FriendOfDeSoto

You should maybe indicate if you’re critical of this exploitation or in favor. If it’s the latter it would be easier for the mods. And if it’s the former you would lessen the inherent yuckiness people feel when reading this.

If you enter into starting a family, adding kids through whatever means, and you think this should not alter the relationship, you have another think coming. Kids are hard work. First your focus is to keep them alive and out of trouble. And over time this gradually shifts towards them not becoming a-holes. This takes energy and time, a lot of it. And that’s the most common reason why some couples have much less bedroom fun. They’re exhausted. They’re stressed. People behave differently when they’re exhausted and stressed. Raising kids is a marathon, not a sprint. Ideally, it’s a series of never ending gut wrenching crises until they move out. And truth is it doesn’t even end there. Some relationships handle this better, some don’t. None stay the same. If you think that your current childless relationship is any indication of how this would work with children, and you measure it by loving attention and how much sex you’re having you’re looking at the sky to measure the sea level. Get your head out of the clouds. You have to look at how you handle problems under pressure together. How you can support each other and not look at it as transactional. If that works, you stand a chance of a less bumpy transition into a functional family life.

Of course, every relationship is different. There are many other factors that will play a part and make shit even more complicated. I’m fairly confident though that I’m more right than wrong here with my generalizations.

You couldn’t survive such a radical personality change? Yours changed too. You will probably not win any argument on the assumption that your partner changed into a version is their folks while you stayed the exact same. You’re just the frog in the pot who didn’t notice it got hotter.

I’m a still married father of two.

I do not sense this. Your experience is your own. Just keep in mind you’re looking at a sliver of the whole thing at the best of times. You’re too tiny a dataset, especially considering you just made the sensible swap.

It would also make more sense to divide the day into something decimal but some base twelvers showed up first. It would also make more sense to stop using measurement systems where 12 hooplas equal 1 boink. The alphabet is just another thing like that. It’s been stolen and rewritten and now we are stuck with it. You can write an alternative sound map to help new learners. But the 26 letter order is here to stay.

I get that. It’s just the constellation of stuff here. Polish youths in considerate numbers falling in love with Russian culture is a bit like saying 9/11 firefighters are turning to Islam for guidance. Not that both scenarios would be inherently bad, they’re just not very likely. That’s why I asked for more than hearsay.

Can you back this up with anything but personal observation? There is nary a country in Europe that is under threat of a Russian invasion as much as Poland, now that they’re already in Ukraine. Right wingers all over Europe are very pro-Russian - except in Poland. History looms large in a country whose neighbors split it 3 times. It’s obviously possible that Polish younglings, unburdened with things like history, like the culture. You are well within you rights to separate the culture from its people’s history or what the current government is like. But I have a hard time imagining this as more as a passing fluke at best, or propaganda at worst.

When you’re using lemmy or mastodon, you don’t have to use the website. You can use an app that goes from your fingers to the server without needing a browser and a website to exchange the information.

So most if not all the instances of the fediverse are also a website if you need to use it. But not every website is an instance of the fediverse.

I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don’t - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.

We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it’s constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don’t often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.

You could of course counter that by saying that’s what you believe. It’s paradoxes all the way down.

Most media outlets prefer you come to their website or distribution service. That’s where they get most value out of possible ads. It’s where they collect their own first-person data on their users. As such I don’t find it surprising they bury this license somewhere. I’m surprised they have this policy at all. I don’t think it reflects their lack of pride in their work.

TIL I’m not a true Lemmy user.

You have to consider a few things here. You’re not the only one with social anxiety at that event. Your reaction is not to go in the first place (my MO as well) or to sit quietly hoping it shall pass with haste. Others talk too much. School reunions are such a rich vein for neurosis because you’re guaranteed to be judged by your peers. Peers who knew you very well when you weren’t a more well put together person yet. Few people behave like themselves there. So if the woman says she cheated a million times lol, her neurons may be on the fritz as well because she’s more thinking about how she dunked Sharon’s head in the toilet in freshman year or whatever. And that memory is haunting. And she’s sitting just over there! WHY HASN’T SHE SAID ANYTHING? … So you need to have a salt shaker handy for anything you hear.

Also, some people like attention and will say anything to get it. People like to construct a public persona around their worst character traits, the ones they’re unable to change. It’s like they’re putting a cool leather jacket on, aviator shades too. To distract themselves from their inner monolog, which very well might be telling them what a piece of shit they are.

And cheating is common. In my social group I know of a handful of cases. Drunk and horny, sober and crushing - the motivations are on a scale. In some relationships these secrets never get revealed, in others they’ve made the bond stronger, others have broken up. I would say very few people brag about it but hey, we contain multitudes. Some people end up in an unhealthy game of hurt oneup(wo)manship. Relationships are hard fucking work.

It is also a different picture when you have children with your partner. The willingness to forgive infractions increases for the good of the children.

And while centuries of indoctrination of monogamy and loyalty to your spouse can make this hard to accept: some people make open relationships work. I think it’s more often than not the last stepping stone to disaster but if you can make it work, vaya con dios. I have a hard time with it but I’m trying not to judge.

None of this needs to change how you feel about cheating though.

I’m sorry about your mom’s illness.

What I’m reading here in this thread is that you haven’t found the right therapist yet. And us jokers on the internet cannot fill that void for you.

We all have to live with bad memories. Regardless of quality if we were to enter a pissing contest to see whose suffering is greatest. You’re not living with yours, they keep you as a pet. I would go so far as saying being an obsessive goodie has not worked for you either. So look for a different therapist. At the very least another channel for you pent up regret. You can of course still be nice to the people around you. But you gotta give yourself a break from trying to outshine your average saint.

Without wading into the therapeutic too much, is there a way to move your PC, maybe to the bedroom. Or to set your partner up with wireless headphones.

I would say it isn’t so important to put a label on either of you as it is to find a workable solution. So frame your approach in these terms, make a schedule for headphone time, don’t engage in the at home therapy. Other than that, look for somebody who knows both of you better than me or anybody else here. The advice is probably going to be better.

How long have you been together? How long since you moved in together?

Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I’m thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.

Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It’s not perfect. It’s not always fair either. But I’d rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.

In terms of communism, as dreamt up by Marx and Engels, you can only turn a completely capitalist economy into a communist one. This has never been achieved, shortcuts have been taken. All communist states in existence have either turned authoritarian or to dust. So in my view, there aren’t many communist movements left in the world. They may use the word but either M&E wouldn’t like them or they don’t really have a lot of support behind them. No support, no money. Capitalists have a lot of money. People with a lot of money tend to have the ear of their leaders. If an investor is interested it’ll be real hard to go for an employee-owned model (excluding models with free publicly traded shares). If investors are not interested, the business may be failing and employee ownership is the last hurrah before the end. Capitalism tends to come up on top.

The movements of people since time immemorial does not adhere to the arbitrary political lines we’ve drawn between nations today. Both France and England have seen large scale immigration by the Romans, various old Germanic people, then the Vikings. All these people have killed and fucked each other. Attributing DNA to an area is partially a statistical likelihood, so there’s a margin for error. Except in geographically and/or historically isolated areas, we’re all more blended than anything else. That makes the race theory of the late 19th century seem so utterly ludicrous today but we can’t quite completely get it out of our heads either.

Because they are a rebellious bunch. But it doesn’t matter because in one belief the whole country seems united. And that is to ignore all the pleas of train operators to stand on both sides of the escalators to prevent long lines and crowding on the platforms. We’re having none of that sensible crap.

There is a tendency to walk on the left in Japan as well. I wouldn’t call it a rule but a vibe. For a society that is rigidly built on rules and conventions, they are remarkably flexible when it comes to tolerating people who swim against the stream. Not wanting to cause a fuss overrides a New Yorker outburst of the “Hey, I’m walking here!” variety. IMO they also insist less on the right of way or other car traffic rules when behind the wheel.

I’m no expert. Stop reading here if that’s not good enough.

My understanding is that in cathode ray screens, the old-style non-flat types, heat would make a difference. In LCD and LED screens, so little heat is produced by showing images, it is probably negligible. One of them, I forgot which type, does black by just turning the light off in that spot. So the type of screen used probably matters here.

You can see massive ad screens even in hot places. Now, there may be insulation in use and/or A/C. My guess would be if they can operate a huge ass screen in 100F 40C weather to get me to buy shit, the combined energy costs cannot be exorbitant. And my guess is further that’s mostly to prevent the hardware from melting in the sun, whether the screen is on or off.

Taxes are unpopular necessary tools in the governmental toolbox. They are often marketed to the people as temporary necessities. And then the weeds of time grow over these intentions, people forget, and they’re here to stay.

Germans still pay a sparkling wine tax. It was introduced to be able to increase military funding before WW1. They have since gone from a monarchy to a republic to a murderous dictatorship to an occupied territory to two republics side by side (at least in name, the east got rid of the tax) to a unified republic. Guess what survived for more than a century?