NOVA has started uploading some documentaries. I think the best way we can show them that we’d want to see them upload more of their catalog is to leave comments on the videos asking for that—I know that Spacetime, at least, reads every comment left of their videos, so it’s a great way to contact the creators.

Have you seen coffee prices these days? My coffeemate and I would prefer our own, but we have no choice but to “Lady and the Tramp” a grande caramel macchiato every morning.

It’s reasonable for most people to hit the Carlin-4 twice a day. If not for social reasons, then for health and hygiene.

Dentists say we ought to brush twice a day, morning and night. My dentist once told me that if I’m only going to brush once a day, then it should be at night. You don’t produce as much saliva while sleeping, and that creates a better environment for the bacteria that cause tooth decay. Brushing at night removes the tiny food particles that bacteria feed on, reducing the likelihood of developing tooth decay and gingivitis.

We then brush again in the morning because the lack of flowing saliva overnight causes a buildup of other bacteria that feeds on mucus, which is the cause of “morning breath”.

It’s reasonable for most people to hit the Carlin-4 twice a day. If not for social reasons, then for health and hygiene.

I haven’t logged into my reddit account in almost a decade. A few weeks ago I was searching for something and ended up on the reddit front page, and I saw a video of a man punching a woman. It’s not about how one curates their feed; it is what new users are served.

Goes fishing.
Comes home with a chicken and no fish.

Him in a vacuum? Yes, probably.
However, it’s the handlers and enablers Wormtonguing him behind the scenes that make it difficult.

Hunter/gatherer and early farming societies typically had a lot more leisure time than we do today. Some researchers estimated they only ‘worked’ 15-30 hours a week, and a lot of that was dependent on seasons. In addition, their egalitarian structure and lack of pursuit for excess material goods meant no pressure for long work hours.

I had the same experience on a trip to Europe. All of the European customs officials were happy, kind, and welcoming, all while still doing their job. When I came back to the states, the customs official was dressed in all black, sidearm clearly visible, and he was mean-mugging and being condescending the entire time. When he asked if I had bought anything while I was overseas, I said yes, and he just stared at me. For 10 to 15 seconds at least. I wasn’t sure if he was waiting for me to say something, produce receipts, stop resisting? Eventually he huffed loudly and angrily asked if I had spent more than $10k; no, I did not.

He stamped the things he needed stamp hard enough to shake his little kiosk and gruffly growled for me to move on. If a citizen gets treated like that, I don’t want to know what a non-citizen has to go through.

They’re fairly ubiquitous in the States, regardless of blue or red.

A lot of HOAs are managed by the community to establish community rules and create a common fund for things like landscaping and snow removal. An example of some common rules are prohibitions on keeping broken vehicles anywhere except your garage, and keeping lawns from becoming overgrown to the point where it creates a problem for neighbors. For the most part, those kinds of HOAs are not too intrusive and can be a net positive for the community.

However, a growing number of them are created and managed by the development companies that built the homes, and their primary objective is to maintain “property values” in community. I.E. they create and rules that promote uniformity, and will put a lien on non-conforming homeowners property. This results in the HOA literally taking ownership of the house away from the non-confirming homeowner and evicting them from the community. Then the development company will resell the house at full value.

I’ve heard stories of people being fined hundreds of dollars for simple things like planting a garden, painting a door, and hanging new curtains.

“Human nature” is where material conditions intersects with cultural conditioning. “Left leaning” doesn’t mean anything in America, especially when the cultural underpinning of the society is consumerism and the acquisition of wealth.

Ownership class needs to extract as much value as they can out of their workers. They think that if you don’t entangle healthcare with employment, then no one’s going to work anymore. I think it is all projection; the wealthy already don’t work nearly as hard as the people they exploit.

Yep! Not only is incredibly economical, it’s a healthier meal than most “traditional” American breakfasts.

Didn’t stop conservative media from deriding it as millennial over-indulgence. Vilifying the millennial tendency of frugality + preference for plants-based diet choices by portraying avocado toast as excessive and soy milk as emasculating, along with a concerted effort to deliver narrative to the /pol/ audience, it not only swayed the opinions of older generations, but spurred parts of the younger generations to resent each other. I’m sure meat industry profits were also in the mix somewhere.

The only winners in the culture war are the ones who drive the narratives, and it’s been that way in the US since radio was invented.

You are right that worker unions should have the weight of collective bargaining behind them, enough to affect the big changes. However, the US has demonstrated again and again that it will just crush unions if they start to irritate the ownership class a little too much. Like what Reagan did to air traffic controllers, what Scott Walker did to the Wisconsin public employees union, and the 2022 railway worker labor dispute under Biden.

Unions have been defanged by decades of ownership class lobbying and regulatory capture. The executive branch has no qualms about neutralizing and marginalizing union workers who step too far out of line. Something much bigger than labor unions is needed, but I’m afraid the ownership class has us all so exhausted from overwork and the media too wary of our neighbors for that to happen. For the public to build the kind of movement it needs will take both a hugely impactful economic downturn that affects everyone, and as much as I wish it weren’t the case, an immensely charismatic figure to pull them together. Whenever someone with an anti-status quo message and the charisma to start pulling people together starts to gain traction, they invariably end up on the business end of the CIA.

It’s hard not to feel defeated and deflated, especially when we’re all so exhausted.

I have always hated warm coins, but I didn’t realize it until now. Your comment gave me a plain toast-flavored eureka moment; thank you.

A couple weeks ago I had a back-and-forth with a conservative poster who staunchly believed that the GOP is still the “Party of Lincoln.” I was telling them how that wasn’t the case anymore, described the fifth party system, explained that the two parties switched views in the mid-20th century. They responded by saying I had been brain-washed by the MSM and calling me a sheep. I hadn’t seen so many emojis in a reply since ~2009, so I shrugged them off as a bot.

Maybe I gave them the benefit of the doubt a bit too freely.

Agreed. The amount of down votes you’re receiving shows that, even on lemmy, >25% of users have an immediate and ingrained distaste to others sharing the thought that religion can be dangerous. The religious hold their own religion in such high regards, not realizing that, for the most part, they were never given a choice of which religion, let alone the choice to not be religious at all.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion” - Steven Weinberg

“Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen is widely regarded as a patriotic anthem. It’s played at so many sporting events and political rallies that most people think it celebrates American pride. But the song itself is about a small-town kid who gets drafted, sent to war, and then comes home to find himself unemployed, homeless, and abandoned by the system that sent him there.

The irony is that media and propagandists grabbed the punchy chorus and stripped it from the rest of the song. An anti-establishment story about neglect and disillusionment that got balefully repurposed as an advertising jingle to drive military recruitment.

In my line of work, I have to sit in on a lot of meetings that discuss industrial accidents and incidents. Presenters in these meetings typically have spent weeks or months meticulously dissecting the incident, finding root causes, developing and implementing mitigations, and drafts for proposed changes to policy and process to prevent another occurrence. The meetings are intended to be a high-level review of the materials before sending the entire report to org leadership.

However, there’s always at least one person in the meeting that raises their hand/unmutes during the presentation just to point out in an accusatory tone exactly how and why the incident occurred. Whatever thing that person is bringing up is just a slide or two away, and is already included in the analysis, along with mitigations and process changes drafted during the previous weeks’ investigation. Some people will just never miss an opportunity to tell others that they would never have made such a crude, easily avoidable mistake, not on their watch.

Rarely, a commenter in these meetings does make an excellent point and adds new insights or suggestions. Regardless if the comments were useful or inane, my responses typically fall along the same line: “Thank you. You are right, and I will address this in coming slides/bring this back to the team for consideration.” It leaves the commenter feeling like they have contributed to the discussion, whether that’s true or not.

I take the same approach with comments where the only purpose is to tell me how I’ve made a crude mistake. But rarely, someone does say something that gives me something to take back with me. Specifically, I too was once called out for using the word “retarded.” The poster who called me out wasn’t exactly rude, and they didn’t insult me back, but I still felt taken aback because that word is one that I grew up with, and I know my intent wasn’t to insult people with disabilities, so I didn’t understand why using it made me seem like a bad person.

I thought about it for a while and realized that the language we use to describe things often does a poor job of conveying what we actually mean. When we use words like “insane,” “psychotic,” or other terms that originated in psychology or mental institutions, we are not just misattributing whatever behavior we are describing. We are also revealing an implicit bias.

We may not be directly insulting people with disabilities, but continuing to use that language still carries a message. It suggests that we either do not know more accurate words, or that we have accepted a habit of speech that quietly devalues disabled people. In that sense, it places them in the same rhetorical position as the people invoked by the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…”; they become the quiet exception, the ones implicitly treated as “one of the good ones.”

I hope that I am wrong about this, but I am not optimistic about Talarico.

He said all the right things to position himself as not just a progressive candidate, but as a christian candidate. White, male, middle aged, handsome, well spoken, seemingly levelheaded, and gives off strong Mr. Rogers vibes. Those things make him comparatively more palatable than most other democratic candidates, especially in Texas.

However, the democrats have had more than a handful of bad actors and turncoats in recent years. Candidates that talk the blue talk and walk the blue walk, but once they take office they quickly turn face. Sinema, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Robin Webb; not an exhaustive list of democrats that turned their backs to the rhetoric and policies that got them elected, but their the ones that spring to my mind first. Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and a host of others could be rightly accused of actively aiding the republican-led undermining of the rule of law (and civil rights) while in office.

The Streisand effect has a long history of backfiring on public officials, so much so that it’s not too far of a stretch to wonder if the administration banked on the FCC debacle to elevate Talarico. To be clear, I’m not entirely pessimistic about Talarico; I want to believe that there are still good people who want to get into public service for the right reasons. I’m just not optimistic because he’s almost too good. Running a sleeper candidate against one of the stronger progressive voices in congress (who frequently and loudly called out the GOP’s bullshit) is exactly the kind of thing that the far-right think tanks would do.