I appreciate your concern for the quality of your contributions, and I think this place has a higher proportion of that type of user than just about any other platform.

This place is small and it’s generally friendly and inclusive. Most comments won’t get any replies, but the ones that do will generally be constructive. The users here are into the whole idea of the social contract and that we can have something nice if we are just excellent to one another.

I repeatedly say “generally” because this is an open platform and assholes are allowed to join. The assholes can even have their own instance dedicated to asshole topics! But fortunately the instances and communities are generally moderated by actual decent humans who are much like the users!

So let that knowledge help you comment more, not less! Even if you get no comments and like 5 upvotes, it actually feels like something of value even if it’s just a nod from a few decent people.

Edit: part of the conclusion was supposed to be that you can consider comments more like a discussion with people and not some strict message board.

Yeah there is a real trend in conservative culture (at least where I grew up) that fits right in with the rest of the anti-intellectualism. And it’s not taught explicitly but it permeates social interactions.

I’m trying to decide how to describe it… Basically, you look down on people who are trying to improve themselves.

Very much true in my specific limited experience.

I live in a nice little town here in the US, and I’m a well educated middle aged white guy. It’s safe to say that I get to see a pretty nice version of America even as horrible shit is happening all over the place.

I’ve gotten to spend a few weeks in Sweden of all places over the past few years. Plus I got to see the insides of some airports in other places luke Belgium and Germany.

There’s just something different in the air over there, in a good way. I thought of it as a kind of dignity that came from respect for others as well as oneself, but I like how you call it social cohesiveness.

I think some of the details around food and drink showed it best, and they make good examples because they apply to a mix of the general public.

The food itself is obviously much better over there. Even things like the hotel breakfast or the cafeteria at a workplace had a huge variety of fresh, real foods as opposed to ultraprocessed manufactured branded products.

But the dishes and utensils were some of the most interesting to me as an american. In places like an office cafe at work, or a local restaurant, or I think even an airport, they would have actual GLASSES, plates, and silverware. And on top of that, you would often return your dishes to the kitchen or even put them directly on to the dish washer rack waiting for you.

This breaks my american mind. Fragile non-disposable cups in a public place? Other than coffee mugs on people’s desks or restaurant glasses being dropped off and picked up with at your table, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that within these borders. If you could use glasses and silverware in public places here, I can’t decide what would happen first: somebody would get cut on one of the immediately broken glasses, or so much of the stuff would get stolen that they’d close it down.

I like to call out their bathrooms too. The way we do it over here is big men’s and women’s restrooms with next to no privacy (it’s one big room with flimsy floating dividers forming the toilet stalls) and stupid culture wars about who should and should not get their genitals inspected or whatever. Over there it’s just several individual doors, each with a small bathroom. Much better privacy, no fodder for the bigots, and much better utilization of the resources.

American here living in a car-only area.

I didn’t even raise an eyebrow at that previous comment. Sure most drivers are fine, but there are plenty of people who make me wonder what the hell combination of these issues (and others) is going on with them.

The most common example I get to see is the people speeding through the elementary school parking lot in their luxury SUVs. I especially love it when they start a phone call as they start driving, after they just finished standing around, collecting their kid, and walking back to the parking lot.

This is so stupid that it makes me think maybe the “great filter” (the reason we don’t see space-faring civilizations everywhere) is actually that life forms who evolved by fighting for survival and going through natural selection cannot psychologically handle a post-scarcity society. It’s like when the threats disappear everybody forgets they exist even if they are well documented historically.

Related: if you don’t know about how horrifying a disease is, go search for some articles and copypasta about it. Congrats on being one of today’s (un)lucky 10,000!

Fortunately my Mazda 3 is over a decade old and the headlights are actually too dim if anything. I need to polish the housings too. It sucks to hear that they are jumping on the annoying blinding headlight bandwagon along with some other brands though. They seem to do a lot of little things right in their designs.

I’ve posted a couple times about how I load 8’ dimensional lumber into my Mazda3 as well, lol. Usually the people around me are driving their giant trucks and not loading jack shit into them.

I have definitely developed an appreciation for Mazda over the years. I keep toying with the idea of an MX-5 for my next car. (I live in suburban USA where driving is required, and I have a short twisty drive to work when I go into the office)

I thought of you all the other day when somebody in a newer pickup truck got behind me driving my Mazda 3. I didn’t take a photo in my rear view mirror because safe driving and all that, but I felt like I was living in some kind of AI generated c/fuckcars meme.

In my mirror the front of the truck looked like a WALL the height of a grown adult with a little thin stripe of windshield above it. AND there was a big hood scoop on top of that. The little stripe of windshield was like 10’/3m behind the wall at the front of the truck too, just to make the visibility as dangerous as possible.

I was never a coffee drinker for unrelated reasons, and also never acquired the taste for it even though the smell is generally nice.

But now I’m in my 40s and have multiple medical conditions (i.e., more than just the AuDHD, lol) that are treated with stimulants, so I will usually supplement my adderall with a cup of coffee in the morning and one at lunch time.

The nice thing is that I don’t have decades of tolerance and habit around the stuff, so it is still nice and potent. Instead of adding a bunch of junk to it, I just let it cool off then drink it quickly or add a chocolate protein shake to it for a few breakfast calories if I didn’t eat.

Plus even though I don’t like the taste I think the coffee at work is decent because it’s a machine that grinds whole beans, and the operations manager for our location fills the hopper with the beans himself. Some Starbucks somebody gave me recently tasted rotten in comparison. And that’s not “mischievous child” rotten, that’s carcass rotten.

I take exception with the mixing of the stone cold fact that we’re all stardust with all that other crap.

It is good to be able to vape some weed and watch beautiful videos about amazing mind-blowing shit that actually exists, and not automatically entertain whatever magical/religious/supernatural idea is making the rounds in your neck of the woods.

I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

That kind of suggestive language gives me a large hadron.

It amuses me to play Roblox with my son when he’s on a tablet or console and I’m using the Sober app to run the Android client on my Linux desktop that was built to be a windows gaming PC several years ago when he was a little baby.

He has an old PC that he doesn’t use much, but he’s got a much fancier one on the way.

Is it though? Sure they’ll have a couple great quarters

STOP TALKING! WE ARE FUCKING SOLD!

The entire developed world is on the path to the population stabilizing then gradually decreasing. I’ve pointed this out multiple times for exactly the reason you state. Policy in the US is horribly backwards even before we get to the immediate damage done to real humans.

Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.

I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”

I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.

Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.

Alright fine, I can tolerate the little ✨AI ✨ sparkles in my M365 webpages a while longer if it means more kaboom at the end.

Yes, please.

I’m a big bearded white guy and look like I should drive a stupid truck, or at least I would look that way with some shades and a baseball cap. Where I live is pretty white, surrounded by rural areas, so the trucks are everyyywhere. I doubt I need to convince anybody on here that these vehicles are bad, but I have a couple of observations from my perspective here in real america(/s).

I have a couple of friends who are those rare truck owners due to legitimate need because they are literal farmers, in addition to their day jobs (this is the USA, after all). Not only are their pastures on steep hillsides, but they only have huge animals like horses and cattle so that comes with pulling trailers and hauling bales of hay, etc. The trucks LOOK like they are farm trucks, their back seat areas in the cabs are dedicated to dogs, and the drivers are… petite women. 🤣 They are super nice and generous too, so I get to do the “have a friend with a truck” thing.

But, since I live close to a Home Depot, I don’t borrow one of the trucks unless I am buying 12+ foot (3.66+ meter) lumber or an appliance.

Every time I’m at Home Depot in old clothes with cuts on my arms and legs, loading standard 8’ (2.44m) lumber into my decade-old economy sedan, I’m surrounded by people who look like me demographically but are dressed much more cleanly and getting into shiny clean late model luxury SUVs or the hulking pickup trucks that cost even more.