This reminds me of a recurrent thing in life: someone competes following a set of rules, and the other player doesn’t follow them. Of course that gives them an advantage.

There are two logical options to make the game fair again:

1)finding a way to make the second player follow the original rules

2)accepting the new game with its changed rules

Agreed. People blame capitalism but our problem isn’t economic: it’s social, psychological, cultural.

That financial obesity is a symptom, but the root is the issue of cooperating with immense amounts of total strangers: no animal is wired for it, almost no one is wired to truly, deeply, emotionally care for nameless and faceless people: strangers who, you feel, won’t help you when you have a fever, but who raise the price of potatoes because they need them too. We say we do care, maybe we even donate 5€ to some cause, but a stranger is a stranger and our day goes on.

That antagonism is even more heartfelt if you were a child who wasn’t give the love they should have been given… Like way too many of us. Burning the village to feel its warmth.

No animal before us had the option, once they had abused the trust of their pack, to easily move hundreds of miles away and start from scratch with a clean reputation.

No animal before us fell into the trap of the paradox of tolerance: if a pack member intentionally and repeatedly damages other members, other animals do not spend a lot of time writing books about feel-good, entirely theorethical principles.

No animal is as detached from themselves as we are: since we have such complicated language with abstract concepts, we can forget the truth of our bodies and live in a fantasy world. We can even deceive ourselves, and make decisions informed by that deception. Even worse, we can deceive others a lot better than other animals: a lying gazelle might maybe sound the “lion!” alarm when there is no lion, but it’s soon discovered; humans instead can brainwash others into standing against their own best interests, and the victim might believe it was their own opinion until their very last breath.

Capitalism creates competition with its advanatages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure it has great alternatives within the current system: incentives are necessary in a society of strangers, although I think the details -such as the amounts and the safeties- should be re-thought.

Again, within the current system. But I believe we will witness big changes in our lifetime (climate, biodiversity, AI, mass surveillance, military drones, a multipolar world, life extension, pandemics…), and who knows, maybe the entire framework might change.

(the app gives you 5 free scans per month, then you need a subscription btw, just noticed)

thank you, a little too tech oriented for me (I was mainly looking for advice on the things I listed as my usual purchases) but I’m sure it’s helpful for many others

Thank you, useful resource, downloaded the app

While I agree on every community needing at least a little content, I’m not sure I agree on the second point: if this place had a lot more communities, even with two active people each, it would also attract more users, or at least it would make me visit the site more and would have reduced the time I spent indecisive on signing up.

A community isn’t just a bunch of content but also a possibility for it. It’s the reassurance that there is at least another person on this site who shares your interest. It’s somerhing that makes it more attractive not to jump from site to site for each different interest. Those who create them are doing their part by being available as moderators, which is already something that should not be taken for granted.

I have plenty of ridiculously niche communities I’d like to see that would be lucky to get 3 members each, from lichens to cron diet (longevity diet with a little less calories than mantainance and very micronutrient dense) and scientific (or just fanboy like and excited sometimes, waterhomies style) discussion of nutraceuticals (such as garlic and ginger and turmeric) and of mitochondria and of microbiome, to specific anime/manga fans, to animal movements (crawling in various ways as a sport), and I could go on, but I don’t create them because I don’t want to mod them since my relationship with tech makes me go through unpredictable offline phases