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

It’s sad that the same people who want their god to reign supreme over everyone and everything always seem to make him so weak that even an icon is dangerous. It must be utterly exhausting to be so threatened all the time.

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.

I get that, I had that bad habit in Reddit, too, usually because there were already 40 people picking apart things in the comments section.

But there’s a value to doing it yourself, and leaving it to other people can make that part of you that engages in mental analysis flabby. In this day and age, we often need far MORE critical analysis and primary sources than we’re getting!

That, and oftentimes bad actors scoop up the funny and wrong posts because they know that a joke that implies their opponents are idiots will land better than just a rant, so you have to be careful about not adding fuel to the fire.

I agree that it’s an eyebrow raising title, though that might be the point. Still, you’d think journalists would realize at this point that titles can’t just be provocative in order to be catchy. :/

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?

“A report, called “Give the Kid a Break – But Only if He’s Straight,” found that LGBTQ young people are given harsher punishments than their straight, gender-conforming counterparts. In the study, participants suggested disciplinary consequences for an older teenager having sex with a 14-year-old. A 16-year-old straight culprit was much less likely to end up on the registry than a gay 16-year-old.

[…]

Even the laws themselves can be blatantly discriminatory. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex sodomy; however, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion included this single negating phrase: "[the] present case does not involve minors, which this comment will refer to as “the minor exception.'” Kennedy was referring to adult-on-minor sexual conduct, but states have used it as a loophole. Texas law, for example, considers sexual contact with a minor under the age of 17 a felony, unless both participants are under 18, no more than three years apart, and they are of different sexes.”

Quote from the article, my emphasis added. Please read the article and see the point it’s making before assuming the worst.

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.