Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

I worked midnight to 8am as a security supervisor at a hospital. It was nice in some ways and awful in other ways. Honestly, all the ways it was awful occurred outside of the actual shift itself. It was harder to hang out with friends, I was always tired, I had to try to get tired and sleep while it was sunny out (blackout curtains and sunglasses on the drive home ftw), and the world was waking up while I was going to bed. It was hard on my relationship with my wife.

The shift itself was pretty great actually. The hospital was quieter at night. As a supervisor, I did have some issues with my guards falling asleep at desks or trying to hide and take naps. Two people got fired over it. But most of them were pretty good. One guy fell asleep while driving the patrol vehicle and crashed it into a gate. That was embarrassing for everyone and he ultimately lost his job (he didn’t admit to falling asleep, but we all suspected it - he was working two jobs and was perpetually tired). The best thing about the job was sneaking up onto the roof early in the morning on my patrols and watching the sun rise.

I think a more serious and probable question is what would happen if your doctor had a heart attack during surgery. Doesn’t take a degree from Hollywood Upstairs Medical School for that to happen!

LENNY!!!

What purpose does throwing someone in prison for ten years do though for something like forgery? Would it not be better if they were forced to do community service and lost access to the tools that led to them committing forgery? Why pay money to remove someone from society for a decade? Is it to teach any other potential forgerers a lesson? Is it to teach the forgerer themself a lesson? Is that really a lesson that needs to be worth a decade in a cell to learn? The world’s justice systems have generally erred too much on the side of retribution instead of rehabilitation. It’s especially sinister when you consider how much our capitalist systems place more value on things like capital over people’s lives and wellbeings. To be clear, I consider myself to be a capitalist, but a social democrat that believes in heavy regulations on our capitalist systems. I think our retributive, excessively pro-business justice system is a clear example of what happens when you let capitalism go unfettered and bleed into every aspect of our lives. Forgery is not violent. Most of the time it is not actively dangerous. Why don’t we come up with more creative and proactive ways of punishing people that would benefit people at large rather than ruin the criminal’s entire life? Even in a case where I am not on the criminal’s side I find myself pretty appalled that ten years could even possibly be on the table in a forgery case.

Seriously. Why the fuck is it even a possibility for ten years of prison over something like this? It’s crazy to me that a nonviolent crime could be punished so severely. I mean, why do we have prison? Is it to remove dangerous people from society? That’s certainly how I think it should be, but these sorts of punishments really show that it’s all about sating the bloodlust of victims.

To me, the larger issue for the world outside of Russia is the ensuing chaos would be pretty scary when there are nukes sitting around. All it would take is one bad actor to get ahold of those for bad things to happen. I don’t think it’s likely and I can’t currently see the motivations for using nukes on any other nations apart from Russia itself and Ukraine, but chaos is chaos and many would consider the evil we know to be safer than whatever else lurks around the corner.

Personally, though, despite being aware of this it would regardless please me so much to see Putin fall. I would especially love to see Russia democratize more, but I’m afraid that’s probably a pipe dream anytime soon. Uncontrolled chaos generally doesn’t lend itself to more democracy.

It really depends on your field of work, but if it touches customer service (or even is just a job that will involve socializing with peers) at all then I think my biggest advice is to just be very friendly and approachable. Practice your regular conversational skills.

I was once a fundamentalist Christian. After a long and difficult process I deconverted and became a very vocal atheist. One of the “all religion is horrible” types. But at some point I realized that I had never abandoned my fundamentalism. I had only changed the flavor of it from religious to nonreligious. I still dealt in extreme beliefs with very little room for questioning and nuance.

It was when I introduced that nuance into my thought process that my worldview genuinely changed. I’ve come to understand that most lines you can divide people on will have well intentioned people and sinister people on both sides. I have met so many delightfully kind and welcoming religious people in addition to all the terrible ones I’ve known. They’re generally in different circles, but not always. It does us a mental disservice to think in such black and white ways.

The same can be applied to arguments. It is possible for two sides of an argument to have genuinely good points. It’s possible for an argument to not have a “good” side. And of course it’s possible for an argument to have a completely good side or a completely bad side. The point there is that I think we should think critically and dissect arguments and look for good faith arguments and bad faith arguments. We should understand that things aren’t always going to be easy to make decisions on and that’s okay. It’s okay to struggle with an issue and admit that you don’t have an answer to every question.

Religion is a great example. Nobody can prove something that isn’t provable. You can think that religion is sinister for that reason, but I think that does a disservice to religious people. I don’t believe in God. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to believe in God if I’m being honest with myself. But I haven’t forgotten what it was like to believe and I don’t blame people for finding comfort in it. Who can blame people for searching for a little bit of hope? I don’t think it matters to many religious people whether they can prove their beliefs in God because for them it’s not really about believing in the “objective truth” but rather clinging to hope for a bright future in a very dark world. And those hopes don’t need to be attached to bigotry like so many religious people have unfortunately done.

You could just refuse to say their name… Orrrrr you could just get some fun SEO terms going so that when people Google it they get results like Reddit sucks dick or Reddit is shit or Reddit hates you.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It’s a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.

I don’t doubt that ADHD exists and that your experience is valid. But I also think we need to be really careful about our expectations. I know I don’t have ADHD. I can focus plenty when I try. Social media has shortened my attention span and made me prone to proslcrastination, but it’s definitely not something I am actively incapable of. Yet so many people have self-diagnosed me with ADHD.

I have at least one friend who in college landed a prescription for Adderall because he wanted to be able to get extra focus even though he knew he didn’t have ADHD. Later on he went off of it and managed to become a lawyer and made it look easy. This is someone who never struggled with focus. I knew him since grade school. His use of the drug was clearly abusive.

I get angry at people like my friend because I know ADHD is real. And I know his abuse of Adderall only makes more people out there minimize the existenxe of real ADHD. But just as you’re saying my rhetoric makes it difficult for people with ADHD, I think overdiagnosing hurts people without it. Like I said in my first comment, if I’m in a really competitive environment like a school and I’m going against people that are using a “performance enhancing drug” for focus, then our societal expectations for what I should be capable of are out of whack and I start to be expected to perform and focus like someone on Adderall.

There has to be a compromise between handing it out to everyone and refusing to give it to people who genuinely need it. I have no idea what that compromise looks like and I’m truly happy that people like you and another friend I have who genuinely has it are able to get their medication. But outside of the very real world of ADHD, I see it becoming a problem. My wife who has been able to write an entire PhD dissertation in a very normal amount of time and experiences far less distractability than most people I know regularly questions whether she has ADHD. It’s that state of mind where everybody thinks they have it that I worry about. We don’t need to all be on Adderall.

This is something that concerns me about the recent excessive self-diagnosing of ADHD I’ve been seeing people do in the US. I think our late capitalist system has us convinced that we need to be constantly focused and productive. Distraction is a disease. I worry that when our expectations of how a person should function begin to look unnatural and based on how humans function on something like Adderall, then we slowly begin to act like there’s something wrong with just being a normal person that takes their time living a more naturally paced life.

God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don’t get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There’s no color anymore. It just feels like what’s the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I’m sorry. /endrant

I think they were just making a Lord of the Rings joke because the movies were filmed in New Zealand. I don’t think they really believe that New Zealand prisons are bad.

My grandma fell for a scammer that was pretending to be one of her grandchildren stuck in a jail in Mexico over a mixup. No AI voice or anything, just an actor and a vulnerable 90+ year old woman. She sent the scammer $10,000. I cannot fucking begin to imagine what AI is going to do to the scamming industry.

It’s depressing to me how parasitic executives have become in American business. I think we need to bolster our laws to further make it illegal to drive businesses into the ground in this way. Cap how much executives can profit off of our system. As it is, something clearly needs to change. The current way of things is infinite growth prioritizing short term gains at the expense of long term stability to the point of failure at which point the business crumbles and c suite execs jump out with their golden parachutes. Then those execs can go on to run other newer healthier companies into the ground as well. It’s all so flagrant too. We all see it happening but nothing can be done until our government steps up to the plate.

I’m actually having a lot of fun watching this place grow! It feels like a smaller community, but I’ve watched it expand so fast in the past week. Now that we’ve surpassed 100,000 people it feels like we’ve reached the point of it having enough mass that it can sustain itself. Once we reach a million I really think we’ll start getting more attention and at around 10 million we’ll be approaching terminal velocity. People on Reddit have been wanting a good alternative, but are just afraid of losing the large community vibe. It’s going to take time, but this week has felt like hope.

Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn’t understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.

Okay, so think of every website that is part of the “Fediverse” (aka uses “ActivityPub”) as just being different ways to display the exact same data. Sometimes their data works really well between two of them and sometimes it’s a bit more awkward. Lemmy and Kbin are both trying to imitate the “forum-style” software that Reddit uses, so they integrate really well with each other. Same data, slightly different UI. Mastodon, on the other hand is imitating Twitter. So trying to read Mastodon in Lemmy is like trying to read a Twitter feed as Reddit threads. It’s messier. Kbin seems to be trying to find a way to better display Mastodon-style threads within their UI. Otherwise, I think the big picture way to understand the difference is just that it’s a matter of UI and which one you prefer more.