Yeah I should’ve written it as “It is not like that for me”. Though this is the first time I’ve heard someone who meditates compare it to doing drugs.

Well everyone is different. I practiced Zazen and nobody ever told me of experiencing a high or altered awareness. That’s only my experience though and I’m not trying to discount yours :)

Meditation doesn’t get you high?

No it’s a a fairly sober experience.

Drugs don’t alter your awareness?

Well I guess they can. I have no firsthand experience with psychedelics etc. but it doesn’t sound like the same kind of experience.

No, meditation is not like drugs. If anything it’s like exercise for a very particular part of your mind. It can train the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused. I practiced for many years. In my experience it does not in and of itself bring any sort of feelings of happiness.

“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state,” Habba added.

“Rules for thee, not for mee!”

“If you do not agree to sign this document, we would appreciate it if you could provide detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal teams.”

The equivalent of not letting you unsubscribe from a spammy mailing list unless you provide a reason.

Thanks. I suppose I should add I’m not American. Perhaps the takeaway is no two-party political system, such as in the US, can have a “political center” because the respective “left” and “right” parties seem inevitably to become opposed to each other on every issue? Things are different in Europe, where multiple parties can support the same policies, but to different degrees or funded differently.

Plenty of EU political parties which are labelled center-right on Wikipedia aren’t completely dead-set on destroying the entire social safety in the same way the Republicans are in the US, for example. Although they simultaneously might call for reduced benefits and lower taxes.

Also, many EU countries have what I would consider actual left-wing parties in parliament. On some issues I would consider myself slightly right of Germany’s “Die Linke” for example.

Being in favor of mixed economies, with stock markets, venture capital firms, but also universal healthcare and protection for unions. Being against American style basically unregulated firearm ownership (which seems quite popular on both the far left and far right, yet maybe not so much in the middle). And I feel free to criticize the actions of parties or politicians across the political spectrum, not just those on one side. I understand many people, especially the political left which I sympathize more with, are very angry these days. Justifiably. So am I. But being accused of being dishonest just for having a different point of view is annoying.

On the other hand, the kneejerk of labeling every even remotely centrist viewpoint as inherently dishonest is pretty annoying. My own views lean SocDem and I’ve found voicing any opinion which is neither solidly left-wing or solidly right-wing, especially if it does not align with very American-centric views of the political spectrum, often elicits unpleasant reactions. Nuance is hard, I guess.

As far as I can tell this was intended to be a Venera probe, possibly it would have been Venera 9, but because it failed in earth orbit it was classified as “Kosmos”.

Yeah, that’s a more nuanced take than mine. I sadly doubt this country will actually do anything to improve pay equality however, which I would agree lies at the root of the unpopularity of those jobs.

It’s a Venera probe! The probe missions of the Soviet space program were remarkable. What a technological feat to get these machines all the way to Venus (of all places) and send data and pictures back, in the 1970s!

You mean like the White House and Congress?

Americans mostly don’t even want to do the manual labor jobs which have always been available in the US, like residential construction or picking crops. And the oligarchs want to both reduce immigration and re-industrialize? It’s going to be comically unpopular.

I’m sure it’s a very real and concerning problem that Americans watch too many foreign movies in theaters.

KDE has almost perfect fractional scaling, that was the real chadfeature for me.

~$10/mo currently but since I recently switched to Linux, and it’s working very well for me, I feel like upping it a little.

I’ve long considered donating to Mozilla since Firefox is by far my most used open source software. But they don’t seem to lack money. So, huh.

Yeah, same. Previous years it was cars driving around with flags, posters for events, etc. This year I saw absolutely nothing. Feels a bit glum tbh.

I never really used Skype as a VOIP platform, but it was a great tool for many years for calling international phone numbers affordably. I’m sure it helped many people saving a lot of money calling their friends and relatives. For that I remember it somewhat fondly.

It’s the new trend in software engineering: Turd-Driven Development