Asklemmy

How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don't have me go through a service to figure it out

Tipping.

Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.

For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.

Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.

Ads being everywhere.

The American Healthcare system

Cars. Fuck cars.

Work to live.

Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.

Trump

Religions.

Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of "Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?"

Took a while to digest because there's a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:

"We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn't have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves."

Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can't justify letting people live unless they're necessary to society in some way - which might've made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn't really necessary at all.

New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn't actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you're out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making "life" easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn't how things should be at all!

Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we'd have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.

Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just "capitalism" or its consequences.

Destroying our only habitable planet.

Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.

Americans generally being unaware of how far their country has fallen behind the rest of the world in virtually every respect (except sucking). Despite increasingly obvious problems that intensify every day, large numbers of Americans believe that American “democracy” is the end of history and as good as it gets. If you criticize their country, they will blame the other major political party (even if both major parties have indistinguishable far-right policy outcomes since they are both owned entirely by the bourgeoisie) or say that other countries also have problems, ignorant of the fact that those problems are either less severe or caused by the USA. Either that, or Americans will assume that you are a paid shill or insane, since no one on Earth could possibly have a legitimate reason to despise America. American ignorance is profound and purposeful even among highly educated Americans. Americans believe the shittiness and backwardness of their country, the half lives even the happiest and most successful among them live, to be humanity’s permanent and ideal state.

Lawns, specifically, the western preoccupation with having little plots of land that should not have viable ecosystems or edible food grown on them, just rectangles of chemical-soaked and constantly-mowed fuzzy green conformity.

I'm paying some guy's mortgage but he gets to keep the house at the end.

our strange treatment of animals

we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who've had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.

[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]

lack of body autonomy

hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:

your body, your choice.

it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the one right effecting all these issues. newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain't worth the air its vibrating through.

slippery slope gatekeeping laws

making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y. if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.

To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.

My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.

Throwing away food to maintain profits while people starve, but since I'm not the first to think this I'll let my man Steinbeck explain it:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Religion is a collective delusion and college graduation shocks me by how ritualistic it still is

Health insurance tied to your job.

The current work week, there is no need for it to be that long with the advances in technology. Capitalism, its a pyramid scheme that is unsustainable.

Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.

Extreme wealth

That girls wear pink and boys wear blue.

That repairing stuff yourself is worse than the company repairing it for you

It's kinda true since the company will probably try to withhold schematics, withhold spare parts or worse, maliciously design it to be unrepairable

The job "market". Every time I hear a politician say "I'm going to make more jobs", I want to yell "jobs are made by the act of doing something!"

• Using internet services that are worse than alternatives, just because they are more popular.
• Ads and pop-ups that block entire website.

Mowing lawns, screw you dad.

Much of the concept of "intellectual property". Here's a good essay by Richard Stallman:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

Copyright by and large needs to be abolished. Patents in software are nonsensical, and elsewhere they should be drastically scaled back. Trademark is alright, with a few adjustments needed.

But all of the above is hiding behind a concept of "property" that just does not apply to intangible things, and we need to stop using that term to describe them.

Advertising (and capitalism in general).

some more

public philosophy mirages

eg.1 "free market will balance everything"

will it now? until we actually see one, we'll never know. we don't live in a free market, and never have. they rig the shit out of it with eg. drm and region locks, and then gaslight us that its free & balanced. lol.

eg.2 "democracy is the best we have"

same as above, when i see a true democracy i'll let you know. caveat: unsure of your exact country's situation, but when was the last time you consistently voted on what you want to happen, rather than who will fail to implement their election promises (with 0.0% accountability btw).

also, friendly reminder: mostly the "who", you can vote for was already chosen in a private vote by the political parties, before they even pretended to care about our opinion. lol.

strawman public discourse

arguing in the media over the wrong points in an issue to keep public discourse on a 'lively' treadmill

eg.1

Q: Is climate change human caused?

A: Doesn't change the issue: stop poisoning the water, air and soil - we need them to live. duh.

eg.2

Q: Is being lgbqta a choice?

A: Doesn't change the issue: if its not a choice they can't control it, leave these people alone. if it is a choice, its a free country, leave these people alone.

edit: if you disagree with any of the above, please expand, i'm open to a new perspective.

Filing taxes in the US is a cruel and byzantine process. It's fucked that the government has the resources and really the infrastructure to know what people owe, and will go through with finding out from time to time to determine if people are cheating, but all but requires them to use a private service to figure out what they owe first.

Social media becoming advertising platforms, I think.

Everything.

• We are run by an oligarchy of nihilists that gladly want to make humanity go extinct to buy yachts they can already afford.

• I am constantly told I need to lower my expectations for everything day by day, and then told I am entitled for simply wishing for the life a white boomer had in the 60s. If that makes me entitled, what does that make the white boomer that DID get to experience all that? No, I'll never own a house, now even renting is out of reach. Looks like porky's all set with his workforce and the only jobs left pay 14 an hour tops.

• Just how fucking boring this world is. Look around you, there is so much to see and do and you will never experience any of it because you were not born a multimillionaire. You will never experience the beauty of Sierra Nevada, you will never get to enjoy Niagara Falls, even if you are lucky enough to have stable employment. Americans proudly call vacation a thing of the past, and the few times people do go on vacation, it's practically suicide for their career.

• Bigotry is somehow being paraded as this noble thing, actually and that actually being tolerant is supposedly this sign I'm some big dumb-dumb.

• If blue cities are so bad, why are property values there so high? Shouldn't red areas have higher property values since most people are fascists and want to live in a place where minorities are more optimally oppressed?

• If this country hates me so much, why isn't it easier for me to simply move to another one? Even would be leagues better than this shithole.

• Some of the worst atrocities being justified because it is for "the economy". Ol' Vivek argued that climate change isn't real because if it was, the consequences of doing something about it would hurt "the economy", as if consumerism is a human right that transcends clean air and water. Hence my first point about us being run by nihilists. If they sincerely believed in God, they wouldn't be doing this, or be claiming "it's okay, I'll be dead before anything bad happens! YOLO!" They only believe in their God whenever they need a justification to do whatever they want. Ironically, God seems to tempt more people into sin than Satan and Lilith combined

Suburban car culture. People can go on and on about the how they like driving, and like the freedom to drive everywhere, even if it makes them fat and lonely. But what about their kids? It's insane that kids are essentially trapped at home unless a parent happens to have the ability to drive that somewhere. Your convenient lifestyle comes at the cost of raising neurotic introverts who won't go outside.

"Internet of Everything" ideology. Sticking surveillance technology on shit that doesn't need it to make it both worse and more malicious really fucks things up.

Homelessness, and by extension, rent