Notices by Thorwegian ❄️ (thor@berserker.town), page 25

adding to this, money can be used for good or evil.

when a cooperative sets up a store for the mutual benefit of the participants, this is definitely "commerce" but it's not capitalism.

when investors fund a business, and this business advertises, this is "capitalism", because both the investors and the business that was invested in has injected capital with the expectation of future profit.

when a business offers a service free of charge and sells ads on its website, this is also capitalism.

but it isn't surveillance capitalism until this business begins to track its users in order to display targeted advertising.

the reason surveillance capitalism exists is because advertising is an absurdly inefficient way of selling your product. you must blast it at millions of people to get a small fraction of them to buy your product. targeting the ads makes it more efficient, and thus corporations can spend less money per sale secured.

the most common alternative is something like the Netflix model where you're paying a subscription fee for every website you use.

we also have perfectly functioning micropayment systems that are here today.

you can make micropayments with the click of a button if you have a Bitcoin Lightning wallet installed. payments are instantaneous and fees are so small that even small change can change hands with no trouble.

the Nostr social network (which is *not* blockchain based, despite the number of Bitcoin bros who use it) has these in place. people can give each other tips really easily.

i think there should be a fork of Mastodon that implements this. maybe it can be used to collect donations or subscription fees for Mastodon servers.

@thatguyoverthere @SuperDicq there are different degrees of it. you see some people in their 30s and 40s who still dress "alternatively" but these are often people who work in businesses where that's acceptable. but there is also the intellectual kind, which you can't see. i don't belong to a particular subculture and only dress "normal" because of that.

99% of young people who attack the establishment become members of it later on.

no matter how convinced they felt at the time, it was just a phase for them.

i'm 40 and i'm still not a part of the establishment. i wasn't particularly rebellious as a teenager or young adult. my objections came later, so it's more of a Noam Chomsky thing for me.

@thatguyoverthere @Phil i see. i was just talking to someone with ADHD who searched for the right specialist for 2 years, but his insurance isn't accepted. in a field like mental healthcare, you can't just swap one specialist for another. humans are complex.

@thatguyoverthere @Phil i heard it was about making drugs because someone couldn't afford healthcare

@thatguyoverthere @Phil or possibly assumed it was, because someone jokes the plot couldn't possibly happen in Canada (and medications were involved). i never watched it.

it looks like one of the reasons they're so strict about #ADHD diagnoses here is simply about capacity, according to this news story i'm reading:

https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/maja-brukte-sparepengene-pa-adhd-diagnosen-_-men-fikk-ikke-hjelp-av-det-offentlige-helsevesenet-1.16410027

the public mental healthcare system is completely overwhelmed. it doesn't have enough money and resources and must triage heavily.

some people get diagnosed by private healthcare providers and pay big sums for it, yet still get turned down for further assistance when they return to the public healthcare system afterwards. a diagnosis isn't enough. it must be a very serious case to be eligible for therapy.

this severe under-capacity explains a lot. that's why they offer so little help. best you can hope for is medications or welfare money.

"limited money and resources" isn't something you associate with Scandinavia, but when a healthcare system must try to help everyone (even people who wouldn't normally be covered by health insurance) everything has to be spread more thinly.

the speed and frequency of care you get as a working person is reduced somewhat, because your tax money is also subsidising healthcare for the poor and the disabled.

in countries where you actually have to be able to afford health insurance or pay in cash to even get help (the United States mostly), nothing is subsidised. those people just fall off a cliff.

@Phil what was Breaking Bad all about then? i'm asking because i keep hearing these stories of people who can't seem to get healthcare because they're afraid of the bills.

@coin have you seen it? i've been searching everywhere.

keep scrolling 🤏

i was speaking with a guy who works as a teacher recently. he has to document that he's not a pedophile, because he works with children.

i'm 99.999% sure that not a single woman has to do that.

it's gender equality, but not really. paper thin.

two options i am absolutely fine with:

a) everyone openly admits that men and women are different and this is why we treat them different

b) of course they're not different. so we must consistently treat them the same, with no exceptions.

what bothers me is when the lips pay service to option B but the outcome in practice is option A. that's just a big lie. make up your damned minds.

i don't understand why i can buy an entire dresser from IKEA for next to nothing but if i wanted to make that same dresser by hand, the materials alone would cost more than the dresser. i would only save money on something like that if i built it from scraps.

@thatguyoverthere ask an ART historian however, and they say the modern era ended around the 1950s and after that, we have entered the era of post-modernism

@thatguyoverthere if my recollection serves me right, anything post-1400s is "modern" if you ask a historian.

@thatguyoverthere historians have a date. but that's not how the word is commonly used.

in common usage, "modern" means "contemporary"

if you're in your late 30s or early 40s and you think anything from the 1990s is "modern", consider that 1993 was 30 years ago.

in 1969, when they put people on the moon, 1939 was 30 years ago.

normal people: i need to buy new socks

me: these are bad socks. sell me steel socks 😤 i bought socks already. why are you selling them to me again?