One small part of the problem I only learned about recently is the Whole Language approach to teaching reading. Basically teaching kids to guess what words make sense instead of actually teaching them how to read. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s but continued to be used in some parts of the US into the 2010s. An entire chunk of the US population (and a few other countries as well) was literally not taught phonics/sounding it out because their teachers or schools followed this ineffective alternative method.

Of course that's far from the only factor, but it's one many aren't aware of.

If voting did nothing, there wouldn't be so much voter suppression and gerrymandering.

Personally, I would say absolutely do not stay home. If you want to abstain from the presidential vote or primaries it might not make a difference, depending on your state, but in the more local ballots you can make a difference for sure. Even better, consider getting involved in local politics, even just in the school board. Showing up to meetings and speaking can change minds. Shifting your town's culture and making local connecions makes a bigger difference than a vote for Biden in most states.

Voting is not enough, but as someone else here said, vote for who you'd rather negotiate with. Additionally, when people like Trump get elected it sends a message to their sympathizers that they're in the right, and it helps the overton window shift to the right. Look at the increase in hate crime after Trump won. Who is in power can cause cultural shifts that also make activism harder or easier, or even literally safer.

If you don't schedule maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you.

Don't insult mushrooms like this, lmao, what did they ever do to hurt you?

A few main issues contributed: the commute was 1.5-2h each way. The pay was low, and the raises that kept being hinted at never materialized. And the supervisor... picture this: you're in your mid 20's,and your supervisor is the same age as you. He was clearly only made supervisor because he's good at the work he used to do, not because he has any leadership skills. He doesn't seem to enjoy being in management, and is responsible for a solid 90% of all workplace hostility. He's not exactly mean or anything, but definitely way too intense. Despite having done the same work you're doing, his expectations seem maybe impossible? His work is his life and he brags about things like working on Christmas.

There were a lot of things I genuinely liked about the job, but after a time my mental health was the worst it had ever been. It's the only time I've genuinely felt suicidal at all, as in, not intrusive thoughts, but actual desire. I had so little spare time because of the commute, but couldn't afford to move closer. I knew I had to leave the job and was frequently applying for other jobs but hadn't had any success yet. I was too scared of not having another job lined up.

Then I went and hung out with an old coworker from a restaurant I had worked at in the past, and I found out the dishwasher there had a higher hourly wage than I did at my STEM job that required a degree - it was a pretty fancy restaurant but still... Within like two or three days (I think, although I was dissociating a lot so it's hard to say) I had my resignation letter turned in, and I was ready to leave and never look back.

I saw UFO's. I don't want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn't believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one's phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn't match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I've ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO's, and that scared the shit out of me. I'd love to find a non alien explanation, because I don't want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn't believe someone else telling me this story.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gltides.html

If the great lakes only see a fluctuation of 5cm max, I don't think it is affecting the human body in any meaningful way.

I'm in kind of the same boat as you op, I've been using Swiftkey for 5+ years but have been wanting an altnernative that isn't associated with the big tech companies for a while. After seeing this post earlier today I decided to give AnySoftKeyboard a shot.

I got it all configured the way I wanted but now I'm actually using it I don't think it's gonna work for me tbh. I'll give it a few days before making a decision though. I wish there more options out there.

On the plus side, I came across this and it made my day:

I know in real life it must have been gory and tragic, and I would normally never laugh about someone losing a pet, but the first mental image that comes to mind for me is cartoony and ridiculous so I'm with you on this one

Try a few distros before settling down - setting things up a few times is a good way to get to know the ins and outs better. Try something other than plain Ubuntu - I really enjoyed Mint and PopOS personally, both of which are forks of Ubuntu. In my first 6 months I tried around 4-5 different Ubuntu family distros, and that was such an important learning experience for me.

If you want to use wine, get bottles instead of running plain wine. The dependencies are much easier to manage, and you can run separate configurations of wine. As I know from personal experience, the sandboxing also helps prevent you fucking your computer up.

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Look up some terminal games - there are a few that are designed to help you learn. I don't remember the names (I'm down to track them down later if that would help), but in particular I remember an SSH-based file searching game and a folder exploration dungeon crawler themed game.

Learning commands is less useful than understanding how Linux is setup, but it'll all come together with time - just keep playing around with it and learning new things.

My vote is for mint. If you've been a long time windows user it should be the easiest one to get used to. PopOS is also newbie friendly if you're not into the feel of Mint for whatever reason.

My biggest recommendation though is to spend some time with a few different OS's and try setting things up different ways. Like if you start with Mint, try something new a month or two later. It's a good way to get used to the way linux OS's work under the hood.

I'm not a programmer at all, but if you have some background with computers and are willing to sink some time into learning and setting up a new system you'll be fine.

I want to give them a chance, I liked most of the times I came across them aside from the previous thread. The previous thread was pretty concerning though ngl - I don't think they intended to brigade but it still happened. I want to have solidarity with them, but so far, coexisting with them has been hard for a lot of people here. I'm hoping they settle down somewhat and listen to their admins requests such as staying out of c/main discussions and not spamming emojis, so it doesn't have to come to defederation.

I didn't know they were state funded anywhere, wtf?

I definitely automatically drift towards ND people, basically every friend I've had was some flavour of ND. However there are also ND people who are just as difficult for me to get along with as NTs. To be blunt here, really stubborn/argumentative people and super high energy ADHD people come to mind. Like, even if the basic parts of our communication style are the same, I still can't keep up with some peoples' energy levels and don't enjoy confrontation or debate. I still subconciously find myself choosing them over NTs though.

I do agree that cats and autistic people have a lot in common - I have no proof but from my immediate circle it seems like we're more likely to be cat people. I gotta disagree on sleeping a lot though bc I've had insomnia my whole life and I thought that it was common among autistics?

Wow! With vpn on (as usual) I get tons of other people's stuff - almost entirely movies and TV, lots of Bluey episodes in particular? Makes sense I don't see anything of mine, bc I haven't torrented anything in the past few days. When I turned the vpn off, nothing showed up. I suspected my rommate wouldn't be torrenting bc he always asks me to do it for him lol, he's less tech savvy, but it would be funny if something of his actually did show up.

I know a friend of a friend who had a platonic sugar daddy - this is extremely rare. From what I've heard from sex worker friends, the most common thing they want is companionship (followed by sex, and then nonsexual kink activities), so you would still have to provide that even if you're not going to have sex. You can't expect money for nothing, but sex is not the only thing being asked for here. I can't speak to getting banned or not, but if you are not willing to have sex or indulge in any kinks you will realistically be looking for an absurdly tiny pool of sugar daddies, while sifting through tons of typical potential clients who do expect sex and/or kink, and plenty of scams on top of that.

When I was a kid they were almost always like movies - I wasn't involved at all, just watching things play out. Sometimes they would be first person though. In early adulthood it flipped, now they're almost always first person.

Sometimes I think about the good and bad things about my early childhood, being one of three autistic siblings with an autistic mom, and as I'm getting older and starting to consider adopting, wondering what it was like for her. I've also been talking to friends about their neurodivergent parents. It seems like the most important thing is making an effort to be present in his life and emotionally support him - even if you're not perfect, kids seem to be able to tell if you're genuinely putting in the work or not. I know people with fairly unstable parents who still had a pretty good childhood and have good adult relationships with their parents because their parents were trying their best, and they could see it.

I think you sound really self-aware as well as considerate of his needs, and that's a really good sign. If you don't have a personal therapist, I would recommend finding one though. And both for your son and yourself, don't be afraid to shop around for therapists that are the best match.

Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.

What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it'll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.

Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.

It's not about what company has the best system and most control, it's about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.