of me to the point where I make sure to not have friends who’d ever consider having a wedding and inviting me to it. I’m now proudly non-monogamous and happy among people who don’t have to make a big expensive thing around pretending they want to be together forever.

Life hack: if you never talk to anyone they can’t be mad at you (probably). Don’t follow me for more life hacks because it makes me nervous.

After several months in an amnesia-like state in which I formatted all my local disks I discovered that a nearly forgotten me from the past had saved her professional website on a git page, from where it could easily be restored in seven minutes. The excitement about this caused several seemingly lost brain cells to grow back into a functional form. There was even a self-written documentation about how to use the static site generator. Thank you so much schmorp from the past, you totally rock.

Thanks for adding that info - something I’m less aware of, luckily I live in a dry climate where water helps.

I can’t tell you why anyone in their right mind would do this but apparently they do. Although usually there will be more people going from the more expensive city A to the cheaper city B.

shrugs gestures around The ongoing everything crisis of everything?

You misread. My argument is “most tourists bad, most tourism bad”. Considering the crisis situation we are living in, especially climate change, people should ask themselves whether seeing the world is really that important. Questioning the tourism industry as a whole sure makes people defensive. I’m not against people seeing other places at all, I’d rather not have it happen in the way it’s happening now as it’s stupidly destructive and selfish. Can we set up things in a way where you can rather spend several months immersed in a different culture than rushing to somewhere for the two measly weeks your employer lets you out of your cubicle? Or is that too radical and we’re doomed to forever keep building ugly resorts and turn everything into AirBnbs?