This is all just about normalizing poor decisions, right?

Ya. I got Century Club on Reddit based mostly on AdviceAnimals posts that hit front page.

Thing is, if this is “relatable”, then people are nodding along and normalizing it. It’s a classic half-joke. Only not actually funny.

Call me crazy… but maybe find a way to deal with your emotions that doesn’t involve compulsive spending and damaging your marriage?

Removed by mod

Better yet, offer to help them with their time management. That way, it’s a positive and friendly offer, not an overt criticism. And it jams in a little more condescension.

I come back tired and missing home. Maybe because I travel cheap and rough.

…and yet, here we are. I left Reddit recently because of the drop in quality, and a lot of folks I know agree that it sucks even if they aren’t yet tapped into the fediverse. The internet still has a lot of friction and inertia. These things take time. But the momentum has shifted. These social media cesspools can’t last, even the most idiotic knuckledraggers will eventually smell the stink.

The downside is that they will find their way here. Lemmy will be bigger and less cool. Eternal September, am I right?

Harry Mack does freestyle raps about his sponsors. I think his bars about Keeps hair medication service and Nord VPN are just as entertaining as the rest of his stuff.

Well, it sounds like you have a lot of reasons to not have children. I think that’s maybe the great understated tragedy of the economic fuckscape we live in: that a lot of good people can’t afford to properly have a family. There’s still plenty of room for happiness though, and I wish you the best of it.

Right. There’s also a huge difference between taking measures that affect birth rates and actively rounding people up and culling them. Eugenics has got to be the most equivocated term in the English language. Except maybe god.

Generally, people that are less educated or with shitty values. It’s not about genetics; it’s about the perpetuation of bad culture. If I were to name some groups that typify this: religious fundies and under-educated rednecks.

Ya… the only problem is WHO is having all the kids.

Because life is and will continue to be pretty good for a lot of people. I definitely think it will be for my kid. Also, Idiocracy. If all the good, thoughtful people take your attitude then every human will be an idiot or asshole, which is an utterly hopeless future. I get that hopelessness. I felt more or less as you do for a while. But there a good, noble reasons to have a family. It’s not so cut and dry.

109 billion people have died outside of underwater caves. I’ll take my chances.

Bud, you sound like a technophile geek. The kind of person who custom built his own computer. You’re not the target customer. Apple builds products for people that don’t care about technology, they just care about what the technology does and want it to be easy and seamless. And that is a vast majority of the people.

I think the issue here is that we’re all genetically just apes and we live in a world where we’re expected to know about geopolitics, outrageous technologies, all kinds of cultural artifacts, and a bazillion other complexities of modern life, in addition to the basics of feeding ourselves, finding a mate, and child rearing. At the same time, we have behemoth corporations in control of all media with a strong interest in keeping people dumb, angry and discontent. And education is… not what it should be.

No, humans aren’t inherently evil or stupid or whatever. We’ve just inherited a world situation that we are not adapted for, and few people are able to learn and grow sufficiently to really understand and handle it all properly.

I think it depends on context. If you’re brought up in a wholesome environment with respect and positive values, you’ll realize that living like that is better. If you’re brought up in a cesspool of fear and violence, you’ll think that’s the way the world is, and you’ll behave accordingly.

It’s not that America is inherently bad, or any particular cultural system. It’s that when a society doesn’t maintain its values and spiritual core, it will rot from the inside out.

The problem is our society has sold out so much of our community, our education, our values for convenience and corporate greed. This is like what the Right used to blather on about, but they’re to blame for most of the real depravity. In any case, we’re just seeing the fallout.

Fig ma balls.

News Feed Eradicator is a must have. I can check in on Facebook for personal messages and events, even post occasionally… but I don’t see the feed and I’m not the least bit tempted.

It’s also good for sites like Reddit (which I’m migrating away from, of course) where you can disable it for a set amount of time, to enjoy some idle web browsing time without slipping into a vortex.

Also, not a browser extension, but I use Google’s Family Link to moderate my web use. I can’t access social media on my phone. My wife administers it. It’s occasionally inconvenient, but on the whole it has been transformative.

Buttons? Ew.

I have consistently been Luddish about moves like this (removign physical keyboard, eliminating phone jack, even the tablet form factor in general) but I think I was mostly wrong, and monimizing hardware features in favor of software seems to improve user experience.