This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.

But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.

So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I'm naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they're part of my family and dynasty--so I'm giving them names that have a lot of personal "worth" to me.

Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn't white, and I couldn't figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt "right" for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none "fit".

And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was "high worth" to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn't get the name of this other character I really liked.

Now, if I was doing that in a frickin' video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are "high worth" to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.

And it wasn't like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this "gut feeling" that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow "weren't right" for her, even though that frickin' inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.

So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.

Making all these posts on Lemmy be about another site.

The community won't flourish if the only thing people are talking about is their social-media ex.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren't false, heh.

Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can't see that.

I'm an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It's like that in real life, and it's like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It's like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.

The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it's "changed" and that you're going to stomp off if it doesn't "change back". (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)

Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just...a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life--why do you think they're constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.

You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That's similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don't have the time or energy to essentially "volunteer" your time on a small community to help it grow.

But the thing you're complaining about is...just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn't).

So, rationally, what's the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?

Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.

(Here's something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn't someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)

Nah, you say it to sap unity and make people stay home from voting.

Your vibe is the same as the girls who say they bluntly "tell it as they see it" in their dating profile, but anyone with any relationship experience knows that means they're completely willing to make things toxic as fuck because they'll just vomit their selfish so called truth anywhere without caring about consequences or how it destroys, because it serves some sort of other motivation for them.

Using words to encourage people to embrace hopelessness and not vote is a propaganda technique to put Trump back in the Whitehouse, and him being there weakens the nation so immensely and catastrophically that it's extremely attractive to cash and weapons poor enemies to plop someone in front of a cheap computer to spread propaganda to attempt to destroy a nation from within. People who can't fight the US with military might will use words instead.

In short, your words are not neutral. You're either what is called a useful idiot, an ordinary person who swallowed outside propaganda whole and does the work of other interests here, or you're a knowing perpetrator.

I hope people here use whatever skills they picked up in English class however many years ago to think about not just the exact words of the poster I'm responding to, but why they posted this thing at this moment, their motivations beyond what they claim they are, and the effects of an appeal to truth on a reader and how that can influence perception even when the thing said isn't actually necessarily true or contains such a small flake of some truth that it is effectively turns into a lie when put beside the bigger and more vast and complicated truths.

Whenever I "can't understand" something, I stop for a moment, and start interrogating my own assumptions of how the world works, because I clearly made an assumption of how the world or how people in general work and need to correct my own thinking.

It's very hard to change how others do things. Much easier to start on yourself.

Humor and comedy have always been able to say things too risky to be said in any other way.

Supposedly, the role of a fool or clown or jester in a monarch's court was to fulfill this function. Say things everyone else was too terrified to say to the king.

Vapes.

What will happen is one or another of the flavorings used will be safe to eat because of stomach acid and digestion, but inhaling it into delicate lungs will cause disease long term. Look up popcorn workers lung to see how a common butter flavoring in the past that was meant for eating on popcorn harmed factory workers breathing it in daily.

One of the existing vape flavors... or a new one... will eventually be shown to cause simular lung disease due to daily breathing it in never truly being studied. Someone with a favorite flavor will use it for years, like any smoker with a favorite brand of cigs, then probably get sick from constant long term exposure.

Not just that, but they locked and restricted his access to medical equipment so he had to make a detour to get a different one, and that time cost the person he was trying to save her life.

Complete scum.

It's a bit depressing to me that we've known this for at least twenty years, and possibly more and it's still a problem.

A major concern has been busing. Even in normal times, districts use the same buses and drivers for students of all ages. They stagger start times to do that, with high schoolers arriving and leaving school earliest in the day. The idea is that they can handle being alone in the dark at a bus stop more readily than smaller children, and it also lets them get home first to help take care of younger siblings after school.

If high schools started as late as middle and elementary schools, that would likely mean strain on transportation resources. O'Connell said Nashville's limited mass transit compounds the problem.

"That is one of the biggest issues to resolve," he said.

This is basically it, school systems not wanting to buy the extra buses or hire the extra drivers they'd need.

Unfortunately I don't see this ever being solved without a major cultural/financial shift in the USA towards properly funding education. Too much financial pressure to have fewer buses and fewer drivers. If my high school and middle school had started at the same time as the elementary, that'd be like 14 new buses alone at $60k-$110k a pop, not including driver wages and the diesel for each one...and we had more than one high school and middle school in our district. So it'd be more like 50 new buses, just to start HS and middle school at the same time as elementary. The cost would eat smaller districts alive. It'd be several million just to procure the buses new.

Given family holidays can be very stressful and violent in bad families, I have to wonder if that poor kid said something dad didn't like, or cried, or whined, or otherwise was a completely normal kid and the dad lost his shit and shot him for it. Then came up with "I thought I saw a thief!" to get away with it.

Like, everyone in this thread is assuming the dad actually heard a thief. But I think that should be questioned, too. It's so common for bad families to slap kids around during thanksgiving. My uncle once lost his shit over something stupid and threw his half-paralyzed mom (she'd had a stroke not too long before) out of her chair onto the floor.

Because most people run on their personal experiences, and don't do great when they have to think very far ahead or extrapolate and make connections.

If you're lucky enough to be born into a conservative home that's not bugshit crazy, and you're lucky enough to not be TOO smart, neurodivergent, gay/lesbian/trans/etc. then you've probably never seen the full ugly face of conservatism because you were treated nicely.

Lots of conservatives will treat you perfectly politely...if they get to know you, and as long as you look white and clean-cut enough. As long as you give the right social signifiers, basically.

Most of my ex-conservative friends group was driven away from conservative family because we were abused in some obvious fashion, were gay/lesbian/trans, were neurodivergent, etc. We were different in ways that, ultimately, after a lot of pain, forced us to cut ties with family. (It was never our first choice though.)

But a woman who was lucky to be born into a family that treats her halfway decently won't experience that sort of ugliness until an emergency happens and it's leopards-eating-faces time.

And it's VERY hard to rock the boat BEFORE something bad happens to you, when you know rocking it will have really bad consequences immediately. People don't like to be shunned or kicked out of families, so if they're not treated TOO badly they'll toe the line and conform out of fear of the unknown and fear of losing everything they have and know.

I've been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it's true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn't get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

For those interested in meta discourse...this comment I'm replying to is a good teaching tool to carry out some exercises, so I'm going to pull it apart, instead of actually talking to the guy.

(Think of it as a live-action English class, but instead of pulling apart boring-as-shit short stories written decades ago, I'm gonna do it to this guy.) Note, I'm not an expert, I'm just a novel writer that gets really pissed off when I see people using techniques IRL that I use in fiction.

First, look at timing of that guy's comment. Original post pops up about the Russian state's "success in amplifying disinformation" online. Within 16 minutes, we have this guy jumping in to say, "But what about the US!" Just fast as fucking lightning, diverting attention away from a news post shedding light on how online information can be manipulated by state-level actors to amplify lies and misinformation.

Of course, I can imagine a topic like this is a high-priority target to be shut down. "Oh shit, they're onto us!"

Now, is this guy actually a Russian agent? (Or from some other nation?) I don't actually know. It's impossible for me to find out. But whether this guy is totally legit in all the views proclaimed and is an individual American who truly believes them, or a bad actor from elsewhere, it doesn't matter.

If you set a cup outside and rain fills it up, or if you go over and fill the cup yourself, the end result is the cup is filled. How it comes to be and the intent behind it doesn't matter. We can't prove intent here, that's invisible thoughts in the poster's head that we can never access. But we can see the actual action they took (posting), and the timing of it (which they chose), and the words contained (all of which they also chose to use), and think about WHY someone would post those words in this thread with that timing. We can't see their intent, but we can analyze their actions and choices.

And in this case, the end result of them chiming in here and now with "the US does shitty things too!" is in my opinion distraction from a really important topic, that social media (including this site right here!) is being manipulated to sow division. As someone else in this thread pointed out, it's "whatabout-ism". The original news article is about one thing, and this guy jumps in pointing to some other topic instead.

Here's some other things I want to call out, pertaining to their word-choices.

I don’t think we

"We". In their very first line. They're trying to put themselves into a group with other Americans, trying to form closeness with their words. Think of in a movie, the used car salesman slinging their arm over your shoulder. WE want to do this thing, right? WE think this way, yeah?

It plays on the human desire to not be left out of the group. And the fear of saying, "No, WE don't actually think that at all!" in case there's repercussions for disagreeing.

should put ourselves on a high horse

Again, playing on emotions of people. "High horse" is a phrase that has an emotional weight. I'm a writer and there's very few places where I'd use that phrase unless I was really pissed and trying to rouse emotions in others by being mocking or belittling.

When combined with the "we", think of someone throwing their arm over your shoulder and saying, "Now, WE don't want to be all stuck up on our high horses, DO WE?" and it suggests someone who goes against the speaker is on a high horse or is otherwise speaking with a snootiness that is not in line with their station or social status.

Which, again, goes back to creating fear in the reader. Anxiety. If we engage with the original news article, are we getting above our station in life? Are we acting out of line? Do "good" people get out of line? And if I think I'm a good person what happens if I do something that might be out of line? A bunch of anxiety about one's unverbalized social status in life swirls around.

Russia hoax was proven false, many Clinton personnel and news stations just ran with it.

The word "hoax" is emotionally charged. People don't like being embarrassed, they don't want to fall for hoaxes, so when you use that word, fear is roused in the reader that there's a chance that THEY have fallen for a hoax, and if they don't back out quick, people might think less of them, or they might feel stupid. People's priorities can get super-fucked-up if they just THINK they got caught doing something stupid, if there's just a chance they fell for a hoax, because there's a lot of emotion tied up in it--panic, shame, guilt. So there's ways to manipulate if you start telling them they might've fallen for a hoax.

Another emotionally-charged word here is "Clinton" (one, it has decades of political baggage, two, it's being dropped in this post when Clinton hasn't actually been doing much or anything politically since she lost, which again suggests the person I'm responding to is shit-stirring as it's brought up for no reason connected to current events in order to harvest the fearful emotions connected to the name from previous years and decades.)

And then connecting the word "Clinton" to "media" aims at fearmongering that "the left" is controlling media.

It's kind of like a magician doing something flashy with one hand (invoking the name of Clinton and the fear of Clinton-run media) while doing the actual slight-of-hand sneakily (this post here that's using whataboutism, the false-closeness of "we", and other charged words like pulling "Clinton" and "many Clinton...news stations" out of nowhere).

Someone might jump in now that I've said this and say that yeah, America has done shitty things, and yeah mainstream media does shitty things--those are important topics too, are you shutting that down/censoring/etc?

But I'm saying that human social interaction has always had a "time and place" component. You don't go to a funeral and ask the widow if she's single. Yeah, she technically is...but it's not the time nor place even if her being single technically is a fact.

Similarly, for a thread that is talking about something that is VERY important (like social media being manipulated by bad actors), it's not the time and place to jump in and start turning people onto other topics. Unless, you know...you're trying to sow division and cause chaos. Then I imagine jumping in and saying "we" have done "other" bad things and shouldn't get on "our high horse" would further your goals.

Anyway. My point with the above isn't to be some textbook water-tight whatever debating the guy. I honestly don't care about that bit. It's more an attempt to talk to people about how timing of a comment is important, and word choice in a comment can rouse emotions (very easily in fact), and these things should be in your mind when you read comments on political threads.

And if you're tired of the usual political comments--someone says something inflammatory, someone posts a rebuttal--you can jump up to the meta discussion, and start picking apart in your head the timing of the other person's post, and the emotional "color" and "weight" of the words they chose to use, etc. and ask yourself questions about why they said that, in this place, with this timing, and what kind of person might have that comment they posted in their history, but also all the other posts in their history, and see if you can build up in your mind what sort of individual that might be, with what motivations.

This is like...the one place where those English class analysis of paragraphs or stories actually start to be very important in real life. The one place where those skills have real-world use instead of seeming useless outside of the classroom.

(Extra credit: There's a few places in THIS post where I used some emotionally colored words. What are they? What effect did they have on you? I don't actually want anyone to tell me, I have no prizes to give out, I just want you to think about it.)

The typical American household would need to spend $445 more a month to purchase the same goods and services as a year ago, a report from Moody's found.

People reading along here should note this person is trying to turn blue states purple, they admit it with their own words, and they are appealing to morality to lure suckers in.

As if nobody but them is a moral person

Bullshit.

But a lot of us have religious triggers planted deep, yeah? That if you toddle along with the person claiming they are of virtue, maybe you'll be a good person too?

Anyway.

Vote like your hair is on fire, because if assholes like this fine upstanding "moral" person has their say and causes blue voters to stay home, we're gonna be fucked, just as we were before. They're trying the same tactic that worked before even to give us Trump. And why wouldn't they? It worked.

No state is "safe" from flipping.

Also note that playing with voting demographics is why a lot of the anti-abortion laws are being pushed...to cleanse purple states of blue voters by driving them out. So when you see anyone encouraging you not to vote because a state is safe, understand it's part of an effort to flip states from blue or purple to red.

That's a really well-written article, the complete opposite of a fluff piece.

I encourage folks to go read it.

When Teavana still existed, I bought a teapot and some "teas" (Teavana was mostly herbal tisanes...but still.)

I don't drink coffee, so I imagined the teapot wouldn't ever be used...but somehow it ended up being a big hobby for me. Bonus: fancy teas from online stores are cheap to ship, because they're basically dry and lightweight. Like, if you want to become a food snob about anything? Tea really is the way to go.

The one learning curve I had (as an American) was learning that you DON'T steep the tea longer for stronger tea. You use more tea leaves/more tea bags. Steeping too long turns the tea bitter. (I thought I disliked tea when younger b/c I'd only ever had cheap tea bags left to steep for far too long.) Also, when brewing a green tea, they're really reactive to boiling water, so you REALLY don't want to use boiling water or it'll be a bitter mess. You want to either boil then let it cool, or get a fancy electric kettle where you can set the temperature so it's appropriate for green tea, oolong tea, or black tea.

Funnily enough, if as an intellectual you let go of the idea that others are dummies and start examining what they do and why and start brainstorming about what might motivate them, you might get a better idea of all the dynamics that go on when it comes to an individual's choice or motivation. Including, yes, why people are "anti-intellectual". And perhaps how to "solve" it.

I'm a bit snarky here, because I get irritated by other supposedly "smart" people looking at things through a tiny, biased and prejudged pinhole.

You're smart? Ok. Get out there, observe things, learn them, then come back and form a hypothesis that aligns with what you've observed.

Oh, there's young racist fucks too.

I was out doing some outdoor work last week, and I've basically the skintone of a vampire so I cover up, so I had a big unstylish fishing hat with a neck protector on. And some kids from the local junior high mocked me in terrible Spanish as they walked home. (And by terrible, I mean I could identify how bad it was and I haven't had Spanish classes in 20+ years and never was fluent in it and I could still tell it was bad.)

I'm not even Hispanic, but it made me mad enough with it happening just one time that it hurts inside to know similar stuff happens on a daily basis to other people. And some of it totally comes from young racist fucks.

There's a number of people who might have stayed religious if their religion actually focused on helping people and wasn't full of hypocrites.

Because it's very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don't need a plumber. But when you do...you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber's skills. Plumber can't eat, leaves profession, there's now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, "Well, why doesn't the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they'll come and fix your toilet later if needed?" But that sort of re-invents credit, right? "I'll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now." If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a "universal" trade good, and it's also easy to store (you don't have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)--but that's a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It's a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too...see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

I don't like this, more because I can see how this would be a route to making games shittier long-term by forcing you into a perpetual subscription to the game you bought.

Like, I can see how it'd be useful and fun. But I can also see how, if this new type of save takes off, game design would change so you would no longer be allowed to have old school local saves that don't require an internet connection. I think my alarm bells go off because you COULD work this into a local single-player game experience, but the way it's constantly tied to streaming in the article suggests they won't bother.

So it smells like bait--they'll do something cool, but also pretend it could only be implemented with this attachment to streaming and subscriptions.

brominated vegetable oil - it's found in citrus sodas because the (natural) citrus flavoring is an oil, an orange or citrus oil of some type, and is prone to separating if there's not a way to keep is suspended in water. And I've seen separated sodas in a QA testing lab and they look pretty nasty. I imagine orange sodas that haven't already reformulated will have to, so they might end up tasting different. I know orange Gatorade reformulated to get rid of BVO about 10 years ago or more. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo

As a note, California also forced (by being one of the largest markets) reformulation of dark sodas containing caramel color across the nation. Caramel color is what happens when you brown toast or caramelize sugar. I kinda just scratched my head because it seems you'll get more exposure to the carcinogen they're talking about if you burn your toast. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/questions-answers-about-4-mei . And if burned baked goods were a genuine problem, it seems we would've known it long before now.

I think most industries definitely need more regulation, but California sometimes seems to do banning so often on the slightest sliver of data, and it kinda creates a regulatory "crying wolf" situation, where people become so used to the "known to cause cancer in California" warnings that they start to ignore ALL of them and can't differentiate the ones that are dead fucking serious and the ones that honestly require unusual situations for it to happen like someone eating/consuming a physically unlikely amount of the product constantly.

I personally think it's a problem when people don't have a way to differentiate the warnings about things that'll genuinely fuck you up under current levels of exposure, and things you basically have to go dip yourself in a vat of daily for months before it harms you.

And I think it's a problem because people naturally have short attention spans, and when EVERYTHING has a warning, you know people aren't going to actually do research to figure out which one is dead serious and which is fluffed up and starting at shadows. So you start to get inconsistent heeding of the warnings. Eventually you'll ignore the boy crying wolf because you're so tired of going to to check if the wolf is there, and the wolf'll come eat you then.

I have no solutions for solving it though, given how polarized things are (one side massively under-regulating, and the other sometimes starting at shadows) and how few people are willing to listen to nuance.

Utility Locator Simulator.

You know those "Call 811 before you dig!" signs? (Or, where I grew up, call JULIE?)

In the real world, underground utilities are generally found by utility locators using tools that detect current running through either a metal pipe or wires, or through a tracer wire if the pipe isn't iron/steel. Utility locators do tickets called into 811, and go about neighborhoods (both city and rural) marking with paint on the ground where gas/electric/fiber/sewer/water/etc. utilities are, prior to construction where digging will happen.

I feel like it'd be really fun to simulate someone using one of the detectors and having to go to some street location, find the utility pedestals or hookups to homes or businesses, and trace the lines and paint where they go.

You could base it in real science like a lot of simulators out there, too. There's different techniques and frequencies you can use to detect underground utility lines, and different ways they can interfere with one another so that things go wrong and your markings are off.

And the whole process of locating utilities could be very, very gamified. You could get a score on how well you marked them, and terrible things could happen if you were wrong.

Like, maybe you marked a gas line incorrectly, so the next contractor to dig hits it and gets blown sky high when things explode. Or maybe an office building/school/whatever had to be emergency evacuated because your poor marking caused a gas leak when construction started.

Or maybe you located the cable fiber to 200 homes in a neighborhood wrong, and an excavator cut it, and suddenly all those homes can't watch the Superbowl and the "happiness" of the neighborhood goes down.

Or you located a water or sewer line wrong, and suddenly someone's back yard is filled with water/sewage and little Timmy gets sick and dies because his wading pool is full of poo.

And you could get things to level up, too. Like, if you do good work and move to a better utility locator company, maybe they issue you a can of wasp spray.

Or perhaps you befriend a beekeeper and they can come out and remove a swarm off of your utility pedestal so you don't get stung to death, and you can save the bees instead of killing them. Get an Environmentally Friendly badge achievement or something.

Or you raise relationships with the construction contractors so they mark their locator tickets better so your job is easier. (Or you piss them all off, and they tell you to mark ALL utilities for three high-traffic blocks...when the only digging they're doing is a single stump in someone's back yard, far away from the horrible convoluted intersections you were forced to mark.) Or maybe homeowners like you, so they stop surrounding "ugly" utility pedestals on their properties with rose bushes so you don't have to crawl through thorns to get to it.

I think it could be very fun, and also kinda raise awareness of what utility locators do and why.

Yeah. My eyes got WIDE open about the "function" of third-party candidates in the US after I saw in hindsight (because isn't hindsight always clearer?) Jill Stein's role in a prior election. They're basically there to shave off just enough votes from one of the major parties to tilt things one way or another. Easy for 3rd parties--no matter of they're crazies OR if they actually have legit policy stances that really should be considered, such as climate issues--to be turned into agents of chaos. People working the USA's political system from the outside work BOTH sides--the right and the left, pretending to be either one to sow discord as it suits their goals. The more division the better, for them.

I really want various ballot initiatives to succeed in changing how voting is done in the US, so you can safely vote for the candidate you actually want without handing the election to the worst candidate. Voting would be much invigorated if you could vote for someone with pride and enthusiasm instead of, "At least they're not XYZ" which is what has to happen now working within the rules our system has for us.

Here and there, a few states have implemented better systems with various flavors of ranked choice and such for their state elections, so they're not stuck in a two-party horror show for local elections at least, but there's a lot of hard work that has to be done before that gains enough momentum across many states and towns and smaller localities in the US that it might be feasible to change the way voting is done on a federal level.

So, caveat here that I don't have ADHD myself, but I have two friends who do.

One of my friends had a mother that was very shaming and critical when my friend with ADHD got distracted or forgot things. Like, "You're so smart I don't see why you can't Do The Thing, it should be so simple!" and "Oh, she'll forget her house keys and come crying to me to bring them to her!" (As if my friend was entitled or something--but she's actually one of the most humble and sweet people I know, I have no idea why her mom has adopted this martyr persona where things she does on her own are somehow my friend's fault. Her mother seems to struggle with anxiety, and projects it on everyone around her--she tries to deal with it by controlling everyone through passive aggressive remarks. Obviously since ADHD has rejection sensitivity sometimes, it hits my friend hard.)

For another person in another family, it might have been different, but for my friend, because her mom was always on the, "You're so smart, why can't you Do The Thing, it's so simple!" train, the distractions and forgetfulness and stuff got rolled up with trauma because not only was her brain distracting her all the time, but when a task WAS remembered, there's a bunch of shame and trauma getting into the mix on top of the ADHD symptoms. Like, she already had tons of trouble trying to Do The Thing, but her mom made it so there was also shame and anxiety pulling her attention away on top of the baseline ADHD.

So maybe "technically" it's depression or anxiety or whatever--but it seems a fairly common experience for folks with neurodivergance who are surrounded by family who just "can't understand" why they don't "do the thing".

I don't have ADHD like I said, but I have C-PTSD and grew up with family that is schizophrenic (I mean this very literally--several family members formally diagnosed, etc.), so when my C-PTSD stuff goes off due to stress, my gut instinct isn't to Do The Thing to fix it, because in my experience my family was so chaotic that it honestly didn't matter if I did or didn't Do The Thing. My status of "in trouble" or "not in trouble" would be in flux according to THEIR mood, not what I actually had done, so it doesn't register on me when I'm upset that "doing the thing" might fix the bad feelings by appeasing the other person.

So I ran into a lot of issues were my stress response makes me flee stressful things (like school homework when I was young, or cleaning, or paperwork deadlines for dr or whatever), which has a negative feedback cycle of, "Why didn't you do this, it's so easy!" kicking up shame, which makes me flee, which makes more shame, on and on and on in a shit cycle.

My friend and I had very different home lives, but the thing we shared here was mental differences (her ADHD, my trauma from a shit home life) getting wound up with anxiety/depression that are intimately attached to the shaming others/society does if it perceives us to be "lazy" when we're actually panicking/afraid/guilty/hurting inside.

My condolences for your loss.

What I've noticed is while there's absolutely corruption at high levels in America, amongst the rich, there's almost no situation where (say) you have to sneakily hand over an extra $20 at the DMV to get your driver's license. Or slip your nurse at the hospital an extra $50 to make sure she cares for you appropriately. Or get a lavish gift for teacher so you can get the grade you need to get into the right school.

I mean, here or there people can try that stuff, but it's still a legit scandal if it happens, it's not baked into society.

Whereas that sort of casual greasing-of-hands with an extra $5 here, extra $20 there $50 there at every single level even amongst not-rich folks can supposedly be common in heavily corrupted societies.

Yeah, there's corruption--but it's pretty over-our-heads for everyday stuff. It's not baked into everyday interactions we have if we go down the street to the grocery store, or want to get a Passport done.

I'm not in a spot to listen to the audio, but Cory Doctorow is always insightful on these things.

Amazon has been fucking over the book industry and small authors since its inception...Amazon literally began as a startup that massively disrupted publishing. Any author that can diversify their small business (because most authors are one-person small businesses making modest livings or below-poverty livings, the Stephen Kings and J. K. Rowlings are rare) to get some of their work out of Amazon's grip should.

And audiobooks sell well, so if you can sell them without handing a big ol' chunk of profit to Amazon, you should try.

Some authors find a way to game Amazon's system now and again to make profits, but it's very perilous locking all your income to one predatory distributor. You never want all your eggs in one basket.

I also grew up in an abusive home--but I had a freeze/flee response to conflict.

So, there are several "defense" tactics when it comes to conflict. Fight, which you grew up with. Freeze (do nothing and hope they don't notice you), Flee (leave the situation), and Fawn (people-pleasing).

When people say not to be a people-pleaser, they are generally talking to people who have an oversized urge to please as their defensive tactic. If you are a person where "fight" is your go-to, toning it down so you can properly interact with people isn't a bad thing. It's what YOU needed to do for YOU to gain necessary social skills.

But other people out there have "Fawn" as their defense mechanism. That is to say, whenever there's conflict, they try to placate other people as their technique to de-escalate. And this becomes a situation FOR THEM where they erode their own boundaries trying to please other people whenever in conflict. It becomes a problem when other people take advantage of them because they tend to fawn and give other people things too much, and it causes harm in their life where work/spouses/friends abuse their placating nature. At that point, people who "fawn" need to try to do what you did with your fight response, and set more boundaries and say "no" more often without placating.

A good portion of "general advice" on the internet does not point out that "context matters". But it really does, the patterns and personality and past of the person taking advice matters, and when it comes to someone who grew up in an abusive home learning how to master their defense mechanisms, different people will need different advice.

If you were truly as belligerent as you say before, I'd be honestly surprised if you over-corrected to the point of people-pleasing becoming a detriment, as it's extremely hard to shake these things. They almost seem to be inborn personality traits that are ramped up into extremes if one is in an abusive situation. I have a friend who had a journey similar to yours, with a "fight" defense mechanism mode, and he's done a TON of work breaking the "fight" response, but you can still catch him in moments where he goes into "asshole mode".

And I'm the same, I've grown and improved, but I still default to "freeze" or "flee" in conflict situations that are especially stressful. (My growth has been embracing a "fight" response when necessary, and also a "fawn" response when necessary.) Him and I made opposite journeys...I learned to be more aggressive because it was necessary, and he toned his aggression down (because it was necessary to avoid driving away people he loved).

Danish hosting firms CloudNordic and AzeroCloud have suffered ransomware attacks, causing the loss of the majority of customer data and forcing the hosting providers to shut down all systems, including websites, email, and customer sites.

I finally realized this guy's name reminds me of some in house menswear brand at Sears or K-Mart or some other department store that suffered and wheezed and whimpered before going out of business.

I've nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn't have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I've mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam's own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield--it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn't have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III...but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it's supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it's been rock solid.

I've played No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur's Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don't feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)

For those curious about political/propaganda meta-conversations in threads like this, look at this dude's comment history and contemplate why they say what they do, and at what points in a conversation they decide to open their mouths and say it, and what the probable intended result of what they're saying might be.

Treat it like an English assignment, folks. Except it's in the wild and not sanitized in a book, it's trying to work on you in real-time.

What do you think this person's purpose for speaking up is?

This is really cool.

Basically, these are a bunch of burnt scrolls. When you try to open, they're just carbon and they crumble really easily.

The AI was trained on some of the ruined fragments, then the intact scrolls were scanned, and the AI is able to decipher spots that were basically "differently wrinkly" because of the organic ink that had been used on top of the papyrus, which caused it to wrinkle a bit differently when burnt.

So in this case, the AI actually helps us read scrolls that would be destroyed if a human were to try to pick apart the burnt remnants.

This whole thing is significant because this library of burnt scrolls might have original writing by both known and unknown authors from that period.

There's a lot of classical works we only know of because other writers referenced them. The originals are lost, and the citations are the only remains. Also, some works we only know because scribes copied and re-copied books over the centuries to preserve them. And with copying and re-copying, mistakes or changes might happen.

It's possible in this library of burnt scrolls that we might find an original uncopied/unaltered work so we can compare the ancient version of it with versions copied and re-copied over centuries, or a work that we know from citations but don't have an actual copy of.

It's really exciting.

AI has been really exciting in general where it comes to deciphering lots of old text. Personally, I'm waiting for tons of unread/unstudied cuneiform tablets to be scanned/auto-translated, because even if the AI has some errors, being able to text-search in English (or whatever language) for certain keywords will make it easier to realize one of those unstudied tablets might hold something unusual or interesting. Basically, it'd give an easier way to triage which ones might be useful for an actual human to study.

It seems to go either way, depending on all the little local variables. Strong communities, or dog-eat-dog.

Also, you can have situations where if you "conform", you're protected by the growing-together, but if something makes you different, that community comes after you, out of fear that you being different will bring even more hardship down on everyone's head.

My social group is made up of basically goths, queers, nerdy weirdos who grew up in fundamentally conservative and religious towns and families, and are (now as adults) generally very supportive and chill with differences--but we got a hell of a lot of bullying from our natal families/cultures growing up. Based on individual personalities, there's honestly little reason we were rejected...we don't go out committing crimes, or bully, or be mean. But the differences we do have seem to scare or make our families feel ashamed of us--so, rejection. And so we lose the protection that the community offers others.

I recognize communities supporting each other is important--but the bit where perfectly good people who are kind and smart and aren't committing crimes are just thrown on the curb like trash because we don't believe in religion like others do, or because we ask questions when things don't make sense...I struggle with that bit, for obvious reasons.

A lot, mostly porn.

I'm not morally opposed to porn--but like 99.9% is aimed at straight men, or is the Disney-style furry art, and it does NOTHING for me. It's like being drowned in, I dunno...football communities. It's boring as shit and I Just. Don't. Care.

Nutrition and diet stuff.

(And here I go, talking about the stuff I don't want to listen to other people harp on about! Haha.)

It's mostly because I used to handle regulatory documentation for a food company, and as a part of that I read a LOT of mommy blogs/health blogs/etc. and discovered people are shockingly uneducated about the actual science of nutrition--but more than happy to talk about their ignorant misinformation at length, and gather followings online for it. People are also uneducated about the history of nutrition and food regulatory agencies and say a lot of stupid things there too.

You kinda see the same sort of problems arising that caused the anti-vaxx mindset. Anti-vaxxers come about because vaccines were so effective at preventing once-prevalent childhood diseases that people grow up without actually knowing people who got sick from those things, and they start tilting at windmills instead due to a lack of personal experience with the deadliness of certain diseases. (They attack the vaccine helping them, instead of having the experience to be scared of the disease.)

Likewise with food, food safety with pasteurization and such has been SO effective that you have things like raw-milk advocates crawling out of the woodwork because they've never actually heard about a toddler's kidneys being damaged for life from salmonella. Apparently to them, their "freedom" to eke out...oh, some tiny unconfirmed extra "nutrition" from unpasteurized raw milk...somehow outweighs the very real risk of actual human beings becoming ill and dying. But historically back in the day tainted milk was a very real danger, killing kids and elderly and making others sick, it was a public health menace. The discovery of pasteurization was ground-breaking because it fixed that public health issue. But people who don't know their history and haven't seen with their own two eyes someone getting really sick from raw unpasteurized milk get fixated on some hypothetical damage being done to them or their freedoms if they can't get or drink their raw, unpasteurized milk due to laws or regulations. They're completely willing to let real people die on their minor molehill. Mostly because, as with anti-vaxxers, they haven't seen what life is like when people are getting sick left and right from this stuff.

I also come from a background of trauma and abuse, and I'm extremely aware of how quickly control of food by someone antagonistic towards you can physically make you ill or sick very, very quickly. A lot of people have hot takes they think only affect them but which can fuck up other people if they were applied more broadly. There's this disconnect that food is actually needed for people to live...probably because the people flapping their gums have never missed a meal.

Well, when a mommy and daddy hat bobble love each other very much...