The Lighting Count Returns

The phrase "money can't buy you happiness" is literally a phrase made to placate the poor and divert their attention away from the blatant abuse of power and classism that thrives in capitalism.

Money buys food, heat, shelter, medicine, and most importantly the very thing that the rich fear the most. Opportunity.

Because if they couldn't gate keep then all their status as being special falls away.

But what is so sad is, for all the money the rich have. Their world is so small. Sure they can go anywhere, do anything, be whatever they want to be, but only with the people who they have yet to burn bridges with.

Because the only way you get to be rich in a capitalist system is 1. Be born into money, 2. Betray and abuse people all the way to the top, or 3. Get extremely lucky and make something everyone needs.

And number 2 is sadly the more successful and available way for "everyone" to reach that level of wealth.

You literally have to trade your humanity for status.

And isn't that what it all comes back to? Trading one thing for another thing?

We didn't move beyond the most basic of social systems. We trade our time for things that we need to live. But when the value of those things can be artificially inflated and manipulated, then effort itself becomes meaningless.

When does effort become so devalued that we just stop working all together?

And that's the crazy part that is happening right now. Companies want to trade out human workers for AI and robotic workers because beyond the cost of buying them and servicing them, they will pay for themselves by being able to work almost non-stop.

But then, if you fire all the workers, then no one can afford to buy anything, or pay rent, or even buy the things they don't need but the companies want to sell to you.

I do wonder what logic goes through their heads when they choose to impoverish the very people they rely on to sell their products to.

Because there is a breaking point. It's happened many times in human history. Usually due to wars but The Great Depression was probably the most obvious sign that there was a major flaw with capitalism but nobody wanted to take the opportunity to fix it.

And now, in the 21st century, as we very slowly approach fusion power, and lab grown everything, and 3d printing and AI this and AI that. Where the hell does the normal human fit in?

Because not everyone can just drop one job and switch to a technical and mechanical skill set for servicing the machine that just took their old job.

This isn't the ending of the newer Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie where his dad gets a new job repairing the toothpaste machine that originally got him fired.

When does it threaten the jobs of those who actually have enough capital to fight it? Like the Doctors or Dentists, or any other highly delicate job that so heavily relies on human intuition.

That's what I worry about. Like sure all the non creative, repetitive manual labor jobs are likely to be taken away from us all. But when it comes to those jobs that we used to go to college for, the ones that should have been safe for our whole lives, what about those?

Well now we have to deal with AI take those jobs while the bots take the physical labor jobs.

You would think at this point, great all that money those companies must be saving should be taxed and then spent on giving everyone homes, and healthcare and utilities for free right?

Right?

Of course fucking not. Because if you destroy your working class by firing all of them, then you also destroy your customer classes. And despite how much money the rich love to throw out the window on stupid shit, that doesn't add up to the collective profits they get from the rest of us.

Cat: sir?

Man: Yes?

Cat: I wanted to let you know, if you died right now, I would eat you. Not because I don't care about you but because I couldn't stand watching you rot away into bones.

Man:....uh thanks?

*Cat looks at the man. Unblinkingly*

Man: uh...same?

I want to write a paper about how absolute dog shit the argument for Capitalism and "Inflation" are. Cus like, we aren't running out of oil, drilling for it has only gotten more efficient over time, and we definitely have cheaper ways to transport it. So supply is not the problem and therefore, the demand is being kept up with.

So where does the "inflation" come from other than greed? Every commodity is interconnected but it always flows back to how something is grown or transported.

The farmers need fuel so even that goes back to fucking oil.

But yet, somehow, despite improvements to production, transportation and accessibility, soooome how they can justify shaking gas prices up and down like a pogo stick during a 9.5 earthquake.

Idk, seems like the most accurate design to the original to me.

Everyone losing their minds, saying they turned him into a fursuit. Have y'all SEEN the original SNES design? He literally IS a fursuit.

My only criticism is the legs. All of Star Fox's team had their legs amputated because it helped keep their blood in the upper parts of their bodies during major G force events.

The single greatest question and answer we ask and learn over and over again is “Why did that happen?”. It drove the creation of religions, sciences, art and every system of government we have. “Why” is the very essence of the human condition. Be it “why are we here” to “why did I do that?” We question our perception of reality in order to anchor ourselves, and it is only when we lose the ability to ask why or care why, that we lose our hold on reality. So the question becomes, “why” are we still so obsessed with the question of “why”?

When our ancestors observed lightning and eventually the destructive power of fire, they most likely asked themselves, “why did that happen?”. That question itself spawned thousands of years worth of mythologies and religious formations. Zeus, Thor, Indra, Raijin, and many many more deities were created as a way to rationalize the power and indiscriminate nature of lightning. Many natural phenomena that mystified ancient peoples would be explained as magical or divine entities, as the sciences were not yet to the point that we would understand the world as it was.

As we grew into larger and more complex societies, we would establish mathematics and systems of government in order to bring order to the chaos that could sometimes erupt from conflicts between nomadic peoples. We would slowly shift from wandering and scavenging to farming and settlement building. The Mesopotamian empire would be the earliest major human civilizations built in our history, but even that took millions of years of growth to achieve. The very nature of the creation of stone structures took millions of years and the understanding of geometry, even if a system of math truly wasn’t understood. They did understand what shapes made stable building blocks and that was enough to build stronger homes than wooden huts covered in animal tarps or other foliage.

We would continue down our evolution into more and more differing civilizations, shaped by the environments that surrounded us. Regional belief systems would continue to grow until they would erupt into powerful religions and those beliefs would be the cause of conflict between peoples as everyone vied for their interpretation of the world to be the more dominant one. Even those groups with no centralized religion would butt heads with those with religious dogmas. The Huns vs the ancient Chinese, the Romans vs the growth of Judaism and eventually the adoption of Christianity. The Crusades vs Islam, despite the fact that both were born of Judaism. Humanity had found its greatest self destructive weapon, and all in the name of who had the best answer to the question of “why”.

Even in the modern age, with all the scientific progress and rational thought permuting throughout our cultures, we struggle to settle on a unified answer. We fight over the answer via religions, political affiliations and even scientific theologies. Wars are fought over resources, justified by the differences of cultural belief systems. Boarders are drawn based on those differences, thus alienating each other further, perpetuating the shattered visions and thus answers to the same questions we all ask. “Why”.

It is not all doom and gloom thankfully. We as a species do continue to endeavor to find answers via the “mostly” neutral act of scientific discovery. We most recently set our dreams and hopes back out into space, exploring the most basic of questions, “why did life start here?”. By further understanding the universe’s machinations, we can turn back the clock and find the origins of how life began on Earth. Then, with that better understanding, we will be able to answer the next big question, “Are we all there is in the universe?”. While it would be wildly unlikely statistically to be the only planet in all of the universe to have life, some people struggle with the idea that we are not quite as unique as we would like to think we are. That arrogance is something that scientists have had to fight with for centuries as well. As science is much harder to use as a boogeyman as religion is for controlling people. The pursuit of knowledge is almost always more liberating than making things up in order to placate people's fears.

Humanities need for the answer to “why” was, is, and never will be a bad thing. Our curiosity is what drives innovation and progress. While religious beliefs become a hindrance to that progress, their place in our lives can not be ignored or dismissed, as having that belief system is oftentimes more comforting than the lack of scientific or moral answers to the problems we face in life. Sometimes, we just need a spaghetti monster in the sky to blame, or thank for the seemingly random events in our lives, and if that gets us through the day and helps us not get stuck on the “why”, then that’s okay.