I would guess it’s actually more likely in memes and stories, because using a similar name will help the more smooth brained readers follow along.

This was my first thought. Somebody tell this guy that not only is his moon model there glowing, but he is too!

For bonus fun, tell him that he’s radioactive.

It would probably be fun to have some instruments on hand to prove it to him as well.

When the majority of our voting public just chose the GREATER evil in all three branches of government, the lesser evil is still significant harm reduction.

And if the lesser evil had won all three branches of the federal government, maybe we’d instead be talking about how the voters sent a signal that the greater evil needs to tone down all the evil, and things can move in the right direction.

But nope, let’s just pull the lever on the max-evil slot machine to see whether we end up ma more in cyberpunk, nazis, or mad max!

This makes a nice companion to the meme that ends with the rich guy saying “fuck off” to something reasonable that involves helping other humans.

Very well said, and the story sounds very familiar. Mindfulness and reprogramming yourself to essentially react with positivity rather than negativity is a good way to describe what worked for me too.

And if that sounds like a good approach to anybody else, I found a lot that stuck with me in the philosophy of stoics and buddhists.

To be in control of your state of mind — by working with your brain and body and not against it btw — is to be in control of your quality of life, within reason.

There’s a Tesla dealership just outside my town and I’ve noticed several cyber trucks pilling up in front of it.

The majority of the cyber trucks I’ve ever seen IRL are in that “please buy me” pile. LOL.

“Jumped the gun” is a funny way to describe knee-jerk racism and hatred.

As a fellow American I do agree, but I think it also lets us off the hook too easily. It shows plenty of society being dumb, but not enough of it being mean.

At first I read this as “big gender” rather than “bi gender.”

For a few fleeting moments, I thought we were headed into a totally different, and possibly uncomfortable, direction!

I think the most sacred, fundamental, and important “right” my fellow Americans care about is the right to self destructive behavior.

That’s what you’re supposed to do!

The Technology Connections content everybody is talking about covers it. The main wash’s detergent goes into the little compartment, which is closed, then a little extra goes on top to help with the pre-rinse.

That is the dumbest thing about pods. If you want to use your dishwasher “correctly” with detergent in both the pre-rinse and the main wash cycle, you need to use two pods for one load of dishes!

Either that or open & divide the pods I guess, but then you aren’t really using “pods” are you, lol.

Yep, and that goes for really nebulous things like relationships and mental health too, not just the physical world.

This sentence hit me:

seeing the world in terms of discrete, quantifiable units and categorical rules

I wonder how many past situations I could remember where I had anxiety and panic over not knowing the rules to follow in a situation. But that’s like asking the wrong question if the reality is that there are no rules, and you need more of a guiding philosophy or purpose than a rule book. For me, I think you do what you can to make the unique experience of life things better for yourself and others. We nerds do have a tendency to focus on “number go up” which has its benefits, but has to be in moderation as with everything else.

The lights flickered when I read this. I think that means I’m the real one and they upped my sedative to keep me stuck here. Oh well. Maybe I’ll get fun dreams out of it tonight, at least.

College-aged me would have loved Arch. Maybe retirement me will have to play with it for fun in the vaults.

Present-day me however, in middle age with a growing family and a full time job already working on Linux-based software all day, is a total slut for Linux Mint.

It installs and gets running easier and faster than Windows, and is based on widely used and tested stuff from Ubuntu and Debian. It’s not the “learn how operating systems work” distro for sure, but there is a lot of practical use in the world for the “plug the installer drive into your busted old Windows 10 machine and in 15 minutes have a responsive useful Linux PC where your parents can find the Internet browser” distro!

I am very interested to see if SteamOS makes a big push into desktops, though. A whole lot more of the desktop Linux world could become Arch based.

You are sincerely welcome! I thought that whole comment of yours distilled a lot of our/my frustrations down to a few hard-hitting sentences.

I mean, I could have just as easily used this one:

capitalist “greed is rational and your lessers have to lose for you to win” programming

I think every other sentence you write could be used as an answer on Jeopardy and the question would always be “How is so much so wrong with the world? It doesn’t have to be this way!”

For the longest time I never thought I’d see anything like that. Most people were too comfortable. Some always had too little and some too much, but it wasn’t going to upend society.

But lately, sheesh. It seems both more likely and more necessary. I can’t tell what is increasing faster, the anger of the working class or the brazen indifference of the owner class.

Last week at a get-together I actually heard a conservative family member say how the drones in the news are to distract from the important issues like immigration.

This is a standard boomer that keeps news on the living room TV all the damn time. It’s not even the disconnect from both reality and compassion that gets to me any more. It’s how widespread it is, and how the propaganda works even better in the real world than in fiction.

social worship of unchecked avarice

I love this phrase. It covers a lot in so few words.

Unfortunate that it describes the actual world rather than some dystopian YA novel.

When it comes to the marketing teams in such companies, I wonder what the ratio is between true believers and "this is stupid but if it spikes the numbers next quarter that will benefit me.”

Yeah, at first I was going to agree that it’s sad that the general population doesn’t care much about slave labor in their iPhones as long as it saves them money and doesn’t get blood directly on their hands.

But then I think that is kinda true of the whole phone market.

But then I think that is kinda true of the whole everything market!

And once again a Lemmy comment comes to the conclusion that capitalism is the problem, lol.

But Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and therefore is the most capitalism, so I guess that makes it OK again to single them out.