I know a PMDB trainer in the VA. They say this is not the national directive they’ve been given, but it could be something more local.
At a recent conference, there was some very cagey and vague talk about what to do with references to “non-binary” though. This could have been a local, overzealous interpretation of that conversation.
Stay safe out there, gang.
While I get the sentiment, these are the opinions of economists. I don’t think they have any idea what to do to actually stop fascists.
I think at best, reporters would be able to interview anti-fascists for what we should do. I just doubt they have a stable of anti-fascists to call on for interviews.
I’m not entirely sure who they would call upon. So I can’t make any real recommendations, either.
Wait there are no babysitters in Japan? I was only there for a year as a very much childless young adult, but for some reason I assumed there would be babysitters. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever knew someone who babysat unless it was an older sibling looking after younger siblings. Heck, I don’t even know the Japanese word for it. Wow, for some reason I really thought that was only a modern American problem.
Okay. That was very clever. I like that one.
You don’t relax on vacation with small children. You’re always on alert, unless you got another family member or someone to look after your kids for a while.
You go because the kids have fun and enjoy it, but they’re also small enough they might not remember it at all anyway, so it can feel like a waste in that regard.
Another big part is that so many people have virtually zero support. It’s just them and their kids. For the first few years, we lived a 4.5hr drive from any family support. I don’t even know how you find and vet babysitters these days.
It doesn’t help that we’re atheists, so we don’t even get the built in community support that a lot of churches provide.
It’s definitely partly not being in the US. Economically… it’s just really rough. Childcare for our one kid is nearly as much as our monthly mortgage. We make decent money but still have only enough savings to survive 2, maybe 3 months without income.
I still have plenty of hobbies, but like, because finances are tight, we only have one car in a very very car dependent area. There’s simply no public transit where I live. So all of my hobbies have to be at home, or after when my kid goes to bed, which is usually close to 9:30pm, leaving an hour, maybe two, for time to myself during the week.
As a parent to a little one right now… I can say that I rarely felt the “drive” to have kids. My SO was really let down that my initial reaction was anxiety over finances, for example.
That said, I don’t know if anything else could ever give me the kind of joy and happiness that just being able to love on my kid has brought me. If something happened to her I would be devastated.
But I also recognize that I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of personal freedom to be a good dad. I would never downplay that to “trick” people into wanting to be parents. It’s definitely a tradeoff, and especially difficult financially these days.
What do you mean by “lost in pornography”? Like, do you mean developing unrealistic expectations for IRL sexual partners? Or something else?
Honestly, same. Mastodon is fine if you like the Twitter format, but I never did. Lemmy works for me, largely cuz Reddit also worked for me, until the API debacle.
At that point, wouldn’t making an OnlyFans be easier and more likely to attract paying customers?
Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Just read that, and it says they’ve only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would’ve been a lot more than that.
We have 335 million people in this country literally right now. I don’t think “350 million born since 1933” makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
Edit: number fixin
We have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.
Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.
I think that’s a little exaggerated, but even if it were 100% accurate it’s not like America hasn’t earned the reputation.
My parents are both conservative - white Protestant evangelical Christian conservatives. In my 20s, I first became liberal, then atheist, then leftist. I’ve given up talking to my dad because he won’t discuss in good faith, but my mom still… tries.
I genuinely think the problem with conservatives is that they pay attention to and trust the wrong sources. We all have to trust people at some point, we can’t experience or verify literally everything ourselves. And the people we listen to have to trust who they listen to, forming large and complicated trust networks.
Most people don’t spend any significant time or effort vetting their sources. And if you don’t weed out bad sources, or learn to be skeptical of people you might already trust, then your trust networks become corrupted. By that point, questioning someone you trust could be a slippery slope - if they were wrong (or worse, lying) then that means soooop much of the trust network might fall, too. And that is legitimately terrifying for folks. It certainly was for me. It was honestly hellish, realizing that I had to rebuild from the ground up my entire trust network, and now I have anxiety about needing to keep my mental guard up at all times lest I be fooled again.
No wonder people get invested in politics and culture wars as team sports, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. It’s painful to stop.
I could go on and on about this, but I don’t have these thoughts formalized very well, so it’d just be rambling at this point.
Stay safe out there, gang.
Directionless is definitely a feeling a lot of us have out here. I’ll keep an eye on the inbox!
I’m unfamiliar. Another native population?
With renewable energy?