Emoji might be the right choice there. Sometimes I’ll just send back 🤷 or a gif in text messages or quicker formats but for something like Lemmy or Mastodon, I think a more effortful reply is desired since the point of those services is the conversation.

Absolutely, and it isn’t to say I never use emoji/emoticons but I don’t on social media that much. You can convey emotion and vibe with a bit of nuanced typing. This is likely lost on some folks but others seem to be tuned to it, almost like body language. Grammarly actually has a tone mapper built in to tell you what sort of tone you are sending out.

I feel like emoticons are in some ways cheating at using words and thus it shows a lack of effort put into your communication. I use them mostly in quicker format messaging like Discord. I don’t blame anyone for using a 🤷 or such but I’d like to try to be more eloquent.

Some quick research send like it highly depends on the lodge. From Wikipedia

Grand Orient de France, in addition to recognising women’s masonry, decided in 2010 that there was no reason that its lodges should not be able to initiate women, thus adding another strand to international co-masonry

So it seems some do allow for co-ed rituals such as initiation. That said the whole thing sounds pretty sexist to me. I’d probably just avoid the whole organization or any ties to them. No reason to give that group more power.

Not really accurate. When the stock market tanked during the pandemic, everyone with a 401k panicked about it. It’s not just the rich caring about the stock market.

People were calling them Nazi though. Far before he was even elected. Pride saw the writing in the walls. Now though, now it’s undeniable. He’s a Nazi pushing fascism and authoritarianism.

Yeah, potentially.

They might but we’ll see. Also it’s not the red states that matter. It’s the purple ones.

The 2024 legislation might put them over but it’s a long shot.

I honestly don’t think he’ll be able to run. Two or three major things are counting against him.

1. His health. He’s 77, unhealthy, and he may not make it to 78. Both his parents died very old, mother - 88, father - 93. They also had far fewer health concerns though. Plus he caught COVID-19 with most 70-year-olds getting some sort of form of long covid.

2. He might be federally barred from office. On March 4, 2024, his insurrection trial will start and if he is found guilty it would be very difficult for any legal system to state he can still hold federal office.

3. He might not even win the primary much less the federal election. There are a lot stronger republican candidates out there and the GOP is starting to see that Trump is a dividing force. If they don’t go with him, they might split the vote between him and a GOP, if they do go with them, they might split the vote to Democrats.

Lastly and this is like 3.5, Napovointerco might be enacted. If that ever happens the GOP might not win another election. It’s essentially a state pact that these states will honor voting with the national popular vote regardless of what the people in the states vote for. It’s almost at 270 electoral votes. At that point, it will be enacted and the national popular vote will be the deciding factor going forward. The Electoral College will be dead. This also has an interesting side effect that it might cause a civil war.

Sure, and I agree but I’ve seen people trying to kill copyright entirely before fixing the justify their existence through labor bit. Which is entirely wrong, the current world is as such if you killed copyright you’d put million of people out of work.

Technically they are all political and reflect the conservative and liberal mindsets.

Conservatives seem to eat fast food more. Conservatives also seem to be home-schooled more. Lastly, liberals seem to try more food than conservatives. Conservatives typically stick to what they know and are more traditional whereas liberals explore and understand more cultures through food.

He also dismantled the literal team (Global Health Security and Biodefense unit) that was supposed to help with issues like the pandemic then made it worse by going against all medical professional advice and actively opposing it on TV. If you don’t want to defend Trump, then don’t because there is nothing here to defend. He mishandled the entire thing and all he did is give major tax cuts to the rich.

Funny how Biden gets blamed for this when it’s very much Trump who caused this to happen. Obama created the best economy for Trump. We were at the height of the longest economic expansion in American history. Trump then increased the federal budget deficit by 50%, the US national debt increased by 39%, and Trump had negative job creation (downsizing the economy) whereas both Obama, Biden, and Clinton all had positive job creation. Trump lost the most jobs in the history of a president! Trump then went on to butcher Obamacare making it harder for people to fight for a higher income in the economy, then gave major tax cuts to the rich.

But yes, tell me again how Biden inheriting the fuckup that is Trump’s economy is Biden’s fault.

Windows has a built-in weather widget that docs in the taskbar. Shows the news when you click on it. Extremely useful.

Nah, it’s 22 GB for just the current English version, text-only Wikipedia. Adding the media English current version only would be 140 GB (plus the 22 GB for the text). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

So you could do text-only Wikipedia and probably compress it. Maybe drop a few thousand of the articles that don’t matter or are stubs. Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.

I mean the same way Taco Bell is Mexican, Olive Garden is Italian, or any American Chinese food is Chinese. It’s not “food from that area” but instead “food that reminds you of that area.” That’s how American culture works. People say America has no culture because everyone brings their own. Well, this is American culture, a bunch of food that’s not from the places your family is from but food that might remind you of those places.

That said I personally would consider it Mexican-flavored American food along with Taco Bell, Taco Time, Taco Del Mar, etc. That said when I say “I feel like Mexican food tonight” I’m thinking of Mexican-flavored American food because you simply can’t get Mexican Food in America as readily.

Care to share those studies? The only thing I’ve seen is based on content rather than the screen itself. Here are some of the things I’ve seen and followed https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/does-more-screen-time-put-your-childs-eyes-risk but that’s more eye issues, not neurological.

It was 2020. It’s honestly been interesting to see. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31348515/ is a study from before 2020 stating that 4% less of 18-20 year olds smoked when the age limit is increased to 21. I couldn’t find any specifics on Washington state though.