BG3...soon. :)
That’s all kinds of messed up. To not value experience… it feels like all over the world in “advanced societies” we live in so much stress and are pulled in so many directions, flailing, trying to stay afloat in a cutthroat world. No wonder people aren’t having babies.
Here in the US housing is unaffordable. More and more young adults can’t leave home and start building their own lives and creating their own families. Salaries aren’t even remotely keeping up with expenses. Without security why would someone contemplate getting pregnant?
The response of leadership in the US feels like they’re creating a climate of forced pregnancies instead of solving the root cause. Such gross economic inequities as we have here create lives of despair and shut down the dreams of humanity. Those dreams are the fodder for building strong neighborhoods, having children, investing time and money into your community. Instead we have despair so people hide in their shells, protect themselves; even to the point of being willing to harm others.
I'm a blue person, stuck in the southeast. I'm nearly 59 years old, so I can't transplant easily. My spouse has family roots and a house here too. (I don't, I've been more mobile before I met her).
She's not likely to sell her house either (despite being liberal) because she bought the home she grew up in; Nostalgia. I'm hoping that in 8 years when I retire, she and I will be more on the same sheet of music. Maybe she'll be ready to downsize (though she still harbors the idea of keeping the house, renting it, and being able to will it to her daughter), and we can consider leaving.
The only game plan I can come up with is get a nice van as our "second home" and live full time on the road; Quite an expensive way to escape. Sigh...I hope she and I sync up eventually.
Yikes! I had no idea there was any way to lose money when credit card rates were so high. The article says that they had to approve people with lower scores than they would normally do, so they are having to write off double the volume that other issuers are.
...and I just opened my savings account with Apple/Goldman a couple of months ago.
Holy crap...this is great news. I can't wait.
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list was full of books with titles like “Apricot bar code architecture” and “Jessica’s Attention” earlier this week.
![AI-Generated Books of Nonsense Are All Over Amazon's Bestseller Lists](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/3db7277f-6f2f-48fa-a81f-4a9144ff2c78.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
I have no words....
I tried playing a bit with some small money I was ok with losing. I didn't lose much, but realized in short order that there was no way I could ever get enough info to make a rational decision. Nearly every method/recipe/chart that I saw showed analysis after the fact. Welp, I can take anything in hindsight and make a story that fits the picture. But I never felt like there was any way to be predictive. I was only ever going to be flying blind.
I never stepped even a tiny bit beyond my tiny attempt at trading. I learned my lesson. I'll just stick to my index funds/401k/retirement plan and hope for the best.
Thank y'all for being so proactive. I've been dismayed at the spike in Lemmy users over the past few days. The number of instances popping up with many thousands of accounts is suspicious.
Thank you again for working so hard to keep this space "clean".
I've been wondering where to make this post. I don't want to limit it to a book review. I would like to discuss the ideas presented in this book by Peter Turchin. (He wrote an earlier book called Ages of Discord where he went into details about the math and the statistics he used)
If you've read it, what are your thoughts? How to we convince the elites it's in their best interest to stop fomenting dissent and stop their own infighting? IOW, reproduce something like the New Deal the US used in the 1930s to stop unrest and shrink inequality.
The primary drivers of social dissolution are the immiseration of the working class due to shrinking wages and the concomitant rise of elites who seize that capital for themselves. According to Turchin, there is no way to stop societal dissolution, political chaos and govt overthrow except by way of a reduction of the number of elites and a reduction in income inequality. The New Deal accomplished this via non-violent means, but history shows that violence is usually the method used. When violence occurs, many of us peons die (so competition for jobs decreases and wages go up), but elites also perish or get aggressively demoted into the lower echelon. A reduction in their numbers means there's less skimming of the average person's wages, and the less infighting in the elite ranks means that society can finally unify because we're not being weaponized against each other.
The fixation by elites on social issues (like race, gender, patriotism, religion, trans rights etc) is a classic misdirect meant to get the working class divided into sides to "fight" for that particular elite group's agenda. (and to cement that group into the ruling class).
I ramble. I just finished the book and found that it had many "ah ha" moments for me. I recommend it if you haven't read it. If you have, I'd love to hear what you thought.
Omg. I didn’t even notice that. No wonder some posts were disappearing! Thank you!
Wow. Those are huge subreddits that are now unmoderated. Is Reddit planning on using bots to auto mod these and hope they catch all the spammage?
Sounds like a good idea. I've started doing that. How do I get back to those topics? Are they saved in my profile?
Yeah. That’s what I do when a post goes poof. What’s odd is that I posted this when a post vanished in me this evening. After posting my question, I went back to the main page and there’s the original post in question was again. Weird.
I’m going to chalk it up to growing pains. I do see the pages refresh while I’m browsing and it’s a little disorienting, but as long as the content doesn’t poof on me, it’s cool.
When I’m browsing I often get interrupted and have to put my phone down. Or I read one post, go back to the main and it refreshes. Often, I recall a post I wanted to read next, but on refresh, it’s just gone.
If I try to search to find it again, I can’t even get the post to show up there. I even use a word that was in the title, to no avail. Oddly enough, if I go to a different instance, I can see the thread/post again, but here on beehaw, it went poof.
Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have ideas on what is happening and how to stop it?
Thx!
If I were to become wealthy enough to have this luxury, I would probably goof off and video game the first month. I say this because it’s what I used to do when I was in school and had summers off.
After the boredom kicks in, my brain usually shifts to more creative endeavors. I imagine I’d do some of the projects I used to love. Calligraphy, creating my own language, photography, astrophotography, light gardening, travel to see museums, read, wood working and carving, small projects around the house. Oh wouldn’t it be grand!
Dang, now I want brownies too. hahaha! Awesome work.
mouth open...looks like he's got that gecko attitude!
I intend to stay here on beehaw. It will take me a while to get over the habituated behaviors I had with reddit, but the quality of the posts over here is high. I don't feel like voices are getting drowned out over here. So reddit won't miss me. Over time, I won't miss reddit. All good things must end.
Now time to enjoy watching how new communities and the software driving Lemmy develop.
That's my thought too. Even before this, I felt like I was reading automated posts and chat bot responses on reddit. It seems like a zombie forum where most of the "people" weren't really real, it was just recycled content, laugh tracks, and being force fed content posted by reddit itself (versus users) scraped from other places.
I'm having issues with it too. I think the massively increased load must be causing the interface to misbehave. Nothing like finding all the bugs when volume is high. fun!
Anyway, I tried yesterday to find a post/thread that I'd commented in. No amount of sorting in that community was bringing it up. I could only find it by following the comment link in my profile. So right now, I have the feeling that I'm missing a good bit of content while also seeing older popular content still dominating my feed. I'm hopeful that they've noticed these issues and will see how they can rectify them eventually.
Y'all have done a wonderful job. I'm in this for the long haul. I've donated once and will again. I think I'll set up a recurring one this time.
I work in tech in a financial aid office. We regularly get slammed with last minute changes from the govt with little details on how they need to be implemented. So we deal with high volume, high detail (because money is involved as is auditing), and high intensity/speed. It's an ugly mix. I feel like y'all could be in a similar boat. All I can offer is hang in there. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. We support you and I bet you'll discover some crazy talent in these communities that has the intellect, time and energy to help out.
Interesting times to say the least.
I posted here meta thread in the technology community
Later, I discovered that someone asked me a question. I’d forget the link. Their reply was buried in a mountain of replies I’d gotten to a post I’d made. Someone else saw their question and was able to point them to the right spot though.
Out of curiosity, I tried several ways to re-find that post in Technology. No sorting process seemed to show it though. I can only get back into that topic by following the link in my profile to the comment I made. Not ideal. If I haven’t commented, I’d have no way right now to rediscover that topic and see how the conversation is developing.
What am I doing wrong?
Sorry if this is a repost. It looked like my post didn’t go through the first time I created it.
Thanks @Kushan@beehaw.org. That is indeed where I saw it. I forgot the link in my post.
Right now, I’m playing the early access version of Baldurs Gate 3. I’m getting ready to put it down (frustrated: BG3 has the potential to be good, but without controller support, I’m getting really frustrated with the UI. ) and switch to Yakuza Like a Dragon.
What are you playing now and what are you looking forward to playing next?
![the background blur](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f94afbaa-9bcd-4421-a7e5-d7d7e324a8be.jpeg?thumbnail=256&format=webp)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f94afbaa-9bcd-4421-a7e5-d7d7e324a8be.jpeg?thumbnail=1024&format=webp)
I took my buddy camping. He’s 17 years old or so. I got him from the shelter, so I don’t really know. He spent most of the trip just sleeping. 😄
One of the steps in a societal collapse is a loss of faith in financial tools. The stock market has seemed like a casino for a long time to me, yet it is still cranking out money for the upper crust. It is the primary driver for business decisions that produce short term gain, but reduce long-term viability for the companies and for the environment.
Currently, there are no other real vehicles for the average US citizen to invest in for their retirements. In my parents' generation, there were more. Heck, they had a lot of money in CDs and even those earned a decent rate of interest. Yet everything now is such a low return, or boom/bust like housing, so little guys like me are pushed into getting retirement accounts that are stocks. I'm not keen on that.
What's even worse is that many jobs will employer match if you put into one of the stock market based retirement funds. But if you want to just put your money into a savings account, you miss out on the employer matching. So there's strong incentive to keep putting your money into the stock market.
So I keep trying to read the tea leaves to figure out when the casino is going to collapse. ...or even if it will. I think there are some folks that just assume that it will keep making money for the wealthy and the rest of humanity will just get left behind.
Here are a few my little dudes.
My bearded dragon. Her name is Giz. She’ll be a year old in July.
! This is Oscar, my Chuckwalla. He was wild caught and his tail is a little damaged. I’ve had him about 2 years. I hate that he was from the wild though. I didn’t know his history until after I bought him. Sorry about the auto rotation. I don’t know how to fix that.
I’d love to see other folks’ lizards or what you have living natively in your corner of the world.
I'm new from Reddit so I'm still looking around the Lemmyverse. I hope more folks from the reptile forums there take a chance and migrate over here.
I have a bearded dragon that's about a year old. She's a champ. I've read that at some point, they shift to being mostly vegetarian with some bugs once in a while. I don't think she got the memo. She still vastly prefers bugs to salads. I guess I get her to eat a salad 1-2 times per week. But she chomps down on superworms and crickets. I'm raising dubias that I hope to shift to instead of crickets though. I figure I've got a few more months before the colony is ready for me to start getting feeders from it.
Anyway, when to beardies start to need less protein? How often does a mature bearded dragon need bugs? Thx!