It depends.
I’m one of the few people still teaching on Zoom. Turns out it’s a good delivery method for some students at community colleges (like if you have young children at home, etc.)
If I’m teaching, I show up 15 minutes early.
If I’m just a participant, I show up pretty much right on time, then I quietly judge whoever is running the meeting because most calls are run poorly.
Absolutely.
Buy things used, repair and jailbreak what you can, and learn to make things for yourself.
We can’t, at least as individuals, divest from every exploitative system. But, we can remove ourselves from more than we think.
Often enough, you get a better experience out of the homemade and secondary market than whatever the new thing you’re being pushed can give.
Yes.
I was the director of a very small summer camp in a former career. For some background info, the camp mainly served kids from some rather infamous inner-city neighborhoods. This was one of the very few black owned summer camps in the country. 99% of these kids were black or brown; I am vampiricly pale white and ginger.
And so, I found myself at a conference representing this camp…. Mostly to beg, coerce, and shame wealthy people there into giving us money (we sure as shit weren’t making money off the families of our kids; most couldn’t pay, but going to camp was safer than any week at home in the city).
On day 2 of the conference I get a text. It’s from the secretary of some high powered individual from Focus on the Family whose name I have long forgotten. He wants to have lunch with me to discuss an “opportunity.”
What the hell, right? Their money’s just as green as everyone else’s. Maybe I can charm the guy into cutting us a check.
So, I say yes and we meet at the fanciest restaurant in the hotel this conference was in.
Friends, I’m not one to believe in possession but something was straight up evil about this man from the moment I sat down. I mean I felt like I was eating with a fucking demon.
The “opportunity,” by the way, was to essentially fuck over the community our camp was for and convince our board to sell the land to his organization. This land was the same space some of the families of our community had been enslaved on. It was hallowed ground.
I ordered the most expensive dish I could find, waited for the food to come, told him to go fuck himself, and then went back to my hotel room and took a shower to get the feeling of being around that…… Thing off me.
I really don’t know how to describe it. It was like sitting across from some kind of hungry emptiness in the form of an old man.
I don’t know what I talked to, but I do wonder if that mother fucker was human.
I’m honestly just deeply interested in this guy every time I hear about him.
Not because I think he’s smart, on to something, or at all worthwhile though.
It’s just…. Kind of morbidly entertaining to watch a man spend so much time and money to deal with an obvious and incredible fear of death.
He’s going to die some day, and probably from one of these things he’s paying for to avoid dying. It’s Qin Shi Huang shit.
And, ya know what? There are some truly wonderful and interesting works of philosophy dealing with his exact problem, but our boy is too much of a tech bro to even consider that someone may have found a way to deal with the fear of death a few thousand years ago.
So, fuck it, burn that cash bud.