Of course it’s real debt, but taking it on is involuntary. It does not have the same behavioral predictive power as debt that exists because of bad financial decisions.
It might affect your ability to pay, but less so if it is not on the credit report to begin with.
Yeah, I have a few in my Pennsyltucky town and over the years people have even learned not to stop at the yield signs!
Yeah, you can’t drive like a dangerous asshole on your way to park your full size truck based SUV across two handicap spots if you don’t have a car in the first place!
I find myself using desktop Linux more than my mobile device, even on the couch with the family. Monitors on arms that can swing out of the way ftw. No cute advice for keyboards though. We have wireless ones around but I still use my wired Deck Legend on my lap. It’s an old mechanical keyboard that’s built like a tank, with the PCB literally mounted to a sheet of metal that is mounted inside the housing, lol.
It’s almost a shame, because smart phones are still absolutely amazing to me as far as the amount of scientific and technical advancement that can fit in the palm of your hand. But I look forward to the open options various parties are working on.
Hear, hear!
There is nothing wrong, and in fact there is something good, with FOSS being polished and user friendly out of the box.
Historically that has not been a priority, because FOSS has been by the computer nerds, for the computer nerds. But if that priority shifts to being a bit more “by the computer nerds, for the normies” then that is a good thing as long as the developers don’t prevent the power users from accessing any part of the system they want. Fortunately that completely against the point of the FOSS world.
I first learned Unix in the 90s, I use my Linux desktop more than my phone, I’m an engineer on embedded systems digging through C and C++ code all day, I have terminals open all day, and… I have Linux Mint Cinnamon installed on all my machines and love it. Change My Mind, lol.
Yeah, even from inside the US it seems more and more iffy to trust our tech giants even as a paying customer. I love reading the stories about groups and governments in Europe adopting Linux/FOSS, but I’m also surprised I don’t see it more.
Everything in the news is so insane that I could see journalists ignoring/missing such mundane events as public sector software choices.
Yeah…
For the 2024 election I still manually chose the top challenger to every republican (close to a party line blue vote but not quite) and in cases where one person secured both party’s nominations I think I just left it blank out of spite.
But next time and moving forward, I have no idea. It is so, so far away in Trump Time that I could envision anything along the spectrum from excitedly voting for a progressive to being afraid to vote because they’re obviously compiling lists of dissenting voters.
If there’s one thing his base has been conditioned to do more than vote republican, it is to never ever vote Democrat.
Honestly I bet Musk’s stupid third party is the best way to split the nazi vote.
Jeez, Tesla could have been such an interesting part of america’s success story (now China’s) if they just had leadership that was worth half a shit.
I also experienced a significant positive turn in my mental health and work/social anxiety when I introduced significant levels of THC into my life. :D
The funny thing is, the mechanisms and results were totally different. I have an MBA and past project/people management experience and I am pretty sure I intend to stay an individual contributor for my entire career. I work on embedded systems and it is low stress and often interesting.
But your story made me realize that the “don’t be afraid to fall flat on your face” thing applies absolutely perfectly to my own recent progress. There are absolutely examples at work, but even moreso at home.
My big hobby is having a koi pond, and I have been doing a massive upgrade this year. Other than the impossible-to-overstate physical benefits of doing hundreds of hours of manual labor outside in the fresh air with my animals, my mental appearance was completely different from my usual.
I am the type to naturally ask people in my family (including my dad who is an outdoors + pond guy) for advice on design decisions, or what they thought about X and Y. I think that was not just a lack of confidence, but an ADHD-related technique for putting off work. Then of course I would invite people over to help work on it (people like parents who enjoy visiting and helping) which would get me off my ass for that entire day.
So this year for the past few months, I have been kindly listening to anything people suggest and of course researching things on my own. And I have been sending updates that they love! But when it comes to the actual work, I do everything with my own two hands. The design behind that work is a game-time decision that only I make, solely based on my preferences and a kind of first-principals approach to “what are the goals I really care about here?” Sometimes those goals center around healthy fish and I confidently go against misinformed advice. Sometimes those goals center around accessibility with a particular joyful young man in mind. I find both of these efforts pleasing and fulfilling.
Getting your mind to act the way you want requires practice and training, just like the rest of your body. I know it is so god damn annoying to hear when you’re in a dark place, but it seems so obvious once you’re more healthy, but it’s true. To be more confident and decisive in your decisions, try making more decisive decisions. To more easily handle social situations, try getting into more social situations. To more easily lift rocks, try lifting even larger rocks on a regular basis. To have a calm mind, try being calm. The monk-like platitudes full of circular logic are all true!
Hell, fun example: I got my first tattoo yesterday and I got some comments about how I was a trooper and took it like a champ. And I smiled and said something fun, but in my head I’m thinking “I get IVs or blood draws about two dozen times a year, and I have had kidney stones multiple times motherfucker! Not that any of that holds a candle to the emotional pain I’ve gone through like many years of infertility and even an adoption falling through, while being unmedicated for the ADHD/anxiety/depression that I have on top of the even worse neurological shit that requires those IVs!” So basically, when you’ve been through some shit you can handle some shit.
And speaking of unmedicated: get medicated! Taking care of yourself is a marathon, and it might be possible to run a marathon with a broken leg but it fucking sucks. The fact that I know the cocktail of drugs (multiple prescriptions in addition to a sprinkle of certain sativa strains) that makes existence not hurt is PART of my mental health process, not a replacement for it.
Sorry for the random extreme length reply! BSing about our shared and differing experiences on Lemmy is some excellent therapy IMO, so I figured I was going to finish writing this damn reply if even one person might read through it.
That’s pretty good, for how bad it is.
I have a pretty old gmail address that’s fmlast@gmail, and several years ago there was a lady with fmlast12@gmail who kept leaving the numbers off. It wasn’t that bad though, and for one or two important things I replied to help.
“Well, we both want to improve the country”
Did they though?
One of the most consistent features of conservative “politics” is their ability to get lots of ordinary people to vote against their own interests.
Sure it was nice when the rank and file weren’t cheering on the New American Gestapo (good band name?) but the money > humans goals behind the policies were the same. The bigotry and tribalism and other-ing have always been tools in their propaganda machine. We’re witnessing those chickens coming home to roost.
Who could have known it would be a bad idea to systematically poison american culture so that a handful of old white dudes could hang on to the dream of dying as billionaires instead of pleb-ass run of the mill multimillionaires?
Well don’t forget that Walmart itself is literally government subsidized when the people employed there still need food stamps or other welfare programs.
I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.
What you call gut instinct, I call the output of an immensely complex yet efficient organic neural network that has been trained on years to decades of relevant experience.
If business leaders think AI is so great, they need to get in on this shit while they can still afford it!
I love to hear that it was received as intended!
Though I’ll also add one thing that HAS changed without me having to stop being decent to others or critical of myself (in a healthy way): Whether it’s something at work or at some, I have learned to blunt that urge to get somebody’s approval to do something before I do it. It’s a mix of some earned confidence, and of wanting to own my decisions, all in the context of teaching myself to be decisive and act rather than analyze and discuss with others while never doing anything.
And that last bit isn’t my inevitable turn back into the productivity-obsessed conservative asshole I was raised to be. It is self care after a lifetime of raw dogging ADHD. So the first part about being decisive and trusting my judgment is very true, but the second part about just doing anything is probably even moreso in my case. It includes getting things done that I desperately want to do for my personal life and well being. I have built so much shit this summer with my own two hands that my body has gun as much benefit as my mind.
making mundane work unbearable.
Finding joy in the quiet time doing the mundane work I CARE about (lots of yard work, construction, and taking care of my animals) is some of the most important meditative-type time that I spend, I have learned.
It makes work more bearable to more enjoyable when I can find a similar mental state, listening to the same music, etc.
8 years of college here. Three degrees! Also well over 2 decades of industry experience.
And I have good news. In 20 years you will probably still have impostor syndrome because you will probably still be a decent person who is willing to question themselves and isn’t an arrogant jerk. :>
I think many people (USians in particular) need to have it described to them this simply.
It’s just assumed in so many situations that somebody’s right to enjoy their legally-acquired property supercedes any concerns about the life or suffering of others living in the same system.
It’s interesting, and by interesting I mean horrifying, that these outspoken hateful religious leaders assume that just because gay people give in to the homosexual desires everybody obviously has, they will also give in to the pedophilia that everybody obviously has.
At this point I fear that it would be the best case scenario if all the Democrats were sniveling little controlled opposition weenies.
What if a lot of them are good people with the will, the energy, the means, and the awareness that now is their time to make history, and they are not because the writing on the wall (or the approaching shit tsunami, if you will) looks that much worse from the inside where they can see the machinations of this takeover in action long before it hits the news. And maybe they’ve heard some consistent believable inside rumors about the details of certain high profile suicides.
They sure seem to be the useless variety though.