For anyone who’s thinking UK, I’d advise not - we’re about 4-5 years behind you in terms of imminent fascism and whilst there’s still technically a chance to avert it, its very unlikely - especially since Starmer is being even more awful than the Tories.

Re-reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” because its the best haunted house novel ever written.

Thats the great thing about science, you don’t have to ‘believe’ it.

Pep Guardiola

As everyone else has said: kidney issue. If its an infection (you should definitely get this checked out), you’re going to need antibiotics. Drink a lot of water - like, a lot - and introduce cranberry juice to your drinking habits (won’t fix the infection but there’s some evidence its preventative).

If its a stone then get ready for the worst pain in the world but also drink a lot of water to help break it up/aid its passage through.

TL;DR - get a GP appointment and start drinking a fuck ton of water.

The only rules that matter are the ones you and your date agree on and largely revolve around where it is you decide to meet. There’s nothing wrong with either of you having a drink if you’re somewhere that serves alcohol. There’s a lot wrong if either of you go on a bender. There’s also nothing wrong with drinking a soft drink too. Or doing an activity based date rather than a food/drink oriented one.

Just communicate openly with each other before the date with an eye towards your dates feelings/perception of safety.

Honestly, I am not trying to bait you or troll you or anything else when I say this but if you equate a simple request for context with toxicity you’re clearly not approaching this realistically or rationally.

You might well be right and you’ve been treated very poorly but literally no one on this thread apart from you can ever know that and no one is just going to take someone’s word for it.

Blast it.

If they had developed a centralised bit of software such as Twitter or Reddit you’d have a point. In that case you can’t support one without the other.

On a decentralised bit of software you can support the developers and spend your time on an instance they have no control over. So supporting the developers for development is not the same as supporting any particular instance - thats why a lot of instances accept donations too.

Probably not federated across yet. BTW - you’re better using the right structure for linking to communities in post:

!communityname@instancename.tld

Maybe uncharitably, my first thought when reading a post like this is “what shitty thing do you want to say?”.

But I don’t know you so maybe I am being uncharitable.

But you have to realise the fediverse in general is not owned by capitalist orgs with high priced legal teams. Its mostly small teams of private individuals. If someone posts something illegal, including defamatory, in their legal jurisdiction (which is probably not the USA) then they might be on the hook for it too.

Even if you run your own instance if you’re enough of a dick it’ll get defederated or you’ll be banned from multiple instances/communities.

Learn to play nice in other peoples yard. Its hard sometimes but just walking away and blocking is the best option. Sometimes I need to make more effort to do that too.

We live in online world that normalises abusing women gamers on Twitch, DM-ing women in order to hit on them and/or attack them on Insta or whatever, that considers sites like 4chan legitimate humour and where a web search for something like a gym membership can bombard you with scum like Tate.

Add to that the hit that people’s socialisation skills took during lockdown, governments around the Westernised world normalising hate and violence as legitimate ways to get what you want and then dangle in front of them the fictional lives influencers flaunt on Instagram, TikTok etc and tell them they too could have that life if they do this that and the other oh and by the way, its totally fine to abuse women to prove your masculinity because you, as a man, are owed sex by women.

All these reasons like ‘men are lonely’, ‘gender roles are different’ - yeah they play a part but lets not pretend this shit hasn’t been coming for a long time and men being sad they have less role models is no excuse for the rationalisation of violent hate that’s on display.

Let me guess - you think Elon was saying ‘from my heart to yours’, right?

Probably been tariffed by Trump.

Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:

This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:

“…at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”

So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.

Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.

There was a post on some Lemmy community or other yesterday which stated that most Americnas support ideas like universal healthcare (55%) and getting rid of guns from private ownership (mid 60% IIRC).

In that thread someone said it was awful that even amongst progressives the support for universal healthcare was so low and the very few responses to that were basically - :shrug: we’ve been lied to what are we gonna do about it?

The responses to the gun ownership stat were numerous and declared support for ‘second amendment rights’.

When even US progressives are passionately defending the biggest cause of child death in the USA in 2022 but are apathetic about universal healthcare, that’s a uniquely US problem that speaks very much to the level of thinking power available.

I might actually loathe him more than Musk.

I love the aesthetics of hardback books, a beautiful Victorian-era library looks (and smells!) great but my own library is all ebooks. I don’t have the space for over 2k physical books and as I get older and my eyesight worsens, the ability to adjust font size, line-height, borders, contrast etc becomes invaluable.

I won’t buy from Amazon at all, ever. I prefer to buy DRM free but if its not possible to buy DRM free then I buy a paperback copy from a local indie bookstore if possible which I immediately donate to a library or hospital or prison or whatever and, ahem, ‘source’ a DRM-free version from elsewhere. I do it this way because DRM is cancer but I also want to support small and/or new authors so buying and passing on a print copy is good for everyone and having a DRM free copy is good for me.

As for subject matter, both fiction and non-fiction but more fiction than non. I like historical novels like the Aubrey/Maturin series, or the Shardlake series, Madeline Miller’s greek retellings, Hilary Mantel’s stuff, fantasy/sci-f- like Ursula K Leguinn, NK Jemisin, Margaret Attwood, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, Susannah Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Horror/Thrillers by writers like Peter Straub, Catriona Ward, Shirley Jackson. Non-fiction books tend to be popular science that are ‘popular’ enough I can grasp what they’re on about but ‘science’ enough they’re not just dumbed down crap.

Techbro led gvmt - move fast, break stuff. Chaos leads to opportunity to profit, by which I mean him and his class to profit.