It was interesting realizing that a lot of our power is still, at its core, a steam engine

Wow this question is all over the place. I want to call out the privacy bit though. The fediverse is NOT private. You are anonymous, and really pseudo anonymous. Everything you post here is shared with anyone listening though. There are guidelines for how to implement the protocol, but they are not rules. Things like deletes do not have to be honored. Any gov agency can spin up an instance and listen.

We can act like we’re anonymous, but unless your hosting your own somewhere far off with no logs and zero way to trace it back to you, you’re still open. Open web means open, it’s what we want. The open web means no single entity can shut down the whole of the fediverse. The flip side is that you are also out there in the open.

Write who you are imagining, who you think the person is - don’t cater to anyone. Not right, not left, you are the author, write who you think it should be.

Like any vice honestly. It can be fun and enjoyable. Too much and then you need to get some help and it will affect you. Forcing it out of your life, however, is not actually dealing with your problems but rather just hiding from them. Finding the balance is the goal.

A true recovered alcoholic isn’t someone who demands his friends stop drinking when they are around him. That’s someone who is trying to hide from it. A true recovered alcoholic is someone who can see their friends enjoy a drink and say “no thanks” when asked.

This was a lyft in Vegas a couple years back. Taking an autonomous one was more expensive, but I chose it for novelty. That was already on top of Lyft/Uber being more than taxis.

In my experience taxis now are cheaper than uber/lyft. Not autonomous, but coming home from the airport the trains weren’t running for maintenance or something, and an uber was 160 dollars. No joking, that’s how much - base. Taxi was about 50.

“so it’s a taxi”. Basically all it was, except I surprisingly trusted taxi drivers more. For the cost, I’d rather just take mass transit

Hey I used to live in Des Moines! I agree with you. Iowans treat Des Moines like a city. “I have to go into the city today”. No you don’t. You have to go into town. Des Moines is a big town, it’s not a city.

They refuse to believe they’re a city, any time they’re faced with acknowledging they might be becoming a city they do something regressive to it to try to prevent it. Built out not up. Kill all mass transit ideas. Anything diverse happening? Let’s keep that in check. They are a city of 300k that want to run it like a small town. Then the politics, just yuck the people who run it.

There were some fun places, the east side had some good bars, the keg stand in WDM was my stomping ground for a while, but so many people are just happy to have their strip malls and chain restaurants. Oh my god we got a Texas Roadhouse, I remember it made the news when Des Moines got one. God forbid anyone try an actual good local place.

Depending what you want to dive into I can definitely tell you more good and bad

Yes that happened, and yes we could tell the difference. Drunk people were pretty obvious. As long as they didn’t throw up I was fine with them, because again the $7/hour employee would have to clean it up

This was 15 years ago now so memories are fuzzy. Weirdest things I saw? How sad people’s lives could be. The saddest one was a woman came through with her child at 11:30pm, and she was clearly heavily buzzed if not full on drunk. Yelling at her kid who was obviously tired and wanted a happy meal. No kids seat or even wearing a seatbelt. One of the few times I called the police.

As for fun things? All of those jokes and pranks you see online or think will be really funny? I saw them dozens of times. They were never original, they were never funny, everyone thought they were the funniest person for asking for a whopper at a McDonald’s. Gets to the point you know just to type in big mac, tell them the price, and have them move forward. I was making $7/hr. Whoa look we’re having fun at the expense of the minimum wage employee who’ll be fired on the spot if they say anything negative. The ice cream prank? Seen it. Hamburger no meat no bun no condiments? Seen it. We’re not neutral faced because we’re annoyed at you, we were all tired of hearing the same boring jokes. It was all lame dad energy, but coming from teenagers.

Exactly this. If you think about it, regardless of if the religious reason was real or not, people did not know how to handle food safely, and pork is one of the worst when it comes to bacteria growth. My SO is a food scientist and they said it well, people probably just got sick from pork a lot more than other meats. So obviously god was saying not to eat it.

3000ish years later we have things like thermometers and know what bacteria are and how they grow. So I don’t know if the rules came down today if it would say “don’t eat pork” or if it’d be “verify your pork has been handled safely and cooked thoroughly”

Yeah I don’t think people realize how little choice we already have. Groceries? There’s only a few in your area, many of them are owned by the same conglomerate. Cars? Most are co owned. Hotels, food, every industry is owned and co owned with multiple levels.

As George Carlin said, this country was bought and paid for a long time ago.

I’ve found the market is actually warming a bit. Now may be a great time to search casually and find something they’re happier with

Yeah we’re small enough that is fine, or just send a DM to one of them

Ew, yeah that’s not great… Then yeah I think you’ve done everything you can without logging in

Do you have access to it? If you do, or at least the email, I would reset the password associated with it, add 2FA just for good measure, then deactivate the account. If you haven’t used it in a decade why keep it?

😐

Family, togetherness, and of course religion. It’s really a joyous occasion where we all come together

Fine, you want me to be explicit?

If you’re driving and I’ll jump onto the road right in front of you, will you still be at fault?

Yes. I would be at fault. I’m the one driving a hunk of metal that is capable of easily killing people, you could be drunk, delirious, it doesn’t matter. It’s on me.

Where in the world would that be the case?

I say everywhere.

If I come to a factory and stick my hand into a wood chipper that someone was operating and then say “whoever the hell was operating this 5 thousand pound hunk of steel should be at fault now!”

Irrelevant. Streets are not supposed to be deathtraps. No one deserves to die simply by wandering into the street. Again, drunk, delirious, or a child - none of them deserve to die because they wandered into the street.

If someone robbed you, think about it this way - if you hadn’t been there, none of it would have happened.

Again, victim blaming. It is not the victims fault. It doesn’t matter that they were there, if they had 100 sticking out of their pocket. Still robbery. It doesn’t matter if a woman is revealing “too much”. Still rape. It doesn’t matter why a person was in the street. They’re still dead.

If you don’t appreciate what you’re capable of when you’re driving, then you shouldn’t be driving.

It’s easy. You decided to drive a vehicle, you’re at fault, it’s your job to watch out for pedestrians. If you can’t stop in time, you’re moving too fast. If your vehicle is so large that it kills them instead of simply hurting them (see - large trucks with huge grills instead of safer lower fronts), then you’re at fault 100% because you chose an unsafe vehicle. If you can’t see them because it was at night, still I don’t care, that was on you, you should be able to see them. Feel free to argue it in court, that’s what they’re there for, but duty should on the driver to prove that, they were the one operating the heavy machinery. If that worries you or makes you feel emotions then good. You should feel nervous when you drive a vehicle, it’s quite literally heavy machinery that you’re hurtling forward at 60mph. You’re responsible for it.

Same idea, but if a pedestrian is jaywalking across a street, technically illegal and it’s not a safe move - but is struck by a car - the car is still at fault. As a driver you are still in charge of driving a 2-5 thousand pound hunk of steel and you accept that risk when you get behind the wheel. So I think logically, what the person was doing was not the smartest - but that doesn’t mean they deserved death for it - you are responsible.

Think about it this way - if you hadn’t been there driving would they have been fine? If so, you caused it, you’re at fault.

Same applies to rape and dressing provocatively. It’s an irrelevant argument because it puts blame on the victim, when no matter what they do they don’t deserve that outcome. The blame is on the person who caused it in the first place.