Yeah. I move very little now, except for very low-impact PT, because of dysautonomia and autoimmune issues. Something radically changed with my system several years ago, though, so I can’t really eat, yet I don’t lose weight. My body doesn’t tolerate most food now, other than small amounts of rice and meat. I can’t process fruits or vegetables at all.
It’s steadily got worse over the last decade, and yeah, it is slowly killing me, but my doctors haven’t been able to solve it.
I always hated sugar, and ate 3 large meals a day. Huge breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snacks. Never gained at all.
That all changed after my pregnancy at 28. Suddenly I seemed to gain weight through osmosis. I mostly lost interest in food, and only started eating sensible quantities twice a day.
Now I can’t lose weight at all, even with nearly a gallon of water per day and one small cup of food every day or two (to be fair, my body now rejects most food because of an autoimmune disorder), but I can actually gain weight on less than 500 calories a day. It doesn’t make sense by conventional logic, yet here I am. I mostly live on Ensure and Pedialyte, yet I weigh more than I ever have. It’s really weird.
When I was younger, I could eat superhuman amounts of food and not gain an ounce (I was even accused of having anorexia by strangers because I was so thin).
Now, if I even think about one serving of ice cream, I gain ten pounds. Oh shit, I’ve done it. Back to the treadmill, I guess.
I’m 54. When people ask my opinion of this war, I change the subject. I’m not proud of that, but I’ve seen this war more than once.
I have strong opinions about many things, but I’ve seen what this particular war does and I’ve learnt there’s no winning it. I donate to Gaza, but nothing I can say will change the horror the latest flare up of this war will bring. Im sorry.
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
We can and must do better than that.
They’re not required here. You just plop your child in your regular car with no changes whilst they’re learning. It’s insane. I bought a magnetic sign to warn people though, because that seems nuts to me.
I was making a joke tho.
Little Bobby tables learns to drive.
This is smart. When my son was learning, I put a magnetic ‘student driver’ sign on my car, too. More people should do this. It’s just polite.
This was literally the next post in my feed, lol:
You can also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity!
That’s it, I’m done for today. Nothing can top that.
iPhone: Files? What are those?
This is a site with no competent designers.
If my client asked me to design and implement something like this, I’d quit. No, fix your Firefox bug, amateurs.
Haven’t you heard? He’s the second coming of Christ and his cross is the US legal system.
e: link
It does happen in slow motion, and every single time, some people see it happening. They march and wave their arms shouting FASCISM! whilst their neighbours call them hyperbolic.
If you read contemporaneous accounts, you can feel the frustration.
Or… I thought I could feel the frustration, until recently (eta: if you haven’t read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, please do as soon as possible). Now it’s doubly frustrating. I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t. I can’t stop this, so I keep saying ‘if you were a German in the 1930s, knowing what you know now, what would you do?’
I don’t know the answer to that. I know many Germans saw it coming and couldn’t stop it.
What the fuck can we do? Because it is absolutely coming.
e: oh, and worse, trump isn’t actually the problem. He’ll likely lose, then everyone will high five that we’ve defeated The Problem, but Trump is just their carnival barker. He could die tomorrow and the threat wouldn’t change. There’s a solid fascist movement in the US and elsewhere that will not stop with trump’s defeat. There are thousands of them in high levels of the US government , and they’ll barely miss a beat without trump. He barely matters, and I’m afraid when he loses, the fascist movement behind this will find a wide opening.
It’s directed water, and goes straight into the bowl. There’s no ‘all over’ unless you’re doing it wrong.
Also, I hope you’re not flushing those wet wipes. They lie about being biodegradable and cause fatbergs in the sewer that workers have to go down and clear.
My $35 bidet is awesome and just diverts water from the tank. It took less than 10 minutes to install: remove seat, place bidet, replace seat, unscrew tank water supply, screw in water splitting hose. You don’t even need to turn off the water, that’s how easy it is. It’s great for renters, too, because you’re not actually making any modifications, and it’s easy to remove with no trace.
Mine’s a Luxe, but there are several like it in the same price range.
And yet they managed to obliterate a poorly-specced launchpad, causing massive damage to a nearby town and wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem.
I can’t remember NASA ever doing that.
Oh, thanks for pointing that out.
I was formulating an angry rebuttal in my head, then saw your comment and realised I hadn’t noticed the username. Of course it’s Musk. That’s rebuttal enough.
This is almost verbatim the definition of a dystopia, fwiw.
eta: the start of it is nearly a Black Mirror episode
Right, but I wasn’t talking so much about my own experience, rather my experience with other people during that time, because I was tech support for literally everyone I knew, so I knew what they all thought. Because they told me.
AOL was what most nontechnical people had during that time. There’s a reason for those AOL disc memes. It’s made fun of a lot, but that was how the internet became mainstream. They mailed them to everyone and their grandma, and their success was it was FREE** and the discs installed and configured everything for you: the browser, the ISP settings, and even their home page. You stuck the disc into your cup holder, and it gave you a friendly icon on your desktop to click to access The World Wide Web™ (or AOL’s private version of it – most people didn’t know better). Most people would never have discovered the internet otherwise.
eta: and yes, internet society was actually that divided in the early years. More so, if anything. AOL was so ubiquitous and marketed, they made a blockbuster movie out of it. You likely can hear the tone in your head, even if you never used AOL in your life. Few brands have attained that social status, or held it for long. Oscar Meyer, Disney, things like that. And it didn’t last a hundred years; merely a few. /e
It wasn’t just the discs – if you bought your computer from the furniture store it came set up that way. Non-tech people just clicked that icon and didn’t know any better. Keep in mind that accessing the real internet was difficult and required a lot of knowledge many people neither had nor wanted at the time. The computer was for spreadsheets and solitaire, and it was a very expensive luxury.
I doubt you’ll get the response you’re looking for, because the people you’re talking about are the same people you’re decrying today. I’m saying that idealised demographic didn’t really exist, and I’m not speculating about them. I was embedded deeply in a world of those people. I remember them very clearly. I made it my career to understand them.
I strongly believe you’re seeing them through a heavy fog of nostalgia.
eta: and back to the original point, I strongly believe that people who feel the internet has fallen short of our expectations don’t remember what our expectations really were.
I see several specialists. No solutions so far, unfortunately.