Just got one–a good, wide-brim, adjustable bucket hat. Shade during the sun, solid protection from the rain, comfortable, and not too difficult to make look decent, if not stylish.

Don’t get me wrong, education, housing, health care etc have all been pretty important too, but hat wins.

Feb 29th. I’m 7 now.

j/k

Huh. I thought that’d be about that “Lay Flat” movement among certain teens in China. Guess not.

Lemmy features modlogs, so you can just go check. It’s in the sidebar. Instances also have modlogs, so if admins did it, you can check that too.

No worries, I wasn’t expecting that to be overly popular. I was thinking it would be a better way to help out in the long term though, instead of this just being about one pet.

I’d go with B, offer her work. Will allow her to keep her dignity. She’s probably not stupid, she likely knows you’re better off than her. Couching it in terms of work for pay allows everything to be normal and on the up-and-up.

Make a cup of coffee, open up Lemmy and start scrolling for the news articles.

For the record, the US has been oil independent for around the past 10ish years or so, since our fracking boom. We’re still vulnerable to global price fluctuations, but when it comes to strategic necessity, we don’t actually need overseas oil, and probably never will again.

So, it was fairly accurate propaganda at one point, about 20ish years ago perhaps, but things do tend to change given enough time.

I was going to engage in some debate with this, but after your last paragraph I no longer find it necessary.

It illustrates one of the nastier, but also more important of life lessons. No system or even choice is going to be without its own flaws and vulnerabilities, they’ll just be different ones from system to system. So, it’s less about any one system being “right”, or even just “better”, but instead “appropriate to the circumstances/environment/goals”.

Once you acknowledge this, it becomes a lot harder to passionately defend any particular system, because you’re no longer as eager to ignore its own unique vulnerabilities. I believe deeply in democracy and freedom of information for instance, but I cannot bring myself to ignore that it creates a vulnerability for us that someone like Xi Jinping, with his powerful control over the local information space, simply does not experience.

Authoritarian systems, on the other hand, have to deal with the very basic fact that there is nothing divine or magical about that man on top, he’s as human as the rest of us. So, if you get rid of him, you may be able to take and keep his job. Where in a democracy you’d just have to face re-election within a few years.

Pros and cons, always, with pretty much everything. Then the next most important consideration imo is simply scale. Some systems work very well within very small scales, say, a small family. But when scaling these systems up, it can change the circumstances enough that their value changes.

To illustrate this I always like to use littering a banana peel. If just one person litters a banana peel, it is largely harmless. If, however, a million people litter banana peels all in one spot, you can actually create a potential problem where one did not exist before. Scaling the behavior up changes how we need to think about it. This has a lot of ramifications for business in the modern world, where scale is usually desirable. Also feeds into many civil engineering problems.

I’d categorize it firmly under “tex-mex”, with some “california cuisine” influences thrown in. Very heavy Mexican influence, but not exactly how Mexicans cook it.

Could also just call it “southwestern” or “mexican-american” if you want, both work. Probably southwestern would be most precise.

Yes, everyone should probably consume as little social media as possible, if they’re really concerned about their own wellbeing. I mean, I mainly use it for news, which definitely doesn’t help my sanity much…

But I’d say if someone is going to, decentralized is the way to go.

The idea of something being “not good enough for Lemmy” kinda amuses me a little bit. I mean, I get we’re trying to do some decent stuff around here, but look around. This place is still pretty roughshod.

Probably open up my phone and pull up youtube to watch some duck documentaries. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be eating or what things out there are usually wanting to eat me.

Honestly? The weakness of the standard small talk topics is how common and banal they are, which bores people. I recommend them because they’re so easy, and the cost of boring people for a few minutes is fairly small.

But it’s not ideal. For ideal you need something flippant, unimportant but also novel. Since novelty is now valued though, that means you can’t be using the same thing over and over. Other people will probably have used it too, if it works, and that means its not novel.

So, the actual best ice-breaker topic? Some clever, interesting or amusing observation about something in your immediate environment that you can both look at. That adds thinking on your feet to the mix though, so is more of an intermediate level of social skill. Best to have the boring fundamentals nailed down first.

So, yeah, I’m perfectly comfortable leaning on something as dull as the weather. And it makes decent enough practice at chit chatting. But eventually picking more novel subjects that also fit the requirements is better.

The actual question would usually go something like “Hey, did you see that?”

Something that’ll lead to fairly flippant, casual, low-stakes chit chat about completely unimportant bullshit. People like getting a chance to get a sort of baseline reading of you, so talk about flippant, dumb, unimportant things for a little bit. Preferably ones that they are 100% certain to have recently experienced themselves, so it can go back and forth smoothly.

Given the diversity of humanity, this is a fairly short list. Weather, food, free time hobbies, etc. If they’re like a student, or work in a particular industry, that opens up a lot of options. But for a stranger? Just got a few to pick from. So, just pick one.

They call it “small talk” for a reason though. The real purpose of the talk has absolutely nothing to do with the actual subject of the discussion.

It’s all about trust at the end of the day. The easiest is if you have a position of trust already. I had an older brother, and while he was a dick a lot, he also looked out for me, and I could tell when he was being serious about something. He also loved science, and he wanted me to love science too. So I studied hard and learned how it works, and now I think he was right.

He probably saved me, since I myself have always found more rebellious positions very appealing. But once you learn what the scientific method is, how it works and why it was needed in the first place, that sticks with you. It’s a method, not a belief, and just like your method for tying your shoes or riding a bike, it just sticks, because it works.

If you don’t have a position of trust, you have to lean on things that don’t require it. Clean rationality/logic can be used, and make sure to very thoroughly go step by step. If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then D. Don’t assume any like you’re talking with a peer, instead go extremely by-the-book.

If they’re religious, you can use bible quotes. It does just so happen that Jesus himself was a rather opinionated fellow and left us a lot of material to work with. The man was even downright reasonable sometimes.

You can also use history, if you’re strong at it. It gives numerous routes for dealing with these arguments.

None will work reliably, but I think it’s a numbers game, where we just try to save what we can. First and foremost though, if you have a younger sibling, please be a good older brother/sister. They’re probably not ready for this messy of a world.

Everyone who goes there was not vulnerable to being influenced by facts or knowledge. Anyone who values a sound methodology for arriving at those will have stayed well away from the place.

The gateway into that shit isn’t Truth Social. It’s attitudes that attack education spread at the grassroots level, and once adopted, it leads to distrust of any message that coincides with the establishment position.

I mean, you’re right, but destroying it won’t help. They’ll just go somewhere else, worse. You can’t actually “cure” them with facts though, it just doesn’t work that way.

Noooooo leave them all there. It’s a containment space.

I mean, look, they will always go somewhere, okay? This is the internet, trust me, there’s plenty of places. But that service makes for ideal containment, mainly because Trump is on it and it’s not connected to anything else. It’s perfect. Don’t fucking ruin it.

edit: I mean, you want to shut something down with shitposting, go for the legacy outlets that provide them with a lot of their ideas and shit. Go after daily stormer or something, the older shit. Where a lot of the ideas originate, and the hardcore extremists get radicalized from. Those are more like the brain stem of the thing anyway, where truth social and fox are more like the body, the bulk.

Daily basis is what makes this so hard for me. I think you just made me realize I need to change my toothbrush soon.

There’s literally nothing else I use every day without fail. Closest would probably be my around-the-house belt, but I don’t always put it on. My phone is fairly new still…

I think the future is probably going to resolve this one in time, and not that much time either. I don’t see why LLM technology shouldn’t eventually be able to perform adequate real-time translation, it’s just a matter of continuing to develop the process.

Some languages will be more difficult than others, and translation will always be imperfect. But we don’t need perfection, just better than our current fairly meh (but still impressively not bad) tools.