That Southern US usage dates back to at least the US civil war in the 1860s.

But yankee was used to refer to at least some people in what is now the US as early as the 1660s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee

“BEANIS” heh heh heh

Spirituality and religion are different things. Spirituality is basically an attempt to find meaning in life by identifying with something that transcends the self. Religion can be one way to try to achieve that, but is just a set of norms and myths used to try and understand existence and our place in it.

Spirituality can be secular and is by no means a bad thing. It doesn’t even have to be irrational or unscientific. Asceticism is a spiritual practice adopted by many religions and is thought to help one focus on spiritual enlightenment. Lent is an ascetic practice.

Imo this is very much a case of “to each their own” and, as long as it isn’t hurting your brother or anyone else, then it may help him find more meaning in his life.

Grab em by the vespussi

You can either use AI to just vomit dubious information at you or you can use it as a tool to do stuff. The more specific the task, the better LLMs work. When I use LLMs for highly specific coding tasks that I couldn’t do otherwise (I’m not a [good] coder), it does not make me worse at critical thinking.

I actually understand programming much better because of LLMs. I have to debug their code, do research so I know how to prompt it best to get what I want, do research into programming and software design principles, etc.

All is dependent on what instances your home instance is federated with. Federation/defederation by your home instance determines what you see in All.

Szmer.info is federated with lemmy.world, so you would be able to see [email protected], which has US politics. Unless you’ve filtered things out of your feed, but that’s different.

Whoa that’s really odd. You might submit an issue on github, if you want: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Huh. Comments shouldn’t be affected, as I understand it, just posts from defederated instances won’t show up. For instance, .ml is defederated from any and all porn instances - so porn doesn’t show up in my feed. I wonder if it could be a delay in the comments showing up, not actually an absence of those comments?

Either way, plenty of good instances to join that are less defederated than .ml

The particular instance doesn’t matter too much as long as it hasn’t defederated from other instances you care about & vice versa - since you can still see, post, & interact with content from other instances. I made accounts on .ml and .dbzer0.

The peer pressure (and stupid broken updates from MS) finally got me to install linux about 8mos into using lemmy. It’s pretty great, though - wish I’d done it sooner.

Oh of course I agree. That’s just what the nestle asshole said.

That’s good. Boycotts can be effective!

Nestle has an extremely safe, risk-averse marketing strategy. In part due to their various scandals, they try really hard to be family friendly and boring.

That said, they are not worse than other food and beverage conglomerates.

1. child labor: mars & others were also implicated. These companies were most likely unaware of the child labor being used to harvest cocoa. The way it works is there are wholesalers in Africa who buy cocoa from processing facilities who buy fresh cocoa pods from local farms. These wholesalers advertised themselves as being child-labor-free. The farms they buy from were using child labor. This is a problem with capitalism exploiting people in the global south, causing perverse incentives, and with companies having limited insight into the full depth of their supply chains.

2. water is not a human right: The nestle water exec said the quiet part out loud. But, no beverage company believes water is a human right - they just aren’t stupid enough to say that on camera. If they did think it was a human right, they’d be working to ensure universal access to clean water rather than bottling it and shipping it around the world while limiting water access at their extraction points and polluting the water near their factories. Look at what coca cola is doing in mexico - rampant water pollution such that in factory towns Coke is the only safe drink for folks because the water is contaminated. Nestle is bad, but no worse than coca cola.

3. infant formula scandal: this occurred in the 1970s and was obviously awful. Every major multinational food and beverage conglomerate has stories like this if you look hard enough - this just happens to be a fucked up series of events that got some major media play.

People online scapegoat Nestle, but continue to buy electronics and clothing made with child labor, tree nuts/soda/and other products known to be harmful to watersheds, and many other products from companies which harm people in the global south. This isn’t meant to defend nestle, but to remind everyone that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Nestle is not anywhere close to an uniquely evil company. Not even in its own industry.

Things won’t get to that point, most likely. Things can get really bad and still recover. If it’s an apocalyptic scenario, better invest in a stock of bullets and a bunker.

Finance-wise, have an emergency fund and well-diversified portfolio. This is not financial advice, and I’m not a professional, but this is what I’d do with retirement funds and personal stock accounts:

Emergency fund: if you already have this handled, then look at your investments. If you dont have an emergency fund, do everything you can to save up at least 3-6months of living expenses - ideally in a high-yield savings account to protect your money from inflation.

US stocks: Don’t be over-exposed to US stocks, especially riskier ones. Historically, bonds and foreign stocks have been recommended to balance your portfolio, but many people have ignored that in recent years due to the dominance of US large-cap stocks, especially the tech sector. Ensure you’re diversified in accordance with your risk tolerance/retirement time-horizon.

Non-US Stocks: It would be good to have a non-US ETF or index fund with developing and emerging markets. It may not perform as well, but can potentially hedge against US market volatility. The counterpoint here is that US stocks are globally interconnected enough that getting non-US stocks would overexpose you to that part of the market. Caveat emptor, do research.

Bonds: bond ETFs/funds, I-bonds (inflation protected securities, you can buy $10k per year), and automated bond ladders can give you steady returns. Remember buying bonds directly is fairly illiquid - your money will be stuck in the bond for the duration of the bond’s term.

Cash: Inflation isn’t crazy right now. Probably wouldn’t be bad to have more cash than normal sitting in high-yield accounts (earning around 4% APY right now) since the market is likely to dip. Maybe consider liquidating some investments that are riskier than you’d like. I wouldn’t really advocate trying to time the market, but also it doesn’t seem like a bad time to be a little heavier on cash imo.

Check out Boglehead 3 fund portfolios and their variations. Imo it is time to be safe and boring. If you have a long time until retirement, don’t panic - ride it out and consider rebalancing your portfolio to the standard, oft-recommended asset mixes. If your retirement timeline is short, make sure that you aren’t over-exposed to risky investments like stocks.

It really isn’t leftists’ fault, though. Trump easily won the popular vote and flipped georgia, pennsylvania, and wisconsin from their dem vote in 2020. Low voter turnout/voter suppression are the real culprits - along with dems failing to do almost any of the things that could’ve changed this outcome. Leftist memes did not lose dems the election. Voter apathy and the sheer popularity of fascism did.