Finally, someone gets it!

I refuse to be a prisoner in my own life!

Just remove the name America from if and we’re good to go, because America bad.

Nothing against OP, but there’s a lot of people who are completely unaware of their surroundings. Perhaps OP is young, not a homeowner, whatever. The older I get, the more I certainly become aware of these things. The question I asked myself was why come here and not a search engine? But it’s not important, and I think OP got some valid answers here, and hopefully they learned about their community.

As others have said, it’s not across the board. I’m sure there are places in the US where it’s hard to recycle this kind of stuff. Just like I’m sure there are places in Europe where people bury these things in holes in the ground. It’s just the whole “Hurr durr America stupid” thing is old af, and so when I read these jabs I like to talk about how I live in good America, where we have education and social safety nets and electronic recycling.

And the majority of comments I make in this fashion apply fairly broadly to the entirety of the Northeast Corridor, DC to Boston, which is kind of where America started. Just wish there were more northeast corridors, because I do understand and appreciate that some of the criticisms I read are true of portions of the country, and it’s unfortunate.

We have that in the US too, but condescend away.

I have discovered bodies in various stages of post mortem, from recent to rigor. Shitting of pants is not a given. And I was an EMT, not just a crazy person.

I don’t see Vance flags on people’s trucks. I see Trump flags. I just don’t know that Vance gets the backing Trump does. I think the Rs capitulate to Trump so much because of his rabies base, and there’s this concern they’ll be replaced by someone who Trump endorses.

I do think it’s all a game for wealthy people, and we will just pay for it one way or another, regardless.

Those are the best ones.

Maybe we will become the Untied States, a common typo come to life, where all the states kinda just exist on their own, more similar in structure to the EU. Coming from one of the giver states with great education and social services, and even public transit, if the flyovers want to be shitty and sell me their crops and whatever, that’s fine.

When kids start to communicate, it gets so much better. Mine are 7 and 4 now and so we are over that hump (and only have three bedrooms and) permanently, but babies are frustrating AF, and that frustration rubs off on everything. My daughter, I can sit and really talk with her and find out about her day and her needs and her desires. My son is still a buffoon but I get glimpses of an actual person in there, and I love it.

Things are definitely harder when your kids are younger. They don’t communicate, you get frustrated, your partner is obviously frustrated as well, and it unfortunately carries into your relationship. My wife and I write letters to each other as the year goes along and plop them in a box. I do my best to not make it this rosy depiction of a wonderful life. I unload how some times can be difficult. It helps me remember that shit ain’t always perfect, and that’s that. It helps me let go of some negative feelings, and remember that some issues are acute for any number of reasons.

I always joke with people that I didn’t form this immediate bond with my children. I’m not sure it’s even a joke, but I make it a joke now, because my bond with them is immense now. The joke now is that I love them both so much more than their mom, and my wife understands it completely. And it’s not because of some love lost over the last 11+ years I’ve been with my wife, but that this relationship with my kids has just grown to a level I didn’t quite understand before.

So I dunno, I try to compartmentalize some of the bad times. They sure have existed. I try to remember that there’s always some rationale for intolerable behavior, and that sometimes you can’t just wish that trigger away, and that we need to just eat shit for a bit. And so that letter to my wife frequently helped me communicate about those times I was a less than ideal partner, as well as the times she was. And surely it was a vent for the times our kids could be little monsters.

The #1 issue for all of us is Us versus Them. That’s it. There’s 1000 of them and 350 million of us.

You’re responding to the same disingenuous argument you see all over Lemmy made by folks whose jobs are in the IT field.

That being said, why hate Plex? I’m sure, like me, you’re grandfathered in. Is it fucking new users? Sure. Sucks. Not everything is a battlefield, and they’ll eventually fuck me and then I will abandon them, it is what it is. But for now, the shit just always works with almost no tweaking from me. I really can’t ask for much more. Got my mom to watch The Wire because of Plex.

We had two cats. Fed them the exact same way. One got fat and had diabetes, and eventually died because she swallowed something that was not food that got stuck in her intestines. The other cat, he has always maintained a healthy weight. I think it all came down to some kind of feline anxiety though, where she was always seeming anxious, right down to being overprotective of food, and he’s incredibly chill and always has been, except when neighborhood cats wander on our property.

We always opted for Fancy Feast pate, had looked them up when the diabetes first showed up, and they’re apparently high protein, low carb, and they served us well enough. We mix in some other stuff from time to time for variety, but that’s the bulk of it. I’m interested in this Primal though, definitely going to have a look. He is now somewhere in the 13ish range, dunno for certain since he was a street urchin when my wife found him, but we’re trying to let him live a long, healthy life, in spite of his urge to die on the streets somewhere.

Yeah, I need to remember if it was ginko or something else. I’m not the greatest rememberer, so I’ll go back and check the recording. Perhaps not natural meant not native, but I recall being surprised at the description. We shall see, always interesting.

Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.

I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.

I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.

And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.

I love two towns over from Manville, which was the asbestos capital of America, and I can unequivocally say those morons would vote to bring asbestos back if they could.

Starring Cuba Gooding Junior Jr.

It’s weird, when I’m around my kids, I feel like my ability to make decisions is improved, I feel like I’m less prone to any sort of panic. There’s something about having them with me, I suppose it’s that I know that I need to be the one to “figure things out,” that helps me see things more clearly. Or perhaps I’ve just matured a bit. Or perhaps life has just beaten me down so much that nothing is new.

Eh, upstate NY is probably all red, save for perhaps part of Albany. NY State and NY City are very, very different.