They were on the correct side of the value system, but could not bring themselves to agree to the tactical compromise.

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This has been my conclusion as well after many years of deep reflection amidst my depression since the pandemic. The problem with current capitalism isn’t markets, it’s ‘how vulnerable the entire system is to greed & power and if it can grow unchecked like cancer to corrupt the nervous system of society - the government itself’. This sure happened in the most capitalist nation of all as we’re witnessing it now, but don’t tell me a strong centrally controlled government isn’t susceptible to it. A government that can dictate what you can & cannot make holds enormous power over all individuals. Markets really represent individual freedom. I can make a fucking cake and exchange it for whatever piece of jewelry I want from the free market. Currency just allows for easy exchange of goods. These are just tools, not the root of the problem.

Edit: I’ve interpreted the bonsai tree as - Fedonomy, or federated economy, much like the fediverse, is a federated web of nodes, representing customers, producers, & service providers. It is an economic model that solves the problem of value creation, distribution, & consumption in a democratic, open, & equal manner without a middle man dictating the terms of such economy. It is the natural evolutionary step after capitalism.

https://lemm.ee/c/fedonomy

I created it and it’s empty.

We let this beast called greed grow unchecked for so long in the shadows and now it has come out in the open, stepping on the throat of democracy, equality, & freedom.

Look what I found - https://lemm.ee/post/54651420

Hugs to you. I’ve migrated once but that was 2 decades ago. Now I have family & teenagers who I can’t up & move easily and who still look forward to a future in America. I worry too.

Maybe humans go extinct, maybe they don’t, I never made any claims about it. But that your worrying makes no difference to nature and systems bigger than your individual control. I prescribe hope instead of gloom for reasons of self preservation.

I’m fully agreeing that climate change is a terrible and genuinely upsetting thing. But know that the animal in you wants to instinctively react to fear, and doesn’t want you to listen to reason. Only you can control this animal. Know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum (it’s from a song). Our ancestors lived in caves, lived through feudalism, through centuries of egomaniacal kings and ignorant masses, and sword fighting, and disease, and famine, you and I still made it here to exchange messages on the fediverse. I will not bet against human resilience and spirit of cooperation, which incidentally is also something you will realize is fundamentally human when you look deep in the mirror.

Depression is a natural state of deep self-reflection amidst conflict, a mirror so to speak that helps you understand who you are, and as an extension, understand what it means to be human. The way out is only when you’ve figured the underlying root cause of that conflict. What is anger, what triggers this anger, what are insecurities, what motivates you into action and what paralyzes you into inaction. Maybe not depression, but deep self reflection is a necessary path to self actualization. It took me many years in depression to realize the conflict is internal and eternal. That there is an animal in all of us that is that is reactionary and instinctive and is easily triggered by rage, anger, & fear and that all reason and logic hides behind this animal. That when we see the whole world turn into animal, our fears revive the animal in us. Like game theory predicts, when you become selfish, I become selfish. That explains all conflict in the world and I mean all conflict. You may gain clarity and find yourself out of conflict and depression, yet it can still be upsetting to see the current state of the world. And I will say that despite all the terrible news these days, I’m still optimistic about humans doing alright in the long run, afterall we’ve survived so far and our ancestors have gone through much much worse.

Self-awareness & anxiety, two common traits of humans.

Man can be free only when and if he’s able to rise above his insecurities

Extract, Transform, Load - 3 steps to move data from one place to another

Not sure why that’s crazy? Sure you can imagine a teenager making a dumb risky move because they were stuck between a rock and a hard place?

Oh boy, do I got a few things to say - I guess I was never supposed to be good at math, I was too distracted looking out the sunny class windows to pay any attention to the algebraic equations being scribbled on the blackboard by my 8th grade math teacher. Midterms come and I come up with a brilliant plan to cheat through it, I almost feel smug. Since I can’t memorize these algebraic equations, I write all these stupid formulas on small sheets of paper and hide them, one under my transparent but tinted writing board, and another in the fold of my sleeve. As I keep me eye at the door to see if the teacher is coming, this sonnovabitch peers in through the damn windows and catches me red handed. As he’s walking me to the principal’s office, the other cheatsheet falls off my sleeve too. My engineer dad decides to teach me math over the next few months, and he does so with some tough love, but then I realize something - math is a system, and it’s very logical and it makes just too much sense, and if you keep following logic and truth, you will arrive at your answer, no matter how hard the problem. I graduated high school with a graduating nickname of math whiz, yes how nerdy, but look at the transformation.

Three decades later, my autistic kid would stumble and struggle at the same exact gates of math hell in 7th grade algebra like a true carbon copy. I tell her you have it in you to conquer this, but she refuses to believe me. I realize she was in a bad school with a terrible math teacher. I force change schools over the summer. I tell her it’s a system and that you need to practice and that is how you will gain confidence. She put in the hard work and understood the system and now tops her class in math. Her friends from her old school on the other hand think they are shit at math and it is because they don’t have it in them. It’s such a delicate line between being a math whiz and going all your life thinking you don’t get it.

You apply yourself long enough, you are bound to burnout, and then you learn to correctly prioritize work & life.

I feel it’s the autists sincerely applying themselves all day long to hold the house of cards together because they understand the importance of holding the house of cards together, while the rest are only interested in finishing their workday and going home and collecting their paychecks and will get visibly bothered if you make them think too much.

And the rent remains the same!

It’s still not warm enough for population over a tipping point, you are just more aware of the boiling apparatus. I believe humanity will jump once it gets warm enough, much like a frog does, even in a slowly boiling pot of water. I trust humanity, after all we’ve survived so far, our ancestors overcoming much much worse. Can you imagine living in feudalism? Or sword fighting in medieval times? Or when we had to hunt?

‘Supposed to’ - yeah, we all wish. ‘Reality’ is that you are who you are. If you don’t recognize this primal instinct in yourself, you’ll never understand it in others. To understand the world, all you need is a mirror, and you need to look really deep in it.

The rise of nationalism / individualism world-wide is due to powerful propaganda targeting this exact instinctive behavior of man that tells him that he is superior to his neighbor with the different religion, county of birth, skin color, economic status. There’s a reason propaganda relies on rage, anger, & fear because those emotions evoke your animal instincts, bypassing all rational thinking.