Followed you from MI. Sorry this happened and double sorry that instead of giving you a little dopamine to take the edge off MI decided to shit all over this.

Hope you're okay, please find some real people in your life to help you process this. Online is okay if everyone around you sucks, but it really isn't the same, and shit like this does eat at your soul over time. I might not know anything about you, but odds are pretty good that you deserve love and support. Find the people who give that to you and hold on tight.

On a lighter note, your professor is the worst piece of shit I've seen this morning, and I just cleaned up my dog's vomit after he got into the cat's litterbox last night.

See, I've always maintained that he bought Twitter with the specific intention of earning his spot as the Goebbels in the upcoming Reich. It was never about money, it's always been a power play.

This sounds so good on paper, but completely falls apart without carefully defining free speech. Like, what if I hire actors with prop weapons to march around minority neighborhoods and scream that they'll shoot any non-whites who try to vote?

You think that fun performance art is going to be healthy for democracy? Really?

What if I use AI to make convincing video footage of politicians I disagree with mutilating dogs and then graphically fucking their corpses? Do you think my commentary on their lack of support for dog shelters is going to foster democratic dialog, or do you think that maybe some voters will develop a viscerally unpleasant disgust and have trouble looking at them or engaging in what they have to say?

What if you buy a botnet and use it to convince both sides of the aisle that the other candidate is an authoritarian who will destroy democracy and try to control their life. Or to send death threats to people who publicly admit to being trans?

It is important to make room for marginalized voices to be heard, yes, that is essential for democracy, but there are also tons of bad actors who will try to use the very freedom you're trying to protect to deny others that freedom. A completely laissez faire approach to free speech will ultimately serve to silence the marginalized and further empower the wealthy.

Unless you're in the Netherlands, where 2/3rds of the bikes will have the shitty "this is legally a light" LEDs from the convenience shops... Oh, and 2/3rds of those will be either out of battery, or installed facing the wrong way.

A lot of men were never taught to do this. We raise young girls to be incredibly social, but boys are not socialized to nearly the same extent. You can see this in Autism diagnoses. Girls are diagnosed as a much lower rate and the ones that do receive the diagnosis tend to be really severe cases. The leading theory as to why is that society places so many social expectations on girls that the more mild cases quickly learn to mask and pass themselves off as neurotypical.

Hell, I'm 35 and I just started a group chat with some of my bros in order to help with motivation to get things done (it's basically a stand up meeting but for our personal lives/goals). NONE of them even know each other, they were just doing this to help me out because I'm burned out. 2 weeks in and they had all thanked me privately for giving them a social outlet and improving their mood. None of us usually text people unless we need to, and now we'll routinely get roped into conversations because someone shares an interesting update.

Meanwhile my wife is juggling 3 different group chats in addition to half a dozen friends she keeps in touch with 1-1.

There might be some biological mechanism too, but I think a lot of it boils down to boys have "productive labor" modelled for them as ideal behavior while girls are taught how to be considerate friends.

Most of Northern Europe (Netherlands and Denmark are especially bad)

Started looking for places to move to in 2017 because we lived in a red state and the writing was on the wall. Settled on the Netherlands and moved in 2019. Getting through covid was a bitch and I'd feel a lot better if the Dutch hadn't also just elected a right wing nut job, but my mental and physical health are noticeably better. Once you get out you really realize how toxic American culture is. It's like swimming downstream from a mine your whole life and then suddenly getting air lifted to some Icelandic spring.

But what if your opinion is threatening to others? If you believe that white people are inherently superior to other races and it is right for them to be served by the inferior races, then expressing that opinion is inherently threatening to many non-whites.

Sure, I've given hyperbolic examples, because I wanted to demonstrate that you can use freedom of expression to make threats, but there will also be examples that are in more of a grey area. There's nothing inherently threatening about the Confederate flag. If you had flown it in 1600 people would've just said "cool flag, what does it mean?".

Now however, many people see it as a threat, a constant reminder of how things used to be for their ancestors. Expressing your opinion by flying that flag says to those people "I want your children to live as your forefathers did"

Now, not everyone who flies that flag is making a threat, but some of them absolutely are. So what do we do?

I'm not saying I have a one size fits all solution. Simply banning anything that neo-nazis adopt clearly isn't practical and could also be easily abused by the government to quash dissent. I'm just pointing out that it's not a simple fucking problem.

Good that the backend validated it, but why in god's name would you ever lower the maximum password length?!?

Honestly, I think it's more of a practical matter. Even if they didn't have explicit pardon power, whoever's in charge of the executive has effective pardon powers by simply denying to carry out the orders of the court (see Jackson's behavior which lead to the trail of tears).

At least by making it official it's a lot more clear what's going on, and maybe they had hoped this would lead to electoral consequences for those who abused it?

You have to be very careful with this. Neurodivergence is a spectrum and while some of the symptomatic behaviors are definitely mild things that society should probably just learn to accept and accommodate-- other cause real damage and make it impossible for the patient to live a satisfying life.

This is especially true with ASD, where the "highest" functioning patients might just be harmlessly quirky, but other patients with the same diagnosis on paper (important for insurance and legislation) aren't able to express themselves and might not even be potty trained, or able to dress themselves.

Saying that we "shouldn't try to change people with Autism, society should just adapt" provides cover for politicians and health insurance companies to cut the very expensive therapies that help mold young children and enable them to achieve what they want out of life.

The fact is that we all have to change a little to accommodate society. Humans don't spring from the womb talking, wearing clothes, and using the toilet. Society isn't going to adapt to allowing my wife's patient who likes to rip off all of their clothes and masturbate at the grocery store to do so. And now, because of the online discourse of "Neurodivergence isn't a mental illness", politicians are trying to cut my wife's funding. After all, why would you spend tens of thousands of euros per child if their illness isn't even real?

At least the bad take is getting downvoted? 😅

That was just a shitty negotiating tactic. From day one he's rolled out the red carpet for Trump. Twitter was just his foot in the door so that he's already on Trump's good side and can get his company town going in Texas.

John Oliver did a great dive into the Post Office, and I think that segment is up on YouTube for free.

It's actually even more impressive than you think. The only reason it looks like it's losing money is that conservatives passed a law that forces them to fully fund the USPS workers' pensions today, rather than investing some money and letting it grow. No private companies fund pensions this way, nor does the rest of the federal government.

In 2022, PSRA was passed which removed this requirement and the postal service has turned a profit ever since. It operates better and more efficiently than any privately held parcel service, because it takes advantage of truely massive economies of scale.

And as an American living in a country that privatized their postal service-- god damn do I miss the USPS. It was both cheaper and more reliable than what we have here.

Fuck me, this is the first Lemmy comment that actually made me laugh out loud.

Typically if you have ADHD then stimulants just make you feel "normal". Like, when I take my meds it just helps me stay on task and focus on what I want to focus on.

My non-ADHD friends who have taken the same meds recreationally have said they feel euphoric when they take them, which I do not get at all. For me it's just like... Strong coffee? (Then again, maybe lots of people are euphoric when they have their morning coffee?)

All this to say, get a real diagnosis, because there's a real chance that you don't have ADHD. Lots of other disorders can cause similar symptoms (e.g. chronic stress, generalized anxiety). Stimulants really fuck with your sleeping patterns which is absolutely terrible for yor health.

If I could hold a job without my meds I would probably stop taking them. I recently had to stop them temporarily due to another health issue and within 2 days my insomnia was gone and I was feeling healthier than I had in years. Yeah, it's been a lot harder to live my life, but I had forgotten how good a nice, deep sleep feels

Yeah, good fucking luck boycotting AWS. I'd wager a non-trivial percentage of the fediverse is hosted on it too.

That's the key, you just have to get her to stop ingesting the poison.

My father in law watches Fox news. Whenever he comes to visit us in Europe he spends the whole time oo'ing and ah'ing about life here and swears he understands that Fox news is propaganda.

Then he goes back home and two weeks later my mother in law is complaining that he's got brain worms again because he started watching Fox to get Both Sides™.

Oof, yeah, that's not ideal and I certainly get your frustration. This part of life sucks, but you're going to spend your twenties figuring out who you want to be and finding people who want to be a part of that journey with you. It's hard, and it's really tempting to fall into cynicism or retreat into online fluff, and sometimes you have to do those things to stay sane. However, I'm 35 and having the worst year of my life, and I still wake up with a smile on my face because I have built my tribe. The world might be burning around us, but we're going to enjoy our time together while the ship sinks.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take my coffee and walk my dog while the sun is out and the birds are singing. All the best to you ❤️

I'm in a university town, so it's probably more of a problem here 😅