Everybody’s circumstances are different, so I’m only providing this info on the off-chance there is something helpful here.

Several years ago I reached out to my GP because I genuinely believed that I was going to end up committing suicide, and I was worried.

I’d had the occasional suicidal thoughts since I was a teenager, and like most people, assumed it was just a normal part of being a person. As I got older, they became more frequent - essentially becoming any time I let my brain go dormant.

You might wonder what had become so terrible in my life that I was obsessed with ending it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I had a young family, a loving wife, a nice house, a good job. I was happy, and had lots to be happy about.

The best way I had of describing it at the time was like a dual boot system - it felt like there was the normal me, and a different version of me that ran on the hardware when the normal me wasn’t actively using it.

This other me, however, had come to the definite conclusion that everyone I cared about would be better off if I died. It’d used the time lying in bed, stood on the tram, etc - the down time - to work out in detail exactly why, and by how much. It had a plan to minimise the distress and inconvenience to everyone who might end up involved.

Fortunately, I did reach out, though, and got referred to a psychologist. I was diagnosed with OCD and prescribed SSRIs. For me, they worked.

It was a genuine revelation that most people don’t think about suicide daily, that brains can go quiet.

Since being better, I’ve stopped thinking of what was happening as a dual boot system, and more like a badly tuned television. You get everything that should be there, but sometimes these extra ghost images. But it’s not because there’s anything actually there, it’s because the machinery isn’t properly tuned. The SSRIs just set the brain chemistry to what it should be, and the brain started working like it should.

Sorry, this has ended up a bit longer than intended.

I really hope everything works out for you, your sister and your family.

Well, the Greenland thing is certainly barely legal…

From an outsider’s perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.

We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.

Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.

FWIW, saliva contains epidermal growth factor, which is actually good for the skin. It’s one of the reasons the insides of our mouths heal so quickly.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.

But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.

Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.

VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.

JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.

So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.

The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).

The snek!

Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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Ok, I think I’ve worked out what the issue is here.

First of all, let’s go back to where Owen Jones starts off.

The term chav refers to a specific subset of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of their money on fashionable clothes and hang around being a nuisance to other people.

He also argues that the term is used by right-wing media outlets as a broader generalisation of working-class people as a whole, to further push their arguments.

These two things can be true at the same time.

But I’d definitely agree it’s not a slur. It’s just lazy journalism presenting a caricature of the working-class because it’s easier for their deranged arguments.

The majority of people are born into working class families, but only a few become chavs.

It’s a sad reflection on the country that the right-wing media is able to get away with presenting absolute rubbish with abandon, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of people consume this media without realising that they’re being told lies and half-truths.

But that’s what the problem is. It’s not that the term itself is bad, it’s that bad people use the image it conjures to caricature the working class in general.

“Chav” doesn’t mean “working class” in the same way that “penguin” doesn’t mean “bird”.

Heck, some of the chavs I know wouldn’t know work if it hit them.

Chavs are a tiny subset of working class people, in the same way that penguins are a tiny subset of birds.

I live in a northern mill town. Most of my very large extended family are working class (it’d probably be a bit disingenuous for me to claim that I still am, though). They would look at you like you were an idiot if you tried to convince them that chav means them.

Chavs are the kids who hang around with expensive trainers and caps, who have absolutely no qualms about being a nuisance to other people.

They represent a tiny proportion of the working class, and any criticism of them is specifically targeted at them.

Shoes. Absolutely hate wearing shoes.

I wear trainers with my suit. In my younger days I used to make training software for the military, so would end up in various barracks every now and then for setup. After clocking the trainers, my escorts would usually diplomatically explain to me that I won’t be allowed in the mess hall for dinner unless I’d also brought some shoes with me.

I get why the military has these rules (it’s part of the whole thing), but have never understood why other people and places value shoes so much.

I tried to find out what you were referring to - was it the rude person in the vegan thread? If you look, they were pretty heavily rebutted and downvoted by the other users.

The mods uphold the community guidelines, ideally without overreach. If someone’s out of line, but not technically breaking any rules, the other users are usually good at putting people straight.

This. Dirt cheap material cost, no additional machining costs.

You’ve basically said much of what I was going to!

We know where memories are stored in the brain, physically. The biggest problem with targeting specific memories is simply a matter of working out which neurons are tied to that memory.

We can already, fairly crudely, see roughly where a memory is stored by looking at brain activity when the patient recalls it. We can also directly trigger memory recollection by applying electrodes to the brain during brain surgery.

There’s still massive engineering challenges to overcome to get this to a practical stage, but engineering challenges are usually surmountable. With that in mind, do I think the technology will be doable, ever?

• Technology to erase specific memories - absolutely.

• Technology to replace specific memories with new ones - I suspect yes, but that’ll need some big leaps in our understanding of how memories actually work.

• Technology to do this with just a flash of light - no, probably not.

TIL George Orwell was a pen name.

Just for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, this is not the actual etymology.

It just started as a misspelling of “owned” (with p and o being next to each other on the keyboard).

Here’s an example of a sentence where a missing comma completely changes the meaning.

Those cases are different, and are dealt with through your country’s asylum process.

I suspect the N words in question are very much white.

I focussed on the obesity statistics because that is what you were talking about.

OK, let’s flip this.

According to you, people with no money are not only buying junk food, but buying it in quantities to become overweight and obese.

People with no money are buying large quantities of food.

Is that what you’re claiming? Is that how the world works in your head?

I’m saying that people with no money have no money to buy food. You’re saying that people with no money somehow also have enough money to buy large quantities of unhealthy food.

At this point I can only assume that you’re just arguing bad faith, because there isn’t anything complicated to understand here.