• If you’re the owner of the home, know what bylaws there are regarding snow removal near your home. Where I live you can get a fine + snow removal costs if you aren’t reasonably prompt getting snow off the sidewalk.

• Snowy surfaces (sidewalks, driveways, roads) are often icy surfaces = slip and fall hazard. This is especially serious for older folks but it can hurt/injure at any age. This gets worse if it snows then melts then refreezes. Don’t run if you don’t have to. Sand/grit on these surfaces can help, and in my area you can get sand for free at certain town facilities.

• Frostbite on exposed skin is a genuine hazard. Look up the weather forecast when it’s cold and take time-to-frostbite warnings seriously.

What’s a can opener? Kind of NSFW - like not really, but if someone walks in on you watching you’ll have some explaining to do.

If you want to stop support for Israel’s war crimes, Kamala is slightly better than Trump. If you want support for Ukraine to oppose Russia, she’s much better. If your issue is the environment/global warming, she’s immeasurably better. If you’re concerned with things like democracy and rule of law at all levels of government, then she’s literally the only choice.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be the little spoon once in a while?

Get either a piercing weapon to exploit weak points or a bludgeoning weapon to transmit force through the plate, because she’s clearly here to do battle. Dinner can come AFTER I’ve defended my honor.

Reddit:

• It has a much larger user base and many heavily specialized boards that nevertheless stay reasonably active.
• It’s a collection of echo chambers. Dissent is usually stomped out by mass downvoting and heavy moderation/bans. It’s rare to find a board that allows arguments for a long period of time. Agree with the board’s users/mods or get silenced. Posted rules do not matter, and you can definitely be hateful in ways that violate posted rules so long as that type of hate is acceptable on that board.
• So many users mean that getting content to succeed is a crapshoot. Often posts become lost in the noise, especially on busy boards.
• I left about a year ago, but apparently there’s a lot of bot/AI slop on boards now.

Lemmy:

• Much smaller user base. Heavily specialized boards move slowly if they exist at all. It’s not unusual to see boards where it’s just one/a few people posting with days in between new content.
• More ability to have disagreements. Whether it’s because moderating a smaller # of users is easier, the mods are less authoritarian, or whatever you are more likely to be able to disagree. Don’t be blatantly racist, celebrating violence, clearly trolling, etc. and you’ll probably remain able to participate. I’m sure this isn’t universal on all boards, but it’s my experience on many boards.
• For all that I believe the above point, there are still “echo chamber” moments on Lemmy. Sometimes it seems people may be downvoted simply because they are already downvoted. It’s still way less egregious than on Reddit, and such is human nature I suppose.
• Fewer users means you are more likely to get some engagement on your post, at least in my experience. I never sorted my feed by new posts on Reddit because it was an avalanche of posts of questionable quality, so I only saw whatever content had already succeeded. On Lemmy I can look for new posts and see most if not all content on the boards I enjoy.

• Take time off from social media once in a while, or at least avoid doomscrolling all day. Bad stories generate FAR more engagement than good stories, and every form of media knows this. If 100,000 people in your area have an average-to-good day and 5 people have terrible days, all 5 stories presented to you will detail how things are in your area are terrible.

• Physical health affects mental health and vice versa. Eat healthy (or healthier). Stay hydrated. Get 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and use sleep hygeine. Get 90+ minutes of exercise (anything that raises your heartrate) a week which is like 15 minutes/day. Don’t worry about doing it all immediately - if you try to change everything at once you’re more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. It’s way better to make slow, sustainable changes over months than it is to do a difficult crash course for a short time and get fed up with the process.

• Do thankfulness exercises. When I go to bed at night I think of 3 things I’m thankful for in the day. On average or bad days it may be that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink, and that I’m in a safe place and a soft bed. Just remembering those basics (that many of us take for granted) helps keep me aware of good things in my life.

• Find ways to enjoy hobbies that require participation - arts, sports, board/video games, whatever. Just something other than passively taking in TV/online media. This will help you feel engaged and double points if it’s something that allows for improvement because you’ll feel rewarded as you get better.

• Tucker Carlson has always been creepy and ludicrous and everyone knew it. In a lawsuit against Carlson a federal judge literally ruled that his flaws are so obvious that no reasonable person takes Tucker Carlson seriously.
• Elon Musk has always been creepy but IMO the world didn’t know it until a few years ago because he rarely expressed anything publicly outside of Tesla and SpaceX news.
• Trump has always been Trump. Here’s the magician Penn Jillette talking about why Trump was a great reality TV star and a shitty President. It only takes a 94-second video for Jillette to absolutely destroy Trump.

I’m surprised it’s that low. In the first several weeks alone Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000lb bombs. “The heavy munitions, mostly manufactured by the US, can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” That doesn’t even count all the other munitions used.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, just an interested amateur wanting to chat and drawing comparisons from past leaps in tech and other conversations/videos.

For a time expert analysis will probably work. For instance, the “click here to prove your not a robot” boxes can definitely be clicked by robots, but for now the robot moves in detectably different ways. My guess is that, for at least a while, AI content will be different from actual video in ways like code. There will probably be an arms race of sorts between AI and methods to detect AI.

Other forms of evidence like DNA, eyewitness accounts, cell phone tracking etc. will likely help mitigate deceitful AI somewhat. My guess is that soon video/audio will no longer be considered as ironclad as it was even a few years ago. Especially if it comes from an unverified source.

There are discussions about making AI tools have a digital “watermark” than can be used to identify AI-generated content. Of course this won’t help with black market-type programs, but it will keep most people out of the “deep fake for trials” game.

When it comes to misinformation on social media though, well…it’s probably going to get crazy. The last decade or so has been a race at an unprecedented scale to try and keep up with BS “proof”, psuedoscience, etc. Sadly those on the side of truth haven’t always won. The only answer I have for that is making sure people are educated about how to deal with misinformation and deepfakes - eg. awareness they exist, identifying reputable sources and expert consensus, and so on.

Serious answer: I remind myself it’s normal to be shocked by some stuff people do/create. I check the content against my ethics, and try to decide if I’m being uptight or if it really is messed up. If it’s something that isn’t unethical/harmful but I just don’t like, then I remind myself that not everyone needs to share my tastes.

If it’s genuinely terrible I allow myself to feel the anger/sorrow for a bit, try not to let it become excessive, and congratulate myself on having limits that fit my ethics. I remind myself that good people exist and they are the ones I want to support, emulate, and engage with. As others have mentioned, distraction can also help. Video games, music, socializing - whatever will move your train of thought along.

It’s not just Japanese Maid Cafes that are a little crazy that way. Now I’m guessing Hooters doesn’t do much business in China either.

Any peace deal that doesn’t involve Russia leaving behind all Ukrainian territory rewards Putin’s Russia for their invasion. IMO Russia should have to at least pull back to the borders that existed before the 2022 offensive. Of course I’m not in a position to make decisions if it’s a bitter pill that must be taken, but real gains for Russia will be proof that aggression worked.

Also, peace doesn’t need a specific broker. If an international effort including China, or even led by them, can broker a good deal then so be it. Maybe China’s relationship with Russia makes talks more likely to be productive. I can’t think of an explanation as to why a US-led deal with the same terms would be inherently better (that isn’t just nationalism/pride and much less important than halting war).