Jeff Bezos Space Tourist

[Chroma Starlight]

5 minutes ago, Ayeleeon said:

Have you seen I Robot?

Haven't you seen <every war/holohaust film ever made>?

[Chroma Starlight]

On 7/21/2021 at 9:07 PM, Finite said:

It isn't just college that has gone up in price. It's literally everything.

Yeah, but if you had to pick one single artificial situation that's damaging to the heart of an Enlightment-philosophy liberal democracy, it'd be cutting off the access to the mobility that education offers to those who are willing to put in the energy to improve themselves. Reducing intergenerational contact would be another. And now, it seems like an undergraduate University degree is being reduced to a mere trophy for trust fund kids to flaunt over a new class of mobility-deprived citizens. Don't employers reserve most of the intellectually satisfying and meaningful non-degrading compensation jobs for those whom hold degrees of higher learning and whom are accultured in that manner?

How's anyone supposed to live carbon neutral much less live culturally and spiritually-ascendant lives if they're working 40 hours a week at US$7.25/hr? That's a "living wage" of US$15K/yr, and, I mean. Do the math. By the time you factor in the mortgage, car payments, healthcare.gov silver or platinum coverage, exclusively USDA-organic whole food diet, you don't even have enough money left over for a high end VR gaming rig, much less studio-quality analog audio gear. You can't afford to keep many Schoeps mics in your toolkit at $15K/year. It's hard even at twice that. Once you get into the, I don't know, US$40/hr range, things start to be slightly more livable, like, there's enough breathing room for you to live debt-free and actually start saving. 

But education and continuing education is key, they're gateways to higher things, and the world is changing at such a bewildering, staggering, rate lately. And now they just put a toll booth in front of it to ensure only their kids get to have it. Welcome to a new Dark Age Feudalism, and we're already like a generation in now, and these guys are utterly committed to this wrongful apocalypse that people inexplicably let them create while we all screamed about it for decades. This is crap. I want out. This is no place for old people, young, or just people in general. The only ones who do well here now seem to be ghouls, fiends, and the uncommonly fortunate or blessed. Even though I seem to be one of the above, watching this, being enveloped in this, diminishes everything I want life to be, and I look across the world and I see that they don't have this pervasive negative force of an oppressed society in their lives.

From reading articles in print papers in late 2002 and becoming concerned about the "case" for US war in the Mesopotamian lands to utter vehement disgust that unfolded into horror with the US leadership implicated in Abu Ghraib torture, and knowing that must not even be the tip of the now-melting glacier, and feeling so lost that the entire world was perfectly satisfied to let this happen, there were no sanctions being applied to the Axis of the willing, no help being offered to the disenfranchised citizens trapped within the belly of these beasts (US and Iraqi citizens' liberal culture alike became the US Government's and allies' greatest targets) no matter how loudly we screamed or pointed out, citing credible journalism, the crimes as they unfolded. Again and again. Drone war crimes, illegal surveillance, breaches of treaty, disturbances against the international peace and goodwill, weapons sales and cooperation with the world's most repulsive criminal regimes.

And still I cried out, knowing once people heard the message, we'd all put our heads together and come up with some plan to rise above this. I did this from 2003 to 2015 without finding one single willing person, and then my vocality was finally weaponized against me, and so, I doubled down from 2016-2018 to little avail. During that period, I was very well-informed, and I can tell all the sleepwalkers left (and you are the majority, lately) who also refuse to absorb that they're completely screwed if they're late to realizing how and why this ship of civilization was scuttled and we've all been left to go down with the ship. I want out. It's not my ship, I'm not its captain. In fact I've directly opposed everything the captain has done since being old enough to vote.

Their bomb testing gave my dad's family leukemia. My dad actually became a physician specializing in Cardiology and internal medicine because his younger brother was dying of Leukemia in his teens and twenties, but unfortunately he couldn't save them. He went into the US Air Force to pay for medical school as I understand it. I was actually born on an air force base, apparently, though he got out around the same time President Carter was shown the door, before I was four. He thought he'd settle down in some kind of ancestral homeland, our surname was an old one in that county. The 1980s ground our family down, though, and I was too young to understand what was going on. Our mother took "family values" to heart as if possessed by a life-hating demon, no really. Their economic policy destroyed my dad and our family in ways, although I don't know what he was thinking by not registering any of his children to have social security numbers until late in my childhood (we all have sequential numbers as a consequence). The IRS was most wrathful, and then alimony really did him in? FAFSA said I wasn't qualified for aid, his income said I didn't need it, and yet this conclusion wasn't enough to convince the bursar at university that nothing was owed.  He had no money for me despite it just being state U and him being a practicing physician. Maybe he never calculated on the change that followed. Maybe he should have fled to France in 1986. In any event, he's lucky he died young at age sixty-three of cancer back in 2013. He didn't need to be confronted with the ultimate consequence of his generation's generally endless failure to get real about progress and so therefore were culpable responsible and complicit with a precipitous decline in Western Civilization. Naturally, it's little wonder that poor old Pennsylvania and by extension the rest of this country have been utterly laid to waste by the nation growing in its belly like a Xenomorph from Alien. 

There's been no real care in this country for victims of trauma and this country is so very practiced and masterful lately at traumatizing people at home and abroad, that's like its entire business model now. PTSD, Inc. And so, anyway, I graduated finally with student debt just as they began really stripping this world of civilization in earnest in 2002, promoting their "post-9/11 reality" like it was a scientific breakthrough, while also yelling down every form of social and environmental science there was until the bees and bats and birds started dying en masse. And it's been downhill ever since.  It's obvious it's all by design, and no matter how studious or strenuous or organized a resistance to it that the good people here have launched at any point in the last six decades, it's certainly now clear that this machine is presently of a scale that it can will and zealously does make its own self-reinforcing weather, and it's a storm too big for this Internet kirin to weather alone anymore.

Generally speaking, it's been stormy here lately these last two decades. We're not sure if it is specifically the storms are getting worse, or more frequent, or if it's that responses are getting worse, or it's a bit of each, or a failure to respond to the change in climate generally, or perhaps it just comes down to the stark inadvisability of building such storm-vulnerable civil structures in the first place. We do see that other parts of the world have been less stormy, and we do know that Universal Human Rights recognize no borders.


 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Ceka Cianci]

51 minutes ago, Chroma Starlight said:

Haven't you seen <every war/holohaust film ever made>?

I seen this.

 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Ceka Cianci

[FreeToSL]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:39 AM, Lindal Kidd said:

Working conditions at Amazon are awful, but they will be forced to improve, and not via government control, but by economic necessity.

Why is that, Lindal?

Because their turnover rate is so high and they employ so many people that pretty soon they will RUN OUT of people who are willing to work for them! (Yes, really. I read an article a few weeks ago about this, it's not just me talking off the top of my head)

No they wont, Amazon has already sent millions of other shops to the grave, and will continue to do so, at some point, in many places the only job available will be amazon adjacent, and then you can choose to piss on a bottle for less than minimum wage doing full time hours of hard warehouse work, or be homeless. The abuses of the free market will never self correct, if amazon is not forced to pay decent wages and forced to treat their workers with dignity, they.will.not.

[Paul Hexem]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:45 AM, Moondira said:

As you know, elections & predictions regarding them are lost by only a few points. Even if the PEW research is off by quite a bit more than a few measly points this would still mean the majority of those in the U.S. do want single-payer health care now.  So your comparison is invalid.   

If you don't like PEW research (I don't see why, as it is highly respected) you can pick any other reputable survey -- they all say the same -- America is beginning to accept the notion of single-payer health care.

To your second paragraph where you are accusing me of being "so crazy as to believe the government- the same people that to this day conduct experiments on unwitting humans- have solely your best interests at heart", again, your comparisons are off the wall crazy. Why would I believe that because an entity did some things wrong that all things they did would be wrong?  Do you still eat and shop at a grocery store although there has been food poisonings and even deaths due to bad food in said stores?

Sure, one should have a healthy distrust of government, as you say. But that does not mean I do or should distrust government completely. How illogical would that be?  It does seem to be the mindset of the alt-right in America, but I do try to think a bit more clearly than they do with their 'all or nothing' approach to most everything.

Part of the "problem" is I live in a state where the government controls healthcare. Their idea of a solution is to just fine you if you don't have it. It's still private companies gouging us, with the added risk of a fine if you can't afford it. It's like legalized extortion. So I don't blame the people that aren't interested. 

 

On 7/24/2021 at 12:07 PM, Moondira said:

Nobody said if Bezos spent some money on our food insecurity problem that it would be solved entirely. Where do you get such a notion?  Wouldn't it be advantageous to help some hungry people even if all of them could not be helped?

This would be entirely possible. There are many existing programs to help those in need. Food banks are in every city. With all his wealth he could easily hire a team to manage distribution.

And there are so many other programs in addition to food banks which have the potential to make life better with the additional funding he could provide.

Well sure. Thing is, most of these ultra billionaires already do donate millions to various charities just for the tax write offs. People still starve. You know the saying about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? That applies here too. "Add more money" might help a couple more people, but won't solve the problem on even a small scale (globally). These guys didn't get rich by wasting money, so I still can't really blame them in this particular case. 

[Lindal Kidd]

On 7/27/2021 at 9:35 AM, FreeToSL said:

No they wont, Amazon has already sent millions of other shops to the grave, and will continue to do so, at some point, in many places the only job available will be amazon adjacent, and then you can choose to piss on a bottle for less than minimum wage doing full time hours of hard warehouse work, or be homeless. The abuses of the free market will never self correct, if amazon is not forced to pay decent wages and forced to treat their workers with dignity, they.will.not.

I seriously doubt it. There's no argument that Amazon has put a lot of brick and mortar stores out of business. But to be the ONLY choice for employment, they would have to take over not only retail sales, but every other form of employment. Not going to happen.

But your last line is the crux of my point: "...if amazon is not forced to pay decent wages and forced to treat their workers with dignity, they.will.not." When it gets to the point that no one is willing to sign up for that Amazon job, then Jeff will be forced to improve pay and working conditions, and that point can be projected to be not all that many years away.

Of course, he's trying to get around that by replacing as many people as possible with automation, and so is every other business. That's a different problem, and leads us to such social engineering solutions as Guaranteed Basic Income.

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 7/20/2021 at 11:06 PM, Anna Nova said:

Did anyone else watch Jeff Bezos become a space tourist.

 

Like a true SL User, he rode up there inside a giant metal recreation of male anatomy.

 

[True Vortex]

I love space and all the potential that comes with it. However, I was not interested in this launch or those by Mr. Branson or Mr. Musk as these trips were only to promote brands and products here on earth I no longer use because I've learned these very affluent people truly hate me. 

[Ceka Cianci]

For some reason I thought this thread was locked.. hehehe

Which I'm glad it's not, because as long as their is a space thread, we can post space stuff!! \o/

 

I really liked how this young man explains the distances in our solar system and our galaxy and so on, in terms that people can get a better idea of just how big the space is in between things out there..

It's really interesting, I think.

 

 

 

Edited August 1, 2021 by Ceka Cianci

[Ceka Cianci]

Adding one more which is really neat that I never get tired of hearing.. The expansion of the universe and how we will never ever see things how they are, but how they were.. I just think it's so neat.. hehehe

 

[Coffee Pancake]

@Ceka Cianci Here's a whole video book series on the subject, it's intended as a classroom aid.