Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.

But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.

It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.

Fuck Konami

Sincere question: what did Konami do?

Because patents are now used as an offensive thicket and a way to parasitize businesses that actually do something.

Intellectual Ventures is one of the more notable patient troll companies: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/stupid-patent-month-mega-troll-intellectual-ventures-hits-florist-with-do-it-on-a-computer-scheduling-patent/

Ihttps://www.techdirt.com/2012/12/20/intellectual-ventures-dont-mind-our-2000-shell-companies-thats-totally-normal/

Came looking for this comment. It’s absolutely critical to know thyself, and understanding one’s attachment style is one of the easier bits of self-knowledge.

One of the most accessible books on the topic is “Attached” by Levine and Heller. For me, that book was such an eye-opener. I read it as my second marriage was imploding, and I was grabbing at everything to try to save it. The example conversations for my and my ex’s attachment styles were uncanny. I kept getting the feeling of “were y’all in the room with us for that argument?”

I am also a bicyclist with three different bikes. One watch replaces three bicycle computers. I can track performance metrics, longevity of components, and service intervals… for all of my bicycles.

My watch also has functions for sailing performance metrics, kayaking, hiking, running, and lots more sports.

That’s ignoring the other watch functions: timers, find my phone (great for when the phone slips between cushions and I didn’t notice), compass, barometric trends, notification filtering…

My partner has the same watch. The longitudinal health stats from her watch was one of the key factors in getting her health complaints taken seriously. One medical facility completely, repeatedly dismissed her concerns as “nothing serious.” Turns out she had Stage-IVb cancer (now recovered).

I misspoke, and you raise a good point. I meant gift economies, and that error is on me. And those are pretty well-documented. I’ll stick to my firsthand experiences:

• Waianae, Oahu in Hawaii. The weekly take-what-you-need-bring-what-you-can food exchanges there are a huge stopgap for food insecurity and also spur community bonding
• Burning Man - TTITD, regionals, and much of the hippie festival circuit have a robust gifting culture

You are confidently incorrect on this. Currency == money. Money is, for we hoi polloi, a barely consentual conversion and exchange system for our labor, hypothetically allowing us to convert our labor into readily fungible exchange units. Money, at the Capital Class level, is debt, and therefore control, i.e. power. Money is just how they keep score.

There are plenty of barter gifting and Communist (“from those of ability to those of need”) economies, just on scales that fly below the radar of most economists. Your sweeping assertion leads me to believe that you may simply be ignorant of those non-monetary exchanges. Would you be willing to add more context to your assertion?

Edit: I misspoke; crashfrog raises a valid point, and I meant gift economies.

Wampum was used by Eastern Costal tribes as a storytelling aid.

In the Salish Tribes, dentalium shell necklaces were used as a status symbol/indication of social rank. Some tribes used the necklaces as a type of currency, but I’ve only heard the “some tribes did this” part; never anything about which specific tribes used dentalium as currency.

Obviously, anything that holds perceived value can be traded.

Source: went to junior high in a school that taught two full years of Haudenosaunee (also called Iroquois) history.

Salish source: I’ve been a volunteer naturalist in the Puget Sound for eight years with an annual training requirement, with entire days allocated to history of the original Salish tribe for the area where we’re working.

The Salish Tribes existed in the PacNW for over 13,000 years without money.

Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.

Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.

My college sold me out.

I went to a state school in the early 90s. Taking a specific sequence of physics classes was the cue for Navy nuke tech recruiters. And they were aggressive. Turns out someone in the registrar’s office would search for students with that class sequence and sell the info to Navy recruiters. The person got fired, and there was a bunch of pearl-clutching. And yet military recruiters are still such a fixture of college campuses.

The Pacific Northwest would be a wonderful place if it wasn’t part of the US.

Cascadia Now! Yeah, totally not happening at least until the US implodes, but one can dream.

In my case, Inventor and AutoCAD. I hate AutoDesk with the fury of a thousand suns, but FreeCAD just isn’t stable enough.

Oh, and currently needing .NET automatic source generation (long story), which is very difficult to develop on anything other than Windows.