‘Democrats have a plan’

She lost me right there. As a Democrat, I feel confident in stating that we have never had such a thing.

It is a truth so old that Will Rogers was cracking jokes about it 100 years ago.

Before the election we will be preparing bugout bags for my nuclear family and establishing concrete plans to flee.

After the election, if Trump wins we will monitor and be ready. At the first sign of trouble we get out of dodge. I have the ability to get EU citizenship for my family if need be. In the meantime, my wife and I have skills that can get us the privilege to move into some countries based on their employment needs.

My family and I would have reasons to be targeted by white nationalists if they felt empowered. I have received semi-threatening letters from such people in the past.

I hate that we have to think this way, but we do.

Each kid and wifey could have individual Daddy/hubby attention at the same time. My yard and home would look immaculate because my ADHD task burnout could be overcome by calling in a new helper.

I could probably make bank and help improve the lot of humanity by allowing my duplicates to go through controlled medical and scientific testing.

At some point one of me would figure out how to leverage this ability for the absolute betterment of humankind. That would probably become a driving mission for the collective me at that point.

Daily alcohol: blunts my emotional pain, causes awful feelings in my stomach, does damage to multiple organ systems, is physically addictive, and gives you a hangover the next day.

Daily THC and other cannabinoids consumed via edibles: blunts my emotional pain, blunts my physical pain, has a minor effect on working memory when used over years that does not further inhibit cognitive ability or motivation, is not physically addictive, and has no impact on the next day.

Used to self medicate in vaguely controlled doses, it is a no-brainer. MJ is not perfect by any means, but it is world better than booze for frequent users.

Generally, no, but it did last night. We had moved into a new house, and we were trying to tell Uber Eats which train station we were closest to so our delivery person could get off at that station before driving to our house.

We do not love near a train station. It was weird as dreams tend to be.

Florida needs all of the protectionism it can muster - Florida beef is just lousy. It turns out that just because you can raise cattle somewhere spent mean you should.

This is where AI could legit change the world for the better in the future. Use fewer pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as the problems can be fixed mechanically on a highly localized level.

This could even help fix problems with invasive species - imagine a drone fleet that could kill kudzu just as it erupts from the soil.

Aaarugh! So you have any idea how many times I tried to force my phone to use the right word and still failed? I think my keyboard hates me.

This is a huge case of, “Yes, but . . . .”

Yes, exercise absolutely can and does help mental health. It helps me a great deal. That said, exercise requires some level of time, energy, and focus. The key is to find a form of exercise that you enjoy or at least do not mind. If going to the gym is exclusively a chore, you will more likely fail. If exercising brings some Internet inherent reward, you will more likely succeed.

I love lifting weights, but I did not have the mental energy to put together a program or figure out how to work around big physical issues after cancer. I paid a trainer to help, and that eliminated enough of the focus needed that going to the gym became fun. Now I am transferring to running my own program because I have learned enough that it is not as big of a mental load. Along the way my energy has also increased.

Contrast this with running. I hate running. It hurts my joints. It hurts my lungs. Getting outside and running should be easier than a trip to the gym, but it is actually much harder for me because there is no inherent reward. It just sucks, and it continues to suck as I get better at it.

So yeah, exercise is great for mental health, even if it is not a cure all. This only holds true once you find something you enjoy. If you think you enjoy nothing, you are most likely wrong. Keep looking. Keep trying. Maybe you like walking. Maybe you like a specific martial art. Maybe you like biking, but only on a stationary bike in your living room while binging your favorite shows.

Find something that you enjoy doing that fits well enough into your life. That way on the days you don’t want to start, you will anyway because you know it will be enjoyable once you are doing it.

Thank you, friend! I could not get to posting the recipe until now, and you were quicker to it.

I would mildly disagree. Knowing your numbers for a lift can help you estimate where you should be on related lifts. It can also help you very roughly gauge your progress compared to others. The mechanical advantage, friction, and other physical aspects of any given machine play a huge role for sure, but one can broadly make comparisons.

I went through a period where I was under doctor’s orders to treat any fluid produced by my body as a biohazard. That meant any time I urinated I had to close the lid and flush twice. So yeah, there was no mellowing in that case.

Ooh, I actually know the answer to this! I had cancer a couple years ago, and it got really dicey for a bit. While my story has a good ending and I am now effectively cancer-free, I had to look the potential of death clear in the face and start making some concrete plans.

My answer is unequivocal - I would prepare my family for my untimely demise. My wife and I got together when we were young enough that we entered adulthood together and grew that way. There is no me and her - there is only us. This is not some creepy codependency thing. We just became adults whose emotional and mental shapes are highly complimentary. That happens when you are with someone longer than you were not. We also have kids for whom I am the primary caretaker and stay-at-home dad while she works. Both boys are autistic though you might not notice it, and I am their primary coregulator. My family needs me in ways that are not universally true across families.

Most of my plan can be summarized as follows:

• Prepare my wife for life without me. Ensure she has the basic skills that I have taken over in our lives. Impress upon her the notion that while she has been the love of my life, I sincerely hope I am but one of hers.
• Spend as much time with my kids as possible. Cement myself in their memories. Record messages and fatherly advice in writing and/or video for every major life event I can think of.
• Set up therapy and support services for my family once I die.
• Get my friends and family on board for specific forms of help as time goes on. People who want to help do nothing when they do not know what to do. They are more likely to follow through when told, “I know Jimmy really looks up to you. After I die, please take him out for some bonding time at least once a month. He is going to be lost without me, and Wife cannot be a masculine role model like I was.”
• Plan my funeral and write my obituary. Make it clear that any of this can be changed.
• Basically, do anything I can to prepare my family for life without me.

I know this is not terribly exciting, but it found that what I feared far more than death was the fate of my family without me there to care for them.

That is some ingenuity! Smart move.

I am lucky that I have been working with a trainer for a couple years, and she knows this info for every piece of equipment in my gym. It will get harder as I taper off working with her.

I am descended from Robert Drouin, who is only mildly famous for the ridiculous proportion of people with French Canadian ancestry who can trace their lineage back to him. It is like if Genghis Khan only had one wife, was really into subsistence farming, and still managed to be everybody’s Great^X Grandpappy.

First, I am sorry for everyone just dismissing this question. There are many valid reasons for wanting to know the unloaded weight of machines, including just being curious. If you want to change up your routine or compare results between machines, you absolutely want this info.

Some machines will have this information in fine print on the main instruction panel or some small label on the machine. You have to search for it.

The most reliable way to know would be to ask the staff at your gym. A gym-employed trainer would be a great resource if they are off without a client. At my gym, I just put in a request that they label all of the machines with this info. It seems like a big quality of life increase for the cost of some printer paper and packing tape.

Keep lifting heavy and pushing for the details you want. I know on my leg press sled, I absolutely want credit for the 105 lb. sled in addition to the plates I put on it.

As a small child, I feared that humanity would go extinct. I knew the following:

• Species can go extinct, like the dinosaurs
• In many million years, the sun will expand to encompass the Earth
• If we do not invent interstellar travel before then, say goodbye to humanity like the dinosaurs.

I stayed up at night worrying about this. I was precocious in this very difficult way, and it was hard for my parents.

As a teen, this fear was somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of entropy and a fear of the eventual end of the universe.

As an adult, that fear has been somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of human nature and a fear that we will ruin ourselves before either other fear can come to pass.

Looking to the future, I see that my oldest wants to be an engineer for NASA and has the chops to pull that off of his interest maintains. My youngest compulsively helps people. Maybe there are enough people like the two I was blessed with. Maybe one day we can get off this rock and scatter like seeds on the wind. Maybe raising them right will be my small contribution to the continued success of humanity.

I use Lemmy for discussion and reading the thoughts of others, like I used to do with Reddit.

I am old enough that I can’t still use Facebook to check the lives of much of my friends and family. Discord is where I can chat with many of my younger friends.

YouTube gives me short video content for entertainment, and TikTok does the same for more serious topics.

I deep dive Wikipedia so regularly that my wife rightly insists we give at least $20 every time they ask for money.

I hear you and we are voting. That said, backup plans are a thing for good reasons.

My wife is Jewish and something she once said to me lives rent free in my brain. “The gross majority of the Jews you know are descended from people who left when they had a feeling. The ones who waited until it was obviously bad did not make it out.”

Fascism is on the rise globally, but not every country will be led by someone who has actively courted neo-Nazis as part of their base. I saw how emboldened those people felt during his first term, and we anticipate it could only get much worse during a second. We do not want to leave, but we fear that staying may become unsafe for our family.

Are people down voting a link because they find the news it shares to be bad news, not because that news is inappropriate for the sub? Ann I missing something?