Cut out social media from your life completely. No, I swear to god, this is life changing advice not some boomer platitudes about how kids these days are always in their phones.

You don’t realize how much life you are missing by being completely stuck to your phone. I promise the world will continue to turn if you ignore your phone for a few hours at a time.

Quit Facebook, quit Instagram, quit X, quit TikTok. If you feel like you are bored and want to open the apps, try something else. Read a book, start a creative writing project, listen to music while meditating, play video games, do some woodworking, go for a walk or a hike with your dog, learn a new language, go out to the bar or club and socialize, go to the gym and work out, draw stuff from your imagination.

I promise promise promise you will feel better. Not right away, but very soon after you start doing these things instead of the vapid doomscrolling, shitposting, clout-chasing, self-aggrandizing social media spiral you will realize that you don’t need your phone. You are able to live your best life when you aren’t thinking about what’s being posted online or taking constant selfies or photographing every meal you eat.

Your future self will thank me.

I’m appreciating the silence while it lasts.

I’ve got a Malamute mix, and yeah, it just never ends. There are definitely times where it’s worse, but you eventually lose the strength to keep fighting the inexorable tide of shed fur and you just accept that your house will never be a clean or sterile environment. Then you stop even noticing it until you wear fancy clothes or someone points out to you that you are covered in it. The roller brushes provide temporary succor, but does nothing in the long term. The Roomba will contemplate suicide. The undercoat rakes will never brush all of it out even if your dog behaves well enough to let you do it for the time it would take to give them a proper brush out every single day.

The construction worker and the doctor have more in common with each other than either of them do with the billionaire.

That mentality, that the two working class individuals are too different from one another to ever unify because of the fact that one makes more money than the other, is exactly the kind of mental attitude that the wealthy elite have cultivated for years to keep us at each other’s throats instead of theirs.

Ideally, everyone would be in a position to break into the lowest strata of the capital class by the time they reach retirement age and can no longer work. For most people, that translates into a, IRA or 401k built over decades of years working, assets like a house appreciating in value (so that you can borrow against that increased value), and perhaps a pension or some other form of investment that yields dividends.

Even then. I’d argue that if you retire knowing that if you live within your means, your funds will last you for 20 years, you’re not actually in the capital class. It doesn’t matter for most people, because few people expect to be able to live for that long past retirement and they can always adjust their spending habits to push the number out a bit farther if it looks like they will outlive their retirement savings. But that’s just it, it’s more like a savings and not endlessly accumulating more and more wealth. For the true capital class, their money passively grows and generates more wealth faster than they can spend it.

I presume you are referencing people who donate plasma as frequently as possible to earn extra money to survive?

Lower, middle, and upper class is such an antiquated way of dividing people into groups to keep them at odds with each other.

The fact of the matter is, there are truthfully only two classes. The working class, and the capital class. 95-99% of individuals fall into some strata of working class. If you earn a wage, a salary, or a commission in order to purchase basic necessities- you are working class. If your money makes you money simply by existing, and your assets passively appreciating in value mean that you do not have to work for a living in order to buy basic necessities, then you are in the capital class.

If the sole reason you have a Costco membership is for the hotdogs, then I would agree, but for the vast majority of people the reason they shop at Costco is to buy items in bulk and save money compared to buying the same amount at the local chain grocery store.

It’s not even because the hotdog itself is particularly good. It’s your standard beef frankfurter and a fountain soda. There’s no magic with the item from a culinary standpoint. It’s the fact that they still haven’t raised the price on it when they almost certainly could have done so silently a long time ago and nobody would have noticed or cared. It’s the one act of upper management bothering to think about their customers for a change rather than just gouging every single cent they can get out of their members because some math formula told them that it was possible.

All of them?

All of them.

Oh yes, the game where I say “This time I will build tall and focus on diplomacy and alliance building”, before it inevitably devolves into science rush into a military buildup to carry out a century-long xenophopic extermination campaign to rid the galaxy of the alien race who wronged me.

I refuse to believe that anybody who claims they are working 80 hours per week are actually productive or efficient for all 80 of those hours. If anything, I think their employers are the ones getting screwed by paying some guy a shit ton of overtime to do theoretically the exact same amount of work that two people working 40 hours could do just as well, if not better.

Everyone should strive to work as little as possible. This was the promise of the future that our ancestors broke their backs to provide for us, and these fucking corporate drones just can’t help but maintain the status quo for internet clout.

Coming up with a stage name is usually something that agents will tell their clients to do if their name sounds “too ethnic”. Happens when they are auditioning for roles, not when they get famous.

Random fact I heard the other day: Leonardo DiCaprio almost sent out headshots with a stage name at the advice of his agent, but his dad talked him out of it and told him to be proud of his name. I forget what they told him his stage name should be, but it was way more generic and forgettable than his real name.

The thing that will kill this is forcing users to migrate to a new app. Removing the largest friction barrier that prevents people from leaving your app by forcing them to cross it is a great way to scatter the TikTok userbase to the four winds.

I hope this kills TikTok, and that the people who enjoyed using it remember who was responsible for it.

The video games industry needs to learn to not be afraid of letting games cook for a little longer. Silksong took a long time to come out, but what we eventually got was a good game made by a small team. Imagine if instead of the 500+ team members working on the next annual release of Assassins Creed, they peel off 50 artists, writers and programmers to create a new IP over the course of the next 5-7 years? Kind of like the original decision to do just that which got us… Assassin’s Creed for the original Xbox.

There has got to be a good balance between “Here is EA Sportsball 20XX, that will be $70 please.” where you get an underwhelming and uninspired annual release title with minor changes from the previous year, and Duke Nukem Forever or Cyberpunk 2077 that were trapped in decades-long development hell and released a sub-par, buggy product.

It’s not the $70 price tag that’s the issue, it’s “what am I getting for the extra $10 I am paying for this?”. If the answer is a more polished and refined product, I’m all for it - but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I don’t like tip culture either, but I’m not going to stiff the guy making federal minimum wage.

If I’m drunk and having a good time, 20% seems fair to me. You can pay whatever you think is fair, I’m not passing judgement on that account.

This is the coolest trick since I learned about the “quick 20% tip on your tab” method. Take the total bill, move the decimal point one place over to the left, then multiply it by 2 to get 20% gratuity. I will sometimes round down on the change to make it closer to 18%. Also I only really need to do this when I’m drunk and can’t maths.

Approximately 2,000 cheeseburgers.

Yeah, I was gonna say… there are definitely way to push anything AI related into an unrelated existing outgroup. Just say the liberals are using AI to steal elections and BAM, just like that you’ve got all the MAGA zombies hating AI.

I’m down with that. Web 1.5? Let’s do it. I’ll get my Geocities page up and then we can rev up that hit counter.

Obviously there are still going to be holdouts no matter what the issue, but by and large people have come to accept that seatbelts are inherently good and should be worn at all times when in a moving vehicle. It’s no longer a debate in the public discourse, there’s just people who wear seatbelts and people who make excuses for why they shouldn’t have to or don’t want to.

I see smoking in a similar light - it was a culture war that raged on for ages before finally the general zeitgeist came around to accepting the facts that the tobacco industry tried for so long to bury - smoking is bad for your health. Whether or not people chose to continue smoking or not is irrelevant, I just marvel at the fact that we actually won that culture issue. The good guys won, and justice prevailed.

I just can’t see us collectively coming together as a culture and agreeing on anything like that ever again. It’s not that those topics were not politicized - they were - but we now live in a post-truth society where if we were still trying to debate about seatbelts or cigarettes there would be no way to break through the stubborn political trenches people have dug themselves into.