The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn’t feel like commenting because I knew that I’d just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.

You may technically be “reading” emotions, but you’re not doing it on a conscious level, and the way it tends to surface in you is through emotional mirroring - i.e., you feel the emotion the other person is feeling.

To illustrate, someone I know has significant social anxiety, and I saw her in a social situation standing alone. Her facial expression and body language immediately kicked in my own discomfort, so I went over and talked with her and her face lit up. I could feel her relief as plain as I could feel her discomfort before. It’s easier with people you know, as you have a lot of baseline data, but even total strangers give off the cues you pick up subconsciously. What is interesting is that I’ve found that some highly manipulative people are fairly adept at masking their external emotional cues, especially facial microexpressions. I would guess that professional poker players are highly adept at not only intuitively reading microexpressions, but also at concealing their own.

“Empath” is a colloquial rather than clinical term, but it is useful. For people who grew up in an abusive household with unsafe parents, being hyper-attuned to their parent’s emotions was an important survival skill, as being able to make yourself scarce at appropriate times can save you a beating. People give off all sorts of cues to their emotional state, including facial microexpressions, vocal tonality, body language, etc., and children raised in these environments have honed their ability to inutit emotional states from scant external cues, usually without realizing that they’re even doing it. Unfortunately, most tend to disregard the “gut” feeling they get when doing it, because their abuse profile also typically includes emotional invalidation, which has taught them that their emotions are “wrong”. So the cruel irony is that most “Empaths” don’t trust their intuition, and tend to associate with abusive people like their parents, which feels comfortably like “home”.

Wait, the woman in the picture is only 36!?! She looks like a 50 year old trying to recapture her glory days with botched plastic surgery. She has serious Mar-a-Lago Face.

Not all of them are in fixed locations. Some of them are pop-ups, like a DUI checkpoint.

FWIW (and tangentially related), anyone traveling with weed is best served by keeping it in the trunk, rather than in the passenger compartment. Police have more freedom to go through the passenger compartment under the guise of concern over weapons that might be used against them, as opposed in the trunk, which can be viewed as a separate container and is less likely to be searched.

Immigration checkpoints in Southern California aren’t just for immigrants. They stop everyone to scan for immigrants, and you have to pass through them when you go to certain places. Weed vapes are legal under state law in California, but illegal under Federal law.

Concentration in fewer and fewer stocks is what happens towards the end of a bull market, and we’re currently in a bull market that has been running wild for years. My personal opinion is that we’re going to get parabolic price increases with a blow-off top, with the following collapse coinciding with the collapse of the U.S. dollar and destruction of the U.S. as the dominant economic force in the world. The stage has been set with a shrinking economy resulting from a massive ill-conceived trade war and indiscriminate deportation of our low-cost labor force, along with gross fiscal irresponsibility from unnecessary tax cuts and excessive spending giving rise to unsustainable budget deficits. The final nail in the coffin will be the debasement of the dollar by a corrupted Federal Reserve that has lost its independence from the Executive branch. There is a reason that gold, a hard asset viewed as a safety net, is in it’s biggest bull run in history, and that bull has a lot further to run. Things will likely come to a head in the 4th quarter of 2026, or not too long thereafter, and we will then slide into that I’m calling “The Greatest Depression”. May you live in interesting times!

I’m an attorney and I’ve met more than a few with “Dark Triad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) personality traits.

An special tariffs were levied on Spirit Halloween store.

I bought a Kobo as well, after having a ton of DRM issues with books I’ve bought on kindle. I love the Kobo!

I recently picked up a sewing machine at a garage sale for $40 and it has been a game changer for me and has really upped my look. All my clothes are now tailored to fit my body, and it makes a huge difference. I’m a middle-age man, but am very fit. However, most off the rack clothing is cut for the average American male physique, which means that shirts that fit me in the shoulders generally have tons of extra fabric around the mid section. Now, every short sleeve shirt I buy gets “the treatment”. I take up the sleeves to mid-bicep (because showing bicep is the male equivalent to showing cleavage), take them in to hug my biceps, and then taper the shirt to the waist to show off my trim waistline and emphasize my shoulder to waist ratio. Quite honestly, it’s amazing how much more attention I get based upon that one simple change.

Apple and Google should just prevent their app stores from functioning in Texas.

Ha ha, that’s a good one! Fascism’s enablers standing up to fascism.

It’s a bummer because reddit used to be really cool. It’s like when you discover a cool little cafe or something that you love going to. Eventually more and more people discover it, and it becomes a bit more crowded, but you still go. Then it gets written up in some magazine or something, and the crowd becomes nuclear. It becomes a tourist trap flogging merchandise, and they turn it into a chain, with the food semi-preprepared for mass consumption. The experience sucks and what was a special spot is ruined.

I’ve noticed that the lemmy front page has a much greater turnover than the reddit front page, which is nice.

Honestly, reddit drove me away. I got tired of being hounded by engagement bots asking inane questions, and in the wake of reddit going public, the comment police regularly were nitpicking my comments, reading into them intolerance that simply wasn’t there. I was just sick of it all. Reddit has a much bigger userbase, but lemmy is more friendly. There are occasions where it would be nice to post something niche and have a robust discussion, which requires a site with more mass appeal, but I’m not interested in all the drawbacks of dealing with reddit.

It’s ridiculous. The fact that a significant part of the report was clearly fraudulent calls into question the merit of the entire report. How could anyone take it seriously after finding dozens of fraudulent sources? They should sue to recover 100% of what was paid.

I imagine using the TOR browser would work as well.

There is no good answer, and you have to find what is right for you. I’ve been around too many toxic people for too long, and at this point I feel like I don’t owe anyone my time or attention, family or not. Setting solid boundaries has worked wonders for my mental health. While I would love to have a good, healthy relationship with my family, I cannot make that happen by myself. They have to meet me halfway, and when they engage in behaviors that I wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else, it reminds me that I shouldn’t tolerate it from them either. People get so hung up on “but he’s your father” or “it’s your family,” but the people that say that have no idea what I’ve been through and no frame of reference. It is absolutely 100% the right thing to minimize or eliminate contact with abusive people, even if they are your family.

I feel for you. My parents also drank the Koolaid, but my mother is dead now, and my father has slipped even further down the rabbit hole. He’s also a horrible person in general, and while I used to engage with him if he were behaving himself, I’ve effectively gone no contact now. I’ve only spoke with him once in the last few years, and when he launched into a racist anti-immigrant tirade I told him not to be a coward his entire life and hung up on him. It was on my birthday.

“I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn’t get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”