Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
… what’s your content? If you’re not comfortable posting it, them what type of media is it? Not to rub it in, but getting your content from you, your fans, or someone who contacts me currently is the only way I will ever get your content, as I ruthlessly block advertising in every aspect of my life.
To be clear, I’m not against self promotion. For example, if you went into a video game forum and posted links to your game, that’s not advertising in my view. More importantly, I would probably actually be interested in a new video game by you if I were browsing a video game forum. Hell, if you randomly PM’ed it to me or emailed it, that would be fine too.
I make games and stuff. Let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to get noticed on the internet. There comes a point where whatever you’re selling will be popular enough in a closed circle that it spreads through word of mouth but before that you need to get an audience. That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces. If you don’t get that momentum whatever content you’re making might be dead on arrival. A lot of people and companies making ads don’t actually like annoying others with them, but it’s really hard to get anyone’s attention now that there’s like a billion new things releasing every day.
That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces.
I’d have no problem if you just spammed my inbox or all of my communities. I’m all for self-promotion or even just promoting stuff you like. I don’t get adverts anymore, but there have been so many times where I got a negative impression of something I later found out was cool because it was advertised to me first.
I have no problem with people being annoying in my inbox or trying to promote themselves. What I do have a problem with is the constant stream of undiluted, intrusive bullshit being sold to me since the day I was born. If I saw your game in a web ad that’s keeping me from the content I actually wanted to see, I would absolutely not be interested in it; if you or a fan blindly spammed it into my inbox 69 times in a row, I would definitely check it out.
Independent repair/handyman business pays google to place ads in their results when you search for relevant terms. In the past this was done through flyers & newspapers & billboards and such. If the business made absolutely no effort to advertise their service, then you would never be able to find them when you’re looking for that service, except for through word of mouth (which is arguably a form of advertising in itself.)
Don’t get me wrong, I hate ads too, and they’ve become far too prevalent in popular media. But they exist for a reason.
Edit: we also should have the right to block and deny ads as we wish. And at the same time, advertisers should have the right to exist. Google’s recent DRM and crackdown on adblockers should be met with forceful government intervention, in an ideal world, due to their debatable monopoly over their sector.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
For sure. I’m not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM’ed or emailed stuff. For example, I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
I would argue that if there’s a product that nobody knows exist that’s not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don’t actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don’t need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don’t care about. I don’t care about the newest tech toys. I don’t care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don’t need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I’m drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn’t even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there’s a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You’re allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don’t ever want to hear from you again.
You really should be directing your angst at the bastards who respond to advertising. If it weren’t for them, there would be no advertising at all because it would be completely unfeasible. Nobody would be willing to pay for something that has no return on investment.
Disagree. Ad campaigns are made the way they are because marketing people are abusing how our brain works naturally. Some people have managed to build defenses for it, but most people simply lack the ability. That’s like blaming people on wheelchair that they can’t walk.
Exactly! I can’t even stand physical ads like billboards because the concept of reserving land for manipulating every passing person into buying something they don’t need is ridiculously perverse to me. Ads are an attack against my psyche and I will do everything I can to avoid them.
When I want to invest in a better product or look for something that solves my wants or needs, I research my options. I will never make my decision based on an obvious ad because they are intrinsically deceitful.
There aren’t really billboards (not many anyway) where I am around New Zealand so I never really thought about it but you are so right, and the fact that it by design distracts drivers… so bad.
If I’m looking to buy a product, I will always research it or go to a brand I trust. I have NEVER clicked on an ad for a product and then bought that thing.
But that’s their manipulation towards their employers. These numbers rely on people who lie and manipulate for a living to tell honest numbers about their own worth.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should chooseadvertisementsas the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are theonlypossible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don’t have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the “rich uncle” of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That’s your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That’s what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I’m fine with that, but good luck.
Are there a nontrivial number of people who genuinely enjoy ads?
Maybe? My parents are boomers and they watch cable TV with ads. I’ve told them a few dozen times that they don’t need to watch them, that they could mute them or watch elsewhere, but they don’t care. My grandmother also watches the ads when she watches TV. Oh well…
I didn’t mind ads on TV as they were pretty entertaining until it became the same ten ads played in a loop over the day. Pretty much put me off watching cable forever.
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service? Do you want monopolys that never change because smaller business cant advertise with their stuff.
I don’t like 99% of advertising either, especially online, but there are some exceptions.
How do you reach people with a new product that didn’t exist before? Or a Service?
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, New International Version
EDIT: I’m not a Christian and I’m not trying to convert anyone to my faith (or lack thereof), I just think it’s a neat quote.
My point really is that you can generally talk about your products in some existing forum with reference to existing things. For example, if I wanted people to listen to my music, which I have deluded myself into thinking is a unique, previously unheard-of blend of genres, I would post links onto music forums and groups who are interested in recommendations of music adjacent to the type I produce. And that is how I actually spread my music on Reddit (although not as PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S) back when it was fresh. No ads, no wasting people’s time and internet. I only reached people who already expressed their interest to receive music like mine. I got a very small following, but I achieved my goal.
Nothing is so unique that it belongs in no forum or is of interest to no existing community, yet simultaneously needs to be broadcast to the entire world. I have no problem with people sending me stuff they believe in to my email or other inbox, blow it up for all I care, but what I do take issue with is shoving that stuff into my web browsing experience or even sandwiched into the content I’m trying to watch.
Clearly an advancement from simple electromagnetism, which was the unification of the previous studies of electricity and magnetism. Not fully original.
Genetic engineering
Based on prior analysis of genetics, which itself descended from simple breeding, and chemistry. Not fully original.
Quantum computing
Hybrid of computing with quantum principles. Not fully original.
Like I get it, we do discover new stuff and create new techniques, but (1) these physics still existed before we discovered them and (2) (much more importantly) these things are not new in the sense that they’re not totally unique, that we can compare them to things that exist because they are inspired by things that already exist.
I mulled over whether or not to quote the Bible directly once I figured out where that quote came from, and I ultimately decided to do so because of the Bible’s reputation for needing to be “read into”. I think that particular passage says something really interesting about how, in some sense, nothing really new happens, that what we’re doing can be seen as a version of something else. This is particularly interesting as a piece of a Christian document; Christianity generally doesn’t posit a cyclical view of the world. You live, you die, you go into the afterlife, judgement day happens, and God’s chosen few spend eternity in heaven; e.g., the plot is linear. Therefore, there clearly must be some deeper context to the text.
Regardless, it was a minor part of my original argument. The rest should stand on its own.
Also, I went to Catholic school. I’d like to use my religion classes for something; I’m most certainly not using them for praying 😂
Ok so I suppose you’ll be using raw electromagnetism instead of anything that uses advanced electronics? Just because something has a history doesn’t mean it’s not new, and even if that were the case, just because something’s not new that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful improvement.
What I meant in the original argument is that nothing can be so new and original that we cannot talk about it without referencing previous concepts and those forums. For example, results in advanced electronics were initially presented in early electrical engineering theses presented to engineers and physicists interested in electrical [1] phenomena.
We would not need to show advertisements to promote advanced electronics. There are already forums of people interested in electrical engineering. We can promote advanced electronics to our heart’s content in those forums.
Ok so I suppose you’ll be using raw electromagnetism instead of anything that uses advanced electronics?
So this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but at some point in a complex design I might actually have to go back to “raw electromagnetism”, e.g. numerically solving Poisson’s equation or Maxwell’s equations for crucial parts of the circuit, depending on how small things are. What you learn in a typical electronics class is a behavioral approximation that’s good for describing the general expected behavior of a circuit, but not always precise enough to finish a design.
[1] Loosely, an electrical device is any device that uses electricity. An electronic device is a device that does “something” “smart”. For example, an amplifier is an electronic device as is a digital timer, whereas a light bulb is electrical but not electronic. Modern “Electrical engineering” is more precisely “Electronics engineering”.
How is you posting about your music on a forum not an ad? You saying you only reach people who might already be interested is just saying that you target your ads.
Do you consider it different because you’re an individual doing it manually?
I remember growing up in the 80s and we’d have adverts for milk and eggs. Not any brand or company. Just a general message to drink milk and eat eggs. Think it was like a farmers union thing.
Most people here will only know who Accrington Stanley are because of those ads.
Yeah, from the beef council. Also, “The more you know…” Those were kind of like advertisements. I tried to post pics of some Cuban billboards but this app wouldn’t do it. I’ll try again. They basically blame everything on the US embargo.
I’m upvoting because this should actually be unpopular. Intrusive ads are bad but less intrusive ones let you know who the patrons are of the otherwise highly expensive services you enjoy. That all of this gets paid for with ad money is nothing less than a miracle.
If you don’t want to see ads then don’t give them your notice! I like being informed when new products go to market.
Yep, like if you want to know about new phones coming out or whatever other topic of interest, subscribe to one of the myriad magazine websites that obsess over that kind of thing. Ads for that stuff showing up everywhere including our damn physical mailbox is a public nuisance, and a waste of resources.
Yeah, I watch about fifty different people making videos and they make money from it and all I have up do is watch fifteen seconds of adverts? I love it, my genuinely unpopular opinion is there should be more things making use of them, I wish Ubuntu had an optional add bar or advert box that I could watch while working to generate money to fund development, even better if they mix in adverts for cool open source projects so I can lean they exist.
YES this. We should start a community. I hate advertising, absolutely hate it, and do everything I can to avoid it. Pihole ✅, YouTube premium ✅, sponsorblock ✅, Firefox ✅, ublock origin ✅.
You don’t need to pay the people most responsible for the problem (Google). My primary instance is invidious.flokinet.to, but most others provide a good experience. With a small configuration change, SponsorBlock works with Invidious.
Also Firefox is pretty good, but check out Librewolf if you’re on Linux. No telemetry, and private by default.
We should start a community
Agreed, but I don’t have the time/energy/social skills to moderate it.
but what if the advertisement presents you something that you like and wouldn’t have found otherwise? I’ve had advertisements showing me indie games that I really liked.
I get your point, I’m just trying to add a specific scenario.
Then I will probably not get the game until I see someone I know playing it or recommending it to me. I literally do not care how cool or interesting your product is, if you make it block what I wanted to see or keep me from the content I actually asked for, you will generate a negative impression on me that will be very difficult to fix.
I actually said as much to an indie game developer who wrote a similar reply. I am a musician, and this is the approach I took to promoting my work back when it was fresh. I’m fine living in obscurity if it means that my music isn’t just some ad.
This has also happened a few times already in my actual life. IMO, the onus is on the content creator to promote their product in a way that is palatable. You are not owed my consumption.
I have already discussed a few unobtrusiveandopt-in ways to promote your work to interested parties.
I actually do block all advertisements and yet I still get games and music crammed into my content hole. We can do without ads.
I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was a kid. But Disney’s management of this IP has totally ruined it for me. I still haven’t seen The Rise of Skywalker after the trash that was The Last Jedi. They also seem to be focusing on pumping out as much content as possible, which has diluted any feelings of longing I had to see more.
They also need to branch out a bit more. The best of new star wars imo (Rogue one, Mando, and Andor) are so awesome because they focus any other aspect of the immense galaxy instead of focusing on the same 1 family from sand planet.
I downvoted because this is a popular opinion. MCU is the same thing. Most people probably don’t have a strong opinion on Star Wars either way, but for the people who do there are plenty who think it sucks.
I like Star Wars fine. If they make something, I’ll probably watch it. But I don’t consider myself a fan. I don’t keep track of the lore and would be hard pressed to tell you the plot of anything I hadn’t seen recently. Which is a long way of saying I’m in the don’t have a strong opinion camp.
It was a different perspective on an imperfect galaxy and one that felt like it was lived in.
Not just Aliens visit earth!
But a new perspective like.... what if just because we have faster then light travel, racism didn't go away, and it had laser swords and near super human abilities powers!
On the last day of my college internship a senior VP at my little company invited me into his office presumably to get to know me prior to extending a full-time offer. To break the ice he asked me what my favorite Star Wars movie was. I smiled and replied that I could never get through any of them.
As I was uttering these words I began to notice the giant Star Wars poster directly behind the gentleman. It then dawned on me that his office was chalk full of Star Wars memorabilia.
The man did not ask me any further questions. He shook my hand, thanked me for my great work, and I never stepped foot into those offices ever again.
If I come across you in a dark alley and we’re all alone then you better be ready cos I’ll accept your opinion and offer some other suggestions of movies that we might like, such as all 3 Lord of the Rings (extended editions of course).
I absolutely loved Star Wars as a kid. Every movie since then has been a major disappointment. I’ve only watched the first of the OT as an adult so far (with my kids), and I was not as into it as expected. Luke was one whiney kid.
Some of it does. Maybe even a lot of it. Andor is a pretty good miniseries though, I like that it’s more mature and has a bleaker undertone like Rogue One.
No Star Wars media compares to the idea of Star Wars.
Except maybe for Andor. I liked Andor. Make stuff that gets away from those fucking Jedis and the whole Skywalker family. They’re the worst bit about the whole franchise.
I think so much about it is awesome (visuals, design of ships and sets, music, etc.) but maybe due to lack of repeated exposure to the movies as a child I don’t feel much about them. The modern movies were especially meh, since they all feel like they are trying to recapture the feeling of people who saw the originals in the cinema in the late 70s and 80s, but without doing anything new. I did quite enjoy the Fallen Order game and will probably play the follow up at some point too though.
I feel the originals were great when they came out, but haven’t aged well. Of course, I was a kid and the special effects were cutting edge at the time.
They’ve aged fine if you don’t expect the effects to be 2023 effects. If you accept that they were top of the line 1978 effects, it won’t bother you at all. What always made me laugh is my mother telling me how they were all dumbfounded, not by laser blasts and cool ship exteriors, but rather the introductory text moving off into infinity. I think she’d have been something like 21 at the time.
The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
How about spacial inefficiency? A car only carries 1-6 people compared to a train which carries dozens or even hundreds. Or a bus which carries dozens.
Traffic and parking are the biggest issue i see with cars and space efficiency. Both can be significantly improved on with self driving. Especially if most people opt for public ownership of cars and not private. Something think will become more popular as self driving takes over and lowers the cost of taking the self driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber.
By the way i think self driving cars will make trains more popular. As trains suck at first and last mile transportation. Self driving solves the first and last mile issues.
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues. And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
You’re allowed to like self-driving cars, but buses and trains are objectively more efficient in the large scale and all you have to do is acknowledge that. The more people realize this, the more room there is for us to make progress
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Simple we have already chosen cars in the US. It is far easier to use the existing roads to our advantage then try and redesign the entire country to fit a train and tram and bus model.
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues.
In a public car the car will drop people off and drive away to pick up other people. There would be no need parking at all. Just a small drop off and pickup location.
Now this won’t work as well if we are talking about private ownership cars, but it would be better as the car can drop you off and then drive to a centralized parking location. This would remove the need for street parking or parking lots next to restaurants and stores. Or if your planning to stay a long time for exmaple if your going to work for 8 hours. I think many people might want rent out their car during the day. Car drops me off at work and I tell the car to join the “public car” network for 8 hours and it can go find some people to transport.
And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
Oh sure it won’t be as effective but it will be much better then what we have now. And there are benefits cars have over trains. For example after a the world pandemic scare I find traveling in my own space a much more pleasant experience then sharing with many other people. Also I really like listening to music in a car as full volume very enjoyable experience that you just can’t do on a public train :). A car will be a single vehicle to my destination, I can get in a fall asleep if I want. Buses and trains are usually multiple vehicles and you need to be some what alert to know when your stop is.
what you say makes sense, not saying you’re completely wrong, but your whole argument is based off the fact that we have already chosen cars. But simply doubling down on a worse solution just puts us deeper in to the hole, instead of making the more difficult decision of redirecting some of our massive amounts of GDP in to larger scale projects (yknow instead of wasting billions on military spending & corporate bailouts) such as making the investment into the development of a proper rail network BESIDE our existing infrastructure, like china has done for example. (not supporting china but it is true that they have made massive progress in public transportation across a country equally large as ours, in a relatively very short time)
Not at all. Most German car companies know this and some have even said as much (focus on luxury cars, car sharing and subscriptions). The Greens (part of the government) have been pushing for better public transportation and now Germany has a nationwide ticket for just 49€ per month. We still need much more investment in infrastructure, but that opinion is shared by many town planners and politicians. An added benefit with reduced road traffic is that driving becomes easier and fun again.
That all sounds very German, lol. I’m mostly just speaking from my America-centric perspective. It would be nice to have reduced road traffic here and make riding more fun, but a lot of the people that support public transit typically hate motorcycles just as much as they hate cars so I feel like I have to oppose them even though I don’t own a car myself.
Better public transportation shouldn’t mean that cars or motorcycles will be banned. It’s a way to move more people more efficiently. Ideally, you wouldn’t want to own a car or motorcycle, because other modes of transport provide a better service. While it might seem very German/European, it’s actually not that straightforward if you consider that the modern car, truck and motorcycle were all invented in Germany (by Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler) and that the economy of Germany and Europe as a whole is dependent on the automobile industry. However, other companies in other countries are facing similar problems, so it’s not unique to Europe either. The ones which adapt best will survive (probably).
On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
Adding onto this, city driving is just… different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it’s rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn’t go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I’m the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would’ve been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I’ve heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can’t even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
Cars were almost banned when they first became popular. The existing infrastructure and traffic safety regulations (shared roads) were not adequate for a speeding death machine. However, cars were very important for the military, so highways and modern road networks were quickly pushed as “the future”.
Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you’re about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.
It’s cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can’t evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn’t be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.
Honestly if you can play that game you must have super human reflexes. I used to play it on the xbox360 and loved it but I’m older now and recently got it on ps5 and I’m just constantly smashing into shit. I would be terrible in a real car!
In a sense, I agree that it makes sense to train people to be better technical drivers. The issue is that for avoiding accidents, your time is orders of magnitude better spent practicing planning and avoiding potential situations in the first place.
Being able to see where you need to pay extra attention, what cars to keep extra distance to, and being able to judge what a safe speed is saves far more lives than building the technical skills to get out of a situation once you’re in it.
To be fair though: at least in Norway we have an obligatory course where we drive on sleet/ice or oil to practice controlling a car in winter conditions. However, the main focus of the course is on recognising how fast you can go in different conditions, and how far of a breaking stretch you need to plan for.
Maybe doing this will also make people more hesitant to get behind the wheel. If more people are aware of the risks of driving, maybe they’ll start to demand alternatives
Germany’s driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.
Problem is that there’s no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn’t a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.
Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who’s allowed to drive.
And just having access to some public transportation doesn’t mean you have useful access. Being able to access a bus stop doesn’t help if it won’t take you where you need to go, or if the time schedule isn’t acceptably close to your needed transportation times.
The way I see it is fuck em, if you can’t safely drive and follow the rules to mimimize risk for everyone around you then pay for a taxi or take the bus. No public transport? Get your ass on a bike. Everytime I go out, even for a short 10 minute drive to the grocery store, 90% of the time I see someone doing something insanely stupid and dangerous but because nothing bad comes of it they don’t learn not to do that.
Driving a vehicle should be considered a huge privilege considering how easy it is to kill not just yourself, but others simply by being a dumbass and not taking it seriously enough. People back up without looking, make turns without looking, tons of dumb shit constantly, shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off. There should also be a forced age limit for being able to drive cause old people are fucking terrible drivers, or at the very least they should have yearly tests past a certain age to ensure they’re still capable of driving.
Drive properly and safely or deal with the massive consequences of not being able to get around quickly. Need a license to get to/do your job? Drive safely or get fucked. Absolutely zero sympathy for shitty drivers.
shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off
Man, this really pisses me off because I know they know they’re the dumbass who fucked up but their fragile ego can’t take being honked at so they flip you off nevertheless. Hate idiots like that.
We aren’t saying that they should be driving, quite the opposite. We’re saying that it’s completely fucked that in some places you have to drive to participate in society, precisely because many people shouldn’t. There needs to be alternatives to driving so that law enforcement can remove anyone’s license without effectively placing them in house arrest.
Imo it’s kinda unavoidable. Humans make mistakes all the time. We could greatly reduce the risk however, if we simply reduced our reliance on independent vehicles. Unfortunately this depends on the place where you live as well but if possible, it would be much safer for the collective majority to bike/walk to areas or use public transport where applicable as it would drop the amount of traffic on the roads
Sadly, most cities are build in a way which forces you pretty much to own and drive a car. Everything so far apart and tho public transport may help, tho in some cases is either neglected or badly implemented. Ideally, i think cities should be built around a way that easily allows traveling on foot, bike or with a solid subway and/or bus system.
Can’t agree more. The microlabels are too much at this point. You do not need mix sexual orientation, which is the sex we are naturally attracted to, with having preferences, which are the qualities we find attractive in a person or a relationship. The two are completely separate.
Exactly, every gay person I know IRL is disgusted by how the pride movement/LGBTQ+ whatever the hell they add on everyday, conduct themselves. It’s like a cult at this point, and I feel it paints a bad name on actual, normal, gay folk. These people who make being gay their entire identity, need to really consider some self awareness exercises.
Gay community can be brutal. It’s not the all-inclusive safe space some people like to think of it as. Gay or not they’re still all male and are mostly into manly stuff and if one is not for example into femine guys it’s not a taboo to say it out loud. Sexual harrasment is quite common aswell and probably wont get you canceled. Many would probably ban women from gay spaces if they could.
I think there’s value for folks in the community to have the hyper-specific labels. I’m saying this as a bi person who agrees that pan, Omni, etc are sub categories of bi.
No don’t worry. We can describe the totality of human sexuality and existence with three simple words: gay, straight, or bi. All these other labels confuse the straight people and therefore should be discarded to appeal to straight people’s infinite compassion.
Agree. I understand expressing acceptance of non hetero love so kids know that there are other options and they’re valued, but i don’t need to know what labels everyone has chosen, who they’re having sex with, or what is under their undies. And i believe that many people who are medically trans are chasing a masculinity or feminity that they feel is not allowed as a male or female and it’s sad that the stereotype is what they’re moving towards or away from instead of individuality. Also, kinda drunk, so probably disregard.
Read the bisexual manifesto. Bi has always included nonbinary people. If you are attracted to all genders, both bisexual and pansexual are valid labels you can choose.
Actually didn’t know that, even though I identify as bi lol. Pretty sure my other bi and pan friends didn’t know either from the kinds of discussions we’ve had. But then that’s just a bad choice linguistically, no? It’s very misleading because you literally have the terms bi and non-bi and you need to read some manifesto to understand that they’re not a contradiction. Meanwhile aside from the stupid overdone cookware joke, I think nobody ever questioned the meanings of terms like pan or omni, because they make sense linguistically.
Homosexual is attraction to the same gender; heterosexual is attraction to a different gender. The bi in bisexual is both of these, not attraction to two genders. Think of the bi flag, pink, purple, and blue: what do you think the colors represent? Nonbinary people have always been included in bisexual if you take some time to think about.
I don’t doubt your textbook correctness or the historical correctness of this, and maybe I should stress that I am not trying to exclude anyone from the bi term, but at least in my anecdotal experience, these terms are mostly used “wrongly”, meaning that there is a lot of confusion. And the meanings of words change as people start using them with different intended meanings.
Therefore, given the premise that we want to simplify things by cleaning up some redundant terms, I would prefer to keep the one whose meaning is intuitively clear to everyone. I just don’t see why - given bi, pan and omni all mean the same thing - one should choose the most misunderstood/misused term.
Personally, I would just keep the terms and let people choose whichever they like, I’m just trying to entertain this discussion of choosing to keep only one of them and the pros/cons for each choice.
Upvoted, but I have a slight disagreement. I think bisexual should actually be a label under pansexual. Bisexual doesn’t necessarily account for anyone outside the gender binary.
I think this thinking falls into the common belief that “sexuality” and preference within “sexuality” are actually distinct things. I really think everyone’s sexual preferences are unique, and so even microlabels don’t do them justice. But I don’t think the purpose of labeling your sexuality is meant to be perfectly descriptive, it’s a way to connect with people over shared parts of their experience with sexuality and that can be as coarse or fine as you want it to be. You say there should be only straight, gay, and bi, but we could go even more broad and say there should only be cishet and queer.
I do mean no exceptions. They rarely do "good things" for anyone.
Having a homeless shelter where you require the homeless to attend mass is not helping people, it's taking advantage of people in a bad situation and forcing your views on them. Just one example.
Absolutely, 100% agreed. I know most other church-goers would disagree, though. Religious organizations should be treated no differently from any other organization.
I upvoted you, but do disagree with this a bit, there are a few religions which set up food for anyone willing to come inside, like I went to eat langar at a Sikh temple during my friend’s wedding, and all we have to do is cover our head out of respect. Grab a plate, sit on the floor, and eat.
I randomly went with my friend a couple days later, and they still had food out, so it’s not a wedding only thing, but they actually have cooks in the kitchen most of the day.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
So silly. Genetics can make it harder to lose weight, but not impossible.
I’m related to several people diagnosed with hypothyroidism, but none of them are obese because they know the condition makes weight loss hard and actively work harder because of that. The biggest one is what I’d called “chubby”, and that’s more likely because her thyroid numbers are in flux at the moment, and she’s currently working with her doctors on that.
I used to be fat, and when I watch morbidly obese people talk about how much they love food and it makes them happy and makes them feel better that is 100% me. Food is absolutely an addiction for some people, including me. Thankfully I have it under control to be at a healthy weight and lose weight when I need to, but some of these people have absolutely tragic childhoods or life experiences and I don't blame them at all for coping in that way. I could 100% see myself in that position if I had been through what they have been through.
However, those people are self aware that they are unhealthy. The people I can't stand are the "healthy at every size" fat acceptance people. Healthy at every size was SUPPOSED to be that you can make positive health focused changes at any size and there is no point of no return. But it got twisted into I can be morbidly obese and I am still 100% healthy forever. And they even make people feel bad for wanting to lose weight, even if it's for health reasons. Those people are trash and fall on the same level as antivax people IMO.
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, until you start spewing harmful bullshit and then I will judge you as much as I want.
I’m also a comfort eater. Huge sweet tooth, and almost 0 self-control when the hunger kicks in. My diet fix was making sure I only buy and order what I should eat, because I will clean my plate. I’ve accepted that, and making sure there’s only the appropriate amount of food in front of me has worked wonders. Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I definitely agree with you about the fat acceptance movement. I have to leave those conversations before I start saying things I regret. Again, I try really hard to manage my bias.
I have a weight problem and I told my wife, who berates me for it, that if there is food I shouldn’t eat in the house, then I will eat it. It’s that simple. I’ll eat a lot of what’s available.
I’ve lost 30 lbs before with intermittent fasting and taking calories. I know what works for me.
Anyways, she insists that I’m being unreasonable and that I should eat in moderation. She buys ice cream and then will eat a spoonful every 30 days.
I’ve been very lucky in that my wife has been very supportive and understanding, but I’m the same way. My rule is that I’m not allowed to shop hungry, because I’ll buy shit I don’t need to eat, and then I’ll eat it because it’s there.
In general avoiding situations when you only rely on your willpower gives much better results than fighting yourself. When I think I should loose weight I only buy boring ingredients that require preparation to be tempting in any way. If I get strong cravings I just eat some random vegetable and try to better plan mealtimes next day. It’s much harder when living with uncooperative partner or parents that like always having snacks in their kitchen. We’re literally built to eat food whenever it’s available.
This happened with my ex - the kids and I, we are all built more lean and spare, but ex hung on to weight. So I cooked or he did, we all ate the same food but somehow he got fat, we stayed skinny.
Well I am like your wife, low tolerance for sweet stuff - usually when I want something sweet I want to taste it, not really eat it, if that makes sense. So yes, a big spoonful of ice cream, one twix candy & save the other one for next week. Emergency chocolate bar at work lasts a month.
Ex was the other extreme, could binge sweet foods. So even with the metabolic advantage of being a couple inches taller and male, his natural intake kept him on the heavy side.
Intermittent fasting is such a good way to maintain weight, but not if you can eat a bag of candy in your eating window!
Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I think that’s the best way to go about it, eating like a monk literally all the time is much harder than eating well the majority of the time, at least for me lol.
The guilt is an enemy as well, I’m the type to go “well, I’ve broken my diet strike, might as well eat a sundae” in a sort of self hate spiral that makes no sense. If I allow myself to indulge in expected moments I feel much better. Like, literally everyone around the table at christmas goes like, “I ate way too much”, I shouldn’t feel bad for feeling the same haha
I was never huge, though 212 at 5’9" is overweight and approaching the technical definition of obesity. Due to some undesirable side effects of that weight (medical), I’ve been working to lighten up and am already down 24 lbs in 3 months, with a target of 170. It’s tough, and even painful at times, but it really is as simple as making sure calories in is less than calories out. For the doubters, I recommend just starting with meticulous tracking of activity and food consumption without even making any changes. It gets very obvious very quickly what’s happening, which makes it easier to start making changes.
100 pounds lost is amazing. What did you find that worked for you and how long did it take?
My biggest issue with exercise was monotony, so a family member recommended that I try CrossFit. Started going 5 days a week and never looked back. I’m not culty about it, but I love it. Having a different workout every day keeps things from getting boring.
I was also eating like absolute garbage. Red meat, carbs, and sweets galore. No greens. Lots of bad snack food. The only thing I had going for me was that I’d already cut out all sugar drinks besides alcohol. So I just decided to cut alcohol entirely, as well as introduce healthier carbs (like whole grains) and more greens/fiber. Lots of salads. I still do red meat, but it’s more infrequent, and I gravitate more towards poultry and fish.
I didn’t count calories in the beginning because I just wanted to focus on the two big changes, exercise and diet modification. Once I had those down, I was losing so fast I never bother counting, and I still don’t. I’m currently working on strength, especially in Olympic lifts, so I count my macros (protein, carbs, fat) instead.
My advice to anyone that asks is to find whatever consistent exercise you can do. If that’s CrossFit, great! If not, that’s fine, too! Just find literally anything you can power through consistently and do it. And consistency is the key. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t feel like working out, but I maintain the attitude that “moving is better than not moving”, so I still go, and every single time, I end up glad that I went. People are always like “Ah, man, exercise is hard.” Nah, dog. Exercise isn’t easy, sure, but it’s the consistency that’s hard.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately and your comment is interesting. Your first sentence is definitely phrased in a more controversial way than the rest of your comment, but I can’t help seeing it as very similar to “Being depressed is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against depressed people.” Is that an unfair comparison?
I know that treating fatness/obesity as a disease is kinda controversial but I feel like folks give people dealing with mental health a lot more grace than people dealing with health issues related to being fat. I’ve also heard that for some people they can be perfectly healthy at a higher weight (though this is clearly not the case for many fat people who are seeing health impacts). I guess I’m assuming that a lot of fat people would potentially like to be less so, but can’t (for any number of reasons) quite get there. This seems really similar for me to people dealing with depression, anxiety, etc who want to change things but keep falling back into the problem.
I guess my question is do you have bias against people who can’t escape other bad cycles like mental health or even stuff like alcoholism? Or is it more just that you think it’s fair to judge people without the discipline/willpower to get out of a state they didn’t want to be in, like you did.
This is a fair question. I guess maybe my statement could’ve been less broad. If just “being fat” is the primary problem, that’s what I take issue with. If the problem is deeper, and being fat is a secondary issue (like a result of depression, hypothyroidism, or some other mental/physical ailment), then that’s a different situation. My stance in that case is that the person should be actively trying to treat the primary problem. I know depression almost never just goes away. Sometimes it even sticks around with therapy and medicine, and that sucks hard. But at least they’re trying.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your personal take on the whole thing. As someone who has never been fat, I’m trying to figure out what’s the whole deal with the various movements around it. I feel it’s gonna become a much bigger cultural discussion in the next decade. And congrats on getting down to a happier weight for you! Setting and reaching goals is definitely something to be celebrated.
This is an old thread, but taking your first comment into account, doesn’t this make them guilty until proven innocent in your eyes? If your first thought is “what a fat lazy fuck” without knowing their story? That seems unnecessarily judgmental, and I can’t help but wonder if it comes from a place of insecurity, maybe left over from your own history with weight
Unpopular opinion follow-up: You should be using proper units of measurement.
Don’t get me wrong. I can perfectly infer from the story what you’re saying. But 150 or 250 lbs just doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does the height or what people write in the other comments.
“Proper units of measurement”? Come on man, don’t be a pretentious ass. We all know metric is better, but don’t shame the man (or woman idk) for using the system of measurement they’re most familiar with!
Hehe. I hope I phrased it nicely enough for them to understand i wasn’t yelling at them. I think it’s mildly ignorant to comment on the internet and not to translate it into proper units. They even edited the comment and it made me ashamed a bit. This is not the job of one individual.
What I was really trying to do is shaming you, the people of Myanmar, Lyberia and the US. And your culture. For living in the 21st century and not even adopting the proper system that would make lots of things easier for you. And for being ignorant towards all the people on the internet who are not offended by progress. (or at least their ancestors hadn’t been…)
Ahem. Didn’t several spaceship explode so far? Planes crashed… People died. And I think many US scientists have already switched to metric and many engineers have not. I bet they currently waste large sums of money for doing double the work when working together. Combined the sum of not switching is already a ludicrous amount of billions and billions. And the world isn’t getting less globalised. So true. It costs money to switch. And it’s probably yet another man’s pocket that money comes from. But the sooner you do it, the more money it’ll save you and everybody in the long run.
Edit: And after a while even your engineers might thank you for the easier calculations. And it’s not that a two-by-four has two by four inches anyways.
Isn’t tragedy of the commons when you share something and it for example gets overused and destroyed in the process? Tragic referring to the part where everyone is trying to get the max out of it for them individually and causing the demise?
This is something else. And also it IS in everybody’s best interest. I’d assume it’s not the most fun activity to learn your feet in a mile, yards… And translating recipes is just madness. I imagine you need all sorts of little helpers, the measuring cups, smear butter everywhere to measure it by volume… and need to whip out a calculator if someone stays for dinner. I think it costs money and people are lazy and fail to see the bigger picture. Because they haven’t tried thinking about this for 5 minutes and are already complaining. It’s not that they wouldn’t also benefit.
Disclaimer: I’m also not perfect and sometimes fail to see some bigger picture.
But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).
So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.
It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.
Hmm I think that for a lot of people, it wasn’t a choice to get fat. I know a lot of kids who are already obese and they aren’t even in their teens.
However, I do think it’s a choice once you’ve realized it and have the ability to actually do something about it.
Kinda related but unrelated: it irks me when someone comments how easy it is for me to be skinny, bc it isn’t. As a previously underweight person, I think gaining and losing weight are just as hard. I had to control my diet, work out, and have a lot of self control to not lose the habits I was building. I folded and stagnated a lot, and yeah it was demotivating but I still had to make a choice to keep going.
Well, anything that can consistently be changed with hard work is ultimately a choice in the same way. Not everyone can deal with the amount of effort needed to lose weight. When you have accumulated awful habits, you need a lot of both time and willpower to change them.
But that doesn’t mean go out and harass fat people. Trust me we fucking know. You can’t lose weight instantly. Some of us may actually be working on it.
Also fat people have the right to be happy. People hating on “happy at any size” is just being assholes for the sake of it.
I agree completely. What makes me irrationally angry is when people say stuff like it’s there’s no correlation between being fat and being unhealthy. Like if I went to work drunk or started smoking cigarettes or doing weed, people find it acceptable to be concerned and try and help me be more healthy but you can’t mention it at all if I’m stuffing myself with unhealthy crap.
I agree with you. I don’t go out of my way to hurt big people and I don’t outwardly do so on ourpose. I just have to catch my initial bias and push it aside first, which I’m working on, I know it’s a me thing, for sure.
I agree “happy at any size” can be an acceptable attitude, for sure, but I disagree with “healthy at any size”. Obesity puts stress on organs and body parts, simply just because of the extra weight, even if everything else is fine.
Oh I’ve actually been told by fat people that there’s no way that I actually enjoy working out and that I’m forcing myself to go to the gym while not enjoying it.
Guess it’s weird I like improving my physique and enjoying seeing how I can reach new goals ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I used to agree with you and still do in a way since I have quite negative attitude towards fat people. However I now realize that while calories in - calories out applies to everyone we’re still different especially in the way we experience hunger.
I’m thin and fit myself but I eat like shit. What differentiates me from fat people however is that I only eat about 3000kcal of shit and then I’m full and it may take quite a while before I eat again but I also go to gym and mountain biking and stuff so I use all the calories too instead of storing them as fat. I also sometimes simply just skip dinner altogether because I don’t feel like eating. I’m just lucky that I can still function just fine even with an empty stomach and I don’t experience aggressive sense of hunger like some other people do. Also I hate cooking and eating. Takes too much time.
My theory for why this is is that my body is just better at switching from carbonhydrates to burning fat (converting it into glucose) and thus I don’t experience the drop in blood sugar levels the way some other people do to whom it takes a while for this process to kick in so they crash hard after all the carbs are used up.
After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they’ve started with. Which isn’t even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you’ve been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.
To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it’s one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.
I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it’s missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to “just go out more” or an anxious person to “just stop breathing so fast” or an overweight person to “just eat less and move more”, but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you’ll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it’s an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.
Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.
I would’ve thought you would’ve learned kindness out of that ordeal. Didn’t people make fun of you? How’d it feel, even if you knew they were right? It’s just rude and inappropriate. There’s no need. eve
But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.
Unfortunately if this is the only route to losing weight that is out of reach for many, many people who are already getting totally fucked by the system and struggling to get by.
There are a lot of people with eating disorders that result in them being overweight. Some people who have been neglected and abused as children can turn to food as their only source of comfort. If you have not been safe as a child, you will likely not have a basic sense of safety as an adult. If no-one has been kind to you and took care of you, you will likely not know how to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.
So, you use food to feel safe and to get a sense of comfort. You use it to numb the feelings, to feel something nice. Because you do not have the resources to cope with the world that others that were loved as children do have, you do not know how to deal with it another way. And you survive and fight to make something of your life after all that has happened to you.
And then you get overweight. And society will tell you that it is your own fault. That you should show more restraint. That you just should eat less. That you lack willpower. That you are repulsive. That you are inferior to people who are not overweight. That you are unlovable. Basically, that you are everything that they used to tell you that you were when you were a child.
And you try to lose the weight, but you feel awful. You feel unsafe. You have nothing else that gives you a nice feeling. People will compliment you and be nicer to you and say that you look better. But you are constantly stressed. You think about food day and night, constantly, until you break. And you eat and you gain the weight back, and more. And you will feel like a failure, and you will feel unlovable and repulsive. And you do not know how to deal with these feelings in any other way than by eating.
And so, the stigma around being overweight actually makes it more difficult to love yourself and to be kind to yourself. The focus on food and the idea that everything will be okay if you just lose the weight will make you put all your effort into weight loss, instead of solving the real problem. Namely, that you need to process trauma and find other ways of coping with feelings and the world.
I think this is what is happening to a lot of people who are overweight. And they might not even be aware of it. They might think it is just about food, because that is what everyone is telling them. That they should just work harder at losing weight. That they just should have more willpower.
But I think that many people who are overweight do not lack willpower at all. They have survived horrible things. They did not get basic life skill lessons that others did. They did not grow up with a sense of safety and feeling good about themselves. But they survived. And they try to make something of their lifes. And that takes a lot of willpower. And for them to get better and to lead a more happy life, they need help with learning new ways to cope, they need their strength to be acknowledged, they need to be accepted, and, above all, they need to be loved.
I try to be nice to everyone as none of us are perfect and fat is just a more easy to see imperfection, right?
But as far as it being mostly lifestyle choice, I agree. I am older. When I was in school there was ONE fat girl, Tanya, and a few “husky” boys. The rest of us were thin.
Do I think Tanya chose to be fat? No way. I think she had some medical issue that made her body hold on to all that fat. But I think the natural incidence of that sort of issue cannot have increased, in one or two generations, from that 1/400 to 1/3. It’s not possible.
Being overweight is an overblown focus on people’s health. Most mildly overweight people lead a normal life. There are more important focuses that also impact weight gain without all the shame.
I’m 265 and 5’9", and I spent my whole life feeling like this was my fault. I’ve changed my diet, I’ve tried exercising, but I was always met with extreme difficulty. I thought exercise was supposed to be difficult and I was just a big baby. People would say, you just have to build up stamina. It gets easier. But it never did. It would get to the point where I’d be crying and pushing myself and still not accomplishing as much exercise as even an average unfit person could. I’d walk a few miles every day and never build stamina, never feel better, never lose weight.
I just found out I have an issue with my pituitary gland, likely a tumor (going for a scan). I just had the tests to confirm the issue is in my pituitary (the tests were miserable). I’m actually not producing certain hormones, so it turns out I’m incapable of building muscle. That’s why I can’t build stamina or convert my fat into muscle. I’ve been told this was “almost certainly” my issue for 2 months, (after my mom, aunts, and cousins were all diagnosed; we likely share a genetic defect causing pituitary tumors) and I’ve had the confirmed test results for over 2 weeks. It’s really hard to shift my perspective away from “this is my fault, I just need to try harder.” I expect to battle with health insurance a couple weeks to months before getting my hormone replacement. My mom only took 2 weeks (averages 2 months), so fingers crossed.
I’ve always thought more people were overweight for medical reasons than assumed by the general population, I just didn’t think I was one of them. I see a lot of moms like me hustling after their toddlers, eating well, trying their best, and still being overweight. I wonder if it has something to do with all the “endocrine disruptors” I’m always hearing about. I definitely think some people are overweight “by choice” (or by a mental disorder rather than a physical one), and I have major problems with “fat positivity” (I believe in body neutrality), but I think it’s more people having a medical problem than you’d expect. Same with my wife and child who both eat like horses but have BMIs of 13. It’s not like they’re not trying to gain weight.
We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.
That sounds like a solution that should make everyone happy. However, the crowd arguing against more pronouns would also argue against this, just because they’re impossible to appease.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the (mostly) political right that seems all these new pronouns as stupid would also ironically be against giving up on their own gender specific pronoun for a gender neutral one.
I’ll go one further: I get (and respect) the utility of they/them pronouns for a singular entity, but it IS clunky and confusing. English is ever evolving but when I hear a “they” it is still very much more abstract and plural than a more specific he or she.
Whatever: it’s my shit and I’ll gladly deal with a nanosecond of confusion and adjust if it allows people to maintain their dignity. Point is, by insisting that there’s nothing confusing about they/them in reference to a single entity feels disingenuous. I know moderate people who are otherwise live and let live as well as receptive to basic human dignity who are turned off by the confusing abstraction, switching tenses, etc.
They/them isn’t the elegant, seamless drop in that people say it is and it hurts the messaging. I get that being rigid and forceful is necessary with the rampant transphobia and “i’m just asking (bad faith) questions” going on, but I still fuck up semantics and tenses like whoa
I don’t think they/them is the ideal word to replace he/she with either. It probably needs to be a whole new word. They/them exists in my language too and it’s used when you’re talking about multiple people. It’s confusing to say “they did something” when you’re speaking of a single person.
This argument has never made sense simply because of the fact that singular they/them has been in use for literally centuries. It’s even reasonable to say it’s always been in use considering singular they/them was in use in the 14th century and modern English formed around 14-17th. I can guarantee you have never batted an eye when you heard something like “someone called but they didn’t leave a message”.
There are only two differences with recent usage: people are less likely to assume genders so use they/them more freely; and people identifying specifically as they/them. The words themselves haven’t really changed, they’re just more common now. Opposition to singular they/them is almost entirely political.
Their argument has a lot to do with people not establishing context upfront unlike your example with “someone called”. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a conversation with someone talking about a non-binary person, only to realize five minutes in they weren’t talking about a group of people. It’s super jarring when it happens.
True, but singular they is undeniably clunky. Unfortunately it’s the best we have, so we will have to get used to it. Opposition to the natural evolution of language has never worked.
It’s not people using the neutral that bothers me, it’s the fact that the neutral is both singular and plural while the non neutrals are only singular/plural.
and the plural part also alters the entire sentence structure to plural.
“He is over there” - Singular and easy to understand
“They is over there” - Just sounds wrong.
“They are over there” - Both singular and plural. Is it a person of unspecified nature or multiple people of mixed ones?
English could use a popularization of a strictly singular neutral that doesn’t carry implications of being an object rather than a being (“It is over there”)
I feel the same but with genders. To be clear if anyone identifies to a specific gender, I’ll respect that. However I don’t see why genders are necessary. We are all unique human beings and there’s no need to label everyone to a specific gender.
I think a little bit it’s just that people typically like labels. They want to fit neatly into their little labeled box and the more labels they have, the more unique and/or complete they feel.
I really rejected labels as a teen, I hated the idea of it. Now I realize they can be useful for some things, and you know, if my trans brother feels better because his label is now male, that’s fine it doesn’t hurt me any to call him what makes him feel good.
the more labels they have, the more unique and/or complete they feel.
That sounds completely bonkers to me but you might be right.
if my trans brother feels better because his label is now male, that’s fine
No, of course if you don’t like the body you have and you want to change your “gender-defining” features, you should. It’s a bit like changing your haircut - although more impactful. You didn’t like your looks/body before, so you changed it and now you feel better so that’s perfect!
Before I learned about the LGBTQ community, I thought of gender as something you were born with and that described your body type: masculine or feminine. Aside from that, I don’t and never believed that it defines what kind of person you are, it only defines a part of your looks.
Now with the community there are people who describe themselves as non-binary or agender and again, I’ll totally respect that. However when I tried to think about what my gender really was, I started to realize that the whole concept of gender didn’t really make sense to me. What does it really mean to be non-binary? Heck, what does it even mean to be male or female? If it’s not just your body-type then what is it? Why do we need it? Isn’t it easier to not assign any genders at all? Just be who you want to be and love who you want to love!
If it’s not just your body-type then what is it? Why do we need it? Isn’t it easier to not assign any genders at all? Just be who you want to be and love who you want to love!
That would be lovely if they weren’t a lot of heavily armed persons willing to kill you or make you suffer if you act that way.
We should remove the gender information from ID and other documents unrelated to the gender
(Maybe kept the XX or XY mark on medical papers though, may be useful to avoid death from medical poisoning, but even your gender and sexual preferences have nothing to do here, so no gender mark neither)
However I don’t see why genders are necessary. We are all unique human beings and there’s no need to label everyone to a specific gender.
And if many people (specially, even if not exclusively, in a certain country whose name I’ll avoid mentioning) didn’t have as their favorite passtime “kill the freak”, where “freak” is anyone not belonging to their narrow definition of acceptability, difference would truly be unremarkable. However, reality doesn’t seem to be working well for those folks, and they need a way to identify each other to provide community and to feel less alone and, maybe, to defend each other.
And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.
My language is the exact opposite, everything is gendered in a binary way, and there’s no way to talk in a neutral or non-binary way, at least not in a super awkward way.
Gonna need tons of capitals controls to prevent money from leaving, rich people are good at moving. To what end? So the federal government gets even more money to spend on subsidies, police riot gear & highways. They’d turn the Pentagon into an octagon before they’d meaningfully help their citizens.
I definitely think 50%, like they supposedly do in China. No exceptions. You try to evade it, you go to jail for six months, enjoy. I think that’s what happened to Jack Ma.
Anything would be alright with me, I’m in Australia and so I’m definitely warped with my international tax views. Probably why i’m at the extreme end of the scale
If other nations can have billionaires and we can’t, and our country is vast and rich, we will be at a disadvantage.
The WANT of money is corrupting itself. Actually having the money itself is not needed. People who want money will destroy your little system, and throw your country into chaos, ruination and poverty, united by a conspiracy of common interests.
I would rather just regulate what needs regulating, within reason, with a gentle hand, and only a strong hand with the worst of violations. For the record, I would be much harsher than the us has tended to be when it comes to pollution, etc.
Also countries should tax companies on money that goes out of the country based off of their overall profit. So if Google makes 10% profit over costs the. We charge them 30% tax on the money they funneled out of Australia. Done.
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
Haha, I guess many dog owners just can’t see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional “love”. I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.
Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. “Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!” (adding this here just to test :D )
I think people are stupid about pets in general, just like they’re stupid about everything else. There are plenty of people who could make a good home for almost any animal, even a pitbull. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to pet ownership.
I agree with you about how awful it is to use these dogs as fashion accessories and put them in crates. I also think it’s because a lot of people desire the “lopsided love”. It definitely feeds their egos and a lot of them are narcissists, don’t know any better because they’re stupid or both.
Animals should only be in cages temporarily for the right reasons. I hate when people claim that their dogs love their cages. They don’t love them. They are just trained and conditioned to tolerate them. Most dogs do want to please their owners and it’s very convenient for these assholes to believe their dogs love being in their cages for hours on end.
I do agree that the caging trend is fucking awful. I have friends who leave their two large dogs caged for 8 hours a day and it crushes me. These are both well behaved dogs who wouldn’t make a mess out of a cage so I really just don’t get the point, other than it’s millennial meta to do cage training.
The “cage” thing is weird, because it seems like it is used by the worst/laziest dog owners, and by good dog owners / trainers (with very different reasoning). The average dog owner seems to not even use “cages” much.
Anyway, crate training is very much worth it, but it takes a significant effort
I would simplify taxes as being the cost of being part of society and therefore the tax money should be put back into that society to benefit the people being part of it. Healthcare, education, maintenance of public roads/buildings/parks/…
I think of taxes the same way. I just meant that not everyone would agree on what what parts of society the government is responsible to fund. My primary thought was healthcare in the US because it feels like half the country is against that.
Yeah I never understood that ( I’m from Scandinavia or as your conservatives describe it - that socialist hellhole ). I recall seeing a study some years ago that the US spends many billions a year more on healthcare than it would with universal healthcare.
So what if my taxes pay for the treatment of someone’s cancer? It goes the opposite way too, healthcare that I need is being paid for as well and nearly everyone needs some sort of hospital or emergency care at least once in their life - regular doc appointments likely once or twice a year. Over here, I make an appointment and walk out without paying or even seeing the bill.
That sounds so much better to me than the shit we have here. I always get so frustrated to hear people argue against it when the US is like the last fully developed country that doesn’t have some form of single payer healthcare. Like, look around. There are plenty of examples of it working, but half the country just doesn’t seem to get it.
I’ve had a conversation with someone on Reddit about this some years back.
They basically explained that people are being told that healthcare/social security is socialism and they’re being told that socialism is just communism under a different name and therefore is bad.
Maybe also unpopular, but my standpoint on taxes is: The government is the one giving out the money in the first place. Every dollar comes from the Fed (exception some virtual money) like the monopoly bank just gives out money in the first place.
The point of taxes is to keep the economy working fairly. Like putting high taxes on something to discourage bad behavior, and the other way around. Also, it’s necessary to keep capitalism from evolving into feudalism, as money likes to accumulate on a few rich ones.
The second thought is what the government should with the money. Of course, they should do great and needed investments. Often times, this is not the case, but the root problems here are not taxes themselves. There is no alternative universe where the government is spending all money perfectly.
The real problem is the rich being able to evade taxes, and they frame taxes as something unfair. Additionally, not rich people pay far too much in taxes.
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.
It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
It is very hard to have rational disccussion when people disagree on the basic observable facts, ignore the “rules” of debate, and are struggling with critical thinking. You can meet difficult people on all the political spectrum, but certain idealogy attract more difficult people, and certain stuff mainstream conservatives believe right now has absolutely no basis in reality.
Yeah except for the fact that they are causing very real damage to POC and LGBTQ people. So let’s be very clear here. Conservatives are not intentionally hateful and can be nice and kind if you are a straight white Christian. If you aren’t in the in group though they can and will turn on you even if they tolerate you. Because conservative ideology is one fundamentally founded on hate and oppression.
I have had plenty of conversations with people irl. Most of the them with people who are to the right of me on the political spectrum. What I found in the conversations that were fruitful, was that our disagreement on larger issues, such as economics or personal freedoms, tended to stem from disagreements on smaller issues. To paraphrase my friend, “We are using the same words, but they all mean different things.” It seems to me that there are some elementary differences between progressives and conservatives that change how we rationalize the larger issues. That’s how the two groups can, based on the same information, come to two different conclusions.
That being said though, I think Fox News and other conservative news channels have created information silos. Not everyone who is conservative has necessarily had access to the same body of facts and evidence that progressives have. I think a good portion of people who are stuck in those silos would change their views if they had a more balanced news diet.
You’re not outright wrong, but it’s really hard to have the rational discussion skills to cut through decades of propaganda. For the many deep in the right-ring bubble, brainwashing is a better term than mere propaganda.
I can agree with that. I’ve been part of a cult before (was born into it) and I can recognize a lot of what I went through there in far right people. I guess I’m just a little sensitive to people calling these people idiots and hateful people due to seeing myself in them. Like, to me, they’re (usually) just good people being manipulated into thinking the awful things they say and do are good, and they need a rational and caring person to pull them slowly out of it, the same way I did.
Obviously, it takes more than just talking usually to pull somebody out of a cult, but I think it’s still a big part of it. They’ve been fooled into thinking that things that are rational aren’t, and unless they’re confronted with the actual truth and the facts to back them up, they’re not going to even start to question their beliefs.
I’m also not suggesting that every person needs to debate every republican about every issue they bring up. If you can’t or even just don’t want to debate somebody, you don’t have any obligation to, but I don’t think insulting them over it is almost ever the right response.
There’s also the angle of how every cult teaches you that you’re going to be persecuted for your beliefs, and brainwashes you into thinking that should reaffirm you that you must be correct. That is one major reason I think labeling all conservatives as irrational and hopeless is dangerous. When somebody who’s been taught that the world is going to hate them for being “right” finds that the world does not, in fact, hate them, but instead just displays genuine concern, that’s when you fully start to question everything.
I don’t think every right winger is going to fling left when presented with this view. In fact, I think the vast majority won’t, but it will make them a little more understanding, and a little more understanding over the course of many years and generations adds up.
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
Isn’t there Thorium reactors or something that should be some of the safest. And the waste can’t be turned to nuclear weapons. So it probably won’t be used :(
If you take all operational nuclear reactors safety records into account from all countries in the world, including all meltdowns and near meltdown disasters, it’s still by far safer and has resulted in less deaths and long term illness than any fossil fuel, on every single metric.
True that newer style reactors are far safer, but that’s the point. If we had started to transition in the 70’s into nuclear power, we would have made a massive dent in climate change and set the stage to transition into full clean renewable energy sources and along the way improved regulations and engineering standards for existing nuclear plants.
Yes, BUT the risk isn’t distributed like the rest. One Reactor could displace tens of millions of people, disrupt infrastructure, and cause devastating impact to the US economy. That’s a lot of risk based on it’s proximity. If they could build them in the middle of nowhere out west that could all be mitigated.
I feel this would have been spot on, in the nineties.
Right now the problems plaguing nuclear are economic. There is no guarantee you can build and exploit a plant and get to break even before either it becomes irrelevant, or you fall victim to regulatory jostling.
Nuclear was a missed opportunity, but the window is closing fast and it will probably remain a missed opportunity forever.
Nuclear power plants generate waste very slowly—slowly enough that we won’t be using fission any more by the time it becomes a serious problem. Fusion ignition was achieved recently, so it’s only a matter of time.
However, nuclear power plants are also extremely expensive to build, which seriously limits their practical usefulness.
We have blown the concept of ownership way out of proportion. No one should be able to own things they have absolutely no connection to, like investment firms owning companies they don’t work for, houses they don’t live in or land they’ve never been to.
You don’t think investment firms don’t do work for the companies they invest in? While some might strip the business for parts many actually invest in something because they see the potential for growth and push the board to make those investments.
Not every investor is looking to gut the company they invested in.
I think you can invest in things, but that shouldn’t give you any legal ownership rights.
I also think it should not give you any profits, just the ability to protect your assets from losing value over time (inflation, decay, wealth tax, …). This way people could either start something themselves and make a profit, or invest it somewhere else to try to preserve the value. What they couldn’t do is invest and profit from other people’s work.
I know this is pretty radical and would definitely need many changes to the way we do things right now, but I strongly believe that decisionmaking and profits should be reserved for the people actively involved in something. If you want to work with companies you don’t run then get payed as an advisor or associate, because that is the work you would be doing.
I like this idea, I had never thought about it this way. But it would be hard to implement, what about owning things that does not physically exist? (Like a company)
Yea it would be a pretty radical change, requiring adjustments in many areas. But I do think it’s necessary, because people not being personally invested in the things they own (just financially) and profiting from other people’s work is imo the big problem with our society right now.
Companies would work the same way. You can own it (make decisions and get profits) as long as you work there. Ofc you can work for multiple companies, but with reasonably restrictions (e.g. 8 companies if you work 40h/week and 5h/week/company). I also think companies should not be able to own other companies, because companies cannot be “personally” involved in anything, only people can.
I think it depends on the environment you’re in. In my social circle, among family, friends, and coworkers, almost all of them believe that socialism is a poverty cult and a terrible idea that will lead to more human suffering, so when I express any socialist opinion, it will be unpopular in my environment. Obviously here on Lemmy, it’s the opposite and socialism is popular here.
I mean, yeah, politics, religion and other ideology-driven subjects are more contentious, but apart from these very divisive subjects, there isn’t much anyone can be a fan of that is unpopular.
What about food? If you go to Italy and declare that your favourite pizza topping is pineapple, I assure you it will not be received well. If you put chorizo on paella, you would be scorned in Spain… Go to an American police station and declare that doughnuts suck, and you might get shot.
Any topic that people are passionate about, and you are going to see plenty of arguments and see some unpopular opinion pop up.
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