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.

Anyone who claims these companies have users best interest at heart are gullible people at best or a cult.

Yeah of course, they would be very wrong about that.

However, that doesn’t preclude a company from doing a good thing if they think that is what will make them the most money. If Apple’s giant marketing and product apparatus is going through the effort of selling privacy features, then that absolutely tells us they believe their customers care about it, and it suggests it probably goes into their design process. Maybe.

Apple sells walled-garden integration and privacy, but they do not sell openness and interoperability at all. In contrast, Google sells openness and interoperability, but not so much privacy.

Apple makes their money from hardware sales while Google makes their money from advertising. Again it’s consistent, smaller numbers of higher revenue users versus sheer scale.

I don’t trust either of these companies. Admittedly I do have some products from each still in my life that I’m phasing out, while I use a linux PC for most things. But when it comes to Apple in particular, I have to question how many “hurr durr sent from my iphone” jabs are sent from privacy-invading android phones that have multiple giant corporations’ tentacles in their firmware.

Note that given that this is Lemmy, I assume the proportion of comments posted from primarily FOSS devices is 1000x higher than for other sites/apps, I assume many of those comments are from privacy-respecting devices!

Did we just compare buying a certain brand of phone to being a serf? Really?

The answer to this strawman of yours is “no” though.

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.

Wow, imagine if all this awful shit could lead to a Mutually Assured Destruction of documents and net worths rather than one of nuking the biosphere.

That line of thought just turned the worst parts about the worst people into a pleasant thought for me this morning!

🎼 Always look on the bright side of life🎶🎵

Wow, yeah “Kate” you are onto something. There is something fishy going on here. He is… (reads about him for 10 seconds) very black indeed. Of course.

Fucking people.

Signed, white guy with way too many relatives who would agree with smiling racist lady.

As somebody in between being a young and an old, holy shit yes!

We in the exclusive Oregon Trail Generation (born late 70s into early 80s, tail end of gen x into the oldest millennials) get to watch how much harder it has gotten for young people, driven by ancient politicians who had things the easiest of any generation throughout their lives, economically speaking.

Have you ever heard the Chris Rock routine about rich vs wealthy? Like yeah Shaq is rich, but the white guy who signs his checks is wealthy!

Highly paid employees are not in the personal life social circle.

I used to be able to do them at will, and even overlap images an additional time to get a crazy second level of shape.

But now I can’t, thanks to the american health insurance industry. yay!

Yeah it’s a funny joke, but this kind of shit actually works on people to an alarming degree.

I think it’s an extension of dunning-kruger, essentially. These dummies love “knowing” something that all those smug educated people that study it for a living somehow do not know. It’s something I see in my more conservative relatives too, the need to put others down to establish your legitimacy.

Even decades ago I remember hearing in conservative media the revelations that water vapor was a greenhouse gas, or that methane was, or that the sun goes through cycles, or that the earth’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular. Every single time it was discussed with the wonder of that brain exploding in space dude meme. Just flinging that confusion and doubt in all directions, knowing that each piece will probably be the thing that convinces part of the audience.

Yeah I didn’t say that it was appropriate or welcome.

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.

The reasons the others gave are valid, but it’s also a cultural thing. We’re taught via pop culture that getting a jury duty summons, much like having to go to the DMV, is something to be dreaded. Like if it happens in a cartoon or a cheesy sitcom, there might be scary music that plays in the background while the character does a Darth Vader “noooooo.”

I bet so many of us have ADHD because the instant laser-point hyperfocus and blocking of all other stimuli helped our ancestors survive quite a few times.

And anxiety is obviously similar. Though in that case I think it’s more that we have evolved this skill for vigilance so that we can launch into fight or flight mode at a moment’s notice, but there are not the same constant dangers to monitor. So we essentially have an instinct to expect something bad to be coming at any moment, but it is uncalibrated and without meaningful environmental inputs it basically starts amplifying noise.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton was tied up in this awful stuff, sure, but the Biden hair sniffing thing just reeks of the conservatives’ constant focus on sexuality while crying about how it’s actually being shoved down their throats.

And that double entendre wasn’t intentional, but it definitely stays.

Next you should pretend I wrote that first reply of yours where you linked to a random Australian video about the previous elderly president and then said they were in a cult. How would you critique me?

Yeah, and this is especially so in the important voting bloc of white middle class people --the ones who probably own their home (with mortgage obviously) and are still making ends meet. The good ones are horrified to see what's going on in the world, and the troubled ones may still think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires with the whole master race thing going for them, but other than inflation their day to day life has not changed.

I'm a white dude living in the swing state of Pennsyltucky, in a very white republican suburb a good distance from the city. My town is growing and some good companies have large offices here (access to infrastructure plus the tax benefit of being in the next county over), so it's attracted residents from just about every ethnic background. But to get an accurate mental image, you have to sprinkle that diverse mix over a base layer of 80% white people, lol.

Just mentally going through our family, close friends, social acquaintances, and various local parents we run into (I have a kid in elementary school, and we're active in the school district), it is almost all white families living in single-family homes or sometimes townhouses. Many are two-income families, some are one-income families (working professionals in a reasonable COL area, not exactly CEOs). I know everybody has their own problems including the ones they don't share with me, but for most of these people life just looks normal. If you followed me around all day and could not see the awful news on the screen when I sat down at my PC, you would be hard pressed to tell which decade we are in. You would need a clue like peeking at my phone model or seeing an old covid mask on a shelf.

There ARE exceptions. People who are not white have absolutely been fucked with by ICE. Thank goodness the best Mexican restaurant in town got raided so that my fellow whites aren't tempted by amazing food from non-white sources. And I do know of one white family where both parents are civilians that work for the government. Both remotely, before Trump 2. They are amazing people raising three great kids (the kindest people we know are usually single child) and they got all kinds of unnecessary stress and fuckery in their real lives thanks to all the chaos and ill considered return-to-office mandates.

<Attenborough>

Here we find the conservative doubling down by immediately repeating that no, they do in fact know that you are, but plead: "what, then, am I? Tell me!"

Oh what a lovely surprise! They have just tripled down in the very same sentence! You see, part of their hive's rules is that all outsiders must be treated as cooperating members of a single enemy conspiracy.

pedodent

Holy shit, lol. I really hope that term is becoming a thing.

Gotcha. Something about what you said made it sound like the standard windows flavor to me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to running teams in a browser tab that its lagginess just feels like a slow loading webpage refresh, while the rest of the system’s GUI is flawless.