Smartphones (and the Internet more generally) have led to a major decline in reading books among the American public. I think this plays such a huge role in the absolutely batshit crazy cultural shift we’ve seen.

That’s a common glitch on Lemmy right now. Subscribing to communities oftentimes gives you that message, but as far as I’m aware they’ll still show up in your feed like normal. I’ve heard if you click subscribe and then let it sit for a while it can resolve itself to show you as fully subscribed, but I haven’t had much luck with that.

I worked midnight to 8am as a security supervisor at a hospital. It was nice in some ways and awful in other ways. Honestly, all the ways it was awful occurred outside of the actual shift itself. It was harder to hang out with friends, I was always tired, I had to try to get tired and sleep while it was sunny out (blackout curtains and sunglasses on the drive home ftw), and the world was waking up while I was going to bed. It was hard on my relationship with my wife.

The shift itself was pretty great actually. The hospital was quieter at night. As a supervisor, I did have some issues with my guards falling asleep at desks or trying to hide and take naps. Two people got fired over it. But most of them were pretty good. One guy fell asleep while driving the patrol vehicle and crashed it into a gate. That was embarrassing for everyone and he ultimately lost his job (he didn’t admit to falling asleep, but we all suspected it - he was working two jobs and was perpetually tired). The best thing about the job was sneaking up onto the roof early in the morning on my patrols and watching the sun rise.

I think a more serious and probable question is what would happen if your doctor had a heart attack during surgery. Doesn’t take a degree from Hollywood Upstairs Medical School for that to happen!

I’ve always found the Bible to be so arbitrary. A bunch of old dudes at a few councils 1000+ years ago decided what they wanted their core beliefs to be. And then they decided what books they wanted to recognize as legitimate in the Bible. The only difference between which books are “apocryphal” or “heretical” and which are “inspired by God” is which books those old men chose and which they rejected. Why is the fever dream that is Revelations considered legitimate when other more coherent books aren’t? Understanding how arbitrary it all is played a big role in my deconversion from Evangelical Christianity. The people who tout the Bible as the “one truth” rarely understand how arbitrary the process that got them that book was. They would spin some tale about how “God spoke through those men” or whatever, but it’s all just bullshit excuses. You can imbue any event with supernatural backing when it conveniently fits your narrative.

And I’m not even someone who thinks that “all religion is poison” or whatever. Just the “Bible based” belief system that treats the Bible as infallible. I think logic and emotion are just as important of tools when talking about morality and religious guidance as the Bible is.

LENNY!!!

What purpose does throwing someone in prison for ten years do though for something like forgery? Would it not be better if they were forced to do community service and lost access to the tools that led to them committing forgery? Why pay money to remove someone from society for a decade? Is it to teach any other potential forgerers a lesson? Is it to teach the forgerer themself a lesson? Is that really a lesson that needs to be worth a decade in a cell to learn? The world’s justice systems have generally erred too much on the side of retribution instead of rehabilitation. It’s especially sinister when you consider how much our capitalist systems place more value on things like capital over people’s lives and wellbeings. To be clear, I consider myself to be a capitalist, but a social democrat that believes in heavy regulations on our capitalist systems. I think our retributive, excessively pro-business justice system is a clear example of what happens when you let capitalism go unfettered and bleed into every aspect of our lives. Forgery is not violent. Most of the time it is not actively dangerous. Why don’t we come up with more creative and proactive ways of punishing people that would benefit people at large rather than ruin the criminal’s entire life? Even in a case where I am not on the criminal’s side I find myself pretty appalled that ten years could even possibly be on the table in a forgery case.

Seriously. Why the fuck is it even a possibility for ten years of prison over something like this? It’s crazy to me that a nonviolent crime could be punished so severely. I mean, why do we have prison? Is it to remove dangerous people from society? That’s certainly how I think it should be, but these sorts of punishments really show that it’s all about sating the bloodlust of victims.

I appreciate your patience with my ignorance. Thanks for that 😅 Seems I spent a bit too much time in old hostels in cities to have a good understanding of European infrastructure… Probably not unlike coming to the US, seeing New York City and Boston, and assuming our infrastructure is all old…

All good points, though speaking from the US/Canada, most of our sinks now only have a single faucet so if hot water is dangerous in any way then this certainly doesn’t prevent things like residual amounts of microorganisms or harmful substances left from the hot water from coming into contact with our cold water by the time it reaches the faucet. Our single faucets are probably a result of modernized newer plumbing in our newer buildings - water heaters in the US are huge, sealed very tight, and are designed to be replaced fairly regularly. I’m guessing many places throughout France and other parts of Europe still have older plumbing systems because replacing them would be difficult and costly in all the older buildings you guys have. Do you have mostly dual faucet sinks in France?

US/Canada here as well as someone that has visited most of western Europe (UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland) and stayed in hostels - no boiling necessary in any of these places.

There’s actually a pervasive myth I’ve encountered that hot tap water is dangerous and that one should only drink cold water. As far as I’m aware, this myth is due to an old setup for water systems that many western homes had before modern taps. The tap was separated into separate cold/hot faucets. The cold water came safely from the city, but the hot water came from tanks that were stored in people’s attics. The water in these tanks sat stagnant and was therefore prone to rats and other creatures dying in it or bacteria building up. This is why still today, most British homes have separate hot/cold taps - to keep the “safe” water separate from the “dangerous” water. I occasionally encountered such taps in the US and I assume that’s why my dad raised me to make sure the water was cold before drinking it. My father’s understanding of this was clearly outdated though. I learned all of this from a Tom Scott video.

Some day the orioles will discover the same technology. I’ll be walking through a forest and hear a really sexxed up voice saying “Hey big guy, why don’t you come up here and make me moan?”. So I’ll naturally climb up the tree to investigate and all I’ll see is an oriole excitedly staring at me and holding its phone staring at the Birdnell Humanology app. Only then will the birds have their revenge in full.

I love the ornithology app so much! I recorded an oreole singing in the forest the other day, then the app identified it and gave me a list of recordings of oreole songs, so I was able to loudly play it on my phone and sure enough the oreole came over to investigate! (I felt a bit guilty for faking it out like that, so I stopped as soon as it came over.)

To me, the larger issue for the world outside of Russia is the ensuing chaos would be pretty scary when there are nukes sitting around. All it would take is one bad actor to get ahold of those for bad things to happen. I don’t think it’s likely and I can’t currently see the motivations for using nukes on any other nations apart from Russia itself and Ukraine, but chaos is chaos and many would consider the evil we know to be safer than whatever else lurks around the corner.

Personally, though, despite being aware of this it would regardless please me so much to see Putin fall. I would especially love to see Russia democratize more, but I’m afraid that’s probably a pipe dream anytime soon. Uncontrolled chaos generally doesn’t lend itself to more democracy.

You could just refuse to say their name… Orrrrr you could just get some fun SEO terms going so that when people Google it they get results like Reddit sucks dick or Reddit is shit or Reddit hates you.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It’s a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.

I don’t doubt that ADHD exists and that your experience is valid. But I also think we need to be really careful about our expectations. I know I don’t have ADHD. I can focus plenty when I try. Social media has shortened my attention span and made me prone to procrastination, but it’s definitely not something I am actively incapable of. Yet so many people have self-diagnosed me with ADHD.

I have at least one friend who in college landed a prescription for Adderall because he wanted to be able to get extra focus even though he knew he didn’t have ADHD. Later on he went off of it and managed to become a lawyer and made it look easy. This is someone who never struggled with focus. I knew him since grade school. His use of the drug was clearly abusive.

I get angry at people like my friend because I know ADHD is real. And I know his abuse of Adderall only makes more people out there minimize the existenxe of real ADHD. But just as you’re saying my rhetoric makes it difficult for people with ADHD, I think overdiagnosing hurts people without it. Like I said in my first comment, if I’m in a really competitive environment like a school and I’m going against people that are using a “performance enhancing drug” for focus, then our societal expectations for what I should be capable of are out of whack and I start to be expected to perform and focus like someone on Adderall.

There has to be a compromise between handing it out to everyone and refusing to give it to people who genuinely need it. I have no idea what that compromise looks like and I’m truly happy that people like you and another friend I have who genuinely has it are able to get their medication. But outside of the very real world of ADHD, I see it becoming a problem. My wife who has been able to write an entire PhD dissertation in a very normal amount of time and experiences far less distractability than most people I know regularly questions whether she has ADHD. It’s that state of mind where everybody thinks they have it that I worry about. We don’t need to all be on Adderall.

This is something that concerns me about the recent excessive self-diagnosing of ADHD I’ve been seeing people do in the US. I think our late capitalist system has us convinced that we need to be constantly focused and productive. Distraction is a disease. I worry that when our expectations of how a person should function begin to look unnatural and based on how humans function on something like Adderall, then we slowly begin to act like there’s something wrong with just being a normal person that takes their time living a more naturally paced life.

God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant

I think they were just making a Lord of the Rings joke because the movies were filmed in New Zealand. I don’t think they really believe that New Zealand prisons are bad.