OpenStars

'cept it comes instead of a home, ability to afford supporting a family, food (at least the kind with proper nutritional support), medical care, and capability to work at merely one job to make ends meet. So... yeah, easy except for that.

You define your own meaning of life. Whether you are Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, or whatever, that is still true. If you want to be high literally all the time, go nuts and have fun with it - but please note, it sounds like you don't, not really?

Consider possibly joining a support group, to help you through working that all out, by hearing stories of others who are further ahead on that path than you? Plus you may be surprised that you could be further ahead along it than you thought.

And yeah the world really does seem fucked, but so what? Don't use that as an excuse to give up, if you would rather have more fun standing up on your own two feet. The world may burn (and freeze, and more likely alternate rapidly between both extremes), but you still get to decide what you want to do about it!:-P

Maybe watch the movie Braveheart, as William Wallace (Mel Gibson) gets eviscerated at the end, knowing full well that he could have chosen to avoid it, but instead choosing to value his pride... and freedom. We all die, every single person who has ever lived has died up until now (barring weird freak events like someone time-traveling from the past beyond us into the future:-P), but you get to choose how you want to LIVE.

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz 😜

Yes it is available. It in turn points to another site Censuswide, but does say:

The figures are representative of all US adults aged 16+

What I wonder is... how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.

Maybe it is the...

I think I was "wordy" - I appreciate your thoughtfulness and conciseness both.:-)

I get you.

Even toddlers learn to speak first by babbling, and only later to converse and communicate with someone rather than talk at them. Some technological platforms have even evolved to facilitate that - like instead of "^This" and "I also choose this guy's wife", what about emoji reactions that do not extend the length that you have to scroll through to find the next substantive comment? Except that - this is the enshittification part - when ads can be placed in-between comments, or even someone hopes that they could be in the future, or more likely they want to purposefully obscure the signal so that "x number of comments appear on this post", rather than "x number of comments + y number of emoji reactions", that works against their profit model. (and yeah, there was "awards", but who even used those, plus they just were not... good, especially for this purpose)

About both that and being combative: fwiw, we all are that way - the good thing is that some of us are honest about it, which gives hope for change.:-) But we all will have bad days when we are cranky and especially when we feel "attacked" we feel the need to strike back, and the feelings at least are not wrong, just how we handle them may not be so productive.

So I get you - I am the same way, though fortunately less and less over time. Leaving Reddit truly has helped me leave a lot of that behind. Over there that is just the "expectation" that people encourage you to do, but the culture is better here.:-)

Spez did manage to understand something real about Reddit: that many people (not all but enough for the sake of his profits, he hoped) want to speak, rather than listen. Never mind about feeling heard or it being worthwhile by adding anything to the conversation, just simply, plainly, shouting your opinions into the void. Like Discord chat except based on topics rather than channels.

Those of us who HATE that about Reddit, and want a greater balance, enjoy it here much more.:-)

I meant that people like Matt Gaetz and MJT are promising to make the 4th turning happen, by escalation of the existing obstructionism and even outright bringing about a second civil war. I do not think it will happen so quickly, but they will try again, and again, and maybe one day it will. So this is a time of "replacement". But I did not read the book, just a wikipedia article about it, so probably I am not matching up the terms well.

Keep in mind that people will PROMISE that, but then not deliver. Worse, they will promise it and then WILL deliver their distorted view of it - an example is Trump "draining the swamp", which he did, sort of, so long as you define "draining" as "installing" and "swamp/corruption" as "efficient and capable leadership, using fact-based policymaking decisions rather than whoever donates the most gets to wear the shiny hat".

If you can just remember that "good=bad" and vice versa, "up=down", "forward=reverse" and so on, then the fact that conservatives want to "innovate" the nation to "remove corruption" is a "good" thing!:-)

Sadly, whether we vote on it or not, powerful people are going to implement the 4th Turning regardless. Possibly they will use corporations to become powerful lobbying groups and then after taking over the government from the inside turn around and use the facade of it to take over, or maybe they'll just do an end-run around it altogether and let us have whatever silly little government we want, while they ignore it and do whatever they please free of interference from it. Most likely they will do both at the same time. Source: they have already been doing both of these for decades, and while corruption goes back beyond the dawn of humankind lately the swing does seem to have turned more towards rather than away from it.

I am no historian personally, but from what I am hearing, even if a former President had only had to deal with a tenth of the issues that Biden has - heck, just pick COVID alone out of that ginormous list - that he already has dealt average to above average with it. But when you put them all together - like you had a whole list and still didn't get to huge concerns that people have like the border issue - then it becomes supremely admirable, in relation to what he has had to deal with.

I wonder if some of that may be due to the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle early on in his Presidency, but even there he owned up to that, despite how it was Trump who caused >95% of it, and anyway that was years ago now. Another part is that the process he chooses to use to get things done is slow and boring, and then he doesn't grandstand to the extent that past Presidents have done.

The media has consistently been instantaneous to blame Biden whenever there is the tiniest thread of a future thought that he might be to blame, but then when he does things like help out the train workers, or lower gas prices, those achievements barely register. This is "biased reporting", arguably so much so that we are not "informed" by what they say and thus it seems not "reporting" so much as showing "advertisements" for things that bleed & lead.

Fox News is correct - hurk 🤮 - when it says that our "lamestream media has failed us". Ofc it is also corrupt and it does even worse, but if that much at least were not a true statement then it would not have half the viewership that it does.

Like Brexit, we have allowed our government to fall into such disarray that we will never be seen the same way again on the global stage. Nor should we.