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“Welcome in what can I get you”

“I want a plain black coffee”

“All rights wha-“

“No sugar or cream or flavor or anything else.”

“Okay, got it, wha-“

“I don’t want no caramachmocha flippy-do’s or frappachina-what-it’s. Just. A plain ol regular black coffee”

“That’s great sir, now please wha”

“Just a old fashioned stright up coff-“

“Now the first thing you’ll notice is that this scenario has never occurred once anywhere in the history of the world. And if you say, “Well yeah, but it’s just a joke.” I’m saying the thing that it’s exaggerating has never occurred. But the perception of a world that caused the artist to create this and motivated people to share this millions of times is incredibly important. Because in reality, no one ever took his black coffee from him. Every shop like this has black coffee. He can also get it at any gas station or any McDonalds drive-through or from home.

All that happened is the range of options for other people expanded and he perceived that as persecution; as his choice having been taken away.

This is not political, this is a human nature thing. Most people are not satisfied to simply have the option to live their life they want. They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice they made. And if over time they see that their own personal preference has become less popular, and even worse, is now seen as being basic or unsophisticated, they will perceive the mere existence of those other options as a criticism of them even if they’ve never heard anybody voice that criticism.

This is why it’s so important for some people to imagine the archetype of the “Angry Vegan”, even though 1) I have never run into one of those people in real life, not even once, and 2) meat statistically is more popular now than it has ever been in the history of the world.

But I don’t know - when I started work, many decades ago, it was expected you’d start at 9, finish at 5. You’d get your lunch break. You are expected to give about 70% of yourself the majority of your time. The last hour of each day and Friday afternoon were quiet times. There was time in the day to hang out with your coworkers for ten minutes talking about anything, not just work.

Now you’re expected to come in early and leave late and work through lunch. Give 100% all the time, more if you can push it. Don’t take leave. Work every second of every day as hard as you can push yourself. Do not waste time in the kitchen just chatting. Why aren’t you working harder?

And perhaps we’re burning out and take massive amounts of stress leave not because we’re not keeping a gratitude journal but because we are all being pushed to breaking point consistently, day after day, until we snap.

The older days weren’t perfect. But there was an understanding that work wasn’t life, and we could relax a little at work and still get paid enough to live. Now we are expected to give everything we’ve got, then give more, and not get paid enough to do something as simple as get a coffee after work. Even our hobbies are supposed to be monetised.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.