EldritchFemininity

This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.

Since you have the help of a therapist, you should use them as a resource to help formulate any plans and put them into motion. Therapists aren’t just there to talk to, they’re good for sound boarding ideas like this off of because they have access to resources that other people might not necessarily have. A therapist’s word or signature can get you access to medical care or services that would otherwise be more difficult to get, and they know the ins and outs of systems like social security or aid programs. Their job is to help you, and by telling them straight up that you need help getting a plan together to get out of your living situation they can focus on that.

In the short term, I would recommend putting together a “bug out” bag that you can stash somewhere safe in case you need to leave quickly. Ideally, you should have copies of important documents such as social security cards and stuff that you might not be able to go back for later, but it should at least be just enough stuff to get you by for a couple of days if you need to drop everything and leave. Stuff like a change of clothes, a water bottle, and some cash.

I literally had this happen with my desktop last night, and it’s entirely down to Windows actively choosing to go into sleep mode or not. No activity on the computer, click on sleep, the monitors go off and I started to walk away except I noticed that my keyboard and mouse were still on (the first things to turn off when Windows goes to sleep for me) and the fans were still running. Wiggled the mouse and it had only turned the monitors off. I tried it 2 or 3 more times and Windows kept doing the same thing - putting the monitors to sleep and nothing else. I eventually just straight up shut it down with the power button.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

My problem is that I love the state/region I live in, but large swathes of the rest of the country are a risk to my life and my age, skills, and minority status don’t make me appealing from an immigration standpoint, let alone that many places have just as much of an issue with people like me as the Republicans do.

The thing is that it would take an extremist left wing government to bring it back to some level of normality. FDR was a Democratic Socialist (officially), and the New Deal was one of the best improvements for the country we’ve ever had (minus all the blatant racism and destruction of minority communities that the highway projects caused). It was American socialists and anarchists who fought a bloody struggle that won the world the 40 hour work week and weekends. And even that was merely considered a stepping stone on the path to a 20 hour work week. The Overton Window has been pushed so far to the right that we’ve forgotten what it truly looks like to have 2 sides in the government.

Isn’t cough medicine more cost effective per alcohol percentage? That’s what I remember the alcoholics drinking when I was younger.

“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

AI run on statistical probability. The more options there are in something, the harder it is to get right. A clock face becomes hard because practically the entire clock changes from moment to moment, and logos on shirts are similar in that they’re largely all in the same place but vary dramatically in shape to be as distinct from each other as possible, which is basically the exact opposite of what an AI wants. When your whole thing is basically averaging stuff out on a probability curve that’s weighted towards specific keywords, having massive variation in your data points is bad.

Many years ago, I worked at a fish market and one of the guys who sold us fish during the summer won a big fishing tournament one year where he got a brand new truck and a bunch of money. When they asked him what he was going to do with the money, he said, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”

Approach Moshe Safdie’s company about building Habitat 2027, 60 years after the scaled down compromise was built:

Habitat 67

I don’t either, I think it’s super weird and creepy, but most people that I’ve talked to about it have never even thought about it before, and the people around my parents’ age consider it “patriotic.”

This makes sense as I was in school before 2010, so my experience would’ve been from before more schools started adopting them. And my dad would’ve probably been in school in the 50s, so when he was wearing a school uniform with a tie everyday, it was absolutely a rich private school thing.

Counterpoint: Americans would say the same - “I suppose it probably seems strange to an outsider but in a country where it’s the norm for every school, it didn’t feel like that to me at all.” - about pledging their undying loyalty every morning to the flag on the wall of every single classroom starting at the age of 6.

Not to say that it’s the same thing at all, indoctrination on that scale is completely different from a freaking school uniform, but the base is the same - it doesn’t seem weird because it’s what you were told was normal.

As an adult, I can see some good arguments for uniforms in this thread, but as a kid, I stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance in middle school and swore that nobody could make me wear a tie like my dad had to for school. One of the big things that bothered me about school dress codes as I got older was the inherent misogyny on display. Some rules from my high school dress code, for example:

During Spring/Summer, boys may wear t-shirts and shorts. Girls must wear pants or skirts. Skirts must be below the knee. Girls are allowed to wear t-shirts, but only if the sleeves are at least 4 inches long and must be a unisex crew neck shirt. Shirts with a v neck or that show the collarbone are too revealing and are not allowed.

Also in the US is the issue that school uniforms are universally a private school thing, and so create a divide of elitism as a clear signal of those whose parents are wealthy enough to send their kids to a private school vs kids who go to public schools. Those divides start at home, though, and I don’t know how much a school uniform does to deprogram that kind of rhetoric from your parents and their friends.

If I’m working, I don’t have the energy to do more than a toasted bagel with cream cheese. On the weekend, especially if I manage to sleep in, I might do something like an omelette or egg sandwich of some kind. If I have the time, I might go big and break out a can of corned beef hash, cook that up and poach an egg in the middle of it, then have that with some toast.

If it was easier to get and keep fruit without it spoiling before I can eat it, I’d probably throw in a mandarin orange or something as an easy to eat side to my usual bagel, but American supermarkets make it hard to buy small batches of food more frequently rather than making a trip twice a month to stock up on groceries.

I think a lot of Americans simply are too sleep deprived to either have the time or energy to ingest anything other than caffeine in the morning.

If you wanna try something different but really good, a lot of breakfast places near me have a variant of Eggs Benedict usually called something like Irish Eggs Benedict, which replaces the ham with corn beef hash. Add a side of home fries, and you’ve got something that’ll really stick to your ribs and keep you full and happy for half the day.

I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.

Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.

Again, not what they were talking about.

Fly a plane. Get in the sights of a Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe.

Don’t understand potential energy, you’re in a tight spot.

You do you lol