TheMoonToMyLeft

I don't see why this is hard to understand. If you're spending so much on childcare that it eats up the majority of one parent's salary, that parent might as well stay home. The problem is that it's the usually the woman giving up paid work in favor of being a stay-at-home parent, as if the general assumption is that the man should work and not raise his kids.

If we're going to have trickle-up economics, where money inevitably ends up in the hands of the richest among us because large amounts of capital in one place seem to exert an almost gravitational pull, then I think it makes sense to use the government and its powers of taxation as a countervailing force by taking money from the rich and either pulling it out of circulation permanently or redistributing it to the working class, who will in turn spend it on goods and services so that this money eventually finds its way back to the rich.

This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn’t start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue. -- WILL ROGERS, 27 November 1932

it really sticks out to me that your comment may well be based on wrong assumptions about the afterlife

My assumption, if you can call it that, is that the only afterlife for which we have any empirical evidence is fame. If there's life after death, it's in the memories of those we left behind. I'm not too worried about that. People will either remember me or they won't; that's beyond my control and thus not my problem.

As a Christian, I prefer relying on the good old ways of God's revealed Word in Scripture.

Is this really the place to proselytize? Hasn't it occurred to you that I most likely grew up culturally Christian at the bare minimum, and if I don't exhibit Christian beliefs there might be a reason for that?

I grew up Catholic. I'm not any sort of Christian today and haven't been since I was 18. I've never believed in any god, whether it's Crom or Yahweh -- but when you're an unbelieving child in a family of believers it's safer to fly false colors until you've gotten your own ship and sailed into open waters before you hoist the Jolly Roger.

Since I don't believe in the Christian God, the Bible is not the revealed Word of God to me but merely the words of men, translated by men. Since the Bible is only literature to me, I have no more reason to believe that it is a true account of historical events than I do to believe that the events of the Iliad actually happened.

In fact, because archaeologists have found a site that may well have been Troy, it's a little more plausible to believe that a bunch of Achaean kings besieged a city because one of them got cuckolded than it is to believe that a Jewish carpenter turned rabbi was somehow both God and the son of God and rose from death three days after he died screaming on a Roman cross -- though I suspect both tales grew in the telling before they were finally written down.

I'm not going to tell you that your beliefs are wrong. But they are precisely that: your beliefs. I don't share them. I have no objection to them as long as you are content to live by them without shoving them down my throat. Nevertheless, they do not give you standing to say that my assumptions about what comes after death are wrong.

We could both be wrong; for all either of us know, the only afterlife that awaits any of us is an eternity serving as sentient chew toys for Yog-Sothoth.

My retirement plan is my grandfather's M1911. All I've got to do is pull the trigger and the nightmare stops. Knowing I can opt out at any time helps me get through a lot of bad shit.

So, the future is a command-line that uses natural language instead of a shell with commands one must learn separately from one's own language?

OK, but what about shell scripting? Will thus NL CLI be scriptable, or will we still want POSIX shell, bash, etc. for that sort of work?

What about the chains of capital? Nothing is going to change as long as the powers that be can profit from the way things are.

At this point I'm no longer willing to deal with job postings because I can't trust anything I see on the internet. I'd rather just put up a "situation wanted" post with a "principals only" warning and see if waiting for people to reach out to me is really that much worse than reaching out to businesses.

Haven't been able to find one that will give entry/work visas to self-taught techies without university degrees.

No, but without a CEO there's no one to hold the bag if everything goes to hell.

You can't say "I was just following orders" if there's nobody to issue the orders.

Sure, let's automate the CEO. Right after we automate middle management, police, state legislatures, and Congress.

I am sure to handle users' information with care and respect their privacy.

How? Is this data end-to-end encrypted? How long do you retain it? What will you do if a government shows up with a warrant or subpoena?

Is UTC the only valid timezone in Markwhen? Also, is there any way to discover feeds in the works, or should I hope to come across feeds linked on people's websites?

I'm not clear on why I should provide an email address to access a chatbot.

I think I'll stick with the one that comes with GNU Emacs (M-x doctor).

As a man, talk therapy has never worked for me. CBT helps me cope with negative emotions, but doesn't fix their cause (life under "capitalism" in the US). What's worked for me has been physical activity that doesn't involve a computer:

* bashing out heavy metal on a cello (think Apocalyptica but without talent)

* lifting weights

* pounding a heavy punching bag

As a result, I view advice to get therapy as I do the suggestion that I "touch grass"; they're the sort of thing people say because they don't have the guts to tell me to go pound sand.

You haven't said anything about other emotions, so I've got to ask: do you let yourself feel anything? Not just joy, but sadness, disappointment, anger, or even outright hatred? Or are you so out of touch with your emotions (as many men are taught to be) that you've forgotten how to feel?

If so, I'd start by finding a way to reclaim your emotions. You have the right to feel everything, positive and negative alike. To start with, here's an exercise. I want to you read my post and shout, "Hey, TheMoonToMyLeft, GO FUCK YOURSELF!". I want you to get angry, if you can. I want you to feel it, and act out that feeling.

If you can't even do that much, then you're in a deeper hole than you suspect and you need to call your local suicide prevention hotline ASAP.

Also, you need to start listening to heavy metal. Go fire up Paranoid, Master of Reality, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath.