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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2325 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 25, 2023

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I'm taking my third month long vacation in the past 12 months; given that we are probably seeing the very end of the covid price extravaganza that let me go to japan and london from Socal for a couple hundred bucks; this time filling out my map of Europe with Romania, Bulgaria, and greece (which I somehow managed to avoid up until now.) If I don't go now, I'm probably gonna not go for a long ass time; prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.

I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me. Cheap plane tickets, cheap lodgings, cheap car rentals, incredibly cheap train tickets (including that summer ticket in Germany that was all local and national and some international rail with unlimited rides for like, 12 dollars or something. Shit was wild; I hope they do that again.), and short lines.

I guess It has to end eventually though, or all the places I like will go bust. This is me bidding a fond Farwell to the Coronavirus era, I really hope the people who want me to eat the bugs and live in the pod don't also make me go back to the fucking office.

I'm with @f3zinker. The response to Covid was awful and it basically destroyed the social capital I spent most of my adult life accruing. I hated it and think it was the worst political, social and economic disaster of the last two decades.

The diversity of human experience, right?

It let me stop being a human beast of burden and get on the social capital accruing section of the ladder.

Truly proves meritocracy is a myth: no covid, I work for wages until I'm dead. Yes covid: I get a degree, and now I own a house and have a funded retirement and all sorts of shit; where as you (maybe?) get absolutely fucked by the thing that helped me immensely trough no fault of your own and with no way to stop it (I assume).

What degree did you get? What job did you get with that degree? Where did the money come from?

Like TheDag said, I'm happy for you but I find myself still resentful about the whole pandemic situation. I was considered an essential worker at the time and saw an overall drop in my lifestyle quality. Wages were stagnant with no bonuses, even though supposedly I was too fucking valuable to stay home. No one was hiring in my specific field so I couldn't jump to another employer until right about the time partial re-openings were happening. My commute got a little shorter but all the amenities/services at and near my worksite were shuttered.

I didn't get the benefits of WFH. No binging Netflix, no experimenting with kombucha/sourdough/mead-making. No working on classes during my downtime. (If anything my workload went up.) Vacations I had planned for months got scrapped, including some not-easy-to-get backcountry backpacking permits in a few national parks. All of my social outlets were closed "out of abundance of caution" (which went right out the window when the media decided protestors somehow can't spread covid). I just got dry-railed for 18 months.

And like TheDag said, people definitely got hit worse than I did, some I know personally. Hell, whole nations got wrecked by this. Maybe I should just grin and bear it. But goddamn I am tempted to backhand anyone talking about how cozy and great the pandemic was into next Tuesday.

The pandemic measures very significantly and permanently reduced my quality of life. I won't bore anyone with the telling of the tale, but it's very lop-sidedly net negative for me.

Still, I can't fault anyone for profiting from the whole affair. I'd have done the same in their shoes.

Sure, make hay while the sun shines, but expecting me to give anything more than a token thumbs up to someone profiting off of a situation that reamed me is a long wait for a train that ain't coming.

Interesting, I'm happy for your economic opportunity my friend.

And yeah. Meritocracy is largely a myth - our society rewards a very specific type of person. Whether they have 'merit' or not is largely up to opinion. I tend to think not.

Honestly, Covid wasn't the absolute worst for me. I think a lot of people I know got hit way harder. I just don't like your tone when so many children and other people have their lives ruined and you're lightly bragging about how great it was. Not a great look.

Eh. Pre covid MY life was at least a decade in to getting "ruined" just by society functioning as intended.

I can sympathize with people that got fucked by covid, and I would happily live in a society where people didn't get fucked by covid; but that's not what we got. The majority of everyone is getting fucked every day, and I've finally managed to ascend high enough in the crab bucket that I get to stand on the little people while my bosses stand on me.

It's shit, but it is what it is, right?

Well that's quite a negative view of the world, I'm sorry pre-covid was so shitty for you my friend.

I think your perspective matters quite a bit. Even for people near the bottom of the status hierarchy in the modern West, I don't think 'getting fucked every day' is something that can describe it well, but to each their own.

If you aren't in a wealthy country, then you're justified to rage at the world as far as I'm concerned.

It might be because I came to the US from a semi-subsistence based farming community in central America (we grew most of our own food, but also raised cattle and exotic hardwoods for sale and had some amount of tourism.)

Going from there to Socal and seeing that people actually worked harder and had shittier lives has kinda made me suspicious of the entire neoliberal enterprise: if shit is materially better for people in a town with no electricity, no municipal water, and one phone line just because they aren't participating in the modern capitalist economy; it seems like the whole system fails to justify itself.

Having gone from one to the other, I can say it's not the stuff. The stuff is great! Cellphones and hamburgers and the internet and all that shit is fucking wonderful.

And it also can't be a monoculture. We had black Caribbeans, white expats, and the mestizo locals all living together and speaking different languages/having different religions.

And it can't be all that gay shit, because nobody gave a shit if somebody wanted to have sex with the same sex or trans their damn gender; people just shrugged and moved on like "Well, it makes them happy and we have spend hours at the pilon husking rice by hand so who gives a shit."

So, if people are sadder and have shittier lives, it has to be everything else.

Not to dump my personal political journey on you down thread, but I've been ruminating on why I have the opinion that I have since you posted your first comment.

No I'm actually quite interested in your perspective, I appreciate you laying it out here.

Can you expand on what you think consists of 'everything else?'

IT's hard to say, because it's a lot, right?

But if I had to bet on one thing it would alienation; both in the Marxist sense (from you labor) and in the common sense (from communal living.)

That seems to be the main difference. Two examples: We had really excellent avocado trees on our property, and everybody near us knew that. So, when they wanted good avocados for some reason, they'd come to our house, yell up the path, and bring us some baked goods/coffee/a fish they caught/ some nails/ whatever.

Nobody tracked the value of exchange, everybody just kinda had a feeling of "our ledgers are more in X's favor, better bring them some chicharron from the pig we just slaughtered."

The thing that makes this different from similar structures in the VERY capitalistic USA is that this would happen with people you barely knew or had only met once, because the community was actually a community. You can't get this in any way other than actually living communally I think; no amount of church groups will replicate it.

If you want the benefits of communal living, you have to be a communist in a literal sense type of thing. It isn't enough to attend a reading circle once a week, you have to be willing to put someone's cousin who you've never met up in your house for the weekend because the river flooded and he's stuck on your side.

I feel you. Covid saw my job switch from wasting two hours of my life a day in commute time to fully remote. I suddenly got 8-10 hours of my life a week back. I moved out of state and took advantage of the extremely cheap flights to hop around the country visiting my family, friends, and (at the time long-distance) girlfriend. I could skip town for a week at a time without needing to take time off, since simply bringing my laptop was enough to work uninterrupted.

I’m still remote, but looking for new work and a lot of the places want hybrid employees. It’s hard to give up…

I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me.

Agreed. I thrived during the lockdowns.

Wtf are you on about. I cant bid farewell to covid era fast enough, I get literal dreams of the... 2019 economy! And just about everything else from that world.

Man, I want from being poor as shit to being fully middle class just from school moving to fully online. That was it. Being able to attend remote classes at a four year was all I needed to jump three income brackets.

This on top of avoiding the vast majority of senseless bullshit associated with life: No commutes, no waiting in line for no fucking reason at the Drs, the DMV, the industrial supply, the airgas.

Everything that should never have been in person or queue based since the webpage was invented suddenly wasn't; even when I was still hauling around conduit and cables and pump motors instead of going on the computer and pretending to work everything was so much faster and easier.

Maybe it's just my autism; but I feel like covid really exposed the extent to which human labor and human socialization is mainly involved in a giant game of pretend where everyone works sooooo hard in such important jobs, you can't believe how important this thing I'm doing is; only it turns out that 40% of it can totally stop happening and everything keeps ticking along with barely a hitch.

All the office managers and Jr. cfos and second chair purchasing committee members in the world could die tomorrow and cause less damage than the LA port longshoreman getting laid off without enough consideration, style of thing.

prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.

What are we talking about here exactly?

I could travel to Japan for a month with a budget of 2000$ for all my lodgings and travel and tickets; now the plane ticket on it's own will eat most of that.

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