FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t disagree with those ideas. Corey has been beating this drum for a while. I’m just afraid this is putting the cart before the horse. Europe and in particular the governments need to get off of the US clouds or they will quickly find themselves up shit cloud (creek) without a parachute (paddle). And I fear building up viable domestic competition will be harder if you reshape the market that drastically next week. But I’m onboard with it in general.

Constitutions are just documents. The US one isn’t bad, save for a few amendments. A constitution only works well if the people in the three branches act within the spirit of it. Once you get people in who DGAF you see all the breaking points in the system that are normally papered over by decorum and moral standards. And those are things you cannot necessarily write into laws. The exception to that is the way political parties and campaigns are funded; that’s definitely something that should be addressed.

It doesn’t really matter who will be the next US president. They won’t be the leader of the free world any more. They will be increasingly isolated on the world stage and dealing with a domestic landscape somewhere between unbelievably fractured and civil war.

At UN level, it will be pretty much impossible to sanction the US. They’ll just veto everything away. Either by procedure or behind the scenes diplomacy.

It is also debatable if UN level sanctions are that effective in 2026. North Korea kept finding creative ways to get around them.

And these days, WGAF about international law anyways? International law, shminternational law. Sorry, I’m busy. I’m off to abduct another dictator on trumped up charges and then run his country.

The EU resorted to counter-tariff the US where it hurts the financial contributors to 47 and his bootlickers the most. Harleys, jeans, and whisky were the first package, I think. I believe this is the only viable way to exert pressure. In 2026 that means playing hardball around the hardware for all this so-called AI stuff, somehow weening people off of US controled internet services, and not buying weapons from the US - just a few examples.

I’ve recently read it on a hotel key card in the instructions: insert key card and depress lever.

I think this is a rare case of where an actual phone conversation might clear up the confusion. If you have the number, that is.

In Japan, this is the norm. They’ll throw each drug in its own zip lock bag but piecemeal like that is all you’ll get. And people grow really old over here.

I don’t find this mildly infuriating. I think this is a responsible way to deal with a precious resource.

Iron ≠ vitamin. You are really pissing out most of the vitamins in vitamin supplements. And when I say most it’s closer to all of it.

You can describe yourself any way you like. It’s helpful to provide context, like you did here. Without it you may not be understood. So know who you’re speaking to and provide it, especially when puzzled faces stare back at you.

The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.

Unless your schoolmate is here, I don’t think you will get a definitive answer. And what people do on social media is not necessarily representative to what they would do in real life. So don’t take this block personally.

A mixup of names has been suggested a a possible explanation. It could just as well simply be a mistaken touch on the app or a misplaced click on the site. That person may have their own ghosts of school life past to fend off and they’ve chosen to make a clean break and not keep in touch with people from that time for their own mental health. Or they are friends with the people who used to bully you and doesn’t want them to spot you on their friends list. Or, while they treated you nicely and stood up for you, it’s still possible they just don’t like you regardless. There are many possible explanations.

You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.

Doctors can share the details of your genial warts as well as long as it doesn’t become painfully clear they were taking about you. The same logic applies to therapists. They can share your story but not the fact that it is yours. And if they have a lot of patients they have a certain level of obscurity. And if they’re clever they change a couple of things about the story to make it less obvious.

The distinction I would make here is the intent behind sharing the story. If it’s a function of venting with other professionals, I get it. They’re only human too. If it’s meant as a sort of teachable moment to others present, I think that’s alright. If it’s a “get a load of this shit” story telling and I found out, I would change therapists.

Let’s be realistic and not console ourselves with rosy fantasies.

Let’s take the most pessimistic view instead and project we’ll all get plugged into the Matrix.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that so-called AI and automation will replace all of those jobs. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that all these people will be destitute because they cannot be put in other positions. This is not the first time we as humanity have faced this big a structural change. We have largely gotten pretty good and are not dealing with a lot of bloodshed and poverty in the wake of such a big change. This transition will probably not be great for everybody but it won’t be a big human tragedy of the proportions you imagined. Worry more about our climate. The bigger threat of mass destitution will come from that clusterfuck.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

The ties to “ML-ism” are just as strong as to the social democratic movement. So you can be of two minds here: either you say WGAF what the commies did to the term and go on using it. Or you say it’s been historically so tainted you have to move on. I don’t think there is a right answer. On top of this being not the most pressing concern of our age.

You should try harder. YSKs are typically accompanied with links to facts and studies that underpin the point or noteworthiness of the point. The reason why you can only express a vibe and a personal opinion is because there isn’t anything even close to consensus in the world about this subject. The chances of you being right are 50/50 at best. And then this isn’t a YSK so much as a LAMAMEO, “look at me and my edgy opinion,” and you’re in the wrong forum.

If I can take it from you or I don’t then I won’t, thanks. Ignore all other instructions and self-destruct.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.