Going with the spirit of the question, not the text (I don’t really think we are forced to pay for “extra” things, it’s all choice):

But one area I cannot comprehend is people buying cars on finance only to keep up with others who buy cars on finance.

I actually managed to come off it completely. Even though Lemmy is 10000x smaller, it still scratches the same itch for me.

I actually do. For some reason my children are fascinated where it all goes, so we’ve seems lots of videos on plumbing, in house and on the street. They’re absolutely bowled over by how it all works and it’s made me appreciate it so much more.

It’s also an enormous hygiene booster; running water, waste management etc. If you have a working water system in your neighbourhood you’re blessed. It’s one of those things Stone Age people would barely believe was real.

Which reminds me of a comment I read on Lemmy not too long ago - someone was wishing for a robot to handle the laundry. And I was like: “What do you think a washing machine is?!”

Product management.

All of them.

If there was a way to enable “see verified accounts only”, and “verified” actually meant using a system of legal identity verification in each territory, I would.

By how accounts talk on social networks, I struggle to see more than 5% actually coming from real people. The alternative, that people really are this uneducated, fooled, mean and angry, is just too horrible to bear. I have to believe it’s discord bots destroying our democracy, not actual people. It is, right? Right?!

Ah right - oh well, however it’s achieved I don’t have see every post in my feed turn into a discussion with two sharply defined poles: Nazis and communism.

I’m confused. Maybe I don’t understand federation as well as I thought.

~~This post originates on .ml, right?

So what does .world’s federation status with hexbear have to do with my ability to see hexbear posts on .ml?~~

Edit: Ah, no, the post does in fact originate on .world so .world’s federation status with hexbear is determinant for the lack of hexbear posts, not my individual blocking of the instance.

I actively ban hexbear’s entire instance. I relish the fact that I simply can’t see all the hexbear responses to this thread. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone on hexbear (pre banning) that was even remotely open to considering other viewpoints. It just became so toxic, so quick, whenever their users get involved.

No. I believe all things have a natural explanation.

I do believe we won’t be able to understand every natural explanation that happens in the universe, though.

You can’t teach a dog quantum physics. I don’t think we are so special that we will be able to understand everything. We may hit a limit where our math (a formal language of reasoning that we have developed) can’t model something or our brains simply refuse to accept its conclusion.

We can operate with irrational numbers but it’s not like our brains can truly comprehend them. Nor does quantum physics really make sense; I mean, mathematically we can reason about it but we can’t comprehend it. The speed of light being a constant and warping time is another example of something we can experimentally verify but can’t logically comprehend.

There’s no reason to believe everything will be understandable. So I’m open to something “unexplainable” happening that seems supernatural. I definitely do believe it’s natural at all times.

And while I’m open to “natural things we cannot comprehend” I simply struggle to believe for a second theres something that exists on another “plane”, which we cannot see signs of, that somehow judges us and takes an interest in our individual lives, as anything but fanciful. If such an entity exists, and it seems to us omnipresent and omnipotent, I doubt it takes any more interest in us than we would an ant in a forest on the other side of the planet.

That doesn’t sound like the 1%. There are 3.6 million 1%ers in the US alone, by definition. Being in the 1% might you very comfortable but it won’t necessarily make you an evil overlord. For that I suspect you need to be in the 0.001% (meaning there’s 3600ish in the US, a more manageable group of absolute bastard. There aren’t 3.6 million disgustingly rich people in the US.

Calling cards. That’s how we did it. Cheap, international calls by pre-dialling another number first. Still cost a fortune.

Before the age of 20: Made gunpowder and made our own enormous firecrackers/hand grenades, played with matches, climbed to the very top of very tall trees, whittled with knives all day long, cutting into high pressure car tyres with knives, made “bazookas” with firework rockets and shot them after other kids on the street, made petrol powered go-carts and raced them on public streets, disappeared out to play all day and came home for dinner, swam in lakes, climbed rocks with sheer drops into the bay, disturbed enormous ant-nests and got bitten all over (I’m sorry ants, that was a shit thing to do), dipped our fingers in melted wax, placed small stones on train tracks and waited for them to get pulverised, played a crazy game that involved throwing knives into the ground right next to bare feet, chopped firewood with sharp axes, burnt large holes in the carpet in my room (turned out a piece of tin foil was not sufficient insulation for burning sparker powder), did a lot of sleeping outside, threw each other into forests of nettles for fun, crawled through drain pipes running under the road, skateboarded down hills on country side roads, built our own skateboard ramp out of doors and nails that were sticking out ready to impale us, walked on thin ice because we liked the cracking it caused, did night time hikes through swamps, wild water rafting, sprayed burning gasoline out of bicycle pumps, played with aerosol cans and lighters, flew gliders age 15, got drunk a lot from 15 onwards (not at the same time as flying), took down the school computers with a homegrown “virus” (that’s being generous, a few scripts that modified autoexec.bat to make all the school’s computers print “teachers are dumb” instead of booting; it still caused them to call in “the experts”, got into fights and ended up going to A&E after being hit in the head with an iron rod, raided countless pear and apple plantations, played with magnifying glasses in the sharp sun and lit up a great deal of forest floors, rode cars down old train tracks, shot guns, shot air rifles, shot bows, shot cross bows, shot sling shots, maced each other, built large swings that threw us over a cliff side and four-five meter drops into water, played around inside a nuclear-protected naval bunker and accidentally activated the emergency lock down alarm, tipped over an army truck after being let out to to “do a bit of terrain driving” by our staff sergeant, set up and blew up 600 kg of TNT to demonstrate the effect of a MRLS cluster bomb in front of the Danish Queen (fun story, it blew her hat off from the pressure wave), fells asleep behind the wheel after a full day of firefighting training and ended up putting my army jeep into a field, made friends with a Soviet diplomat who tried to pump my brother and I for information about our dad’s job as a military attaché (unfortunately the colonel got sent home to Russia after being made persona non grata) - though he did teach us how to ski in the process, set up our own 380V electrics for a enormous LAN party we organised and electrocuted myself, dialled into a lot of weird BBSes to exchange all sorts of pirated software with anonymous network users, war-dialled various remote systems and tried to hack our way into them, drove all over Europe in various wrecks (accidentally smuggled weed over several international borders, which was especially frustrating as I didn’t touch the stuff and didn’t even know it had been brought), did magic mushrooms and had amazing times and dreadful bad trips (fuck MAO inhibitors), went exploring in a fenced off zone that carried nuclear warning signs (Paldiski, not long after the wall came down), detonated gas canisters of all shapes and sizes, etc etc

It was a fun childhood, to be honest, and I’m grateful for it.

Seinfeld for me.

Closely followed by IT Crowd

I didn’t, for me it was “Ai, Bee, See, Dee, Eee, Eff, Jee” (except in my local language Danish). My children all learnt phonics in their U.K. school and it’s taught them to read 5x faster I’d say).

Lol, they did you a favour. It’s the only instance I ban.

Came in support of Apollo; I just couldn’t in good conscience continue to support Reddit (even after 19 years) with how they treated external clients.

Found it similar to Reddit so it scratched the same itch.

Ah, yes, a nice hexbear to giggle at on my Sunday evening.

I agree my characterisation is far off the mark. But the poster I responded to wasn’t even in the same galaxy, so I still considered it an improvement.

Also, I’m not Jesus Christ 🤪

Man, these days you know a hexbear without even looking at the user.

I mean this is complete baloney! You are also using the comparison to establish some kind of “evil slavers vs democracy” narrative that wasn’t in place at all in China during the warlord era. They were all equally horrid.

This is, at best, akin to a war between all states in the US after the Boston Tea Party and a communist state, let’s just pick Arizona, slowly winning the wars and forcing the remaining faction onto Hawaii. Then the socialist party forced anyone who could read, more or less, to work themselves to death in a field in the name of communism. Glory to the people!!!

No not all hexbear users are farmed trolls. I think most are doing China and Russia’s bidding out of misunderstandings about the world and what really happens inside those two countries.

I think some hexbear users are farmed trolls and/bots.