Discussing politics and other contentious sunjects online feels to me like it's counterproductive these days and even though I try not to get suckered in, I often can't help myself. Usually though I just end up feeling frustrated and sometimes angry at the other person either missing my points or refusing to accept them.

Thinking back to conversations I've had here and previously on Reddit, not only can I not remember an example of me "winning" the discussion and the other person changing their mind or conceding the point, I also cannot think of a time where my mind was changed either.

So have you ever begun a discussion online with someone with a different view point to yours and either you, or they, changed the others mind?

According to some sources, at least 1 in 8 of the world population is classified as ‘obese’. Since nobody in any government seems to have thought up a working solution, what do you believe can be done to solve the epidemic?

the alleged definition of obesity

I have a full time job but some coworkers suggested I could apply to a department with a manager who seems to be a complete sociopath and seems to always need personnel.

In said department, there was a nurse that worked part time to finance her bachelor to be a physician assistant with the promise to be hired afterwards. She was sometimes very talkative and a gossip but otherwise a good nurse. Barely a week before the contract was to be signed, after she got her degree, she was told they found a better candidate with more experience so they wouldn’t hire her.

Obviously, she used all her sick days and then quit. Why would anyone work for a manager like this?

Chilling and very sad that people are sometimes like this. She was used.

Would you work for a manager like this? Because some coworkers would like me to apply to work for this guy,because they're always shorthanded. I’m not asking because I need this job, but because it’s always good to know what other options you have before looking elsewhere.

Believe people when they show you who they are would apply here.

With rising oil prices, if countries decided to curtail their consumption - akin to a directed economy - to reduce purchases to a minimum and even refusing to buy above a certain value, what could that cause?

The first reaction I'd expect would be production cuts to hold the prices but, technically, those are already happening. Demand is just not following.

I know it doesn’t ‘cause’ it, per se, but it’s still a ‘factor’ (or can be, rather) yet it seems some disagree with that description.

Working healthcare, I tell all other healthcare / first responders "I hope you have a boring shift" (every once in a while a younger person objects, but they are almost immediately hushed / corrected by their senior coworker).

But it occurs to me that many office / sedentary workers might not find this to be a blessing. What would I say to a desk worker that might be equivalent?

With the rise of cancel culture, it’s something that’s got me curious, why are so many works (music, literature, tv shows, etc.) no longer separated from their controversial makers? Is it purely to do with money (e.g. not wanting to give money to people you don’t agree with?) and what about controversial people who are dead? They don’t gain anything, so why isn’t the art separated from the artist? What’s your opinion on this topic?

I don't regularly watch any of it whether normal weekly show or special event, but wrestling. I still read up news and stuff about wrestling but I can barely consider myself a fan.

I had a dream last night where a misshapen naked bald man with bright red skin was sitting in front of me and reciting a long mostly incoherent rant, so I woke myself up and wrote down the little bit I was able to remember:

You can't say the words but you don't want to hear it

Have you ever had a dream where you were able to bring back some particular words that were spoken or written down? What were they?

Doesn't have to be thousands of dollars. Just a thing you spent money on that turned out to be a complete waste.

It’s been reported that in the German elections, a far right party has made ‘significant gains’.

In the UK (at least before the scandals) Reform UK seems to have had a significant boost and has even surpassed the right-wing Conservative Party in some polls/predictions.

Even France, one or two years ago, was threatened with a far-right government due to the French far right party gaining a lot of support.

It feels like in the last few years, the far-right has exceeded itself and had a surge in popularity. Is this the case? And if so, wtf is fuelling it?

Hey, Ask Lemmy, we all know that people love to talk about themselves, and I'd love to hear about some of your pleasant experiences. So, please, no matter how big; no matter how small, tell me something that you are proud to have made :)

excluding lemmy and not corporate ad slop

Yesterday I wanted to watch a show with 2 different subtitles on simultaneously. I looked it up and found a 6 years old thread saying it was possible with VLC4.

I found VLC 4 on their website, presented as something like a rolling beta release.

The interface is far superior to VLC3, with things I usually add manually that are already there.

I don't get why things that have been available for years aren't pushed to the stable version. Are those still unstable? Abandoned?

I didn't have time to test it much.

I (23M, American) feel completely paralyzed from a career perspective because I have no idea what the hell to do. If I choose the wrong degree program, I have to pay back all the debt with nothing to show for it. Even if I get a job, there's no telling how long that will last. Everything keeps changing so fucking fast and it seems like any field I could go to college for could cease to be viable by the time I finish. On top of that, I have chronic health conditions to worry about that limit what I can even do.

(Edit: Basically I have POTS and a neck injury, so it’s hard to do physical labor and I suffer from dizziness, brain fog, and fatigue from being up for an hour or so. I don’t know my exact limits yet, since the severity of my condition varies by day and there appear to be ways to partially recover from the fatigue without having to lay down.)

I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I'm not sure if that's a viable path in 2027 and beyond. I also used to be interested in programming, but ever since AI and mass layoffs hit the scene, I've become disillusioned and stopped pursuing that path.

I used to feel like the world was stable and I could pick a career based on my passion and be fine. But ever since 2020, everything has felt increasingly more uncertain. The world seems to be losing its collective shit and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon.

Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this? Should I be trying to find close friends or some kind of supportive community that could act as a safety net? Or is everyone too hyperindividualist to look out for each other?

I'm learning traditional Chinese using Taiwan's 華語八千詞 database. That's the 8000 most common Mandarin Chinese characters according to Taiwan's Ministry of Education (教育部)

It helps much to understand the character's etymologies and to that end I'm using this online database. Problem is, I like studying outdoors where no internet is available, hence the downloadable database I'm looking for.

It doesn't have to include explanations in English, just how characters are decomposed and what variations are used (like heart is written in some characters like 忄as in 忻 instead of using the full radical 心)

Or if somebody knows how to download the whole set of images of the webpage I linked maintaining it's structure...

The database I linked is also available as a book (Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) but is so poorly printed characters are sometimes extremely difficult to read.

I understand the consensus at large is no, but what if they could be used for, say, administrative purposes, or some other task which, though not unimportant, might be considered trivial compared to, say, surgery or assessments?

Just a thought.

Also, in addition to whether such technology should be used, do you believe it to be inevitable in any case?

To be sure, I’m not advocating for or against it, merely curious what other people’s opinions are and why they hold such opinions on this potentially inevitable subject

First off: I know now is a terrible time to house search with interest rates, home prices and rents through the roof. No arguments there.

My wife works remotely for a nonprofit out of DC. On a recent trip to work in office, she has expressed interest in moving closer to better support her team. We've just started exploring options within the Washington metropolitan area, that'd be a reasonable commute, preferable by public transit.

If you have knowledge of this area with suggestions for where we should consider, and/or any dos and dont's please let me know.

Thanks very much!

Apologies for any weird formatting. I'm a lurker with no idea how to post. For context, I live in the USA, asscrack of the planet.

I had a surgical extraction of a broken tooth at an oral surgeon in a town about an hour away from me. It was a little bit brutal, so I was told to load up on the prescribed ibuprofen/acetominophen and start antibiotics that evening after surgery. After the hour drive home, I went to the pharmacy that I had listed in my paperwork. They had no scripts for me since last year. I called the surgeon's office. The woman on the phone said she saw them in her system, had an hour left in her shift, and would call me if she saw them sent out. I told her not to worry, that the pharmacy would contact me as soon as they received it. I assumed there was no way they'd leave a patient without post-op meds. Well, I was wrong.

They never sent my prescriptions before closing up for the weekend.

The office doesn't have an emergency number of any kind. Voicemails or text messages can be left for them to check on Monday. What in the world do I do or even say to these incompetent assholes?

I'm managing my pain with my own medication, but it's expensive, and they sure as hell aren't antibiotics. I'm broke, if that helps.

Yes, I know, it's the plural form of Sun, but the word Sun likely predates our understanding that stars and our Sun are the same thing.

I get "stars", but where did "suns" come from?