Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He’s still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I’m guessing he’s pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he’s got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I’d joined just so I could get USAA.

I actually work in the wastewater industry and from what I’m reading, a properly functioning sewage treatment plant already captures a very high proportion of microplastics. This widely cited study noted above 98% removal efficiency at one plant.

We’re already at approaching 2 log (99%) removal without actually trying to. It doesn’t seem improbable to me that with a few relatively modest tweaks to the system we could get 3 log removal (99.9%). Getting to 4 or 5 log removal is likely where things will get really expensive and challenging. But for now, a 2-3 log removal is probably good enough to focus on other sources like tire fragments/dust that typically pass directly to receiving waters with no treatment at all.

The group think around here is so crazy. Should we be using less single use plastic, especially the thin films? Absolutely. But the environmental impacts of mining all that metal and making all that glass to replace plastic with, plus the added energy for transporting the heavier packages and the cost of increased spoilage and product lost to dented cans and broken bottles, dwarfs the negative impact of the plastic replacements.

Yeah, but those metal tubes were awful. I have been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine for decades, and I remember how much I hated those metal tubes. They always split open weeks before the tube was empty and then they’d leak and make a mess and I inevitably wasted a lot of product. When Tom finally sold to whatever corp and they switched over to the plastic tubes that don’t leak and let me use all the toothpaste I paid for, I danced a little jig.

Serious answer, as someone who’s been through years of therapy.

Pretty much everyone rich and powerful experienced intense trauma early in life. And one of the horrible ways our early childhood trauma plays itself out is by causi us to recreate it on younger generations. You don’t just wake up one day as a child molester. That shit was visited upon you in some fashion when you were a child.

Our entire culture is based on generational trauma (strongly suggest you read the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate).

People who seek power and fame are almost all incredibly damaged from a very young age. Not necessarily an excuse, but if you want to stop the cycle you have to be able to step back far enough to see it.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Or as I originally heard it, “going to bed is going to work.”

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn’t had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don’t think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.

Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I’m trapped and can never sell.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don’t invest in Detroit real estate

Depends on how you define that. Literally none of the communities I was part of on reddit have a functioning equivalent here.

Boston? Dozens of posts a day on reddit, maybe one a week here.

Burning man? I don’t even know if there have been a dozen posts in the community here.

Geology? Don’t think I’ve seen a single post.

Communities for specific bands (I’m a jamband fan) exist here but have no are almost no content.

And so on.

I’m the kind of user who comments often but doesn’t post much. With no one here posting, there’s nothing for me to interact with.

If you want echo chamber liberal political memes, obscure open source software discussions, or endless hentai, then lemmy is great. But it has no pull for people who want to participate in niche communities like mine. Hopefully it’ll happen, especially as reddit gets shittier and shittier, but even for people like me who desperately want to leave reddit and are willing to take a chance on a new platform, this is a tough sell.

It’s going to take a few more digg type events to really get lemmy to pick up enough users to make the conversations in the small niche communities hit critical mass. Until then, lots of people will give it a try, then bounce.

I’m not an expert but my general understanding is that its unlikely you’d have both parents be narcissists. A true narcissist is too self absorbed to stay in a relationship with someone else who’s also that self absorbed. Narcissists tend to be in relationships with people who have opposite traits, highly empathetic and easily manipulated. Not saying it can’t happen but youtube isn’t necessarily the best diagnostic tool.

If at all possible, I recommend you see if there are any counseling resources available to you at school or through your local government. Also recommend you read some actual books on the subject, not just get info from YouTube and the internet. Hopefully you live in a place with a public library. Many libraries have a way to check out ebooks and read them on a phone app, which may easier and more discreet.

And I’d urge you to remember two things.

First, it gets better. It can be hard to believe, and it can feel like forever, but it gets better.

Second, narcissism is just another reaction to a traumatic childhood. No one is born a monster. They’re worthy of compassion, even if you can’t have a functional relationship with them.

This is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The last paragraph is so good.

In another indication of the operators working to potentially inefficient quotas, Meta noted that the pages it had on Facebook, with around 560,000 followers, “were likely acquired from spam operators with built-in inauthentic followers primarily from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil” meaning the pages “that mainly posted in Chinese and English were almost exclusively followed by accounts from countries outside of their target regions.”

Late 40s, from the US. My mom drove a manual so I learned on her car. Then my first car was an old VW Bug, and my next couple of cars were also manual.

Now that I live in a city with soul crushing traffic and a completely broken public transit system, I drive an automatic. Driving a manual in stop and go traffic is just not fun. Plus, it’s gotten hard to even find a manual transmission anymore. But when we went on vacation to Costa Rica a few years ago they gave us a car with a stick shift and I had a blast bombing that thing around.

But when you listen to jam bands random YouTube videos ARE the high quality music!

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it