partial_accumen

I’ve given you my opinion. I don’t have to back anything up.

Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got apathy, malice or ignorance.

I don’t think things are getting worse. You do.

So you refuse to defend your spoken position with anything concrete, even though I’ve asked you about multiple specific examples that contradict your position.

And I don’t think any of this should add to the “hate” problem that some see on Lemmy. Which is the point of OP’s post.

Well why would you? You seem to be just fine with the destruction of lives around you, even making supporting statements that you think its good these things are happening to these people. Why do you think that your positions don’t deserve hateful responses? Lemmy doesn’t have a “hate” problem. Today’s leadership in the USA, and as a consequence, our society now does.

Hate isn’t the answer

I agree with that statement. However, your chosen positions are steeped in hate yet you defer or ignore it. That wreaks of hypocrisy on your part, and points back to the intellectual dishonesty I accused you of earlier.

You’re being intellectually dishonest if you are claiming your statement is true.

Just because I said something that you didn’t agree with doesn’t mean I was being “intellectually dishonest,” and it’s rude of you to imply that.

You can keep your false righteous indignation. How can you claim to tell person in an El Salvador prison right now its “no worse off”? Please, explain that to me. How about a fired federal worker? Is it “no worse off” for them now they’re unemployed?

I lived through the 80’s. Try living then and telling me that life is worse now. lol

I already told you I’m an older, well off, white man. Yes, I lived through the 80s too. How is that relevant at all? You’re we should be happy now because we don’t have 12% interest rates yet and stagflation is how we should be okay with trump destroying the world economy for likely the better part of the upcoming decade? Why stop your measure over 40 years ago, long before most of the people here were even born?

Why not tell interracial married couples “Try living in 1966 and not being able to get legally married to your spouse of a different race. lol”

Why not tell women and “Try living in 1918 and not being able to vote. lol”

I don’t think any of that is any worse off than it was a few years ago though.

You’re being intellectually dishonest if you are claiming your statement is true.

Can I ask if you are a white, well off, man?

I don’t think the world is getting “worse,” it’s just the doomscrollers on Lemmy wanting it to be worse to fit their own twisted narratives.

For many MANY groups it is getting objectively worse.

For those in the USA:

• if they are trans they are at risk for violence or legal consequences for simply going in a public bathroom.
• if they work for the federal government they have lost or are at risk for losing their livelihood.
• if the weren’t a natural born citizen of the USA they are at risk for deportation to a prison in El Salvador irrespective of their circumstances of student visa, asylum visa, green card holder, even naturalized citizens.
• if they are a women, their lives are now at risk from preventable disorders if they get pregnant
• if they are old or disabled they are now at risk of being declared dead and having their retirement Social Security income cut off
• if they are a child they are at risk of dying from preventable diseases (like measles or whooping cough) even with decades old effective vaccines available, but not used.
• if they are poor they are at risk for possible hunger and starvation as basic food assistance has been cut around the country deemed as “waste”
• if they are a veteran needing medical care they are now at risk from cuts to staff that facilitate care for the people that stood in defense of our nation.

For our great historical allies of Canada and Mexico:

• they are getting their economies destroyed because they trusted the USA to honor its own written treaties.

For the rest of the world:

• they just today the world got an unjustified kick in the shins with nearly global trade tariffs from the USA.

The only group that aren’t generally hurt yet are: well off older white men

As a member of that group I find it fucking disgusting what is being done to everyone that isn’t in this group at the hands of this group.

I grew up using the (actual paper) card catalog in the library to find books and yes I predate VHS. However, I even understand crypto, but I think my definition may vary slightly from younger folks “understanding”.

Crypto has no intrinsic value like gold, and as fiat currency isn’t even backed by any nationstate. This means any appreciation is based upon the “greater fool” model. Its not an investment. Its a series of Ponzi schemes so repeated that the term “rug pull” is right at home in the crypto world. I’m old enough to see other Ponzi schemes and know how they end up.

The only real value that I can see for crypto is bypassing of national monetary controls. As in, you can buy crypto in your home country with your home country’s currency, then travel to another country with just your coins (as hex values on paper if you want to go that far) and exchange those coins for fiat currency in the other country. This isn’t unique to crypto though. You could do the same with buying rare Pokemon cards and transporting them with a slightly higher risk of seizure at one nation’s border. There might even be less volatility in Pokemon cards than many crypto currencies.

So many trends are variations on things we’ve already seen before. Bernie Madoff would have been right at home with cypto.

I want to see desktop

Some kind of VNC setup

For a Windows user RDP is familiar and fairly high performance experience. I’m a fan xRDP for Linux desktop users accessing graphical desktop in Linux. Its not hard to set up in Linux either which is nice.

You obviously didn’t read the book, because Galt actually innovated (book describes essentially a perpetual motion electrical generator). Musk is a salesperson who is particularly good at getting funding, as well as hiring people who know what they’re doing

Two things wrong with this:

1. Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn’t true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.

2. Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.

They’re labeled as destroying public goods because the government sees all private creations as some form of “public good,” but they merely practiced the ultimate form of “take their ball and go home,”

This is a great example of Rand’s bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt’s Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It’s residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.

it’s pretty easy to assume than John Galt is some kind of important figurehead, when he’s actually just the first in a larger group to exit a corrupted society.

A group that left a corrupt society, and is successful without itself being corrupted? Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term? The pragmatic realty of this would more likely play out like the small real world examples we’ve seen where a New Hampshire town tried to turn itself into a Libertarian paradise a la Galt’s Gulch.

I get why Rand’s message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn’t follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.

I admit I haven’t read Fountain Head or Anthem. That still sounds like reading 400+ pages of Rand to get the same point she’s trying to get across. If others want some better storytelling surrounding her message, it sounds like yours is the better path. For those that just want to rip the bandaid off, the Galt speech by itself is the shortest path.

For those reading the Galt speech, Elon Musk might be a close contemporary example of Galt. He’s a rich industrialist that benefited from other’s labor and the society structures that gave him protective laws, safe food/water, an educated workforce, a welcoming to immigrants, and all of the things that let him succeed. As soon as he succeeds he puts all his energy into destroying those structures because he sees himself as the main character and everyone else unworthy of his ‘genius’.

Eh, I thought the opposite. I thought John Galt’s speech was absolutely skippable since the point had already been thoroughly made by that point.

I’m not sure what you’re proposing. I’m saying skip the rest of the 1000+ pages and JUST read the 48 page speech if you want to know the point of the book. You seem to be saying, “read the first 500 pages, and then stop reading the book once you get to the speech”. I agree with you that the speech is mostly redundant at that point however my method skips right to the point while yours would require the reader to suffer through 500+ pages of cardboard characters with vapid storytelling.

What am I missing from what you are suggesting?

The 1000+ pages of Atlas Shrugged are all an excuse for a 48 page Manifesto portrayed as John Galt’s speech that occurs in the middle of the book.

If you want to understand what Rand was saying, just skip the book part and go directly to that manifesto. Its still a long slog to get through just that part. The rest of the book is slightly worse than bad teen fanfiction.