True, but I don’t know why you’d reload after 8 if that were the case.

That all sounds like it sucks, but I don’t think it’s as hopeless as I’m sure it feels.

Obviously this is just a snapshot into your life, and I’m sure there are more details under the hood, like what exact “adult responsibilities” and stuff you’ve got going on. That said, even in this text I think you’ve outlined a good bit of good stuff you’ve got going on.

First, I don’t know why you think conflict deescalation isn’t an absolutely in demand skill. Every job under the sun has conflict, and being able to manage that is huge. Even within Engineering, you could put that to huge use as a Sales Engineer or some other customer facing technical role.

Second, you got your bachelor’s in an engineering discipline. You can poo-poo your grades all you want, but at the end of the day you succeeded. No mean feat my man. That’s worth celebrating.

Finally, if you’re simply looking for a way out, there are institutions that are always looking for technical people. Obviously this is gonna vary a lot by country, so ymmv, but the government/military is always in need of people in technical roles, and rarely are able to fill them. It probably doesn’t pay nearly what a “normal” engineering job would, but it’d be more than an internship, and it would give you some of that structured camaraderie that you previously felt the lack of when trying to leave.

All that to say, don’t give up hope my guy. I know I’m just some schmuck on Lemmy of all places, but I think you’re capable of breaking out and getting to a better place.

You got this!

Genuine question, why not just walk away?

Like, it doesn’t solve the mental issues you’re already dealing with because of the years of trauma, but like, it seems like step one of healing would be to remove yourself from the situation, no?

Like, tell your dad he should probably get out, because you’re not gonna be there to play witness to keep him out of jail anymore, and then pop deuces?

Here’s the note taking and editors page of awesome-selfhosted. Looks like there are a few contenders in there. DailyTxT looks decent for your use case.

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html

I think you’d be surprised at the number of people who would in fact say that Susan Collins is fair game, but that’s neither here nor there.

I think we’re largely on the same page honestly. I think our difference, if there is one, is the degree to which we think morality vs tribalism is the true influencer.

And this is a bit of a tangent, but I think this is exacerbated by the fact that morals are held to varying degrees of closeness. As an example, everyone agrees that cheating on your SO is wrong. Everyone also agrees that punching someone in the face is wrong. But if a husband cheats on his wife, and she slaps him, you will have people take (often very vehement) different sides on the issue, depending on which “sin” they consider to be worse.

And so, expanding that to the tribalism issues at hand, the majority of people on both sides are attempting to stand for and push for virtues that they believe are most important. Sometimes that’s inclusivity and caring for the poor. Sometimes it’s family unity and economic security.

And don’t hear me wrong, while any of that can be turned towards hate by malicious actors, it is clear that that is occuring on one side more than the other. But that doesn’t make the virtues themselves invalid.

Sure, but it’s equally as unenlightened to say that politics hasn’t devolved into tribalism.

And let it not be missed that your example has one group actively participating in illegal and violent activity and one group that isn’t. The two groups aren’t equivalent on their face.

A more apples to apples comparison would be joking about people at a Trump rally getting killed vs BLM protestors getting killed.

And it absolutely would be hypocritical to joke about the one and not the other, and justifying it to yourself as being fine because people who go to Trump rallies are racist is in fact just tribalism.

To phrase it another way, it sounds like you are saying, to some greater or lesser degree, that, “it’s fine because my morality is perfect, and therefore anyone not on team ‘me’ is obviously pure evil and therefore anything said about them or done to them is clearly and perfectly justified as they aren’t people deserving of moral consideration.”

Of course there’s nuance. Of course every set of jokes fall on a spectrum from universal to heinous.

And obviously a lot of factors go in to deciding if something is truly unacceptable, up to and including if the person truly believes what they’re joking about.

I’m not really arguing against any of that, and I think we’re in fact largely in agreement on that score.

The point I’m actually fighting is one of introspection. To what degree is your opinion on whether a joke is okay or not dependant on your personal political leanings?

How much are you using things like “whether they meant it or not” as a post-justification to make you feel less biased about why you took the position you did? If I provided a hundred different jokes by a hundred different comedians, would your “this is acceptable” vs “this is not” graph more align with a graph of how much they meant what they said, or with how left or right leaning the joke was?

And maybe for you, it wouldn’t be politically skewed at all. Maybe you truly hold an objective metric that can be applied across the board, without a bias towards accepting more things that align to your own beliefs. But you must admit, if so, that it would make you an overwhelming outnumbered minority.

And furthermore, surely you would admit, that most people who do have the “it was a joke against my candidate, and therefore it’s unacceptable, but it’s fine if the joke was about the enemy,” mindset, are quick to argue that they are in fact the most objective person on earth and only make decisions about acceptability based on cool hard logic and rules, not partisanship.

So, is there any set of jokes a comedian could make that are filled with enough punching down or hateful rhetoric that you would condemn, even if the comedian was adamant they were just jokes and that he doesn’t believe anything that’s actually racist/sexist/transphobic/pro-genocide/etc?

Or is it a “no true Scotsman” thing where, if the jokes are bad enough, you just decide that he must actually mean them for real, and therefore you can condemn them out of hand?

If Kyle Gass came out and said, “I meant what I said, I’d have been and would be very pleased if he was killed,” would you consider the reaction justified?

If Chappelle came out and said, “I absolutely don’t wish harm on any trans people. It’s all just part of the act,” would you find his jokes acceptable?

Heck, 15 years ago, way back in 2009, Obama said, “During the second hundred days, I will learn to go off the teleprompter and Joe Biden will learn to stay on the teleprompter.”

The dude hasn’t been able to keep his words straight for a while…

But the timing is… very poor to say the least…

Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.

I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.

But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.

Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.

The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.

If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.

And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.

Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?

“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.

Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.

A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.

That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.

And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.

It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.

Sure, but if that’s the argument, then everyone who has ever bought a laptop that shipped with Windows on it is equally guilty.

Perhaps even moreso. Those people are giving money to Microsoft. He took a billion dollars away from them.

But like, this is classic motte and baily. Your initial position was “all billionaires exploit labor for profit,” but when under scrutiny you just retreat to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so he’s guilty by virtue of simply participating in the system.”

You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?

Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)

Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.

He could have known Notch, though that guy doesn’t seem the climbing type, lol.

Notch is a billionaire. He made Minecraft as a solo project, it became what it was, then he sold it to Microsoft.

Not saying that most billionaires didn’t get there via exploitation, but I don’t think it’s a strict prerequisite.

Yeah, I can’t find a news article or anything, lol. Definitely confused.

I would think the bigger issue would be the permanent ceasefire.

I would think Israel doesn’t trust Hamas not to break it, and it complicates the question of, “how do we respond if Hamas kills a bunch of people.”