great, this guys going to lash out at me because his stomach swallowed too much of his unit to be functional. fricken wednesdays.

True enough, I looked up the population a while after making this comment but I was afk. I don’t see the EU taking up the fight though. I guess papa putin gets another thing he wants. NATO getting pulled apart.

I haven’t deleted yet. All of my family is there, but it’s not on my phone, computer, or any device. I stopped giving meta space when I found out they mapped my network.

Dear Greenland,

You cannot allow this. Whatever political moves you are thinking about making, whatever rebuff you are considering, this can’t be allowed to happen.

I say this as an American. You can’t reason with Trump by letting him violate your borders. I know it may be hard to envision, but you are the natives in a moment of imperial expansion. Your schools are better than ours; you should know what that means. Trump is taking moves from Putin, Hitler, and even the British fucking Empire. You’re Hawaii, telling the fruit companies to fuck off, but with oil.

Jessica Berlin is right. Remove or destroy those machines now. The moment you let the US break ground, you have signaled your own defeat.

I do my best.

I’m a bit beyond the point of beating myself up or lashing out. Currently living alone for the first time in my life (I’m not a young man mind you) and each day is a bit of discovery and introspection.

I have bad days and bad habits but therapy and aweness helps keep things in perspective. It’s hard to explain to people the point I’m at. I don’t consider myself depressed. I’d say I’m re-discovering myself while also trying not to fall into the full escape of solitude.

It’s generally nice, though really ‘healing’ I think, requires some discomfort. So no, not beating myself up. Not angry these days. I’m just trying to be a brave little guy when I need to be.

best of luck on your journey too.

Same, but for me there are certain types of people and smells that put me extremely on edge for no logical reason. Any loud noise or actual aggressive language puts me into fight-or-flight mode. I don’t hyperventilate, but I start to babble, and I have a very hard time with people showing interest in me romantically or even just touching me.

That’s not how CPTSD works.

My theory, in general, is based on three facts.

1: Climate change is happening and will be devastating. 2: The people in charge know it is happening but are too invested in the causes to stop it. 3: The people in charge, and those with the economic power to make changes happen, do not believe in the intrinsic value of human life, or at least they believe that some human lives are inherently more valuable than others.

Now, there are other reasons for the things happening now to be happening. There’s at least 50 years of history that shows that the right wing and business interests have been quietly taking over, at least in the US, even before climate change became a major talking point. Those are facts that we can just push into the wave of things happening as causing amplification or resonance, not really the core factor right now.

My core belief is that the tech-bro billionaires and some select think-tanks and investment firms are planning for what we can simply call the apocalypse (as driven by climate change) rather than trying to avoid it.

The push for AI is really a push for the surveillance state and data control. They are redesigning the way the internet, communication, and commerce work. The future of computing, in their minds, is cloud-based, with users only getting access to things via a glorified workstation. Information is controlled and given out by AI that tells you what someone said instead of letting you see it. “There is no war in Ba Sing Se” type stuff.

It’s not about making money right now. Right now is the R&D phase. It’s the market-capture phase. Your average user is a beta tester for the infrastructure that will become the new internet.

If you want a good picture of it, you can watch the new Running Man movie. I think it’s a good encapsulation, but it’s still too kind for how bad things will likely get.

Will there be something like the Holocaust? I can’t say. But I can assume that, given the state of the world we are creeping toward, there will need to be a way to dispose of “excess people,” or at least to control those people and use them until they pass. This can be done by war, prison, death camps, or even just plain negligence. If the surveillance state is so complete that you can’t organize and riots are wiped out without even an evening news report, then they don’t matter much.

I think the US is done. There are plenty of stupid people doing whatever they need to do now just to make money, but behind them, just off-screen, are people that I think are working to pick up the pieces after the fall. I could ramble on about that… and China trying to take over the US’s place in global hegemony, but I think it’s more important to focus on the core issue.

Global catastrophe is coming. I know it is more comfortable to believe that our leaders are just greedy idiots. And yeah, some are. Some are even that special kind of stupid where they’re super high-intelligence but low in practicality and empathy.

But the truth is, that somewhere in most of the major nations, there is a report that shows the coming shitshow, and most of them have either realized that things are going to be unavoidably bad or have outright leaned into it.

Jokes on her. I don’t remember most of it

Do they still put the latest releases in a .exe file?

cool to know! I think Smart and Final might be a regional thing because I’ve never heard of it. but yeah, one of the draw backs of Aldi is that when they get busy things get messy. In general, I love Aldi. It has it’s issues but overall the shittiness seems muted compared to the other big chain stores. I can at least afford the essentials from there and then, when I get special stuff, buy bulk.

I wish they carried butter beans though.

They really are just following the Iraq war playbook huh? I’m having flash backs to the Abu Ghraib controversy.

I’m sorry, but you must be a new Aldi shopper. The quarter thing has been their model for ages. Often, you or someone else will just leave a quarter in their cart when they put it back.

The self-checkout is new, but Aldi is one of those stores that actually does pass the savings on to its customers. It’s always 20–30% cheaper at Aldi than other stores in my area. The exception is big-name brand stuff, but the store brand is definitely cheaper. $4 for a 12-pack of knockoff Coke vs. $13 for the name brand at the other stores? It’s a no-brainer.

Edit: I’m not super current on it, but as I recall, Aldi does actually pay its workers well. It’s one of the places that has a reputation as “the good one.” I’m sure it’s not perfect, since it still operates in the U.S. economy, but Aldi has been up there with Costco for its business practices.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it is more honest than Reddit.

Lemmy’s problems stem mostly from tribalism, as different instance admins ban and censor anyone they don’t like. That makes the environment hostile to users who came here expecting to be able to speak their minds like they did in the old days of the internet.

The tribalism causes the niche communities of Reddit to generally steer clear of Lemmy because, even if you have the technical knowledge to get here, you may find that your fandom or interest is fractured between six or more instances, with three of them being defederated from the other three or being moderated with such heavy bias that the community is almost unusable. You can be shadow banned, silenced, or just plain banned from an instance at the whims of a bad admin, which is really disheartening. Reddit is a mess, but it’s all in one place still. With Lemmy, you honestly need multiple accounts on different instances, or else you have to choose between your favorite crochet communities or your favorite tech communities. Say one wrong thing, and suddenly you are robbed of interaction.

I love Lemmy. It reminds me of the Reddit of old. It’s also broken and sick. I had to be in five different Star Trek communities because my instance got targeted by vindictive admins. I have to have multiple accounts because some fandoms are locked into highly toxic communities. Some of the best queer memes I’ve laughed at were in a community that is outright pro-Russia and pro-fascism.

Reddit felt like a grand bazaar for a long time. You could find a community for everything, and it would be active. While there was drama, it usually boiled down to you having a new sub added to your list to interact with. Lemmy is more like the high school cafeteria. Everyone is cliquish, and even if you have something to add to the discussion about Stargate or TTRPGs, if you voiced the wrong opinion in a completely different space, then you can find yourself a digital pariah.

At least with old Reddit, the Reddit of 2010, that didn’t happen. We were still a community trying to run things the way Aaron Swartz envisioned. Even if you said something that upset people, the upvote system often allowed that comment to be judged by the community and not one person with an agenda. That’s what I miss. Being able to say something or share something and have the community decide its worth rather than a minority voice deciding what people should see and think. It happens on Reddit, and it happens here on Lemmy, just for different reasons.

I was going to mention this. If for no other reason than to make up for the fact that I was too lazy to switch and it eventually lead to me getting the boot from the private torrent community I was in. I’ll be switching to AirVPN and doing it right again soon.

I can’t imagine Hamas has much to disarm at this point. THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF ISRAEL. just a statement of the situation. They were already basically an abused dog in a cage when they lashed out on Ocober 7th. The IDF was keeping them just sharp enough to be boogie men. A group to point at to justify their human rights violations.

I think John Brown is still a hero.

Not entirely a scam in theory. Though we are currently in a period of unprecedented corruption that is so complicated and complete that it might as well be. Even 5 years ago, I would have attributed certain actions to protect the market as an attempt to protect everyone. The systems in place are such that if a stock company fails, it creates far-reaching market upsets across industries worldwide. Essentially, if something fails, it takes everyone down with them.

The fix would be the state taking control of those industries to allow them to stabilize. Unfortunately, most state actors are also tied economically to those systems. That is, they’re corrupt as fuck and don’t care about people, but their own money and status.

So retirement funds and entitlements weren’t entirely a scam, but they are mostly so now. I doubt I will see a dime of mine if I don’t use it soon for school, expating, or buying a house. I certainly won’t see it when I retire.

I have some basic understanding of finance (and I mean basic), so take this as an observation rather than investment advice. If your retirement plan allows you to change your asset allocation, and you have a high-conviction thesis that a significant market event is about to occur, it may be worth temporarily rotating from a growth-oriented allocation into a more conservative allocation to reduce downside exposure.

Under normal circumstances, attempting to time the market is a bad idea, and financial advisors or plan managers will usually push you away from doing so. However, there are rare situations where it’s clear as crystal what’s happening. In those cases, reducing equity exposure and increasing allocations to lower-volatility assets for a short period may be a reasonable risk-management decision.

Using the recent SpaceX-related market activity as an example, I find it difficult to believe that any fund with a genuinely conservative mandate would have maintained meaningful exposure to assets directly affected by that event. A conservative portfolio, by definition, should prioritize capital preservation over aggressive growth and generally avoid concentrated exposure to higher-risk investments.

You generally can’t tell them, “I don’t want this stock,” when dealing with index funds, but you can get yourself out of the fund entirely while it’s poisoned. Unfortunately, my company was changing providers right when the SpaceX shit was happening, and I couldn’t make the change myself.

I haven’t been keeping up with the bond market but last I heard it was it’s own shit show so I’m not really sure anything is ‘safe’ these days.

you leave me and my dark humor out of this