Whats the job?

Ugaynian

I mean, hopefully positively

Literally the study linked above. It is unlikely that being on the dark web causes significant mental illness in otherwise healthy people. Therefore, causality must flow the other way - mentally ill people (or those on the cusp of mental illness) are more likely to seek out the dark web

Tell me how I am wrong - how else am I to learn?

Unsurprising.

The dark web exists to serve criminals, subversives, and paranoid people. Why else would someone go to the trouble of accessing a part of the internet with a worse user interface that requires additional work to access? There is a pre-existing filter for people who are mentally unwell.

People are enslaved through debt or sword. Money is tokenized slavery tokens.

This is… fucking stupid. The entire modern world is able to function without a central planner because money allows people to buy the things they want and need via markets. There are all sorts of arguments to make about how fair markets are, how they can be reformed, how various incentives or government programs can be implemented to combat poverty, etc. But large scale, non-monetary economies are few and far between, and there is little evidence that they provide better living conditions for their residents than monetary economies, nor that their systems are replicable in other locations and cultures.

Wealth inequality, I think most people here would agree, is a bad thing. But money is a tool, and is a good - or at worst, neutral - thing. You may as well argue that shovels are evil because sometimes innocent people get bashed over the head with them.

This doesn’t make utilities cheaper. Utility prices are almost universally set, in one way or another, by the government. If the government wants to lower utility prices, they can do so easily by just voting.

This ignores the issue of how we actually pay for the actual cost of utilities. That’s a whole other thing. But long story short - NO, you should not expect utility prices to come down if your government builds solar capacity.

I believe this is an idea most legitimately championed by Nick Bostrom. Here is a video explaining his perspective.

I feel like, at least from the stance of abstract philosophy, he makes some good points. And I’m not enough of a philosopher to refute them (though I’m sure some have). Personally, my stance is “I’ll cross that bridge when I arrive at it” - I expect to die before that happens.

For tips on overcoming this feeling:

• You hate everything around you. Good! Being pissed off is an excellent motivator for action. It’s a trope in fiction that you shouldn’t use anger or hate or other negative emotions to fuel your action - the hero goes through a whole arc of using these “bad” emotions for power until they crash out and learn to use the power of love or whatever. But it is worth pointing out that our heros get a hell of a lot done burning that dirty fuel. And they are the hero of the story because they follow the character arc of learning to be motivated by love. We rarely see the tale of the person who sat alone at home doing nothing until the power of love motivated them to action.
• When you say you don’t know how to get from A to B, usually what you mean is that you aren’t sure of the correct path, not that you know that no path exists. Your angst isn’t the angst of knowing something is impossible, but of knowing that something might be possible - of having uncertainty. Thus, the way to cure your angst and achieve you goal is obvious - start exploring the possible paths to get to your goal.
• If you feel hesitation about starting down a path, or about picking a path to follow, just close your eyes, pick one at random, and take a single step. Once you get started, it is far easier to keep going, and often exploring one path - even the wrong one - gives you good information on which path to try next.
• Often a reason people hesitate to start down a path is because they worry that they will waste time or resources. And indeed, sometimes your paths will dead end. Sometimes you will get conned. Sometimes you will stub your toe. But almost always, time spent going down the “wrong” path is not wasted, since you can always be learning about something with each step you take. You are an explorer, creating a map of the landscape - and the better your map, the faster you will travel.
• Another common reason people hesitate to start on a path is that they are scared. They feel quite certain that a path is worthwhile, but they are anxious about being embarassed, or rejected, or being uncomfortable, or of being outed as inadequate. In these cases, it is worth remembering that the pain is the process. Being okay with being uncomfortable is a master skill in life, and so any path which makes you scared and uncomfortable is a path worth following. And if the fear is locking you in place, so you are completely unable to move, here is a technique: wait it out. Simply spend some time sitting and staring at your problem. You can even work it into your daily schedule, eg: every day, spend 5 minutes staring at a blank text editor window, thinking of working on my resume; every day, go to the grocery store and think about asking the nice old lady at the cash register how her day is going.
• Speaking of a daily routine - when pursuing big goals, you are grappling with uncertainty. Make pursuing your goal easier by reducing the uncertainty in every other part of your life. Adopt daily and weekly routines to take care of the basic tasks in your life and clear out the clutter so that you can keep as much mental energy as possible dedicted to pursuing your goal.
• As you work on drawing your map and travelling down different paths, you will meet other travellers on their own journeys. Most of them will be happy to help you - humans typically like helping other humans. They can share their own maps, tell you stories of their successes and failures, lend you resources, and become travelling companions which encourage you to rise each day and start walking your chosen path. Usually the biggest problem people have here is that they are ashamed of the goals they are pursuing - they don’t want their fellow travellers to think they are stupid, or misguided, or greedy, or immoral, or overly ambitious, so they never dare say what their actual goal is, and they never get the help they need. Get out of this trap, again, by taking one small step at a time towards admitting to others what your real goals are. The more you speak honestly to others, the less ashamed you become of your desires, and the less ashamed you become, the more others will see your enthusiasm and be impelled to help you.
• The environment you live in has far more impact on your success than you can imagine. If your dream is to change the world writing software, you will be served far better living in a 6 bedroom house in downtown SF full of other developers than you will be living in your parents house in a rural Bavarian village. And if you dream of being an extreme alpine skier, you should make plans to move to Chamonix, not Mexico City. Live in a city known for your goal, in a neighborhood which facilitates your goal, in a house that makes it easy to pursue your goal, with other people who are pursuing the same goal.

Yeah, my guess is that this an an artifact of cultures which are more traditional in that intergenerational friendships are more common.

Eg, in England, you friend your friends on facebook, then begrudgingly accept your mom’s facebook request.

I Mexico, you accept friend requests from your mom’s friend, Gloria, your dad’s coworker Edgardo, and of course, your entire extended family tree. In these more religiously/sexually conservative countries, the actual people people spend their time with and relate to are probably more gender-matched than in more secular, liberal nations. But this effect is washed out by the sheer number of loose connections that any given person has.

Problem 1: no dragon

I personally fall in this camp. I’m only attracted to women who I’m attracted to, and what I’m attracted to is fairly well aligned with conventional beauty standards. The thought of being intimate with someone who I’m not attracted to gives me a visceral feeling of nausea, and on the occasions I’ve done it anyway in the name of pushing my own boundaries and expanding my horizons, I’ve woken up the next morning feeling dirty and emotionally sick.

Of course, my attraction to any given individual is not a judgement of their character or worth as a human being. I don’t dislike these people, or hold any ill will for them. My penis just doesn’t want to be inside them. Felt this way since I was about 9 years old, and the feeling has been pretty consistent since then - I suspect it is quite immutable. This, for me, is quite inconvenient since I also have a high sex drive and am highly motivated by sex. My life would be far easier if I had the capacity to enjoy sex with a greater diversity of people - but I can’t.

I solve this problem by being attractive, so pretty women want to sleep with me. It’s a fair bit of work, but it’s worth it for the hotties. Plus the other benefits.

To spend time with friends and maybe meet new people in a social, fun, and well decorated environment.

Confused. Why is this dumb?

Fake: anon has the balls to chop off his balls
Gay: anon isn’t fucking pretty women

and now I’m convinced they use “pretty” to mean “underaged”.

What led you to that conclusion? I’m not seeing it.

…?

Are you high? Lots of people go to bars all the time for all sorts of reasons

Sure. But I think it is better to set realistic expectations. After all, it you don’t expect much, then you won’t feel so bad when it doesn’t manifest. With false hope, you are crushed each time your hopes don’t meet reality. In the long run, realistic expectations serve us better because we can see how our efforts lead us to the results we desire.

This isn’t to say that conventionally unattractive people should give up all hope and dispair. It just means they should temper their expectations relative to their more attractive counterparts, and should focus on things which are within their circle of control, like fitness, grooming, style, lifestyle, mindset, and number of people talked to.