SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on From Cleaner Bathrooms to Fewer Trailers, 5 Movie Theater Owners on Ways to Bring Audiences Back to Cinemas 2 days ago:
Only one of the interviewees said location. That would be key for me. If the theater was close by and integrated integrated into daily life, I’d probably go a lot more often. Instead, all of the theaters are way out on the edge of town, often in some grotty commercial area where the land is cheap enough for the obligatory huge parking lot. It’s a commitment to get there, as in, you intend to go to a movie and only to a movie, because there’s nothing else to do nearby. No dinner and a movie, no random matinee as a break from the office grind, no movie followed by hanging out with friends at the bar across the street. I might as well watch at home.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 weeks ago:
I’ll be happy to leave it to anybody who reads this thread to figure out what the problem here is.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 weeks ago:
That’s a reading comprehension problem, I’ll wager. I said Target had it like it was a common thing.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 weeks ago:
What the hell? Why are you telling me what I think?
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 weeks ago:
As an aside, the Target store near me carries Polaroid film and vinyl records. With everything virtual and touchscreen these days, some kids value the kinesthetic experience.
Heck, I’ve been cell phone-only since 2003, but I’ve been thinking about setting up a landline phone from my childhood with a VoIP adapter just because it has such a satisfying heft in the hand, and tactile buttons.
- Comment on Thinkpad for the win 3 weeks ago:
Goddamn, thank you. I needed the laugh this morning, so I went back to watch the video.
- Comment on Murica 5 weeks ago:
If it’s me on the bike, know that I’m pitying you. -6°C is nothing. I drove a lot of miles as a delivery driver, and saw a lot of faces behind windshields in that time. Very few happy faces. Driving makes people miserable.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 month ago:
Enough farmland? I suggest reading up on the Ogallala Aquifer. Also, where the best climate zones for agriculture will be 50 years from now.
- Comment on Over 20M 'people' listed as 100+ years old in the SS database? 1 month ago:
I feel like Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies here, too. If Leon had found fire (fraudulent benefits), he would have posted fire instead of smoke.
- Comment on Good morning. 1 month ago:
Borrowing is not an option?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Compare the situation to all the noise and outrage, but nobody shows up.
- Comment on Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them? 1 month ago:
Given those conditions, everybody drives the speed of the slowest driver.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
And what will not doing it accomplish?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 1 month ago:
The strike is not the start of the exercise, oh, no! To pull off a huge action like this will take coordination, spreading awareness, cultivating relationships of trust, establishing lines of communication, laying the foundations by organizing, and getting people primed for action. That’s what we lack now.
Right now, we could all just choose to disobey together, and there are so many of us that they couldn’t stop us. But it would take a lot of people; only a few here and there taking action would simply leave those few destitute or in jail.
A general strike is not the goal, it’s the announcement that we’re organized. That awareness, those relationships, that trust, doesn’t just have to go away…
- Comment on Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them? 1 month ago:
If that’s true, then it would be a good idea to have everybody converge on a particular speed. It doesn’t seem practical to negotiate that speed amongst a constantly-changing set of drivers, it probably needs to be chosen in advance. That seems like a natural function of government, to choose the consensus speed through a process designed to represent everybody in the community.
To communicate to drivers entering the roadway this consensus speed which everybody must travel at—for safety—the government could, say, post it on signs located along the roadside.
But that’s probably just a ridiculous fantasy. How then should all drivers negotiate the consensus speed to ensure safety?
- Comment on The one drawback to walking at night 1 month ago:
Hard to say. I see women out walking alone at night all the time in my city, at least a handful just past my house every evening. (It’s a university town.) I passed one woman happily chatting on her phone, and oblivious to the world, while riding home tonight after dark. The last time anyone was attacked by a stranger was, I dunno? It definitely happens, but it’s years between instances. They’d probably be safer in the late night hours, with hardly any car traffic. A lot more people get killed by cars.
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 1 month ago:
I hear ya. I just wanted to provide an example in which social norms lead people to do the right thing.
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 2 months ago:
If you want a happier example, there’s the trash in Wisconsin state parks. The Dept. of Natural Resources used to place trash receptacles in our state parks, and haul the trash away. That worked, people put their trash in the bins, because that’s the social expectation.
But the DNR lacked the staff to keep up with the trash. Sometimes animals would get in and spread trash around, but mostly, people would pile trash on or around cans and dumpsters. If that’s where you put your trash, that’s where you put your trash, right?
So, the DNR simply stopped putting trash receptacles in the parks altogether, and announced that you’d have to pack your own trash out. And it worked! Without a socially-sanctioned place to deposit trash in the park, people pack it out. (Mostly. Humans are still essentially animals, so various detritus gets dropped, but no garbage bags full of food scraps left on the ground for the raccoons.)
- Comment on To my late wife, Carmen, my spicy little habanara pepper (pls read and lmk if you think it's okay to send) 2 months ago:
To add to the other comment, saying “always-late wife” would convey the correct meaning to most English speakers.
- Comment on To my late wife, Carmen, my spicy little habanara pepper (pls read and lmk if you think it's okay to send) 2 months ago:
If she’s dead, I don’t think it matters what you say.
- Comment on Gimme some evidence that anyone at all in the government is pushing back on Trump with any effectiveness at all. Someone throw me a bone here. 😬 2 months ago:
I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol’ fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there’s this energy of elated resignation, like, we can’t swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 2 months ago:
So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.
I just want to add that, in virtually every online discussion I’ve seen about the dynamic between men and women, if a man says something incel-ish, or otherwise not popular, there will be somebody (almost always a woman) who will fire back a retort like, “yeah, but no woman wants to be with you anyway,” (I haven’t seen it on Lemmy, which is wonderful.)
There it is: Your opinion, and by extension your worth as a person, is based on your ability to have sex. Is it any wonder that men think that, after being explicitly informed so?
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 2 months ago:
Without a single coherent thought expressed!
- Comment on Hurry 3 months ago:
Sheeeeit, don’t hit a guy with those turgid vacuoles without a NSFW tag.
- Comment on Where's the mayor? 3 months ago:
This is the guy who set a woman on fire in a subway car.
- Submitted 3 months ago to [deleted] | 25 comments
- Comment on ohh ... 3 months ago:
Waiting times are atrocious here in the U.S. The earliest in-person appointment that I can get with my GP is about 6 months out. Non-urgent surgeries are sometimes take close to a year. A friend recently had to keep a bladder drain in after surgery for an extra week because there were no doctors who could do the 5-minute removal available.
Anybody who says that long wait times are unique to public health systems is lying.
- Comment on Do you consider Taylor Swift to be of the working class and why? 3 months ago:
No. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of the working class that everybody agrees upon, but there are some common ones. She’s certainly not part of the Marxist proletariat, since I’m certain that she and her management team are smart enough to have invested her money so that she never need work again, if she so desired. Also, she employs a small army of people to put on tours. Similarly, she has far too much money to be part of the working class as loosely defined by people who must sell their labor to survive. From what I understand, she came from an upper-middle class family, so she’s not even working class by culture.
I can sort of see an argument that she puts on a very physically-demanding show, exchanging her labor for money, but performers traditionally haven’t been considered working class.
- Comment on I don't have a purpose in life and feel like a robot. This cannot be good for my mental health, but I don't know how or what to change. How do I change? 3 months ago:
I suggest reading the book Running on Empty by Dr. Janice Webb. Maybe it will explain some things. (Or maybe it won’t. I’m no expert.)
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 3 months ago:
Seems like the author could’ve cited plenty of examples, then, but just didn’t?