I can almost write a dissertation on this shit but the advice I give anyone who is stressing about the scales is a bit counter-intuitive.

Weigh yourself 4 or 5 times a day and write it down but dont give a fuck about the number for at least a month. If your diet and exercise are on point you just need to trust the process.

Some people fluctuate wildly based on body water, women especially around their menstral cycle. If you wait a whole week between weigh-ins and you had a salty carb heavy meal the night before your weigh in you can have lost 2lbs but be holding 3lbs of water thats going to disappear by the end of the day.

Essentially you need to get a feel for how much your weight swings on average throughout a day so when you have been doing everything right but the scales dont refect that you have a set of data you can examine to make sure you are overall trending the way you hope.

Wrong terminology, It’s denser.

If you take 2 people who are otherwise identical one with 10% bodyfat and one with 30% with the difference made up by muscle the 30% bodyfat guy will look way heavier even if they read the same on the scales.

I treat this one with a grain of salt, because its very good at some things and utterly fucking useless at others.

I needed to know what company made the gearbox in a certain car. No matter what I searched in 3 different search engines all I could find was people wanting to sell me stuff for the gearbox or gearboxes. I spent an hour before I asked ChatGPT and it immediately spat out “The gearbox is a 4l80 produced by Aisin transmissions” which I then spent some time verifying. At the core if search engines hadnt been enshitified, ChatGPT would be nothing more than a novelty. But because they have, its a sometimes useful tool that anyone with half a brain verifies.

If you treat it like gospel, yeah… your an idiot.

People at work have heard my alarm tone and think its hilarious that as a middle aged man my alarm tone is so flowery and gentle until I explained that being awoken suddenly by a harsh abrasive noise puts me in a very combative and abrasive mood for the next several hours and I come to work 45 minutes after it goes off…

Who said they were?

Even the American left has had their national exceptionalism so deeply ingrained that they cant stop screaming “We’re number 1!” while they are drowning.

Thats why they were the perfect mark. The idea that it could happen to them was so preposterous.

Its so prevalent that I had an idea for a movie of a bunch of recently retired dudes being bored with getting old and deciding to re-enact a bunch of their favorite pranks from old movies only to get in JUST far enough to be in deep shit and then realise they are committing felonies and their antics trying to extract themselves.

Ive always wondered something similar about ancient artwork.

Like, sure I can tell its a horse, but thats a shitty horse. Thats a horse from the finest artistic minds of the day that looks like a 7yo did it these days. Like someone didnt look at that misshapen lump and think "I can make that look more like a horse.

And anyone who claims to would need to dox themselves to prove it. Also proving that they make terrible decisions.

In all seriousness its not exactly the most simple thing for a layman.

I speak petrolhead, so when you tell me something has a 2000W motor (Light bulbs and plug in heaters are measured in Watts. I honestly believe they do that on purpose to confuse the issue) I immediately do the conversion to 2kw, which is 2.6 hp on an e-bike that weighs 50kg. A 50cc Vespa makes 3.1hp and weighs 100kg. Now you throw a 50kg rider on there and you have a better power to weight ratio on the E-Bike, and shitloads more torque.

The sheer ego in that statement.

Even Americans who are wholeheartedly opposed to whats happening cant stop condescending to everyone else like “If it could happen to the greatest nation on earth it could happen to you”

We know, we have always known. We’re no better than the Germans, the Italians or any other nation that slid into authoritarianism or facism. America believed it couldnt happen to them because they are just so exceptional, which is why it worked so god damn well.

As an Australian the problem is largely what you imagine.

An unregulated industry brought in bikes that were closer to motorbikes than pushbikes and parents didnt do their due diligence on it. The same industry also brought in a huge amount of bikes that were perfectly sane when stock but were literally childs play to turn into something closer to a motorbike. Now the vast majority of kids went out and did kid shit and they were slightly annoying, a not insignificant number of them got hurt, but there was no real outcry.

The govt as governments are want to do reacted way too fucking slowly in putting sane limitations on what could and couldnt be sold and hold manufacturers and importers accountable. In their defence partly because 90% of them are coming out of china and the govt arent idiots in that they know how easy it would be for an importer to find a new frontman and the Chinese manufacturer to rebrand and force them to play whackamole and partly because they are very popular among adults and people who arent riding them like dickheads AND they didnt want to look anti-green by discouraging people to find car alternatives.

But Here come the fuckwits like takeovers are to “legitimate” street racing on quiet backroads, kids started doing wheelies through shopping centers while filming it for the gram, deciding it would be funny to absolutely destroy the grass and surfacing on local sporting fields and swerving in and out of traffic in 80 zones.

Its not that the cops dont care, the cops know what the reality is that if they start trying to catch them, the kids will run and eventually someones “good boy who never hurt anyone and loved to laugh” is going “to be chased to his death over a modified E-bike and the police are the reason for his death” regardless of what prompted them to chase him in the first place.

All in all its a 3 layer shit sandwich.

Does “people who live in glass houses shouldnt throw stones” translate into American? Half of the rest of the world wakes up every day wondering if your leader has started WW3 over a twitter beef.

But no, you have fun.

I wake up in Australia every morning and check the news wondering if any of the headlines are going to be the 2026 Assassination of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand.

I posted in an ADHD community about how I’m fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.

As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I’m stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.

Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.

It goes through a weirdness peak between 30 and 50. Once you get to a certain age and stop giving “hello fellow kids” vibes nobody cares.

It does get better.

Its replaced by some new fresh hell, but its nice to know the problems change.

This is especially frustrating with the 2 to 4 age bracket. When they ask for something, especially when its a treat like chocolate or fast food and especially when you decide you dont want to deal with the tantrum for saying no and you give it to them and then they give you A GIANT FUCKING TANTRUM for giving them the treat they asked for.

You dont hate them but fuck…

V

I think its a maturity thing for guys. My gym buddies and I were talking about mental health a while back and I said “I was on meds for a while because I had an irrational sense that life wasnt worth living. A year later on the meds I was fat, unmotivated and had erectile dysfunction and I was like ‘Great, now I have legitimate reasons to think about killing myself’ so I came off the pills.”

The 20 somethings all looked super fucking uncomfortable, the thirty somethings nodded and made sympathetic faces and the other 40+ guy said “How are you doing with it these days?” Of course I immediately deflected and said “Oh its hard as a rock” which got the laugh and broke the tension. But the only guy who didnt duck the conversation was the guy of a similar age who had a rough divorce years before I knew him…