The worst part is that the unwanted, unplanted cherry tomato plant is outperforming the beefsteaks that I actually planted. Are we SURE we’ve actually domesticated these things?

Beefsteaks are awesome; I’ve finally figured out the deliciousness of a simple tomato sandwich, just tomato, good bread, mayo and salt and pepper. Beautiful.

I’ll trade you, five of the big ones for about 88 million cherry tomatoes.

Do they at least microwave the beers for you?

1,000 steps but only about 50 feet, huh?

Many of them are just straight up lying, a little bit to you and a little bit to themselves.

For others, it’s the sense that they’ve lost the golden age of their fathers made BY and FOR their fathers alone, for which someone must pay.

1. I’m a good person.
2. Being a good person means I hate bad people.
3. The people who are against me are bad, because I’m a good person.
4. Trump hates all the people I hate and is a strong male leader, so I follow him.
5. The only people who would attack him (read: me) are bad people.
6. People complain and produce false charges when they are afraid of their enemies and need to take them down.

Conclusion: I identify more strongly with Trump for being attacked for being right by bad people.

The sad thing is that, short of taking a mental sledgehammer to some really important internal concepts of self-esteem and value, you can’t stop this train of thought, and you’ll upset them for even suggesting it’s what they think. The closest you can get is putting in their heads the sense that Trump won’t win, in which case they’ll glom onto the next narcissistic, reactionary blowhard.

If you want some more detailed dissection of this thought process, read “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altmeyer: https://archive.org/details/The_Authoritarians_Bob_Altemeyer_2006.pdf/page/n2/mode/1up

It’s an easy read, but damn if it wasn’t chilling the first time I read it, back in the Obama years.

Has some real “of COURSE I’m anti-union” vibes.

Ask the wrong person to share a whiskey with you and you might end up with two fingers.

Ditto that.

And the frustration that comes of that isn’t so much “I didn’t get to make a point, for which I lost the opportunity to receive credit” but more “I didn’t get to engage with the discussion in realtime without having a sense for how others would react, appreciate, or challenge my views”. Reading things afterward has that line of discussion set in stone in a way that’s unlike being a participant.

Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.

If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.

“Older” “30 years or more”

HEY

For those of you who are multilingual from birth, do you have a preference?

Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.

That works for me, until I accidentally move it too far and downvote. Then it’s a struggle to get it back to normal, and then it seems primed to downvote again, because it’s a struggle to get to the upvote again.

I can’t speak to what the original poster was imagining, but one option is years of life lost as compared to the average in that country. So if a sweatshop worker lives an average of 64 years of that country’s 68, that’s 4 years of life lost.

Oh I’m always in the All section. Still kinda wrapping my head around instances as a concept: mentally I think if it as a single room with a ton of cubicles.

I treat subscriptions more like bookmarks: communities that I want to come back to specifically, but I don’t just browse them. It’s more like going to a grocery store and being sure to get the staples but not ignoring the rest of the aisles. How else am I going to find a new interest or perspective worth keeping if I don’t look?

I agree with you: I think decline of a site is an inevitability, especially after advertising is needed due to increased traffic.

But I personally don’t need Lemmy or anywhere else to be permanent, since what I get out of it is either transient (scrolling for memes and things that pique my interest) or meaningful enough that it remains with me, meaning enjoyable or thought provoking discussions.

Granted, I’d rather alternative sites not go tits up in rapid succession while the shuffling corpse they’re trying to ape continues to slog on mindlessly, but keeping the impermanence in mind makes it easier to see these places as areas to congregate rather than the end to surfing the web in general.

When I was younger…well, there were only Palm Pilots back then, so it’s a bit unfair, but I’d prefer physical books, and if I were doing active reading then it’d usually be with a physical book.

Reading digital books now requires using a device that often has access to Youtube or something else that’s shorter and snappier and yet pulls hours upon hours out of my life.

And as I’ve gotten older…I haven’t read read a book in years. Is it a lack of attention span? Yes, which makes me feel sad and ashamed and so fucking frustrated because I could, I could read long books as a kid and now…I can’t.

It’s also that I have more to do: laundry, cleaning, work, cooking, errands, exercise… So there’s less time to sit down and read, or if I do, it feels increasingly hedonistic and therefore wrong to just do one thing at once. If I can multitask then shouldn’t I?

Audiobooks are both a godsend and a curse. I can actually consume books again! But I’m locked into the ease of it.

Actively choosing to doing just the one thing, for myself, is far harder than it ought to be.

I got to a really early point in Dune where a character was thinking about the various ways to be manipulative (not necessarily evil, just politicking) with their expressions and words and body language and I just got tired of it.

Also gave up on Wuthering Heights. Was it revolutionary in its day to draw back the gilded curtain and display naked domestic abuse for what it was? Sure. But…I don’t need that curtain drawn away, as I’ve seen far better depictions of DV, and, well, I go out in public, too. So it was just tedious bitching and being cruel to each other until I stopped reading.

Gropes Over Permission

Also works.