Oh trust me, the watching with a mixture of fascination and horror is coming from inside the states too.
I wish you good luck as well. I hear the US is known to fuck around with other countries occasionally. (And that’s not supposed to sound threatening - it’s just a recognition that we fuck with other countries even during “good” administrations, never mind when we have a dictator-loving wannabe in the office)
Your comment reminded me about how I keep wondering if I should bite the bullet and throw away all the plastic cups, plates, bowls, and utensils in the house. Spend a little money on more metal and ceramic stuff, and potentially benefit my family’s health long term. Maybe.
lol yeah, what’s next? Are benevolent pixies going to distribute it throughout the forest too?
As an American, this line short circuited my brain:
Police there still carry guns on the regular
I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.
And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.
Yeah I agree with that. Relying on individual compassion to fix real estate probably makes even less sense than relying on churches and charity to fix poverty and hunger.
I’m still in favor of making things better in one’s little corner of the world, because even just looking at it selfishly it tends to make your life and your mental health better too.
The finance people (and sadly, many many others) think making the number bigger is a more important and worthwhile goal than making your corner of the world a better place. So good on you for being a compassionate human!
I think “quiet quitting” is just the white collar equivalent to the more blue collar “nobody wants to work anymore!”
I typically stay at work until 5pm because I make no effort to come in early and I take long lunch breaks.
This place is an absolute ghost town by 5, and it makes me happy to see that. It seems people mostly have their heads on straight here.
Yep, now with having my pond chores zen time and being able to enjoy the end results, I think I fully understand what gets people into gardening. I’ve just been forever obsessed with aquatic life.
Oh no, the microbiology guy I’m talking about is beyond full time with his farm. He’s there 7 days a week when he’s not traveling to shows.
And that’s just taking care of the fish and growing them out, not breeding them. He imports from Japanese breeders.
As for breeding new babies and selling them, it’s certainly possible but there probably isn’t a ton of profit in it. Any time I’ve thought about it I’ve thought two things: I don’t want to deal with rando customers and I don’t want to turn my happy peaceful hobby into a job.
I have taken a half step in this direction and it’s improved my life greatly.
I still have a normal job, but my Covid project back in 2020 was to finally put a koi pond in my back yard. I spend way more time learning and thinking about it than keeping up on tech shit. And the job I have now is great - I’m not trying to escape from it or anything.
The best part is that even the guy I bought my recent koi from has a microbiology degree. He’s properly living the “x farmer” dream, but that “job” is much more than a 9-5.
Like so many things in life, actually giving a shit and genuinely trying gets you like 80% of the way there.
And assuming you do actually care, you can’t see communication as a weakness.
Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.
It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.
I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.
I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!
Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.
What they are getting at is that gravity is not a force so much as your mass trying to travel in a straight line through curved spacetime. The weight you feel is because the surface of the earth is in your way.
Get into low earth orbit and that straight path has you going in apparent circles around the planet. You are very much within the earth’s gravity but you don’t feel “weight” because the surface of the earth is no longer blocking your path. You still have mass and inertia and all that, of course.
It doesn’t even need to be overnight! I’m currently sitting in a recliner in an infusion/cancer center because I am on a medication that’s given through IV every month. My insurance is going to pay a 5 figure sum for me to chill in this chair for about 90 minutes.
I’m a software engineer and the actual dollars paid monthly/yearly (not the fake high “retail” cost) are something like 2x my gross income.
Having a callous disregard for the problems of other people only until it affects one of YOUR people is conservatism 101. Empathy is not valued in their world, unless it’s for one of their whitelisted types of humans.
“Well we will never get THAT smell out of the cushions”
Trump still got 72 million votes and counting this time. That’s with another four years of Trump scandals, revelations, criminal charges, insurrections, mental declines, and on-video insane statements.
The people who stayed home, or the politicians who failed to motivate them, sure they carry some blame. They could have helped. But they are not the base. The ones who followed Trump from being the outsider who is fun because he’s an asshole/racist like them, to the corrupt traitorous dictator-to-be who they’d like to watch hurt people. Blame them much more.
The steady level of Trump support unfortunately supports the fear that our culture is just garbage. We’re surrounded by it. There are plenty of proud assholes, sure. But so many people will legitimately be pleasant to everybody they meet and seem to function in society, but either believe horrible things or have a thick shell of indoctrination and ignorance around their brain.