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shrubby commented on You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving   neilthanedar.com/youre-no... · Posted by u/thanedar
lithocarpus · 3 days ago
I mean, it does for people like me who decide to work less as they don't need to earn as much.
shrubby · 3 days ago
I decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up.

It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.

But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.

shrubby commented on William Golding's Island of Savagery   historytoday.com/archive/... · Posted by u/samclemens
cryptica · 3 days ago
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

shrubby · 3 days ago
Spectrum of moral development mostly IMO.

I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely:

"Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.

Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.

Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.

Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.

My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.

Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."

shrubby commented on The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All   thompson2026.com/blog/dev... · Posted by u/NickForLiberty
shrubby · 4 days ago
I am trying to burn my bridges well enough not to be accepted to the clan of complacent narcissists.

I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.

But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.

My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"

shrubby · 4 days ago
I was meaning to write complicit but complacent autocorrupt fits surprisingly well.
shrubby commented on Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders   quill-os.org/... · Posted by u/Curiositry
komali2 · 8 days ago
> I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.

I've been running a co-op for about 4 years now and I really want to expand the model since it seems to be working really well. Turns out giving everyone in the company ownership and an equal say in what we do with our profits (including simply redistributing it to everyone) results in ridiculously hard working people. I'm trying to leverage this into making our own internal product development happen but am kinda stuck coming up with ideas.

Anyway someone interviewed me recently and was asking, "why don't more companies form as co-ops? What's the hidden downsides?" I was surprised that there was this suspicion that there must be some sneaky hidden downside, when in fact co-ops are more sustainable, have lower turnover, higher profit per person, and happier employees. There's no actual downside, it's literally all upsides - oh, except for the fact that there's no way to get obscenely rich as the owner of a co-op. That's it, that's the entire reason. People with capital start companies so they can exploit labor to get even more capital, and only people with capital have enough time and money to start companies, so thus there's not many co-ops.

> replace it with a grassroots up system.

This is basically how Marx wrote about Communism, and how Kropotkin wrote about Anarchist Communism. There have been many... interpretations... of their work in practice. Spanish anarchist syndicalism actually worked remarkably well, they had nearly their entire economy syndicalized before they were betrayed by the communists and then killed en masse by the fascists.

shrubby · 4 days ago
Okay, this sounds awesome. Co-op is sounding good to me.

I'm not too familiar with the communist theory, but I have come to the conclusion that the system doesn't matter nearly as much as the direction.

Waterfall communism or capitalism will corrupt the ones on top. And the grassroots up one will keep absolute power and the human narcissist tendencies at check.

shrubby commented on The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All   thompson2026.com/blog/dev... · Posted by u/NickForLiberty
shrubby · 4 days ago
I am trying to burn my bridges well enough not to be accepted to the clan of complacent narcissists.

I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.

But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.

My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"

shrubby commented on Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders   quill-os.org/... · Posted by u/Curiositry
komali2 · 8 days ago
If you care about the author, navigate to their website and buy a book directly from them, or a tshirt or something. Then they'll actually get paid, unlike from a library loan, or the scraps that Amazon gives them (unless the author depends on Amazon's print on demand for all prints of their books in which case, I guess buy it from Amazon).
shrubby · 8 days ago
Yup.

In order for the writer not to starve, we must bypass the zillionaires.

Send pennies directly to the artist and work for a just society.

I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.

We've seen this waterfall of a system in communism, capitalism and more recently technofeodalism so one would think the logical solution would be to replace it with a grassroots up system.

shrubby commented on AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society   eyeofthesquid.com/ai-is-b... · Posted by u/TinyBig
wildpeaks · 21 days ago
Power reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it.

For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.

shrubby · 21 days ago
Yup.

I'm looking this via the lens of moral development where:

Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.

Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.

Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.

Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.

My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.

Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape.

shrubby commented on AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society   eyeofthesquid.com/ai-is-b... · Posted by u/TinyBig
dyauspitr · 21 days ago
What philosophical foundations are left? Even at the very top the president is corrupt and morally depraved.
shrubby · 21 days ago
The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts.

As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ...

The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein.

A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this".

Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.

shrubby commented on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?   neilzone.co.uk/2025/09/wh... · Posted by u/speckx
shrubby · 3 months ago
Plastic pellets in the woods?

Is it what it sounds like? As in plastic sprayed in to the ground?

Collected? How?

shrubby commented on David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About These Eight Things   honest-broker.com/p/david... · Posted by u/paulpauper
shrubby · 3 months ago
Damn right. All eight.

u/shrubby

KarmaCake day61April 4, 2021View Original