Throughout all my jobs, I've been always systematic in not creating any friendship or relationship. That's because I feel like workplace problems could affect the relation, or vice-versa, when personal disagreements could affect the workplace, because the humans involved would the same, me and my coworker. Imagine dating a coworker and then, eventually, falling into some disagreement (every relationship has one), then one of you (you or them) decides it's better to temporarily go apart so to settle things, but you both will need to see each one face to face tomorrow. You'll look in their eyes and you'll find a hard time distinguishing between your love and your coworker, because they're the same person (you still love them). There's also the presence of falsehood within workplaces, people that seems nice until they're at your back conspiring against you, trying to push you to the cliff. I faced lots of falsehood throughout my jobs. Careers sometimes involve competing against others and there are lots of people that takes this competition spirit too far, diminishing your job and your life for them to get some advantage (i.e. a better position within the company, a better wage, or even "for sadistic fun" of seeing others to be fired).

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I ever felt about workplace relations, I always tried to keep the workplace restricted to my professional persona. I'll be kind and helpful, but I'll kinda "robotic" to my coworkers and bosses. You could correctly guess that this led me to being a solitary person, something I actually always was, because I'm the typical former nerd colleague back at the high school, the shy, social awkward kind, never had real true friends, and love seems like some extraterrestrial fictional thing to me (not that I'm not capable of feeling love for someone because I once felt, but externalizing it and turning it into a relationship only happened in dreams, I guess).

So, in my opinion, it's not a trustworthy thing to make friends at work, especially if it involves possibilities of higher positions and/or higher wages, or a narcissistic boss that wants to be worshiped. But, as I said, maybe I'm wrong.

From knives to ammunition and missiles, all these things are made with rocks (minerals) so, in a sense, humans still use rocks to fight each other. As they say: "War... War never changes..."

I'm not sure if it's a São Paulo (as in the state, not the city) thing, but I had English classes when I was in public high school ("ensino médio"). They weren't the best English courses out there (i.e. they weren't comparable to Brazilian schools that specialize in English courses such as CCAA, CNA, Fisk and Wizard), but they offered a good start for those who had no prior knowledge of the English language. It's also worth mentioning that people who work in IT have more potential to come into contact with communication in English because a lot of documentation is in English. But I totally agree with you that most of the population does not have quality access to English courses.

From my own experience as an ex-christian and now a "pagan" person (syncretic demonolater), I'd point many factors that converged to a general understanding of how demons aren't so evil as we thought before (and how angels and God himself aren't so good as we thought before), while also leading to the understanding and reevaluating of the concepts good and evil, light and darkness.

Starting by the technological progress that allowed us to connect in realtime. Social networks, online communities that gathered people once unbeknownst to each other. Online platforms that connected people from different backgrounds, sharing once unknown knowledge. Books once distant from our reaches are now easily accessible through online libraries. Knowledge was never been so easy to reach (albeit there are many people that prefer ignorance).

This leads us to another important factor: the silent rediscovery and rising of ancient beliefs. The cyberspace brought us knowledge about the Sumerian faith, Hellenism beliefs and many, many others. Everyone can now know in detail about ancient deities and concepts in just a few clicks. Entities and deities such as The Mother Goddess (once extensively worshipped by our ancestors) is being rediscovered. We can easily know a Wiccan nowadays, or a Luciferian, or a neo-hellenist, or a Gnostic, or syncretic people like me, thanks to the internet connection and community. There's also the gnosis (i.e. knowledge through spiritual channelling) becoming available as soon as we have the basic openness to all this great knowledge and wisdom.

These two factors lead to a last factor: the weakening of Christiancracy (the former theocratic West where State and Christianity were intertwined as one) and the strengthening of both secularism (atheists, yet to understand how metaphysical aspects converge with the modern scientific inquiry; as an example, the modern chemistry began from the ancient alchemy) and syncretic ancient beliefs (once "pagan" and "forbidden" knowledge and both sacred and/or profane ritualistic practices, now openly available to be learnt and to be known).

In this way, movies and cinema are just echoes of these phenomena, echoes of the human awakening, becoming part of the culture, extending how the knowledge can reach and teach the masses, even though movies and TV series always have some degree of poetic freedom so they don't always represent things as precisely/concisely as a book/grimoire/oral knowledge. Media knowledge is far from perfect, but their esoteric and occult references spark the curiosity on part of the audience, people that will begin to really know what it's all about. As a personal example, I got to know some esoteric concepts through Supernatural TV series (although it demanded my own research that led me to Luciferianism and then to Lilith).

In summary, I'd call it the Aquarian Era, the Kali Yuga, the Revelation, the new Aeon. Some would call it "evil", while humanity as a whole can now rediscover what "evilness" really is: it's not the demons. It's a part of the Cosmos, it's a part of the Nature, it's a part of ourselves, as above so below. Our spiritual awakening is important to lead us to understand our own shadows through the wisdom of ancient, ambivalent forces, and reintegrating ourselves in Oneness with them.

blares a loud siren

IIRC, it was a high-pitched sound, like a screeching cicada.

"Occult demoness sigil tatoo" (Flux Schnell)

Regarding privacy, PGP is far better than out-of-the-shelf IM-embedded encryption, if used correctly. Alice uses Bob's public key to send him a message, and he uses his private key to read it. He uses Alice's public key to send her a message, and she uses her private key to read it. No one can eavesdrop, neither governments, nor corporations, nor crackers, no one except for Alice and Bob. I don't get why someone would complain about "usability", for me, it's perfectly usable. Commercially available "E2EEs" (even Telegram's) aren't trustworthy, as the company can easily embed a third-party public key (owned by themselves) so they can read the supposedly "end-to-end encrypted" messages, like a "master key" for anyone's mailboxes, just like PGP itself has the possibility to encipher the message to multiple recipients (e.g. if Alice needs to send a message to both Bob and Charlie, she uses both Bob's and Charlie's public keys; Bob can use his own private key (he won't need Charlie's private key) to read, while Charlie can use his own private key to do the same).

Exactly, a laser pointer, while casting a millimeter-sized dot of light at short distances, its light easily gets meter-sized when they reach flight cruise heights, shining airplane's cabins and interfering with the pilot's vision. However, as by inverse square law, the power is distributed across the beam.

The text is not clear whether (a) conspiracy theories cause one to develop psychopathologies or (b) psychopathologies cause one to believe in conspiracy theories.

Regarding the scenario A, maybe, maybe it's because when one finds out a shadowy world under the world we're used to see, their own inner worlds fall down as they were expecting a better world since they were born?

Regarding the scenario B, maybe people with mental health issues are so misunderstood, neglected, bullied and rejected by society (especially by their own families) that they tend to dive themselves into shadowy waters inside the realm of thoughts, consequently finding solace at the knowledge of conspiracy theories?

I dunno, just some hypothesis based... on my own personal experiences... Maybe I'm wrong.

I still have Reddit account (since 2012) and I was never been banned there... Because I barely use it. In few days, I've been using Lemmy (and Mastodon) more than I ever used Reddit in years, because I value and like decentralized and open platforms.

And the second one reminds of the TV series "Travelers", with future factions of time travelers emerging from the changes of previous time travelers in the past. It's worth noticing that time travelers from "Travelers" only displaces their mind consciousnesses, not their entire bodies.

Everybody at the comments are telling about how apps indeed monitor our microphones, but have you experience apps monitoring thoughts? Exactly, mind reading! Once I thought a specific philosophical phrase (yet I don't remember which one it was), and few minutes later a video platform recommended a deep-thought video containing such exact phrase. I didn't even say the phrase outside of my "mind's voice", let alone typing/writing it. I dunno what kind of sorcery they used, but it happened a couple of times. Fact is that the app did, somehow, "read my mind". It was this video platform only, I didn't see other apps doing the same outside of recommending/showing things spoken near the mic or written somewhere.