I learned and taught self-defense for many years. Enough to say you can never know for sure about someone, I’ve seen some really unassuming people turn into beasts in the sparring ring, and seen some big, tough dudes not be able to take a light gut punch.

All that said, I would be shocked if someone like Zuckerberg could handle the swift, primal, animalistic speed and violence that comes with an actual fight. He lives out-of-touch with the world and doesn’t have to watch his back on the bus ride home or learn how to spot dangerous people ahead of him hanging out in a parking lot. Even if he’s really good at katas and sparring, it’s a far cry from actual fighting, and survival comes from as much mental preparation as it does physical.

Ain’t nobody going to educate the millions of people who don’t give two shits about facts and science about the vast diversity of bee species and other flying insects.

If people start doing more to help “honey bees” broadly like growing wild flowering plants and reducing pesticide use, it will also help the other native species.

Let me put it another way, we need to BE VERY CAREFUL about trying to over-lecture about this kind of situation. We’re in a climate where trying to teach people knowledge isn’t received as a gift or benefit. Teachers are tuning their lessons for 7-minute attention spans and high emotional sensitivity, we all need to do the same.

Shrimp textured.

If enough individual people who own land with yards grew native plants and flowering bushes and stopped using so much pesticide outside, it would make a huge difference.

Also, nobody is talking about beetles. Beetles are one of THE biggest pollinating insects and are suffering massive decline, but I guess people are far more concerned with bees because they’re kinda cute.

I would do further reading on this, and not just rely on the “hot take” from one progressive youtuber. It’s a lot more nuanced and complicated than this.

I was partying with those eyebrows that night, those eyebrows had nothing to do with whatever happened.

I hope people reading this have SOME measure in their mind of how immeasurable even ONE trillion really is.

To count to a million it takes about 11.5 days, a billion roughly 31.7 years, and a trillion approximately 31,700 years, assuming one number per second without breaks. Then do it 18 more times.

Or in some cases, wakes up something inside you that you never would have imagined otherwise.

So the countries we export animal feed cornmeal and ethanol to are really gonna be sad. They will have to get that shit from one of the many other countries that want to be primary suppliers of the massive amounts inedible corn we turn into a few burgers.

This gives me the vibe of a meme someone would share on their midwest neighborhood’s Facebook group to “prove” that Medical academia is a scam, right next to a list of “chemicals” they put in your shampoo or pet food or something.

It’s a funny little snippet but doesn’t “mean” anything. Words are silly and names for things can be hard to invent.

Basically American medical academia in the next 10 years.

If you look at relationships like this, like there is some fixed set of people you are compatible with and that number exists outside of whatever personal adaptability or compromise you’re willing to make, then the number is probably actually a lot higher for a population of 8 billion people. Few people have any clue how large of a number that is.

Then if you DO factor in that a relationship is two-way, and you change, and your partner change over time to better adapt to each other and assuming you both want the best outcome, then that adds a variable that makes that number jump WAY up.

Depending on how much you’re willing to change or adapt, you can almost make that number anything you want. Of course, this isn’t the way to have a healthy relationship, your difficult choice is always deciding how much you’re going to change for someone, how much of your mental and emotional energy for change they are worth, and what your worth is as you are right now.

If your answer to that last question is “none” then that magic number drops to almost zero. Having no self-worth (or specifically, things about yourself that you’re not willing to change because of your values and ethics and desires for your future) radically reduces the number of people you might have success with. It seems counter-intuitive, but your adaptability, or passiveness in a relationship can do as much harm as being a stubborn ass.

Of course, looking at relationships this way of odds and numbers and ratios is utter horseshit, but ya’ll kids fantasizing about anime waifus and werewolf boyfriends and crying yourself to sleep because you can’t figure out the “magic trick” to being liked, just loooove to look at your lives in the lens of numbers and rules and systems.

Meanwhile, in reality, it’s more like the gambler’s fallacy. If the ball landed on red 40 times in a row, it says nothing about what color it will land on next. The person you will spend the rest of your life with happily may bump into you at the dollar store tomorrow and you both just feel so good about each other that you both make whatever changes and efforts needed to make it work. Life doesn’t actually follow any systems or rules of odds.

It also only benefits them.

Saying how much [CELEBRITY] annoys you, only spreads their name and recognition and clicks on their content.

This meme is the exact way outside influences have sabotaged all of our social messaging and desires for a better future.

A lot of people who think they’re progressive are going to latch onto this idea and start saying dumb shit like “Doordash is racist” and they will get scorn and eye-rolling from literally everyone else, ruining the actual thing we should be recognizing, which is the wealth inequality that pushes people to deliver other people’s food using their own car and without healthcare or benefits.

Doordash’s problems have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the wealthy pinching off our lives at every possible avenue.

The Moon is so far from the surface of Earth you can comfortably fit every single planet in the solar system between Earth and the Moon.

This would lead to a cataclysm and people would generally disapprove of you doing this, but the point is there’s space in space.

Feeling that right now.

I couldn’t work Friday because I was sick, but I’m totally out of PTO for the year and like almost every company, sick-leave and PTO are wrapped together in one package. So I have to go to work right now on a Sunday night and catch up with work I couldn’t complete on Friday. Still sick, but if I don’t maintain this job, I won’t have health insurance among many other things.

It feels like having a literal lifeline attached to my job, I can’t have a bad week, I can’t have a break, I can’t escape. I have to do this dance for decades to go, and according to every calculation I’ve done, unless I win the lottery I am not going to retire. Lost too much earlier in life.

I’m going to be slogging through moving around little numbers on a screen until I die, feeling my years just tick by.

That our “antichrist” turned out to be just another clownish conman.

So how do you “feel” gender?

As a cishet man, I don’t. I recognize it, I know my social expectations, I know what the unwritten “rules” are and I am just “comfortable” with it. In that it doesn’t bother me enough that I want to change anything.

That doesn’t mean I “feel like a man.” I don’t know if there’s such a feeling. It’s words we use to describe having comfort with your life and situation, and I bet there are very few men or women or anyone else who feel that sensation all the time. Even though I feel comfortable being a man, there are so, so many things I don’t understand, but cannot change.

I would say the way I feel my gender the most is physically and sexually. Without delving too deep into the horny-pool, all I can say is I feel like a man in sexuality. I feel very “male” urges tickling the back of my mind which are very pleasant to indulge in the right circumstances. I have attractions and desires that line up with being heterosexual male and that’s probably the only place where I enjoy maleness.

Everything else? It just feels like wallpaper, and I don’t care. I wear a beard because I know there are people who like beards and have decided I look better displaying facial hair, but I don’t stroke it and say “damn, that’s nice man-hair.” I would feel better smooth shaved but it makes me look like gumby.

I am the first downstairs with a gun when someone hears glass breaking, not because I like being first in line for danger, but because I know I am larger and well-trained and can probably survive an injury better than smaller humans around me that I care about.

I am the one who does the “guy things” because I am the guy. When I (rarely) get support or reward for specifically male things, it feels good but I don’t connect it with my gender. I don’t even know what that means. I feel more like I happen to be in this body in this culture and need to do the best I can with it, and feel no strong urge to change that dynamic. No glaring discomfort, but also no real sense of “identity” about my gender.

Honestly, maybe it’s because I keep the company of people with a few more brain-cells than the stereotypes you see in media, but my male friends are usually the same. We don’t “talk like guys” together, if anyone tried that they would get stared at. Most of our conversations are about healthcare and problems with our homes or backs or family members, real-world, material issues with life more than our gender roles. Most men I know are just “people inhabiting male bodies and roles” and I don’t think that’s rare, I think it’s largely what most people feel.

There are things I recognize that are deeply painful about my gender role, as well as things that give me benefits. If I let myself feel anything at all, it would be a level of despair that no matter what else happens, there is an expectation on me that I will have to work, solve problems and do the hard things in my family/social circle that people who do not identify or “feel” like men don’t have to do. I don’t get that part on a broad, social level. But lingering on what’s fair or not, no matter what the situation, is useless. It’s rumination. It’s the thief of life and joy. You will never be free of injustice or unfairness. That’s not how our world works.

Lemmy intellectuals will attack this take, and they will also be the people who listen to the arguments from the world’s most evil people and their lawyers and say “We need to hear them out, we have a system with rules.”

Towards a class of people who live above the rules and have no system other than wealth and power. Our “laws and rules” are designed to control the population, not the donor class, not the elite, not the ones who have never known hardship. People who can systematically abuse others for their own satisfaction are ruining whatever potential our species had, in my opinion this isn’t just an ideological or legal issue, it’s fucking existential.