My initial reason for not having kids was financial. I think a lot of people have learned it may be better to have children later in life when you can properly care for them. I know many people who’ve had their first child in their late-30s and early-40s. My aunt had her first child in her fifties. That’s not something that was common before modern medicine.

I have always had the idea that I would have a kid if and when I met the right person to share parenting with. That hasn’t happened so I’ve had to put some thought into my priorities. It’s not fair to have a child just because it’s what society says you should do or just because you want someone to take care of you when you’re old. It’s so much more than that and I think people should be more mindful of the responsibilities and long term repercussions.

I offered two reasons I personally may regret not having children. I could list several others such as the pure joy of watching them grow into adults and mimic you and your partner. If you want to say that’s selfish, to bring another human into the word to experience a universe of emotion you’d otherwise never experience, I understand that perspective. No argument.

But then I offered that choosing to prioritize your own life is in and of itself a selfish act. It’s more explicitly about you than it is about another person.

Would you disagree that going out to eat by yourself is more of a selfish act than inviting a friend to eat out with you? Sharing an experience is less selfish, no?

That argument makes sense. Though I see it more from choosing to prioritize yourself and own self interests over having children and sharing a life with them as selfish too. I guess we’re all selfish one way or another.

I’m not sure you’re going to get an objective answer to this as no one has lived a life of either having kids or not having kids, hungrythirstyhorny.

I will say that, as a single male in his mid forties who has observed a good amount of life; first, the thought of not having people to rely on in you’re old age is a little worrisome; and two, not having had someone to pass my knowledge and skills down to is a little sad. However, I really enjoy the freedom and opportunities my life (and bank account) affords me.

There is always a cost to freedom. Or, as Jonis Joplin put it - freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. Choosing to not have children is a selfish act. Whether “selfish” is a bad thing or not is subjective.

I would offer that anyone who’s going through life without children, find some altruistic outlet to participate in. You can otherwise find yourself wondering what your legacy may be or what the point of your life has been - aka a mid-life crisis.

That’s because of the need for an ally / military presence in the middle east. It has nothing to do with Gaza.

I’m of the opinion that an individual with the explicit intent to commit genocide is the main obstacle, regardless of who is supporting them.

This is of course entirely accurate. If you’ve lost your mind and forgotten who Netanyahu is.

But you haven’t because you say, “Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.”

Joe Biden is an enabler but the US is not “the main obstacle to peace in Palestine”.

I generally put short term things on index cards and long term things on digital. Or I just note something down with whatever’s most accessible at the time.

So, for work, I have a long list of tasks in Microsoft Planner I should get done in the mid-term and long-term. If someone asks me to get something done asap, I put that on paper. I’m really bad at getting things done on the digital list but I’m trying to get better at it.

Chores and groceries go on the white board on my fridge. Then I transcribe them to index cards if I need to remember them out of the house.

I try to keep a pad with me when I’m out of the house to note things down. I use a tiny little Fisher Space Pen which easily fits in my pocket.

My problem with digital is that it’s too easy to forget about. When I mark things down on paper, specifically index cards, they start to stack up and I feel motivated to reduce the clutter they create. Throwing out ten index cards because I got shit done feels good.

This is so huge. And I’ll be shocked if this makes it to the nightly / cable news outlets. We have more important things to worry about; like if someone lied about doing drugs in order to get a gun.

When I have a perfectly flat four row stack and the 4x1 tile appears.

Those are pretty good points. Still, you had to participate in Reddit in order to find that story.

The point is that news organizations, reporters, etc. need to start using fediverse platforms so we’re not stuck still using Xitter and Reddit. Moreover, a source from a reputable news outlet would be preferred over social media.

I mean, you couldn’t source a link to a tweet yourself and had to share a reddit post on reddit’s competing platform?

https://x.com/nazirafzal/status/1797413922057711911

Mastodon seems like it could work relatively well.

The other side of the issue though is for social media to feel “social” now, people, consciously or not, want to feel connected to brands and advertising and popular culture. Social media, now more than television or magazines used to, generates our water-cooler moments. It generates the content we sit right here and discuss - it generates memes. These fringe alternatives aren’t popular because the they lack gravity. Gravity comes from investment. Investment comes from potential; typically, potential to make money.

But yeah, group ware, et al, could work for smaller groups. The friction there is getting people to install, and give a crap about, another app on their phone.

What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.

Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the “beta testing”. I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I’m not the target demographic for their platform.

Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It’s for selling ads. It’s for maintaining your attention. It’s for engagement and making you feel a way they’ve determined will keep you scrolling.

And honestly, it’s tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn’t cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.

The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for “social media”. They’ll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.

butt game changer.

Fair enough. Plex may not have the bells and whistles but it’s simple and intuitive to use. I’ve also tried the QuMagie app on my QNAP which does have all those features but found it to be a bit more cumbersome than it was worth.

I tried Google Photos briefly as well and was very shocked at how bad it is, compared to Apple Photos. It took me several days just to figure out how to delete more than one picture at a time. I have to assume it’s much more robust on an Android than on an iPhone but even their web interface was horrible.

I don’t know why people recommend Immich. I found it to be the most bare-bone photo app I’ve ever used. It feels ten+ years old. I tried really hard to make it work but Plex photos is about 20% better and it still sucks.

Here’s an alternative source being that OPs isn’t working for me https://www.axios.com/2024/05/20/biden-reaction-netanyahu-arrest-warrants-gaza

I’m not really confident about what qualifies as “common food” or “typical western diet”, nor the accuracy of the following sources, but I feel like if someone’s going to answer OP, they should have something to back it up.

Onions - 5,500 years ago
http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-onions/

There are two schools of thoughts regarding the home of onion cultivation, and both look at the period 5,500 years ago in Asia. Some scientists believe that onion was first domesticated in central Asia and others in Middle East by Babylonian culture in Iran and West Pakistan

Sugar - 6,000 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar

The extraction of sugar cane juice from the sugarcane plant, and the subsequent domestication of the plant in tropical India and Southeast Asia sometime around 4,000 BC.

Beans - 7,000 years ago
https://cablevey.com/history-of-dried-beans-how-it-all-started/

Examining the origins of the dry bean takes us back to South America. These, serving as a dietary cornerstone, were initially cultivated over 7,000 years ago in the southern regions of Mexico and Peru.

Corn - 10,000 years ago
https://cropcareequipment.com/blog/corn-farming-history/

People have been farming corn, or maize, for thousands of years. Native civilizations in present-day Mexico first domesticated corn around 10,000 years ago.

Potatoes - 13,000 years ago
https://spudsmart.com/domestication-of-the-potato/

Wild potatoes from the (then) humid coastal plains of South America were probably first eaten by people as early as 13,000 years ago.

LOL. You’re just arguing with yourself and your own made up conversation at this point. You don’t have to answer but I am curious if you’re an adult.