Be a queen. Don’t be a drag.

Founding fathers wore wigs.

Humans are already imposing upon our pets and depriving them of their autonomy, simply by keeping them in captivity. Any argument against merciful euthanasia grounded in concerns about how it is imposing are moot.

As for pulling human euthanasia into this context, do yourself a favor and don’t. You might be surprised at how common euthanasia is in humans. At least in my part of the world, it’s largely a wink-wink nudge-nudge situation, but it does happen with some regularity. Also for people who are actually suffering in decline, there are all kinds of supportive care options being provided that simply aren’t feasible or economical for pets. There’s also not really the potential for the same kinds of perverse intentions with pets as there might be for people. Like, the list goes on.

So, basically from either of those two perspectives, let alone the fact that both apply, the argument against euthanizing pets that you’ve presented fall apart.

Having said that, this is often not a simple and straightforward decision. But since we’ve already established that we’re imposing upon them one way or the other, it really comes down to what kind of imposition do you want? The animal is going to die soon one way or the other. You can impose upon it and force it to experience the pain and fear and discomfort of its body naturally shutting down over the course of days, weeks, or months. You could impose upon it and decide to euthanize. What can you live with?

On a more personal note, I’ve had to have 2 pets euthanized.

One was a cat who managed to escape outside, it got hit by a car and then a neighbor’s dog mauled it. Literally pieces of broken rib and punctured lung exposed as well as untold other injuries. No hope of recovery. The idea of letting it suffer another moment was not something I could live with and it was going to die anyway.

The other was a dog with congestive heart failure. There comes a point where there are no more medications and no higher doses that are effective. The animal literally is experiencing the sensation of drowning. They’re terrified and in pain, exhausted, and suffering. The vet might be able to alleviate it a few hours or even a couple of days with a procedure to manually remove the fluid, but then you’re just going to put the animal through this again and soon. I could not live with myself forcing the dog to endure that knowing there was another option.

Plus, I have seen the pet owner that refused euthanasia and wanted their pet to die a natural death. The dog had cancer. I’m honestly broken up enough just thinking about what I witnessed that I can’t even bring myself to type it out. So I’ll stop there other than to say I’ve seen people dying of cancer in their final hours – there is a world of difference in those things, at least in modern times. The pet was clearly distressed, in pain, and suffering. The people are being made comfortable with drugs and medical care.

Who needs laws when you got four paws. Am I right?

If you drink that, urine trouble.

And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.

What a coincidence, I just sat down from washing dishes and my sleeve has pretty much the same exact size wet spot in nearly the exact same place. I suppose I should just crawl into bed and give up for the day but I’d need to take this long sleeve shirt off first and that’s a lot of work right now while my wrist is cold and wet.

Type 2 runs rampant on both sides of my family. I’ve had symptoms since I was a kid, and have been tested almost every year as an adult. However, my test results have always been in the healthy range, so I guess I’m not diabetic, at least not yet.

It’s strange to read through the comments and see all the symptoms and recognize them in myself.

Granted, I think the only diagnostic tool most care providers in the USA look at is the A1C number. I’ve asked many questions over the years: could my symptoms be caused by something else, is it possible that A1C numbers might not be a reliable indicator for some people, and things like that. Basically get told not to worry about it.

Either way, I still get tested each year.

My nose is more sensitive than average to certain types of foul smells mostly in the poop and rotting organic material categories but also things like mouse / rodent urine, skunks, and cigarette smoke. Oh joy.

Mostly it makes me feel like I’m going crazy because I smell these things when nobody else seems to notice leading me to wonder if I’m just hallucinating the smell. But sometimes I put it to good use by being the early warning system of skunks in the area and sometimes I’m the first to notice when the milk is starting to go bad.

It’d probably be one of the pink ones, but don’t discount the orange or purple options or you might just be missing out. Green is sometimes surprisingly good, too. Yellow’s usually something like lemonade, a solid choice, but almost never the best tasting choice and most of the other typical yellow associated flavors are disappointing at best.

There’s a part of me that’s morbidly curious how all of these things work and how they’re used.

Heartburn / acid indigestion. Racing thoughts. Back pain. Severe thunderstorms. Just to name a few things.

Well, that was my answer before I read the other comments and see that most other people have interpreted the question differently than myself.

I went black friday shopping one time back around 2005 or so before online retail was a dominating force. I get why some people enjoy(ed) it and think fondly of it, but that was an experience I don’t want to repeat. All day long so many stores were packed with people, it was hard to get around and slow going. My anxiety is ramping up just thinking about it.

I ended up at Walmart yesterday morning (black friday). Not to shop the sales, but to get some much needed supplies. I was expecting it to be hectic and not looking forward to the trip. The place was barely more busy than any random weekday night. The only spot that was a bit crowded was at the entrance where they’d placed a bunch of pallets of TVs that constricted the space where people could move.

It was nothing like the great DVD stampede or the 256MB thumb drive fiasco of my first black friday shopping trip.

You probably know this, but for others who might not: MS is now allowing some/many/all (???) people to extend the security updates for Win10 for another year free of charge. You have to go into the Windows update area and click a button to accept. At least in the USA, this seems to be a somewhat newly available option, as it was there the last time someone asked me to look at their laptop to see if I could upgrade it to Win11.

Swap a few of the tires with spares and change the color to gray and I’d swear I’ve seen that vehicle flying down the interstate at 80 mph (129 kph).

Quite some time ago, the messaging I was getting from Microsoft was that Windows 10 security updates were going to end this year. I didn’t really keep up with the news on that front, but I did notice that there was some kind of law suit in the EU that from what I recall basically came down to the fact that MS would have to continue to provide security updates to Win 10 free of charge for EU users.

Literally within the last week, a buddy of mine asked me to look at his computer and see if I could upgrade it to Win 10. I could not, as it doesn’t have a supported processor. But what I noticed is that MS now offers the option to extend security updates until 2026 with the click of a button.

So, thanks EU folks! Already knew ya’ll were awesome, but I assume this change of heart from Microsoft was a result of that suit. I appreciate it.

I did that once and woke up in Gaffney, South Carolina with a house wren stuck under my coat.

Lemmy is such a negative place and I guess you’re part of that so yay you.

If the story is to be believed, Jesus was conceived via parthenogenesis (aka immaculate conception aka unfertilized egg). This means Jesus had only X chromosomes and yet presented as male. Jesus was definitely somewhere on the line of intersex, transgender, non-binary, et. al.

It weighs heavily on me, to say the least. It’s nearly impossible to have an even slightly tangentially political conversation with them that doesn’t leave me deeply disturbed and/or infuriated, so I pretty much avoid it altogether. Now the deepest conversation I allow is “how’s the weather” and “what are you having for dinner tonight?”, and that’s sad.

But it’s absolutely the case that engaging with them on political stuff is destructive to my psyche. And even worse, they have a way of turning otherwise entirely non-political topics into something political. These are not the people who raised me or the values they raised me with. And there’s no real logical consistency to any of it other than it’s definitely going to be in agreement with whatever the latest opinions are on Fox News and Facebook.

As a kid, the only particularly “conservative” view point they shared was on immigration. They absolutely believed the whole “Mexicans are taking our jobs” bullshit. I remember even asking them why they aren’t mad at their bosses for giving their jobs to the “Mexicans” and never getting a satisfactory answer for why that was given a pass.

And then from that one little common thread, the rest of the conservative/Republican agenda has wormed its way in. So, naturally as the conservative agenda morphed into a more fascist agenda, so have my parents’ beliefs. With age and health related mental declines, these ideals have become more cemented. These are people who will never forget or forgive Democrats for NAFTA, but also believe that Republicans wanted universal healthcare for all yet Democrats gave us Obamacare instead. They grew up growing and selling weed to make ends meet, and yet still believe it should be illegal and people deserve to be in jail for it. They have a gay kid but believe gay marriage is wrong, because the Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman, and the government shouldn’t be involved at all.

They honestly buy into the idea that police officers and pastors are infallible. If someone is arrested, it’s because they are guilty of something. No pastor would ever sexually abuse a child, they are a pastor after all. If the president says something is true, it must be true. And again, none of this is how they raised me or the ideals they expressed when I was growing up, so it’s definitely like living in some kind of bizarre reality that’s tough to come to terms with.

Making memes about nukes is definitely rad.

Breaks treats into pieces instead of giving you a whole treat per good dog duty. (Was my feigned appreciation good enough to fool you?)