jadero

I cannot know your experience and won’t pretend to.

Unless your objective is to be even more disliked and disrespected than you are now, being deliberately annoying will not get you far.

If you just want respect as a thinking, feeling human, you’re going to have to be respectful of other thinking, feeling humans, ignoring and blocking those who are too immature to have respect for others.

There are people out there who think that power is the source of respect. They are, of course, wrong. The only path to respect is through the elimination of power structures, so that respect can be mutually sought through understanding, not obedience.

I don’t like assholes, so I don’t seek them out. I try to give the assholes who engage with me the respectful engagement they crave but don’t deserve, then block the ones who stay assholes. If I feel surrounded by assholes, I disengage completely until I’ve figured out whether I’m actually the asshole or I’ve stumbled into a snakepit. (And everybody is sometimes an asshole. The secret is to not make it part of your identity or to assume that it’s part of theirs.)

Life is so much more pleasant when disagreements are respectful engagements with learning opportunities instead of just screaming matches.

Good luck on your journey.

That’s true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.

That doesn’t mean the danger has passed or that our “death from disease” rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.

That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we’ll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we’ll still need all the long term care programs that aren’t being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we’ll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.

On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it’ll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.

So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn’t going to be all that much fun for millions of people.

Less serious than what? If my aged brain remembers correctly, Omicron severity is comparable to the original strain, only making it less serious than Delta. As I understand it, the primary factor in reduced severity was that vaccines were available and most people got the vaccine.

Just a note that “Measles parties” are also likely to end badly.

Are these the same doctors who insist on taking a wait and see approach to Paxlovid? If so, I’m not sure they should even be allowed to call themselves doctors.

I believe that the article was making the point that it’s kind of strange to call it a crisis when the system is working as it has always worked. Instead of trying yet another way to keep the system working, maybe it’s time to redesign the system.

It devolves pretty quickly into an infantile solipsism. The world exists only for me, and only when I’m looking.

I had a very strange conversation a couple of years ago. It seems that some people think that math is used only as a tool to control the population or something.

We were talking about something that most people would consider pretty innocuous, catch and release fishing. I mentioned that I had recently read an article that claimed that mortality among released fish was still high enough that approximately every second released fish should be counted against your limit because of the percentage of released fish that die of catch-related causes.

That lit the other guy’s hair on fire. “That’s math! You can’t seriously think that math is real? It’s all made up!” (Or words to that effect. Mouth frothing removed to protect the innocent.)

Over the course of the rest of the conversation, I “learned” that math was invented as a tool of oppression. Science uses math to create fake knowledge. Our senses are the only true sources of knowledge.

Good point.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. If he was already a member of the elite instead of a flunky hoping for acceptance, maybe he wouldn’t be working so hard to screw us over.

The article says “thoroughly under tap water”. I take that to mean no soap, but running water and scrubbing, either just with your hands or with a suitable brush.

More like “with heavy wallet”.

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.

Yes, and thanks!

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Former water treatment plant operator. Thanks for living up to your name.

Perhaps, but don’t forget every god has had to learn a few things the hard way.

Many will cherry pick or apply self-serving interpretations of your pronouncements.

Many false prophets will arise.

Many will rail against your very existence and create competing systems.

Eventually, you will be considered archaic and replaced by the gods of the new thing.

Tongue in cheek, obviously, but not too firmly. :j

I don’t have a recommendation, but I understand the desire for excellent keyboard support in a GUI. I switched to Linux after 3 decades on Windows and I really miss doing all the screen navigation from the keyboard. In Windows, the only time I used a mouse was inside things like drawing tools and badly written apps with inadequate or non-standard keyboard support.

Sort of. I think of the Unix philosophy as being like Lego. Here’s a box of goodies, go crazy. Even Ikea still requires user assembly.

Most end users just can’t do much with the first and often even get tripped up by the second. What we need is something in between that a programmer can use to quickly throw something together to user requirements.

Actually, that’s much like what I was doing with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic decades ago. I probably would never have survived in an actual software development shop, but I was kept very busy by a bunch of small businesses that loved the quick turnaround and manageable costs.