I didn’t think for even a moment that it would be that simple, thank you so much!

Sorry, what? Are you saying that this comment about the holocaust makes the Nazis look… better?

Have they actually got something in the pipeline.

Tough fucking luck. If healthcare is private in the US, it’s none of their business, the state doesn’t get a say.

Honestly, I agree, putting a gender slant on it, unless completely necessary, can easily arecomplicate the situation, as its putting these expectations at the front of mind. I often see this leading either into resentful sexism, or original sin type self-loathing for being a man.

I honesty just think tbe topic of gender online is so toxic, that mixing it in with mental health can cause lots of unnecessarily complications, and makes it easy for third parties to take advantage for their own ends.

Who’s trying to trick you into eating a sugar substitute?

Plus the reporting on it.

At a certain point, people start saying things like “X is supposed to be bad now, but give it 5 years and it’ll probably be healthy again!” or “they say you’re not supposed to do Y anymore…”.

Because, of course, most people get their information from news sources who are always trying to find the next superfood or poison that we’ve all been consuming for hundreds of years. And often, many of the things were taught when we’re younger are no longer considered correct, or at least fully correct, anymore.

So at a point people just get tired, ignore all of it, and just do whatever they were going to do anyway, because from their perspective, scientists can’t make their mind up anyway.

Not exclusively though. For many the fact that there a scary sounding chemical called MSG in their food is enough. Lots of people are obsessive about ‘additives’ and assume they are all bad.

I’ve started shooting myself with BBs, I’m working my way up to pellets, then. .22, probably going to stop before 50BMG, but before long, I will be unstoppable!

I’ve used this for distilling too, when people start talking about methanol. Even with the worst distiller in the world, you’d have to drink something crazy like 10L before it would kill you.

Obviously by that point you’d be dead with alcohol poisoning. But saying “you can safely drink 14 cans of coke a day before the carcinogenic effects of aspartame become an issue” is completely valid, and not the same as saying “drinking 14 cans of coke a day is a healthy way to live”.

Weirdly it’s the other way for me. I love Cyberpunk and am trying to replay it, and my favourite games have always been long and story driven, I love turning over the rocks and seeing how deep it all goes, playing KOTOR as a kid was just fascinating.

But, they’re a slow burn that take some engagement to really enjoy. When I’m tired I miss all the details and nuance, find I’ve not been listening to dialogue and stuff.

But I can fire up something like Overwatch and can play well effortlessly almost instinctually. I often don’t get much time to game, so the fact its full-on actually helps, whereas in an RPG, you can easily burn half an hour on what’s basically just dialogue and travel. It’s hard to take your time to enjoy it when you don’t have time.

But it’s fine, it’s something to look forward to occasionally. You don’t watch a movie every night, and ultimately I could find time, but I feel better spending that time on other things usually, or just letting off steam on a less thinky game.

They’re just not, though. Meta and Reddit are not the same. Reddit and my employer, where we make thing that people choose to buy, are not the same.

People can have preferences on different platforms and products, and they can have different amounts of confidence in different companies on how capable and trustworthy they are.

It’s the kind of meaningless vague posting that rightoids are rightly criticised for when they post shit about the people they consider to be the ‘problem’. It’s vaguely shaped like the way they see the world, but really this is about as substantial as the ‘immigrant benefit fraud’ posts your shitty uncle posts.

I don’t even know what this is referencing, or how this would work, but everyone is in here saying ‘Omg so true’ and believing that this is the reason that things are shitty.

Like, everyone’s quick to jump on bollocks conspiracy theories, and consider such things as flat-earthers to be significant in any way, but you’ll constantly see vague shit implying these enormous, unlikely conspiracies between multiple competing companies, the government, involving the collusion and silence of thousands of people, and they get up voted because people believe it’s the sort of thing that could happen.

What bothers me is that it ends up coming to ‘someone should do something about this!’, but exaggerating constantly makes extreme options look reasonable or even necessary.

Very few people can actually say what they’d want the new status-quo to look like though, outside of vague slogans or utopian ideas that those in power will somehow do things wisely, justly and selflessly, like they never have before. We can’t compare to any other attempt at communism, and even the most prosperous socialist state would be considered ‘neolib’. Because the thing is, it’s really not clear how communism is the silver bullet many think it is, but also, the vagueness and disparity about the end goal means that we can’t really look at our current situation, look at the proposed one, look at what it will take to get there, and make an informed decision on which is likely to actually make things better.

Examples? I would love some free billions!

*exist for the good of those in power. I really don’t see the value of concentrating power into a single point of failure.

German government procurement is horrendously inefficient, but it’s because of incredible levels of transparency to try to prevent corruption.

It means that even the most minute purchases come with lots of beurocracy attached.

You can look at it almost as its own kind of corruption, that syphons money into the beurocracy, but it does mean that things aren’t happing without people knowing, and that, for an extreme example, when you decide to invade another country isn’t the moment when you discover that you discover that most of your equipment had been sold for vodka money a decade ago!

A company is much easier to crash than a monarch or government. A government will lock you up or kill you for planning to overthrow them.

Can someone fill me in on wtf is going on with drag in the US?

I’m from the UK, drag is like our longest running joke, and families go to pantomimes all the time. Recently theres been a more direct association with the LGBT community in the popular understanding of it. I’d say that most people’s view on drag here is:

• not necessarily an LGBT thing, though it very often is
• kinda traditional
• can be funny, or just a fun performance
• pretty lighthearted
• not expected to be overtly sexual by default, depends on context

Some of the stuff I see out of the US is bizzare. I realise that the weirder stuff is always going to be amplified in the news, and people are not necessarily trying to show the full context in photos. But I’ve seen shit like

• rightoids getting so worked up that the pickets outside resemble the Gaza Strip or, as I’m reliabily told, the average us abortion clinic
• performances in weird places like libraries
• people watching a clearly sexual show in dive bars with their kids in tow that look like they’re starting at a painting in a gallery pondering the meaning of nothingness and looking way out of place

Like, wtf? Drag isn’t the problem, it’s the weird-ass way that people seem to be responding to it. Go to a show if you think you might enjoy it, read up on the performance or use context ques to understand what kind of drag performance it’s going to be. Certainly don’t go for political reasons and ruin the fun for performers who are just trying to have a good time. But equally, don’t plan shows that are meant to provoke a reaction for political reasons, for the same reason.

And why the right wingers care so much if fucking beyond me. Imagine having enough free time to consider that important enough to spend your precious free time protesting it rather than doing literally anything else.

Just chill, it’s a fucking stage show. It’s like the whole toilet thing again, just hysterics over something inconcequential. I’m trans and fabulous as fuck and don’t seem to consider these issues nearly as important than a middle-aged cishet blue collar dude from Texas who may never have met a single trans person or encountered anything like this outside of the Internet.

Is only fun show, why you heff to be mad?

I thought that too, but Wagner have stated they expect a new President, and Pompey has sided with the senate and declared Caesar an enemy of the state Putin has sided with the MOD leadership and declared Prigozhin a traitor and criminal.

Wagner seem to be facing little resistance from garrisons, and may snowball.

I just hope it lasts a long time and everybody loses. We don’t want Prigozhin in charge. But right now Wagner are disrupting logistics and doing AD behind Russian lines. If they can pose a credible threat to Moscow, they will have to redirect at least some forces from Ukraine, which is what really matters.

We know that Wagner have been effective in Ukraine against hardened defences, no matter the number. With virtually all Russian forces committed in Ukraine and their swift progress so far, Wagner definitely won’t be able to be ignored. But I also hope they will eventually be destroyed.

I don’t think there’s a problem with people using Sync, I access Lemmy mostly through Windows!

People are happy about sync because they’re going to be able to use a UI they like, are familiar with, and has been refined over a really long period of time. It’s just a frontend, I think it’s way more important that the foundation you choose to build a platform on is open-source and can’t be pulled out from under you. If people prefer accessing through Sync, Chrome, or whatever else, it’s not really an issue as there’s always other options if any of them go sour.

I fucking love open source, seeing the rapid advancements in 3D printing, robotics, prosthetics and a host of other technologies as people build on each others’ ideas is amazing. The fact that a dude can use a brain-computer interface and machine learning to control a fucking exoskeleton he built in his residential house in his free time is like witnessing the future. But at the same time, also using closed-source software is not inherently a problem, and is often unavoidable.

And yes, it’s insane that people have to pay for access to information that they paid for. The fact that I have to pay money to see the standards of how to wire my home safely, that was drawn up with public money, is pure insanity!

Public transport is great in cities, but as soon as things get more sparsely populated, you get diminishing returns. Everything takes longer, runs infrequently, and still barely gets you close.

But then if they run more frequently, they’d be empty.

Yet, where I live, they keep introducing hostile rules, new houses can only have one parking space, at a time where kids are having to live with their parents for longer, so their mobility, job opportunities, etc are really hampered. It would be one thing if there was decent public transport infrastructure, but there’s literally nothing, just people becoming ‘stuck’ because those who make the rules often don’t think about areas as a whole.