Replying as someone with diagnosed depression (“Major Depressive Disorder”, isn’t as bad as it sounds) which apparently first started in teenage years

For me “talk therapy” (such as CBT) has never been ineffective, but not effective to the extent that I considered my depression “managed” so to speak. I’d always have negative thoughts, bad feelings, etc… I was reading The Feeling Good Handbook and became open to the idea of medication, so I was put into contact with a psychiatrist a few years ago who decided to put me on a very low dose antidepressant (10mg fluoxetine/Prozac per day), later upped the dose (20 mg/day, still low)

A week or so after being put on antidepressants (a very low dose, mind you), a large part of my depressive symptoms just… went away. I’m no way near being “constantly happy” or anything; it’s just that the depressive thoughts left. And it was significant enough because I don’t think I’ve ever achieved that with talk therapy

There was an extended period a year and a half ago when I stopped medication due to relocation, and depression came back after like a month or so, but it could have been compounded by the fact that I got a bone fracture back then & was not in a good mood in general… but the symptoms went away again after a week or more of me restarting medication. I stopped medication again 3-4 months ago for another relocation, and depression hasn’t come back for me yet

My understanding is that antidepressants, depending on the type, alters the body chemistry… so depending on where someone’s depression comes from, antidepressants is sometimes the most effective treatment out there (for many others, talk therapy is the most effective). Since it appears that my source of depression is due to losing the genetic lottery, antidepressants probably was the perfect solution. But realistically psychology/neuroscience don’t have enough research funding despite how important and interesting they are, so we don’t actually know that much regarding how antidepressants work… just that they work quite well for some people

And to answer your question: no not really. It just “treats” depression and is not always effective. Happiness seems like something very much separate, but can probably be induced by certain controlled substances (which are highly addictive and bad for you)

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I thought it would be so funny if any of the EU employees would go to a bar in Brussels (majority French-speaking) and have an aneurysm explaining what they do to a local in broken French. Not that it would ever happen… but it would be funny

Exact number is between 3100-3200 EUR/mo after tax. My current salary is fixed by the government and is under a preferential tax treatment (no income tax first 3 years, only social security)

Number might seem low… but in comparison, the country’s median salary is like 2500-2600/mo, 2800+/mo where I live. I also don’t spend a lot (I literally don’t know how to spend more than half of my monthly salary at the moment) so I feel like a king here lmao

The literal same job title I had in Chicago was $61,008/yr exact before tax in Chicago and I definitely felt poor. Enough to survive, but poor

Never been fired fired as I haven’t had that many jobs and jobs in academia usually don’t officially fire someone… the closest one I had was pretty wild though

I was taking a summer job in college on a clinical research project; part-time job, we got assigned working hours at the beginning of each week. I was one of the few students who did not have clearance for clinical/counseling work so I could only do lab work. My performance wasn’t the best and I couldn’t do anything besides processing samples, so after 2-3 weeks they stopped issuing me work schedules and I was “fired”… or at least that’s what I thought. Later it turned out the lead professor and the entire project got into a massive scandal (sexual harassment, bullying, etc… got on local news) that eventually got the professor fired (tenured btw so they can’t be officially fired, uni “convinced” them to leave), so every student worker was essentially laid off at that moment. Probably likely that the entire research team got something akin to a stop-work order earlier so that’s why I never got work assigned for those weeks…

So yeah, the answer was a combination of 1) I wasn’t that good of a worker and more importantly 2) the entire project we were on got into a scandal and was terminated

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if it is just the nature of what happens when a social media network grows large. I did observe how some subreddits instantly get more toxic as they grow bigger too

… On the other hand though, coincidentally I did see some very recent comments that are decidedly more right-wing than the general Lemmy userbase. I personally try not to judge ppl’s political orientation but I do wonder if there’s something weird going on

Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history

So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)

In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)

Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017

It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks

As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating

Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/

My zeroth thing would be to yell at the top of my lungs What the actual fuck

1. Increase security personnel for myself and the White House. Sadly this will have to be necessary given the hostile nature of the US at the moment… hopefully this is temporary
2. Reverse every policy Trump and the MAGA team have been doing (if that even counts as one thing)
3. Convert the US voting system to ranked choice voting
4. Add a wage indexing scheme: governmental salaries, minimum wage, and private market wage guidelines will be pegged to inflation
5. Increase governmental budget especially in areas like health, science

I’d probably be voted out by the time my term ends, but I hope at least some of the changes are permanent

Don’t mind me I’m also looking through the replies, I’m not qualified to answer this question… I basically followed the trend and drifted from China to the US for education & thought I would have stayed permanently, but wow things went down the drain quickly (left before the ICE did their thing in Chicago…). I am still trying to figure out the new country (Belgium) I found a job and relocated to at the moment

Yes, because I was primarily a lurker while I was on Reddit… Lurked on Lemmy for a year too but not anymore, so I spend more time on here

A few somewhat recent ones of different magnitudes:

• Cancer, despite still being the leading cause of deaths worldwide, is seeing a downward trend in mortality rates across most subtypes
• The 2025 Nobel Prizes are currently being awarded
• The Greek Parthenon recently became scaffold free for the first time in 15 years, apparently restoration is using all original pieces as well
• EU has fairly recently revised the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive which will require new buildings to have zero-emission

Currently none; the country is known for having a very high union participation rate, but I don’t know what’s the situation is for researchers specifically… As in, I don’t even know if there ks a union for PhD students/postdocs. I’m convinced to do something about this though, we’ll see. Thanks!

I… learned something new today about Lemmy I guess

No that’s definitely not me, my workplaces may have asshole bosses but actually all have surprisingly little drama all things considered (and I hope I don’t jinx it)

… Thanks, is there an in joke that I didn’t quite get somewhere??

Frankly it helps… your experience tracks with mine as well. I did hear from one colleague that they adopted the Dutch explicit/super-direct communication style and I think it worked for them, so I will give it a shot too. My coworkers are nice so thankfully I believe I will have some ppl to talk to, I’ll make sure to do that

Seems most are on the autism spectrum, and that makes it hard to interact with

Funny you mentioned that… I’m Autistic and somehow the worst boss I’ve had so far was extremely ASD-coded, while the best one I’ve had was not on the spectrum but super understanding. And yes there are lots of assholes in academia

Thanks, that helps a lot… I definitely had an issue with just detaching from my work emotionally for the last job, hence why I literally got sick despite the job being really, really favorable on paper. I will try to do this more for the current job for now; the job is also quite favorable on paper after all. I did mention in another comment that it is unlikely I will get fired, so if I really want to stay I will try to adapt these concepts to the best of my abilities. Thanks!

It’s the supervisor. I’d say it may be more close to the second one than the first: bossman was trained in German academia and it shows; they are from what I’ve gathered a micromanaging person with really bad management skills that also has pretty blatant favoritism, also heard from coworkers that bossman disallowed vacations previously. Not the worst thing in the world but does appear to be pretty nasty; if I don’t want to get fired there are ways I can adapt. My coworkers are honestly quite nice atm. I suppose I will try to do both then, apply for other things while use my… currently strong arsenal tool of dealing with ppl to get through things for now

I’d also be looking for an EU sugar mama as much as possible on the side

I eh will get on Hinge again and visit Luxembourg in the future 💀

Disclaimer that I’m not an economist

I believe I have heard a discussion about this before… that the “always grow bigger” model is not only not a necessity under capitalism, it wasn’t even the predominant economic model in the US for a while. Post war, FDR’s New Deal followed the Keynesian model, which from my understanding indirectly led to the type of regulated capitalism with a much heavier emphasis on shareholder/employee satisfaction… and also when the extremely high progressive income tax brackets happened. The always need to grow bigger idea may or may not have come from Milton Friedman of the UChicago school in the 1970s: one of the core assumptions of the Neoclassical model is that companies maximize profits.

Also this is definitely not just a US megacorp thing. Other countries have megacorps too. Case in point South Korea…

From what I remember from nutrition science research… our body fat are literally living, breathing cells. As in, fat cells which specialize into fat storage, which can grow/shrink, and are in fact very metabolically active. So not only do they get replaced over time, they are biologically quite relevant and probably more “active” than, say, the nearby muscle cells

Wikipedia does have a page for adipocytes, not sure how up-to-date it is but it explains better than I could. Beware that it is quite technical

… Craigslist with no spam/scam. I’m not very social