And when I order laptops from Amazon, they generally send them UPS and make me sign for them. Pretty much anything expensive I’ve had to sign for. Chargeback should be ezpz for OP, though they may want to file a police report (can’t recall the first thread, if they did or not).

Nothing against OP, but there’s a lot of people who are completely unaware of their surroundings. Perhaps OP is young, not a homeowner, whatever. The older I get, the more I certainly become aware of these things. The question I asked myself was why come here and not a search engine? But it’s not important, and I think OP got some valid answers here, and hopefully they learned about their community.

As others have said, it’s not across the board. I’m sure there are places in the US where it’s hard to recycle this kind of stuff. Just like I’m sure there are places in Europe where people bury these things in holes in the ground. It’s just the whole “Hurr durr America stupid” thing is old af, and so when I read these jabs I like to talk about how I live in good America, where we have education and social safety nets and electronic recycling.

And the majority of comments I make in this fashion apply fairly broadly to the entirety of the Northeast Corridor, DC to Boston, which is kind of where America started. Just wish there were more northeast corridors, because I do understand and appreciate that some of the criticisms I read are true of portions of the country, and it’s unfortunate.

We have that in the US too, but condescend away.

This is one thing that bothers me. I hear people talk about Trump’s policies being isolationist, but this flies in the face of that. If youre going to do a thing, do that thing all the way, none of this picking and choosing. If you want to cut the US off from the world, just fucking commit to it. It’s not my ideal course for the country, but I just want consistency.

Yes, just say “I’m from the best US state” next time instead, OP, people will know what you mean.

When kids start to communicate, it gets so much better. Mine are 7 and 4 now and so we are over that hump (and only have three bedrooms and) permanently, but babies are frustrating AF, and that frustration rubs off on everything. My daughter, I can sit and really talk with her and find out about her day and her needs and her desires. My son is still a buffoon but I get glimpses of an actual person in there, and I love it.

Things are definitely harder when your kids are younger. They don’t communicate, you get frustrated, your partner is obviously frustrated as well, and it unfortunately carries into your relationship. My wife and I write letters to each other as the year goes along and plop them in a box. I do my best to not make it this rosy depiction of a wonderful life. I unload how some times can be difficult. It helps me remember that shit ain’t always perfect, and that’s that. It helps me let go of some negative feelings, and remember that some issues are acute for any number of reasons.

I always joke with people that I didn’t form this immediate bond with my children. I’m not sure it’s even a joke, but I make it a joke now, because my bond with them is immense now. The joke now is that I love them both so much more than their mom, and my wife understands it completely. And it’s not because of some love lost over the last 11+ years I’ve been with my wife, but that this relationship with my kids has just grown to a level I didn’t quite understand before.

So I dunno, I try to compartmentalize some of the bad times. They sure have existed. I try to remember that there’s always some rationale for intolerable behavior, and that sometimes you can’t just wish that trigger away, and that we need to just eat shit for a bit. And so that letter to my wife frequently helped me communicate about those times I was a less than ideal partner, as well as the times she was. And surely it was a vent for the times our kids could be little monsters.

You’re responding to the same disingenuous argument you see all over Lemmy made by folks whose jobs are in the IT field.

That being said, why hate Plex? I’m sure, like me, you’re grandfathered in. Is it fucking new users? Sure. Sucks. Not everything is a battlefield, and they’ll eventually fuck me and then I will abandon them, it is what it is. But for now, the shit just always works with almost no tweaking from me. I really can’t ask for much more. Got my mom to watch The Wire because of Plex.

Yeah, I need to remember if it was ginko or something else. I’m not the greatest rememberer, so I’ll go back and check the recording. Perhaps not natural meant not native, but I recall being surprised at the description. We shall see, always interesting.

Yeah, the complaining about spotify’s free tier is something I just don’t get. I grew up listening to the goddamn radio. No choice in what to listen to and ads all the time. But when your jam came on, it felt great every time.

I’m on a family plan with some friends. I’ve discovered a ton of new music because of Spotify. I’ve gone to many shows, bought merch, vinyls, for bands I never would’ve known had it not been for Spotify.

I’m just not sure what people want, but it reeks of entitlement. If you’re gonna pirate music, by all means, go to town. Nobody cares.

Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.

I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.

I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.

And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.

Nailed it on the head. I think also that you need to include that Canada’s relationship vis-a-vis trade with China will be affected by tariffs the US is placing on Canada, and same with Mexico. I think much of everything is from the viewpoint that China is a bigger problem than Russia at the moment. China is also recovering from some economic turmoil, and one way to do so includes expanding their reach, and so the intent is to limit China in other areas.

The unvax’d population in India is greater than the population of the United States. Unfortunately, only 90% of the US is vax’d against measles, which is a staggering number in and of itself, but I’m not sure of the demographic breakdown of it.

Ha, I should’ve mentioned that you definitely won’t. It seems to paint this damned if we do damned if we don’t picture. But it at least paints a picture, versus what can at times feel like this great big unknown. It may also shed some light on some of the motivations for what’s happening. I dunno.

My brother sent this to me the other day and I gave it a watch. It feels pretty unbiased (although I’m uneducated), and seems to have a more macro, zoomed-out view of America and just nations on the whole. I thought it was pretty interesting and it helped to put some things in perspective.

That’s the dem playbook though. Gotta keep chugging!

You won’t hear me disagree.

Our healthcare is tied to our work here in America. Losing that kind of safety net is scary, especially when you will be beaten by police for protesting, and now you need to go to the hospital.

For real. NFL is a business, and every decision they make must tip the scale of “will this make us money”.

I think MAGA represents to Republicans what progressives like Bernie and AOC represent to Democrats. Republicans were able to reimagine their party into a form that isn’t just going to follow the status quo that, like you said, has led to a stagnant existence for average Americans over the last 50+ years. And stagnant is probably a nice way of putting it, since buying power has essentially disappeared, on top of wages barely moving.

So Trump comes in, he says drain the swamp, and you hear that to mean the whole machine, everyone who, for the last 50 years (and some folks have been involved in that government for a good chunk of that 50 years, just perpetuating that status quo) has allowed the rich to get richer at the expense of the working middle class.

And so you toss on your blinders. You’re not necessarily a bigot, but you believe social issues are a distraction from actual problems (i.e., ones that affect you directly), and you vote in a way that you hope will better your life. It’s hard to blame someone, especially someone just exhausted from grinding through their shitty life, for thinking about themselves. It’s not the right way to think, but I get it.