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I want to learn Russian and Chinese

I don’t think it’s taking shelter as much as trying to find an answer to something that has no answer.

For example Eistein I don’t think was trying to take shelter from reality. He wanted to look at reality as deeply as possible and he managed to peek through and see more than almost anyone ever had before.

But he still believed in a God. This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.

In a practical sense, I’m an atheist. I don’t think Jesus turned water into wine or the Buddha achieved enlightenment and entered a higher plane of existence or whatever.

But I acknowledge there might be supernatural or supranatural items / phenomenon/ or even beings that we can’t ever fully understand.

Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.

Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.

Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks

“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”

What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around

What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?

No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.

All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.

It’s a question of

How much effort (man hours which ultimately translates to $$$) versus how much revenue lost (people not buying because of Firefox bugs)

In my experience this depends on your specific application. Sometimes there are weird bugs or behavior where you have to really hunt down what’s going on. Other times it’s as simple as changing a few css lines or something.

I view India as a rising power that has the potential to rival China and the USA. I think the culture is backwards in many ways and advanced in others. I don’t like your current administration, but I do think India overall has interesting politics. I mean, you guys have an active Maoist insurgency. Pretty wild for the 21st century.

I tend to get along well with Indians I meet in the states. I appreciate India long history and cultural impact (Buddha came from India for example). There were democracies in India before Athens was a thing.

All in all India’s a rising power with a lot of potential. Unfortunately I don’t think they will reach China-status anytime soon because they don’t exercise as much central control as China does.

In some ways this is good, Cultural Revolution wasn’t exactly a great experience for a lot of people. But in other ways it means the Indian government doesn’t have the power to reshape India in a way where it can successfully rival the European powers.

Fiction is more important than nonfiction in my opinion. Good fiction teaches you about the human condition. Studies have shown people who read more fiction are more empathetic for example. The ability to put yourself in the mind of another person is not only good for society as a whole, it’s good for the individual because navigating relationships is something you will be dealing with until you die.

That of course isn’t to say nonfiction isn’t important, but that’s what all your textbooks are for. That is nonfiction.

Tldr; I don’t think it’s a problem at all, no

I’m a foreigner. Most aren’t. I work from home. Most don’t. I drink kava everyday. I doubt anybody else does.

If you know who you are and what you believe in then you should have no fear like others are saying. Go wherever you want and talk to whoever you want. I used to regularly post on /r/debatefascism before it got banned on reddit. I was disappointed when it got banned.

When you argue with someone online, you’ll never change their opinion… but you may sway some random lurker just browsing through.

I understand that a lot of the far right use “free speech” as essentially a dog whistle- but freedom of expression in my opinion is a vital part of a free society. That doesn’t mean private places like Lemmy instances have any obligation to follow free speech. But I do support and respect places that do.

I prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.

I do it because I’ll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It’s my computer. I paid for it. I’m not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft’s bottom line.

It’s like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.

yeah kava doesn’t really taste good but i think it’s much a cleaner buzz than alcohol. both work on the GABA receptors. i wanna try GHB one day because apparently it’s also like alcohol but cleaner - but I have no idea where I’d go about getting it and I wouldn’t wanna go searching for it

In an ideal world we would be able to control climate change. The problem is that we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world defined by economics and war. Energy is the heart of everything- without energy you don’t have a modern economy.

Look what happened in Germany right after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Germany was getting most of its natural gas from Russia through pipelines. During the course of the war, those natural gas imports fell of a cliff for various reasons. What did Germany do to compensate? They burned coal. Coal outputs much higher carbon emissions than natural gas. Not only in the burning itself, but in the mining process required to get the coal.

So what was the response of the German society under pressure? Put out more carbon emissions. Just a glance at the global geopolitical situation would tell you that crisis isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I think this is fundamentally the issue. As long as we live in a world with crisis, governments will never let go of quick cheap and reliable energy. When the economy is in trouble, there aren’t going to be any politicians advocating for things that could potentially cost the economy. And to get rid of our carbon emissions - we need to feel some pain.

In order to meaningfully prevent climate change, we would need to do something yesterday. Instead, we probably won’t be doing anything for the next couple of decades.

Of course, I must end this with a caveat that my comment was made to be a little controversial. I don’t believe all attempts to reduce carbon emissions are a bad idea. To the contrary, I believe we should absolutely enact these changes. I’m just expressing a sort of cynical sentiment that since we can’t really stop it, we might as well start spending money on dealing with it

for example, like the army corp of engineers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a giant sea wall in Miami. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/miami-fl-seawall-hurricanes.html

but other things to, like building new cities with modern urban planning in order to handle the massive wave of refugees in the future

Dostoevsky. Kava. My girlfriend refuses to watch Yu Yu Hakusho with me

I don’t know about “evil” because I don’t really subscribe to the Christian good vs evil. Yeah there are people out there who do terrible awful things, but generally speaking the most “evil” things come as a consequence of our amoral decisions.

We decided in the US that cars should be the primary method of transportation back in the 50s in order to stimulate the growing car manufacturing industry. That decision now results in nearly 50,000 people a year dying in car accidents.

We are not much different from the Mayans sacrificing victims in order to bring rain. We do the same thing, but for a different ideological purpose.

This is, in my opinion, much more dangerous and harmful than “evil”. Sadists come and go but institutions and ideology remains.

Having said all that, I’ve been robbed & beaten. I’ve been through heroin addiction. I grew up as an illegal immigrant.

All of those ultimately shaped who I am today, but there were definitely difficult moments. Life is complex though and I think “evil” had nothing to do with the most traumatic and painful events in my life.

i think a lot of it depended on your cd burner. i’ve had differing amounts of success with different burners.

still though, the price was not 3-5x higher if i remember correctly

there’s all sorts of options there too if you have an old car

for example there are those CD -> aux or CD -> bluetooth convertors so you can play music off your phone

but i guess if you do have an old car sometimes it can be nostalgic to put in some CDs. i remember having a belt of CDs on my sun visor. so i get it

CD-RW is superior. It’s more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions… it’s very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.

The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.

Although I don’t understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.

He stated that the idea that China denies it is false. They have successfully integrated the event into their national narrative. Party members openly speak about Tianenem Square and use it as a lesson for how to better govern going forward

Was it a brutal crackdown on protests? Somewhat, yes. But soldiers also defected and sided with the protesters, and the protestors also killed some soldiers.

It’s a complicated event and an important part of modern Chinese history. Yet most people only learn a tiny part of it and assume the rest.

The book series “three body problem” by a Chinese author started the process of opening by mind about this stuff. In this book, he openly criticizes the cultural revolution and anti-intellectualism in the Chinese government during that time period.

I thought all forms of dissent were banned. But it turns out the party today doesn’t see itself as the same as before. So while you can’t criticize the current one, the one from 30 years ago is fair game.

There’s a lot to say here about the US perception of China versus China in actuality. Propagqnda is powerful and fills in the cracks for what people don’t know and seems unusual to them.

What sort of things do you use BTT for? I use it too on my MacBook with Apple silicon. Although I view it as a consolation prize. Most everything I use it for I can do with a bash script + hotkey in Linux on my desktop.

Then again, maybe I’m just not creative enough. I understand BTT has a wide range of options to allow for complex shortcuts. But practically speaking, I don’t know if I can use 95% of those options.

Well, you should get roughly 7~8 hours of sleep so you go to bed around 11pm. Thankfully I don’t have any issues falling asleep.

If you slept in a lot and have a few extra hours in the bank, you could push that 11pm to like 1am or so. Just try to return to a normal sleep schedule ASAP.

I wake up at the same time every day. I usually go to bed around 11pm and wake up at 6am. Even if I go to bed a little later, like 1am or go to bed sooner like 10pm… I still wake up at exactly 6am. Once you do it long enough, your body just wakes up naturally. I always wake up a couple minutes before the alarm.

People really shouldn’t sleep in excessively on the weekend. If you have a healthy sleep schedule Mon-Fri and then go to bed at 5am Friday and Saturday night… you’re essentially undoing all the healthy sleep habit you build during the work week. Sleeping in a little is OK… so instead of 6am wake up 7:30am or something.

If the problem is you can’t fall asleep, there are the common tips. No screentime an hour before. Try reading a book in bed, that always puts me to sleep within 30 minutes. It’s easier to sleep if you’re eating healthy and exercising. Increase your A/C so that it’s around 70 degrees F and get under the blanket. And if you just desperately need to sleep because tomorrow’s an important day then I don’t see a harm in taking a benadryl. Just can’t make a habit out of it.

I’ve just been here since the API change. I’ve been more or less happy with it. Some things are dissapointing, like there being just as much of a hive-mind mentality as reddit. But I guess that’s probably just inherent to online vote-based communities.

I also wish there were an easier way to find new communities - and good ones. I don’t want to browse shitty memes. I want stuff where people are participating in good faith genuine discussion about meaningful topics.

I’ve found some of that here so far.

At the end of the day though, this is open source and decentralized. It’s everything a social media should be. To me, anything less than that is a waste of time. There is zero reason to spend your personal time creating content for a company to profit off of.