You are likely scanning my profile and history because I said something in a tone that made you feel funny or angry. This is called being reactionary. You can overcome it.
Fun fact, if you do itemized tax returns, you can make cash donations to your school, fire department or road authority, etc. and get a receipt and then deduct that from your taxes, it’s basically forcing your state to spend your taxes where you want it spent.
Note: it’s been a long ass time since I did itemized returns, your mileage/laws may vary.
Okay then, you don’t actually care. I’m done with the convo and will never see another message from you.
You’re not listening, this isn’t a political issue, it’s logistics.
Right now, in South Korea, if they don’t open borders then every woman will have to have five children and each of their children will need to have five children to keep the nation functioning.
This is a trend-line that many countries are following because of capitalist influence crushing family and community, it’s just that South Korea is ahead of the pack. If you don’t care and want rapid decline, then good, embrace it and thump your chest that you want millions and millions of people to die as logistics networks collapse over the next several decades. If it was slower we could adapt, but it’s happening too fast for supply chains to adapt to, the supply chains that get you your medicine and toys and food and medicine for developing nations.
If this is acceptable to you, then fine. Wear it proud and say you’re against humanity broadly, there are plenty of people who think our world would be better off without us at all. You’re not allowed to complain about other social issues like withdrawing vaccine research and so on, and it makes me wonder what you’re even trying to do by interacting with anyone online or why you care if someone is “blowing dog whistles” it’s all contradictory.
I am citing an issue with xenophobic capitalism, and you won’t even get past your own breathless reactionary impulses to consider that this is an issue that will become a bigger and bigger issue, unless you think the current crisis in South Korea and Japan are conspiracy theories.
Okay so you’re too emotional to read or understand things that you would otherwise agree with, can’t backtrack on reactions, right?
Ah, so that’s what it is. You saw someone bad screaming about problems with population demographics and have been programmed to scream and rage whenever you see someone actually talking about a real issue, that’s a real good way to become stupid.
This has nothing to do with ethnicity, this is logistics, countries that are simultaneously not opening borders for immigration AND not doing more to support family growth are going to experience economic collapse, which will have catastrophic effects on distribution networks.
You still with me?
Rapid population collapse hurts more people than the harmful effects of overpopulation, and modern trends are showing a global decline in birth rates, with some nations like South Korea are going to be completely insolvable within a couple generations and cities will be abandoned.
SK is the worst case, but this is widescale and largely a product of capitalist influence and authoritarianism making people not want to have relationships and family, along with the toxic social effects of the internet.
You want me to shove data up my ass too?
https://www.bsr.org/en/emerging-issues/the-global-population-slowdown
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/27/nx-s1-5576355/population-babies-capitalism
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/population-decline-future-shock-no-more
Don’t let fuckers like Elon Musk hijack issues that actually matter and have control over how you feel about what you see. Why would you give someone like that so much power over how you feel?
You can’t say you hate what happened with USAID and ignore the effects on logistics from industrial nations becoming unable to produce. This is about capitalism crushing our hope for a future and making people not want to have lives and futures.
This whole “why don’t you do it first” reply is no more intelligent than saying “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” or other dumb thought-stopping exercises vomited out by a generation with no attention spans. I reject it, I block those who dump that like they’re somehow doing some good by trying to find hypocrisy in an idea that makes them uncomfortable.
We are all going to have to start figuring out how to socialize face-to-face again.
Sorry guys, the internet broadly is dying for anything but corporate interests and people with rotten agendas trying to manipulate people. It brings you nothing but stress in your personal lives, why stick to it? Who is using it that you need to spend all day in discord to keep them company? Live for a better tomorrow with actual experiences, dust yourself off and start going out and experiencing the world while you still can.
You’re going to get sick of the fleeting, rare experience of getting lost in a video game, it doesn’t last forever, at some point you will grow idle and feel like something is missing, and you will have a choice at that moment of closing down your PC and doing something you’ve always imagined doing or staying there and drowning that nagging feeling by browsing the algorithmically cultivated feed for some new, equally fleeting dopamine hit.
It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted “don’t ruin the game with woke shit” post up voted to the top.
I don’t think I’ve read a steam forum post in close to a decade, and even then it was a very niche thing I was looking for. I have long since stopped feeling any enjoyment or novelty in seeing completely random people’s thoughts, since in the last few years particularly, people have no intention to communicate and broadly just want attention, which has become monetized so the problem is far worse than it used to be.
Seriously, at some point we’re going to have to accept that the internet is dead or too close to death to be useful for interacting with other humans. I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like, it’s all become weaponized and not enough people are left without agendas and campaigns they’re trying to push. Let’s go back to how we did it for thousands of years and just talk to each other and make real-world friends, leave the assholes and shills and sock-puppets to fight among themselves.
Imagine the power we will have if all the scum and assholes become the inferior population scared to actually do anything or go outside and we become owners of the day and become the ambulatory force towards goals and social progress.
Sure gave me a lot to think about there, very nuanced and thoughtful response.
I mean, we’re all raging at this presidential administration for ending USAID which supplied food and medicine to developing nations and poverty-stricken regions without infrastructure, it will lead to the deaths of millions, for no other reason than they don’t have access and resources in many of the places the program served.
if populations collapse in too many industrialized nations too rapidly, many industries and shipping lanes and distribution channels will start to slow down and possibly even eventually close entirely, leading to much greater problems than even the absence of USAID or other programs. A lot of our modern infrastructure we depend on functions on a scale dependent on a certain level of production and labor.
A lowered population would absolutely help us with a lot of issues with scarcity and pollution, but we can’t get to those lowered population levels rapidly or that’s the same as any other apocalyptic event that will cause vast amounts of suffering.
Yep, basically anything that delivers new “things” to you that requires a level of updating and re-engagement over and over with a sense of looking for something that’s interesting to you, especially including anything that supplants socializing with comments on the internet by random strangers.
I feel like it was different in the days when we just read a morning newspaper, because it wasn’t all interesting or relevant to us, it was just informative and you got “today’s concerns” and then set it down and used it for kindling or bird cage lining later. There was no need to pick it up again and see if anything changed.
Here we train our brains to feel like they’re going to get “interesting stuff” on demand, and it creates an expectation for that dopamine reward over and over, so whatever you read that doesn’t give you that feeling becomes less interesting. This is why so many of us can’t finish a book or sit through a movie, it’s just conditioning.
The good news: You’re a childless adult who can do fun things and just let the rest of the population keep the numbers up so civilization doesn’t collapse from rapid population decline.
The bad news: Everyone else has this idea also.
edit: if you think this is an argument for “great replacement” theory, you’re too deeply internet brained and are a child with values shaped by internet streamers, this is a progressive issue involving countries with declining populations who aren’t opening borders, this will be a problem for all of us.
You can just stop using content-aggregation websites like reddit, youtube or twitter.
Seriously, it’s hard at first because you have no idea how addicted your brain is for content and information about the world, but after a few weeks you will settle back into how you were in the before times, and may even have a desire to sit and watch a whole TV show or movie without scrolling, or you might even read a “book.”
(Books are these things that have “content” encoded in text on sheets of pressed wood cellulose, ask your grandparents about them. Side effects include enhanced imagination, retention of knowledge, images and ideas forming spontaneously in your mind, and simulated experiences that create actual emotional responses.)
You won’t miss out on anything, I promise. Our species has existed for thousands of years without you knowing what’s going on, we will continue to exist for millennia without you knowing what’s going on, just read up on your local political candidates when election season rolls around and you’re golden.
boondocking
I will never not read this as some kind of obscure, local nickname for something absurd and sexual/scatalogical. Like “Me and this chick did an Ohio Boondock in an Ace Hardware parking lot once, the manager called the cops so we had to get out of there, but man they must have been glad they rent carpet steamers, ah tell you what.”
I was floored when I saw what even the low-end pre-made travel-vans were going for. They’re really following the whole “Why sell a million cookies for a dollar each when you can sell one cookie for a million dollars” economic model with these things.
To think the trend probably really started because some folks decided to build like, plywood frames around their poop-bucket in back and documented it on social media with various photo filters to look romantic and free-spirited.
Bonfires on the beach at night, shirtless young dude with a guitar, maybe a dog, probably black lab or golden retriever, girls in bikinis and everyone is just perfect and happy… don’t you want to be happy like this too? Get your van with built-in poop bucket for only $90,000 now and start recapturing that escaped youth living off your parent’s dime and a trust fund!
Lucky for you, that’s always a good thing… but that’s also kind of the idea, they don’t build them everywhere, they build a few massives ones to “process” animals on an industrial scale, so it still ends up in your local grocery store, which is why it’s worth taking a minute to check where they get their meat and dairy.
Oh goodie, a dumb post making fun of veganism, I’m sure the comments are going to super mature and nuanced.
does one life form have more value than another?
Like with everything, there is no clear boundary and it’s up to us, the thinking, sapient creature to make these distinctions so that we can exist while minimizing our harm to the world.
We will never eliminate all harm we do to the living world, that’s ridiculous and nobody is expecting it except the most delusional people.
But we do need to draw lines somewhere. And broadly, we can make distinctions that higher animals like cows, pigs and chickens have more of an “experience” of the world than most insects, and thus their lives have more value. It’s a weird thing to say out loud but we can’t shy away from making these moral choices as long as inhabit the earth and want to remain the dominant species.
Translation: they’re going to make everything else more expensive, like they already do to offset hardware prices, but like turbo edition price hikes.
“Oops! All price hikes!” edition shit.