“I don’t use social media and never have.”
So what are they going to do if someone fires back with this? Deny their visa because they didn’t agree to be spied on by a few of the worst companies on planet fucking earth? Is the government going to be able to somehow make me prove that I don’t have social media?
We have the stupidest people in charge right now.
US: “NATO members need to up their defense spending!”
NATO: “Okay, we’ll do it.”
US: “Actually, We’re leaving NATO.” 🤡
I use only Lemmy. It was easy for me since I pretty much only used Reddit until the mass exodus happened about a year ago and then shortly after they killed the RiF app for Android and I lost the way that I consumed Reddit 95% of the time so I transitioned to using Lemmy full time. I didn’t have much of a choice unless I used PC to access Reddit, which I will still do from time to time for niche subjects, but I avoid posting.
I’ve never had any other “traditional” social media accounts. Call me a hipster, but I thought that shit was lame when people were constantly asking about adding me on MySpace or Facebook and just never bothered to jump on the bandwagon. Eventually, when it came out that those places were cesspools run by unethical hacks I avoided ever signing up intentionally and thanked my lucky stars that I was a grumpy and rebellious contrarian in my youth. I think I was forced to make a Facebook account to use my Oculus VR headset, but I put in as little factual information as I could get away with and never interacted with their terrible algorithm.
I still can’t get over that the dude’s name is actually Burger, and Burger isn’t being used as a mild slur to mean “American” like I’m typically used to seeing in these sort of greentext posts.
Real life is too wacky.
We could go back to the old internet any time we wanted, but people have been supping on the convenience aspect of having everything bundled into easy-to-digest “apps” that they would have to deprogram themselves first and come to understand that finding shit on the old internet used to take work. Small wonder that people hear that X (formerly Twitter) is going to be the “everything app” and like the idea of that. I personally find it horrifying how many people are glued to social media, and meanwhile I’ve never had a Facebook account, never had Twitter, never had TikTok, and I’m still doing just fine.
We let corporations get their sticky fingers on everything, so now everything has to be profitable or it isn’t worth anybody’s time. Even YouTube videos are now all about maximizing engagement, interaction, and viewer retention so that the uploader can collect a paycheck from Google. I don’t give a fuck about whatever excuses they use to justify it, people still made great quality content before YouTube partnered with people for revenue sharing.
If TOR wasn’t so godawfully slow, I’d be using TOR and visiting .onion sites for everything. It perfectly recreates that “old internet” feeling of web design that has function over form and small communities built around niche topics.
That’s still the purpose of the second amendment, for people to own guns to defend themselves and others against tyranny
It isn’t, and has never been. The language of the constitution is plain as day:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The mythos of the 2nd amendment being this poison pill for a tyrannical state government is only so pervasive because institutions like the NRA perpetuated it for decades in service of arms manufacturers and their bottom line. No sane government anywhere in the world would bake such a clause into their constitution, it’s antithetical to government itself.
The 2nd amendment is absolutely an artifact of a bygone era of American history where, as a fledgling nation, we did not have a powerful standing army to rely on for defense against foreign adversaries. A people’s militia was the final defense against such a threat.
However, all that being said, I agree with your sentiment that leftists should be arming themselves. Just because the 2nd amendment has almost completely lost it’s original intent or meaning, doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of the fact that it exists with tons of legal precedent to strap up in preparation for what might come next. Things are unlikely to get better from here, and if things get worse you will be glad you have a firearm for protection.
That’s $1,500 with a coupon and the highest tier healthcare coverage that very few people outside of tech workers actually get. You don’t want to know what the out-of-pocket cost for something like this would be.
Former non-water drinker here.
I was addicted to caffeinated/carbonated sodas. I never had any problems drinking almost exclusively diet coke for a long time. My caffeine consumption was well over the FDA recommendation for maximum daily intake.
I would still drink water, especially when doing sports or exercise, but it wasn’t my go-to for hydrating myself throughout the day.
Several times in my life, I quit drinking them, but I would always circle back around to it because I missed the taste more than anything, and I had never noticed any kind of significant health benefit to stopping.
Recently some months ago, I was having some pretty severe bladder issues. Sudden onset urge to urinate. Like going from 0-100 in a racecar, the rapid urgency was the main issue. One minute I was fine and if you asked if I needed to use the bathroom I’d say “Nah”, and then 5 minutes later I’m literally dancing my way to the nearest toilet to just barely make it in time, like literally almost peeing my pants it was that bad.
Went to the doctor about this, obviously, and that was when he told me that the extreme caffeine intake is causing irritation in my bladder and diagnosed me with Overactive Bladder Syndrome. I was instructed to completely cut out caffeine from my regular drinking habits, no tea or sodas, but I could have a cup of coffee in the morning to get me going, although initially I would want to quit cold turkey to purge my system of caffeine and let my bladder settle down. So water it was. Within about a month, I started to feel more regular again and I didn’t need to rush to pee as often and when I did I could hold it for longer periods of time.
Now I pretty much drink only water all the time. I take a big 54oz jug with me to work and refill it towards the end of the work day. I’ll have a cup of coffee now and then in the mornings on weekdays, but I try not to make a habit of it, and I’ll have a sip of a soda at the movies or something, but I don’t even miss the taste of cola anymore. Occasionally I will buy the flavored waters at the grocery store just to get the carbonated experience, but I can’t drink those all the time. Water is great, it just takes forever to get your brain used to the idea that not everything you put in your body needs to have flavor. It’s super refreshing to get the filtered water pitcher right from the fridge, maybe pour it over a glass of ice, and drink it straight that way.
In short, chugging sodas never used to bother me at all, but I guess as I’m getting older my body is just not having that shit anymore. Just like how I can’t eat straight junk food and not gain any weight like when I was a teenager, my metabolism has finally caught up with me on my soda/caffeine addiction and I had to cut that out too. I realize that I am better off now for it and I’m going to try and keep up the good habit I’ve started to form and keep drinking water.
Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble will burst along with it and I don’t have to listen to techbros drone on about how it’s going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.
The NRA never actually gave a shit about any of that. It was always a front for gun lobbyists to stoke fear so people would stockpile more weaponry that they definitely didn’t need while also promoting the American political faction that would be less likely to pass gun control legislation that would harm their bottom line.
Republicans were just useful idiots. They do not care if Trump is an oppressive tyrant as long as he doesn’t even think about the word gun control. If tomorrow the positions on gun control reversed, you’d see a flip-flop so Orwellian it would make you question your concept of objective reality.
Did she ever accomplish anything other than going to places getting arrested and changing absolutely nothing?
It’s got you here talking about it with your terrible opinions, hasn’t it?
Take a look at this image and tell me if you think these guys accomplished anything other than going to a lunch counter and getting arrested and changing “absolutely nothing”?
Not all the protestors are involved in criminal activity. The news is constantly reporting that 95% of the crowd is peacefully exercising their right to protest, but a small minority of people use the situation to their advantage and cause chaos. The media then reports on these (accurate) instances of violence and then right wing talking heads run away with that and paint the picture that everyone is looting and rioting and attacking cops.
It’s also a known tactic to have provocateurs incite a riot so that the people in power can use it as an excuse to crack down on an otherwise legitimate protest.
You can withhold paying your federal taxes from your paycheck. Most people don’t because they don’t want to get stuck with a big tax bill in April with no way to pay it if they spent that money or lost it on a bad investment. if enough people all did that at once, regardless of state, it could put a big financial burden on Trump. The government heavily relies on this steady source of income, and unless you make a lot of money, you are probably getting a federal return every year, which means you gave the U.S. Government an interest free loan of sorts.
Can ChatGPT actually play chess now? Last I checked, it couldn’t remember more than 5 moves of history so it wouldn’t be able to see the true board state and would make illegal moves, take it’s own pieces, materialize pieces out of thin air, etc.
Trump verifiably tried to steal the 2020 election on live television. Even though he failed, his attempt came close enough to succeeding to give pause for thought. There are fewer guardrails now than there were before to prevent something like that from happening again.
So, to that point, I say why wouldn’t trump cheat again? He was never punished for his last attempt. In fact, he was rewarded for it!
We’re never having another election that won’t have doubt cast on it from either side. We burned that bridge on January 6th.
I see you’ve never met a narcissist before. They are bad enough when you have to interact with them in your daily life, and I feel sorry for people who had to grow up with one as a parent. Letting multiple narcissists be in charge of the government has proven to be one of the worst decisions Americans have ever collectively made.
It’s exactly this, 1000%. I work for a small company that had a return-to-office mandate a few years ago when Covid began initially winding down as access to vaccines became widespread. I was working fully remote and had leased an apartment over an hour away from the closest branch office in an affordable part of town. We had our most profitable year ever in the nearly 50 year history of the company in 2020 when literally every employee was working remote. Morale was up, I was saving money that wasn’t going to gas or car maintenance, and I was feeling positive about the future of work-life balance.
Then, one day, I get called in for performance review, and it was all smiles and sunshine and then they said “You’re doing a great job Furbag, but we’d like to see you back in the office for a minimum of three days per week.” That was the first and only negative comment I had ever received on a performance review since starting for the company. When I escalated the results of my performance review to management, wanting a more clear explanation for why I am being asked to commute 1+ hours in to work almost every day from the outskirts of the bay area, they told me exactly what you said “We’re paying for this building, so we want people physically in the office to justify it. Also, every other industry is doing return to work mandates so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”
Naturally, this is still a sore spot for me. The company didn’t learn it’s lesson and still follows industry trends like little lemmings (and not the good kind that post here) while looking into buying up more real estate in other parts of the state to expand operations. They could be selling the building I’m working in now, and use the profits from the sale to fund everybody with equipment to work from home (desk, chair, monitors, hardware, etc) and work would continue as usual with a lot more employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but I’ve learned that owning real estate as a business is in itself a prestige that the C-Suite loves to show off to it’s competitors. “Look at this historic building we own, isn’t it grand?”, “Oh, you think that’s grand? We rent 12 floors of a 40 story skyscraper in San Francisco, beat that!”.
Managers need the physical locations to continue to exist so that they can justify their own existence, and they’ve fully convinced gullible CEOs that productivity will wane if people are allowed to do work from home “unsupervised”, even though there’s plenty of data that suggests the opposite is true.
/endrant
Fresh wounds always hurt the worst. This sounds like it just happened. You are obviously going to need time to emotionally move on from a failed relationship.
My advice is to distract your brain from the event in the short term. Play with your pets, go see a movie, hang out with your friends, eat some ice cream, focus on your creative hobbies. When this sort of thing happened to me when I was younger, I would flip it around and use my newfound single status as a positive - I can enjoy the foods and activities that I knew my ex-partner didn’t like, I didn’t have to plan my schedule around making time to see them and include them in stuff, and I just generally enjoyed the liberating feeling of being single, even though it still hurt to lose someone so close that I had been so attached to. By the time I started to feel like the feeling of being single was losing it’s appeal, I was emotionally ready to move on and meet new people.
In short, just give it more time. Distract your brain. In time, this too will pass.
Anybody who has ever been unfortunate enough to have to apply for any of these healthcare or food stipend programs would know that it’s not as easy as the government makes it seem. In fact, the amount of bureaucracy, means testing, and highly restrictive income limitations means that most people don’t qualify period and people who do qualify have to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to hear back from the government to know if they have been accepted or not, all the while hoping and praying they don’t get sick and can manage their money long enough to continue feeding themselves.
Case in point, my fiance is out of work right now and actively seeking work. She applied for both MediCAL and SNAP and was denied for MediCAL because she had earned too much already that year to qualify and the SNAP benefits totaled out to $20/month in food stamps, based on historical income, which is insufficient even for the most frugal of individuals to make work. This is for someone currently earning $0/month and being almost entirely supported by me.
After a certain point, it becomes a massive drain on your time and resources that could be spent looking for a job, so you stop bothering with the system altogether because who wants to spend hours doing paperwork and submitting claims just to get enough spare change to buy a bulk bag of rice to feed yourself a struggle meal?
I don’t want to hear shit about “handouts” from anybody. My fiance paid her taxes faithfully for years without ever having to rely on the program, so where are her benefits? She has undoubtedly paid more into the system than she will ever extract.