Depends on context - if it’s a yes/no question or something that can be replied to with a simple “great” or “okay”, thumbs up serves as a “yes” or as a gesture that the person has read the message and doesn’t have any problems with it.

It might be considered rude though for more complex discussions, where you need to respond in sentences

Realistically, it’s an impossibility. This view is mostly propagated via liberal news sources, having the main battle be conservatism vs progressivism or left vs right (as opposed to class struggle, the poor vs rich, working class vs capitalists), and since the democrats are more progressive than republicans, they’re the “good guys” who should be supported.

For it to be destroyed, we’d have to catch up to their level of influence and reach or even surpass it, to show people that they’re a party of capitalists who sometimes are progressive, and not an actual ally of the working or middle classes but only pretending to be one. Maybe going one step further too and influencing progressive movements democrats support to pay attention to economic aspects too, given how their root causes aren’t purely social?

But again, it’s impossible for us workers to have such reach, given how well funded media is.

My european mind can’t comprehend making tea without an electric kettle, something that is very rarely used in the US

Replace with something else - back when I was actually addicted to soda, I realized how expensive it all was and replaced it with drinking tea.

Of course, might not be viable if you’re an american.

There are some setups that allow you to do this.

• nixOS or nix + home-manager on some other distro, but it’s a high skill-floor way to manage a computer so wouldn’t recommend

• window manager heavy setup where you just set it up then copy over the config files to the new install, a bit of a pain to first customize but viable if you’re willing to ditch mouse-heavy desktop experience in favor for keyboard and shortcut focus to control everything.

Apart from those two cases, not really.

I had issues with keeping a stable sleep schedule for years, but now I found a method that works for me: every day, set your alarm clock to the same time no matter what (in your case 5 AM) even on weekends. Then, try going to sleep so you always get full 8 hours, if you fuck up and go to sleep too late then tough shit - you’ll feel tired tomorrow which will serve as a punishment that your brain will hopefully recognize.

They key is to be consistent and not sleep in.

It’s just a sad state of affairs. Digital video games are 1’s and 0’s that you can copy for basically free (with the only cost being hard drive space which is dirt cheap), so preservation shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, we live in a world where logic sometimes has to take the backseat in order to maintain the current ideology, and video game preservation is one of those sacrifices.

A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:

When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn’t hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that’s it.

use your phone to look up the commands on how to get internet working again

alternatively, connect computer to your router via cable

you don’t need to remember anything, except commands you use the most often but even then it becomes muscle memory after a while. If you ever need some specific command to use, just look it up online.

Waking up at the same time every day, no matter if it’s a weekend or a weekday and no matter if you stayed up too late and won’t be getting full 8 hours of sleep.

As obvious as this might sound, this has really helped me to regulate my sleep schedule, something I’ve really been struggling with for pretty much my entire life.

Don’t fall into doomerism - news companies are companies, and negativity gets people on their platforms for much longer than positivity, it’s easy to get addicted to it. Set time limits or limit the amount of news you consume per day/per week.

Recognize that caring about something requires mental energy - if you had 1 friend who asks you to care about their hobby or learn a bit more, then you might agree, but if you have 20 friends with different hobbies asking the same thing, then there’s no way you can care about all of them. Similar thing applies to the news, recognize that you can’t care about everything and try learning how to stay informed without giving up lots of mental energy stressing about things you can’t really influence.

It’s admirable wanting to keep up with the news, but it also can be a bit of a trap and does require a degree of skill to not fall into what you describe in your post.

This time is quite different, actually. First, he learned his lesson about hiring institutionalists as his secretaries and advisors since they would push back against more questionable ideas, now he’s surrounding himself with yes-men like RFK jr, Kristi Noem and the likes. There have also been precedents set like the infamous “official act immunity”, and just many more lessons learned from 2016 in general.

There’s also just much more co-ordination now in general with the whole Project 2025.

Corruption pretty much. The director of the school would constantly pocket a lot of the public funds sent to school and then offload the cost of whatever that money was supposed to go to onto students.

One of my favorite examples of this is this tradition where last year students before graduating are supposed to leave something to the school, and our class was asked to buy new tables, with other classes having to do something stupid like that as well.

I still see the school in the news from time to time being involved in some new corruption scandal lol

Lemmy is my main but I still use Reddit sometimes for more niche subreddits.