I have seen social media described as “microblogging”, but I don’t think that’s true. Or rather, actual blogs like on WordPress are one thing, but the more “conversation” style is something else entirely. Phrases such as “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe” reveal that the true purpose of social media is emotional venting, rather than conveyance of information. For some people at least - and depending on moderation practices and abilities, and on communities setting up expectations, the level of discourse may be either higher or lower, but even so, foundationally, isn’t that what this place is for?

After all, Wikipedia articles are one thing, essays and poetry are another, blogs are still another (with the level of effort being put into their crafting), and finally at the lowest end, social media is found where we just blurt out whatever we are thinking about at any given moment.

Mind you, it can be done well - I have had people convince me of my privilege status & thus shepherd me into wokeness even on Facebook, which is not known for such - but even so, isn’t the true purpose of a thing what it mostly does? Like a vehicle isn’t a coffee holder, despite it being capable of that, as well as many other things.

Some people’s thoughts are just more worth listening to than others. Hence why microblogging e.g. Twitter/X & Mastodon can aim at a higher end, as too can Reddit & Lemmy/K/Mbin (+ soon: Sublinks), but it seems rarely used for its maximum purpose and far more often for its emotive vomit aka “share every single one of our uncurated thoughts”. Case in point: my message right here, which unlike a “blog post” took me <5 minutes to create.:-P

Btw, check out https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb for an example of what I would consider a more worthwhile post. Sometimes, imho, it is okay to aim for more quality than quantity of posts, even if that seems antithetical to the goal of “social media” that aims instead to connect people together to just shoot the shit amongst ourselves.

Instructions unclear, now have Pope following me around the woods trying to poop on me - help!?

It is, but presumably phrasing it as a question increases engagement (or was thought to) hence furthers the OP’s goal, in spite of the factual nature.

i.e. the same reason that Trump was allowed to walk all over the “moderators” at the recent Presidential advertisement “debate”.

You know, “journalism” as it seems to always be practiced these days. As in, chase the profits to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Hrm, I wonder if my time spent on social media has made me more hostile to such predatory practices overall…

Trump would like to have a word with you.

Why u gonna out your neighbors like that?

(Bc if they aren’t “in” either, then they are likely…:-P)

This joke brought to you by my brain. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the AI now? 😜

So I take it the trucks are now piles of rust then?

As before when they were merely potential piles of rust.

How long before the AI answer to every question is simply “username checks out”? :-P

The death of many people from excessive heat and other effects of climate change will be quite a natural consequence of our hubris indeed.

That comparison was apparently done previously.

The limited work on attachment and singlehood has produced inconsistent results (see Pepping et al., 2018 for a review) but suggests that single people are, on average, more insecure than those in relationships (Chopik et al., 2013).

Oh but I see what you mean - the “secure” sub-group(s) in this study would have strongly benefitted from that comparison yes. But it gets more complicated b/c the terms they chose to use aren’t really the English-meaning of those words like “secure”, but rather “low attachment-avoidance and low anxiety”, hence insecure isn’t a single category but three (anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant).

Anyway the comparison to non-singleness could be a future follow-up study:-).

“Insecure” isn’t quite the same as “unhappy”, plus how many people in relationships are happy?

Also as it mentions, being with the wrong person is far worse than being alone.

Still, yeah that second sentence in the title is a bit disconnected from the first sentence, even if technically the truth.

Edit: this title is not the title of the article - interesting. That is just what was used here on Lemmy. The real title of the actual article is “Would you be happy as a long-term single? The answer may depend on your attachment style.”

It’s okay - that’s how I interpreted it:-). Lemmy formatting can also be weird sometimes and people access via different methods, so I try to remember that as well.

citizens of their own country

^This is the big one, particularly in a democracy this is so extremely crucial. But… we did not bother to secure it, so now we may be (are?) losing it all. Like someone who has lost their immune system, we are now vulnerable to not only lack of knowledge but outright presence of active disinformation. Wait… didn’t we need that - ooopsie daisy!? :-P

I am afraid of my country becoming like this.

If we had had more fear sooner, we might have avoided getting eaten alive by Russian disinformation campaigns. As it is… our lack of fear has definitely harmed us greatly, possibly fatally.

The good news is that whatever society rises out of our corpse will have learned lessons from the ordeal. Rome also fell too, but life goes on. Ours might not, and given climate change humans or even mammals + far more might not, but even so, all we can control is ourselves individually, right now. I for one take that as a charge to do whatever I can in however much time we have left. And maybe it’s not a foregone conclusion after all? So much the better. All we have is today - make it a good one.:-)

If you will allow me to say? Your premise seems incorrect. Words like “need” presumes a goal to keep people alive. We “need” Oxygen, in order to breathe which itself is necessary in order to stay alive rather than convert into a corpse state of ‘existence’. However, as e.g. https://lemmy.zip/post/17644464 shows, we are not being allowed to have even that. And if even Oxygen is denied us, then surely education will be even less of a “right”, for homo sapiens or otherwise.

To a fascist, such as the current set of billionaires in charge, education of the masses - or even our very existence, in light of globalism for now and automation eventually - is no longer necessary. And with climate change diminishing resources, possibly it is not even desirable or neutral anymore, so much as something to be either neutrally or perhaps actively pursued to demolish what has previously been built up. e.g. when the pandemic occurred, the response was “so what? let them die. BuT tHe EcOnOmY will go on just fine without them, in fact better without those restrictions imposed by safety protocols”.

So no, “everyone needs education” sounds like something that is not true… at least according to the likes of Elon Musk, who now controls Twitter. Not Bezos, nor Zuckerberg, etc. And they would really like it if we did not tax them in order to pay for such. And a LOT of people seem to agree with them, whether we like it or not. See this fantastic description of it: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs?si=dAGHoctLiPimmTTQ.

First note that it’s enormously variable, with some college preparatory high schools being better than some colleges. The main thing is that education is a for-profit exercise, and now even government-funded ones behave like that too after No Child Left Behind. So like anything else, it’s whatever they can get away with selling their product with minimal input into in order to maximize the margin:-(.

Then above and beyond that, schools are partly paid for by the government, but also by the local district they are in, so schools in richer areas are going to be 1000x better than those in poorer ones. See e.g. this older John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) special: https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM.

Yes the purpose of Kurzgesagt is pop-sci. Hank and John Green are more college level (remember: American college is often equivalent to high school elsewhere in the world) and the likes of Innuendo Studios and CGP Grey can get fairly far away from dancing and deeper into philosophy.

The reason I brought up Kurzgesagt was that even that level is beyond what people want to see.

Then you understand correctly.

The difference is, people like Bezos also want to steal the value of our labor, but without allowing us to educate our children.

Hence it is worse.

Farmers need education. Farmhands do not.

Anyway I was just attempting to use it as an example - we could substitute gas station attendant or fast food worker, etc. There are jobs where, for the job anyway while ignoring the quality of life for the actual person, formalized education is less necessary than for other jobs, e.g. doctor or lawyer.

But my example of using farmhand was not made up: farmers literally pulled their kids out of primary schooling in order to make use of them on the farm. Perhaps they supplemented it with homeschooling at other times when the crop cycles allowed… or perhaps not. But either way, the ways we use to measure intelligence - e.g. if we ask what country does the city of Athens belong to - the farmhands will appear extremely low in such rankings.

So long as someone else in the family does the planning work, someone who was not merely pulled out but who flunked out of primary schooling could exist in life by contributing purely manual but not much intellectual labor.

Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here’s an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but… accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)

However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.

This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.

Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.

That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There’s always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.

With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it’s easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.

Their decision, whether they have spent even one second’s thought about it or not, is “strategic” as in one that will get them personally some benefits, but it is also short-sighted as in one that may doom us all. On the other hand, my naivite is perhaps far worse so I should be careful throwing stones in glass houses.

I rarely like popular TV shows but one that does make me think is The 100 that illustrates thougher choices needing to be made and all the gamesmanship going on surrounding those. e.g. will neoliberals survive whereas progressivism was too impractical to ever have a chance? I don’t know the answer but those seem like the kinds of questions that needed to be explored by people far smarter in such matters than I. Unfortunately, they instead have been explored by people who are fairly smart but whose defining characteristic may be a desire to become personally richer, which again far exceeds my own.

Oh… I thought they had someone already and this was him, sorry - I edited my comment to apologize for misinformation, thanks for the update!:-)

Oh absolutely yes. I mean, prior to Roe v. Wade being overturned, it was even relatively safe for women there too, I would guess.

Back when I was on Reddit I used to read a lot of posts on nursing subs, and I recall a story where some guy brought in federal funding to start an entire institute somewhere east of Springfield, Missouri iirc. Think of all those jobs… However, he cancelled it and left the state b/c of all the literal death threats he received during the early days of the pandemic. AN ENTIRE INSTITUTE!!! And iirc he wasn’t even so much concerned with himself as his family like his daughter. 2020 was not a “safe” place for a medical researcher to be in Missouri. That state is actually somewhat known for this too - e.g. that is where Hawley was the only senator to vote against a child sex slave trafficking bill (surely there could not be any uh… nefarious uh… “reasons” for such, wink? 🤮).

A mere house with four walls and a roof over your head is not a home. People outright desire to pay for solid rather than unreliable infrastructure - electricity, policing, services like trash collection, a bridge if you need it, etc. - these things cost money, at which point the corporations tacking on enormous overheads to price people out of owning a “good” home is an actual travesty of justice, that will literally get people killed, as they instead have to compromise on something, like access to medical care and safety.

Edit: I don’t know about Atlanta in particular, but any actual “city” will be liberal (I would guess?) - e.g. not have full-on card-carrying KKK members as their police, and that one with the CDC I would guess would have good healthcare? Even if someone had to drive a bit to get to it.