Just keep telling yourself that, buddy. Also: “The guilty conscience needs no accuser.”

We lack the will.

Kinda, although I fully agree with everything else you said. Collective action is really difficult even when the government isn’t running COINTELPRO-like operations on anyone who tries to organize anything like a mass protest. For an example of the challenge of collective action, think about how hard it is to get your group of close friends to agree on which restaurant to go to and when. And that’s when everyone wants to hang out together, with nobody intentionally mucking up the works.

If we can overcome the “internal” hurdles to collective action, we can take back the country.

Indeed.

HJF. That guest list… That wasn’t a black tie dinner. That was an assembly of overlords meeting with the kings of their respective kingdoms. Those are the people one would assemble if feudalism is the goal.

• Don’t be ugly, especially not inside, but it helps to look like you at least care about your body and appearance. Added bonus: by going to the gym/hiking/bicycling/being active, you’ll get out more and meet more people. The stronger your network, the more likely you will meet a person who is a good match. Funny things happen when you get deep into active hobbies: you meet more people with those same interests.
• Choose partners because of how well they match with who you are right now. Stated another way: don’t choose potential mates on deterministic physical traits. Sure, everyone wants the super-hot partner. Choose partners because traits over which they have control appeal to you.
• Even if you meet a great person, that person will most likely change. Emotional maturity here is supporting and understanding your partner’s growth. If you cannot accept how the person has changed, end gracefully and amicably. Move on.
• “Keys to her heart:” Communication. Ask, listen. Corollary to that, being explicit about your needs and wants in a relationship. Out of 8 billion people, your romantic paradigm cannot possibly be unique. It’s up to you to develop the patience, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills to fulfill those needs by nurturing healthy relationships.
• Anxiety and agoraphobia: get help. Empathy by way of anecdote, I have crushing depression, paralyzing anxiety, and nearly intractable ADHD. I spent almost three years in intensive therapy, with two separate therapists, seeing them both every week. TL;DR: want results? Put in the self-work.
• “Feels like my time of finding someone has gone past its chances:” The time is past only if you give up or you’re dead. Here’s a speedrun of how “too-late” it is: I imploded my first two marriages. The second marriage didn’t even last a year, although we were together for 20 months prior to getting hitched. After a few years of working on myself and examining the root causes of my failures, I met my dream partner at 47 years old. We just had our 8-year anniversary.
• “Hopefully I can get out of this deep hole I’m in as I’m in a terrible rut right now:” When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Change whatever it is you need to change. Otherwise if you keep doing what you’ve done, you’re going to keep getting what you got.

I have a hypothesis that the Nassau pirates were a successful socialist economy. The Flying Gang/Republic of Pirates was founded mostly from former privateers (legally sanctioned and “licensed” marauders). The democratic and socialist nature of the republic was a growing threat to royalty and the American ruling class, especially given that Africans could be full crew members and even captains with all the rights afforded those roles. Furthermore, European royalty and American capitalists were the only ones “allowed” to pillage native lands. The pirates were in turn sacking European and American ships of their ill-gotten and exploitative gains.

Having a socialist, comparatively egalitarian and equitable society amidst the Carribean sugar plantations was too much of a threat to the ruling classes. The pirates were ruthlessly pursued and purged from history. Sure, King George I (and some others? don’t recall) first tried to bring the Nassau pirates (back) into the fold with offers of amnesty. This is analogous to offering modern engineers well-paying jobs; most terrorists whose names you know start out as engineers*. The ruling classes first wanted to put the pirates’ skills to use for their own gain. Benjamin Hornigold was one who returned, hunting down his former peers.

*think about that the next time you run across a bored, disgruntled engineer

I find it very odd that books on the golden age of piracy all remark how the pirates supposedly kept no records, yet discuss at length how the pirates had healthcare, disability, pensions, equitable wealth distribution… these things all require assiduous record-keeping. And so my bullshitspiration is that there were records. But the campaign to wipe out the pirates was so thorough that we are now led to believe that the pirates were just brigands and chaotic anarchists.

That’s your example of softcore porn? There’s much racier content on magazine covers in the grocery checkout line. Stop trying to impose your puritanical aesthetic on the rest of the world. It’s called /all for a reason. What’s wrong with you?!

Negative. I got mine at 23, but only because it took me five years to find a doctor who would perform it.

Good luck. Also, the recovery times are very serious.

And everyone is different (duh), but there has been a complete absence of regret. Added bonus: my partners have been very appreciative that the onus of birth control is not on them.

I see a lot of “For the PR” comments. This is only a fraction of why ads are purchased by utilities, large companies, and other entities with whom you never directly do business. The overarching reason they purchase ads is to have influence over narratives by those networks.

Source: used to develop software in the energy sector for a multinational; my employer and their corporate customers regularly bought ads to help bolster energy efficiency initiatives. These initiatives and interventions are frequently countered and opposed by exactly the corporate dickwads you think would oppose reduced consumer energy consumption.

I had a partner with genital HSV-1. YMMV, but in general:

• No BFD; the stigma of HSV is the result of a marketing campaign in the 70s (not 100% on the date) by a company selling HSV treatments
• Be honest and inform your prospective partners; yeah, some people who haven’t done the reading are going to react negatively
• Antiviral treatments are available; the one my partner was a daily pill
• In eight years of unprotected sex with her, she never had an outbreak and I test negative
• You may never have another outbreak, you may have regular flare-ups, or something in between
• Talk to your doctor and any take all of my previous comments like the Internet rumor it is

Always, every time.
“Why do you want to work here?”

“Because you have an opening, and the pay looks commensurate for the responsibilities. So far, the role looks like a good mutual fit. But I’m going to need more details to ensure we’re good for each other.”

Oregon. And at least half the pumps must still be staffed. Washington has had self-serve for at least 30 years (when I moved here).

I collaborate with other people who are also on DRS. Before I had teammates on DRS, I tried using Blender, Openshot, Shotcut, KDenLive. Those NLEs are just not there yet.

I actually started my solid modeling/parametric journey on FreeCAD, and I prefer the parametric workflow. I switched to Inventor when FreeCAD kept crashing when the object tree was ~60 primitives even on my monstrous workstation. I would love to go back to FreeCAD, because fuck AutoDesk in its ear, so hopefully they get the stability + complexity under control.

Rant on, bruddah! I am also in the “must use it for work” group, and I despise my work laptop with the fury of 1000 suns. In my personal work and prior to this new job, I was staying on Win 10 for Inventor, AutoCAD, FL Studio (and a bunch of VST synths I bought), and DaVinci Resolve Studio. My experience with my work laptop has spurred my nearly-complete jump to Linux.

FL Studio has been replaced by Bitwig, new learning curve and loss of the VSTs just being the cost I have to eat. I almost have DRS running in perfectly in Aurora Linux. And my two Win 10 machines will just go into an isolated network until I can figure out workarounds/replacements for the Autodesk garbage.

Edit: A society that has not long since been wiped out because it stood in the way of greed.

That’s seriously moving the goalposts of your original statement.

The Salish Tribes lived in the Pacific NW for ~13500 years, which is a pretty long run. They were quite egalitarian, flatly organized, and lived in balance with the ecosystem. There are other long-lived Native American groups to also consider, such as the Iroquois. See: “The Good Rain” by Timothy Egan, “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. That last book suggestion is a bit more tangential, but the point comes across.

Looking at this with a broader lens, 99.9999+% of all species ever have gone extinct. If you look at societies as a type of species, yeah… the less bellicose, less extractive species will get wiped out by the more avaricious until the ecosystem falls too far out of balance to sustain that behavior.

I came in here for this. Thank you, kind stranger with distinguished cinematic taste.

orthodontic sneakers

How does your footwear straighten your teeth? :D

I love Innuendo Studio’s stuff. Such a bummer that he’s most likely quitting.

What you propose is simple (as in simplistic), but far from easy. Content moderation at scale is extremely difficult, if not impossible. See “Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem.”

Also, deplatforming bigots is difficult and ineffective:

• https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/Papers/vu2023no.pdf
• https://www.theregreview.org/2023/11/09/mcdonald-the-limits-of-deplatforming/ (bonus link/spoiler alert: it’s a monopoly issue https://www.theregreview.org/2024/01/16/englebert-a-role-for-antitrust-in-online-content-moderation/)

That green ellipse is called a paragraph break. It denotes a shift in thought or conversational topic.

My example was poorly chosen in the context of the preceding paragraph. Mea culpa. But to address your request for more information on that admittedly poorly chosen example: that was at the start at the Russian invasion, so I don’t have the source readily available. It might have been Jacobin or a YT geopolitical analyst based in Europe. And bluntly, I am disinclined to dig through my histories in order to satisfy nitpicking pedantry.

Yeah, we’re definitely missing each other here. I own my role in communicating poorly here. And you are reading much more deeply into things that have not been said.

I feel like you are digging for an argument that doesn’t exist.

Okay, sure. Maybe that’s fair.

I come to Lemmy for conversations that are fun, funny, thought-provoking, and helpful. So, on that note, I’m out. Enjoy your day.