In a pinch you can just crank on it until you’re satisfied.

Finally a voice of reason - I don’t know who the psychos are who give up screwing for a whole month, but I have things to fasten.

• If you’re the owner of the home, know what bylaws there are regarding snow removal near your home. Where I live you can get a fine + snow removal costs if you aren’t reasonably prompt getting snow off the sidewalk.

• Snowy surfaces (sidewalks, driveways, roads) are often icy surfaces = slip and fall hazard. This is especially serious for older folks but it can hurt/injure at any age. This gets worse if it snows then melts then refreezes. Don’t run if you don’t have to. Sand/grit on these surfaces can help, and in my area you can get sand for free at certain town facilities.

• Frostbite on exposed skin is a genuine hazard. Look up the weather forecast when it’s cold and take time-to-frostbite warnings seriously.

We are sorry to hear you are disappointed with the Canadian gender identity. Please hold if you wish to express your concerns to one of our agents. Alternatively, courses on the challenges and advantages of being Canadian and what it means to be hockeysexual are available in English and French. Completion of the course grants access to free-but-slow healthcare and a $25 Tim Hortons gift card.

"It’s easy for her to talk, sitting far from where the death scenes take place, but put a gun in her hand, and let her go fight, and she’ll say, ‘No thanks!’” This from a guy who discusses deploying troops in America against Americans, yet dodged the Vietnam draft with fake medical issues.

If you want to stop support for Israel’s war crimes, Kamala is slightly better than Trump. If you want support for Ukraine to oppose Russia, she’s much better. If your issue is the environment/global warming, she’s immeasurably better. If you’re concerned with things like democracy and rule of law at all levels of government, then she’s literally the only choice.

Reddit:

• It has a much larger user base and many heavily specialized boards that nevertheless stay reasonably active.
• It’s a collection of echo chambers. Dissent is usually stomped out by mass downvoting and heavy moderation/bans. It’s rare to find a board that allows arguments for a long period of time. Agree with the board’s users/mods or get silenced. Posted rules do not matter, and you can definitely be hateful in ways that violate posted rules so long as that type of hate is acceptable on that board.
• So many users mean that getting content to succeed is a crapshoot. Often posts become lost in the noise, especially on busy boards.
• I left about a year ago, but apparently there’s a lot of bot/AI slop on boards now.

Lemmy:

• Much smaller user base. Heavily specialized boards move slowly if they exist at all. It’s not unusual to see boards where it’s just one/a few people posting with days in between new content.
• More ability to have disagreements. Whether it’s because moderating a smaller # of users is easier, the mods are less authoritarian, or whatever you are more likely to be able to disagree. Don’t be blatantly racist, celebrating violence, clearly trolling, etc. and you’ll probably remain able to participate. I’m sure this isn’t universal on all boards, but it’s my experience on many boards.
• For all that I believe the above point, there are still “echo chamber” moments on Lemmy. Sometimes it seems people may be downvoted simply because they are already downvoted. It’s still way less egregious than on Reddit, and such is human nature I suppose.
• Fewer users means you are more likely to get some engagement on your post, at least in my experience. I never sorted my feed by new posts on Reddit because it was an avalanche of posts of questionable quality, so I only saw whatever content had already succeeded. On Lemmy I can look for new posts and see most if not all content on the boards I enjoy.

• Take time off from social media once in a while, or at least avoid doomscrolling all day. Bad stories generate FAR more engagement than good stories, and every form of media knows this. If 100,000 people in your area have an average-to-good day and 5 people have terrible days, all 5 stories presented to you will detail how things are in your area are terrible.

• Physical health affects mental health and vice versa. Eat healthy (or healthier). Stay hydrated. Get 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and use sleep hygeine. Get 90+ minutes of exercise (anything that raises your heartrate) a week which is like 15 minutes/day. Don’t worry about doing it all immediately - if you try to change everything at once you’re more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. It’s way better to make slow, sustainable changes over months than it is to do a difficult crash course for a short time and get fed up with the process.

• Do thankfulness exercises. When I go to bed at night I think of 3 things I’m thankful for in the day. On average or bad days it may be that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink, and that I’m in a safe place and a soft bed. Just remembering those basics (that many of us take for granted) helps keep me aware of good things in my life.

• Find ways to enjoy hobbies that require participation - arts, sports, board/video games, whatever. Just something other than passively taking in TV/online media. This will help you feel engaged and double points if it’s something that allows for improvement because you’ll feel rewarded as you get better.

• Tucker Carlson has always been creepy and ludicrous and everyone knew it. In a lawsuit against Carlson a federal judge literally ruled that his flaws are so obvious that no reasonable person takes Tucker Carlson seriously.
• Elon Musk has always been creepy but IMO the world didn’t know it until a few years ago because he rarely expressed anything publicly outside of Tesla and SpaceX news.
• Trump has always been Trump. Here’s the magician Penn Jillette talking about why Trump was a great reality TV star and a shitty President. It only takes a 94-second video for Jillette to absolutely destroy Trump.

If Christian parents were really concerned about their child’s safety they’d let them go to library book readings and keep them away from church groups and camps.

Occupational safety may be punk rock, but breaking forklifting rules is early-2010’s dubstep.

Looking at that 2nd point: it’s so odd that Trump’s Republicans include hardcore Zionists AND unrepentant antisemites. It’s like they want to cover all possible approaches to the wrong side of history.

As to the meat of the story, Legal Eagle made a video about the legality of the Musk lottery. It seems pretty clearly forbidden, but we’ve been down this road with rich Conservatives many times before…

I’m surprised it’s that low. In the first several weeks alone Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000lb bombs. “The heavy munitions, mostly manufactured by the US, can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” That doesn’t even count all the other munitions used.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a nunya.”

“Do you mean a nun?”

“No, I mean nunya goddamn business.”

I like that it’s moderated fairly lightly but reasonably. Often I can have an actual discussion with someone who doesn’t agree with me without either of us getting banned by a mod who likes one side or the other. From what I see generally a user needs to be very obviously abusive/racist/violent before a mod steps in, even if the content is controversial.

I dislike that I’ve needed to heavily restrict my use for my mental health until after the election. A lot of people (not all by any means) believe it’s ok to bully and abuse other users so long as they’re sure the cause is righteous. Obvious examples are the daily posts/comments, with a lot of upvotes/support, that label anyone who disagrees with or criticizes Kamala (used to be Biden)/Democrats a bot, idiot, worse than useless, foreign agent and so on. Just to be clear I’m not talking about downvoting which is just expressing disagreement - I’m talking about outright insults. The attitude of “vote with/support me or else” has no place in a democracy founded on free voting without persecution, even if the bully is sure they’re right. If I didn’t mention it, perhaps even if I do, someone may say a version of “but it is actually ok this time” and give reasons why. It’s happened before.

Guess what? Very few “policy bullies” think they are evil - they’re positive they’re justified. Christians demand abortion bans, Muslim deportation, religion in schools/government and so on because they truly believe they are saving eternal souls. I was raised in that environment. That a sizable amount of Lemmy users believe it’s correct/admirable to insult others into “proper” behavior makes them very similar in character to those religious extremists IMO. Apparently when the issue is really important abuse is ok.

I’ll just end by saying Gaza/Palestine is incredibly important to me - I am legitimately very upset frequently by the stories and media. However, I was convinced to support Biden and then Kamala by Bernie Sanders. Bernie laid out his argument with logic and facts and did not once insult my position. I also doubt the posts/comment insults I see all over are winning over undecideds. “I wasn’t sure if I should vote Democrat until I was called a harmful idiot and had my concerns dismissed as being in bad faith”.

Orgasms, exercise and other “arousal” stimuli like fear or aggression make your blood vessels shrink (vasoconstriction). From the link I posted above: “During arousal, your sympathetic nervous system — the one that activates your fight-or-flight response — kicks in. Just as when you exercise, your adrenaline levels go up and your blood vessels constrict. Less blood flow to your nose means less inflammation, so your nose opens up and you can breathe more easily.”

THC can cause vasodilatation, which is the opposite (blood vessels expand) so it makes sense they’d reduce effects or cancel each other out. Fun fact from the same article, it’s also what causes the bloodshot eyes associated with smoking up.

Holy crap, it’s true.

Every night before I go to bed I do a mental health exercise where I list 3 things I was thankful for that day. It’s a habit that is supposed to make you appreciate the good things and help get past the bad.

On unremarkable or bad days the list is that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink all that I needed, and that the day is over and I’m in bed and statistically very safe. It may not seem like much on bad days, but if you’ve ever been missing one or more of those 3 things then you know it’s a HUGE set of problems to appreciate not having.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, just an interested amateur wanting to chat and drawing from comparisons from past leaps in tech and other conversations/videos.

For a time expert analysis will probably work. For instance, the “click here to prove your not a robot” boxes can definitely be clicked by robots, but for now the robot moves in detectably different way. My guess is that, for at least a while, AI content will be different from actual video in ways like code. There will probably be an arms race of sorts between AI and methods to detect AI.

Other forms of evidence like DNA, eyewitness accounts, cell phone tracking etc. will likely help mitigate deceitful AI somewhat. My guess is that soon video/audio will no longer be considered as ironclad as it was even a few years ago.

There are discussions about making AI tools have a digital “watermark” than can be used to identify AI-generated content. Of course this won’t help with black market-type programs, but it will keep most people out of the “deep fake for trials” game.

When it comes to misinformation on social media though, well…it’s probably going to get crazy. The last decade or so has been a race at an unprecedented scale to try and keep up with BS “proof”, psuedoscience, etc. Sadly those on the side of truth haven’t always won. The only answer I have for that is making sure people are educated about how to deal with misinformation and deepfakes - eg. awareness they exist, identifying reputable sources and expert consensus, and so on.

“Hang loose” is what you tell someone who needs to chill out and let the waves carry them away from their problems man. Align your chakras with the Earth and so on.

Seriously though, the reason I wrote like that is I’m using the slang of roughly 90s/2000s-ish California surfer culture, which is where the hand signal was used to tell people to relax and be happy. Or say hi and let them know you are relaxed and happy. If you imagine it as a gang sign for surfer hippies you aren’t far off.