Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

I second this. I’m a very light sleeper and earplugs filter out most of the small sounds so I am not awakened by them.

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

They took that X away from me a few days later. I’ve switched to Freetube and it’s been pretty smooth.

I’ve been using it on Linux and it’s pretty nifty.

Stuff like that has never been unique to self-checkout. I remember in my teens in the 90s you’d run into things like the credit card system being down or the check-checking system being down when you went through the line with a physical cashier, or some barcode not scanning because it’s some niche product that didn’t make it into the system. Or you only had a $50 on you and the cashier was struggling to make change because it was too early/too late in the day, so you had to hold on while they flagged down someone who could help them open another register to break it. Or there was a coupon being weird, or, or or…there was always something now and again. If not for you, for someone ahead of you in line.

Basically, minor inconveniences always happen now and again regardless of your method of checkout or payment. Feeding your own anxiety by stressing out whether you look stupid because a touchscreen has stumped you for this or that reason is unproductive.

Like–yeah, I get it. I’ve felt frustration too. I have felt the same things you talk about.

But I consider my own feelings a “me” thing? I’ve always felt that was a thing I had to overcome in myself, my own impatience, my own frustration over an everyday minor blunder. My own fears that I look “stupid”.

Blaming the world around me (such as the self-checkouts) for being imperfect is…unrealistic, to me? There will always be minor things, minor delays–it’s just a facet of life that will never change.

So it’s always seemed to me that it’s more productive to be zen about it. Especially when looking at my own memories I remember just as many minor checkout “upsets” when going through a line with a physical cashier as I have encountered in the self-checkout. Small errors happen regardless of system, so why not learn to flow with it?

When you make an emotional plea like that, not based in reality, I think of when I was living with my aunt and uncle, and my aunt was so upset I was angering my uncle by not giving in to him.

He was going to abuse us regardless of what we did, I’d been in the situation for a few years by then and saw the patterns, and when you’re in that situation and understand the history of how that individual acts, you don’t fling yourself at the abuser’s feet once again…you fight.

I fought and got free. Got bruises and my hair ripped out of my head for it…but I got out. My aunt put up with a few more years of abuse because she wasn’t willing to put up with that bit, the dangerous bit when he popped off when someone defied him.

The situation in Ukraine is (writ large of course) similar to the dynamics of what goes on in an abusive home. The stakes are higher–more lives lost–but the dynamics underneath are still human dynamics. Which needs to be understood when it comes to negotiation and “civility” and such. It all comes back to the nature of the human animal.

You have a lying abuser at top (Russia) who tries to divert attention by tugging on heartstrings with pretty words while they are placing the blame for the war on the victims who “just won’t stop fighting–don’t they want to stop getting hurt?” as if fighting someone who is already hurting you is abusive, as if fighting back against them is irrational.

You don’t play around with idealism with these people, because they’ve already shown they are not willing to hold up their side of that social contract. (Although they are cunning and know using it on YOU might get you to do things against your own interest.) It’s NOT a given that stopping fighting will stop the loss of lives, that the abusers will keep their word once they’ve given it–with the Wagner dude as an example, who stopped what he was doing presumably because he was given promises if he did stop, then was blown up in an airplane shortly after.

Being civil only works if the other person is also being civil. When they’re not, other methods of dealing with a threat have to be taken. In an individual home, like my situation, I was lucky enough that simply leaving was enough. It was wildly “uncivil”–everyone gets super upset when you say you ran away from home or don’t talk to family…but it was effective to change the situation I was in. I didn’t need to be violent myself, just physically remove myself.

Nations, unfortunately, can’t pick up their borders and walk away to a place where their neighbors can’t reach them, they are by their nature very land-bound. So you get war instead, when civility–diplomacy–doesn’t get the result needed. (Just like talking to my uncle wouldn’t stop him from doing things, it’d only cause more trouble because he’d get even angrier that you’re “back talking” and not giving in.)

BTW, I’m not really responding to this guy, I doubt they’ll read or understand what I’m saying as the wringing fingers appeasement is an emotional ploy meant to get people to stop thinking and start crying inside.

Even if he’s real I’d be surprised if he understood. My aunt never did understand my point when I tried to explain what was wrong in our situation. There’s a reason it takes X amount of years and X amount of tries for abused spouses to get free.

I hope this is interesting enough for lurkers, though.

So, I’m uncertain if the parent’s behavior (screaming and throwing things w/ the mom) has been like this all the time and OP is finally getting fed up with it, or if it’s really a sudden change.

I’d definitely first consider the advice from others in this thread to check environmental toxins or health stuff with the parents, esp. if the behavior of mom is a sudden change–but if that checks out ok, or if the mom screaming and throwing things has been present OP’s life, it’s not a bad thing to consider this advice above.

How you handle parents who were good (or decent enough) parents when they decline is different from how you handle abusive parents. And this advice here is solid for if OP’s parents are abusive.

I imagine the people downvoting it are people who grew up with stable parents who maybe did descend into (normal) decline and thus are thinking of their own experiences and can’t imagine what it’s like to have genuinely bad parents one’s entire life, or the harsh boundaries one has to set to win yourself free of them.

But OP does need to take context into account (including stuff they might not have put in their story) and evaluate if the screaming/throwing things is actually new, or if it’s always been that way and they’re finally getting fed up enough to want to break free.

For those looking at this comment, this guy seems another one that only crawls out to talk about Ukraine and India.

Interesting comment pattern, to be sure.

I stepped away and thought of more things–so a response to my own reply, heh.

As for learning where to draw the line…you need to take a pragmatic approach to your own past responses to things. Stop and look at them with clear eyes, pretend you are a scientist analyzing data both good and bad, and don’t cherry-pick your data, look at both sides of what happened…how many of your recent responses go overboard with “fight” in a way that doesn’t give a clear benefit or align with your ethics? (And how many likewise do “fawn”?)

Like, fighting just to fight drives people away so that’s not a benefit as you lose community and support, and fighting with (say) a customer service person you’ll never see again for $2.00 turns you into a Karen and wastes time so that’s not a benefit.

But haggling on the purchase of a house or a car might actually be a financial benefit (so long as you don’t turn it on the underlings and place it where it belongs and don’t go overboard with being mean just to be mean).

So look at your recent responses. How many fight for “bad” reasons that are small or petty or waste your own time, how many fight for “good” reasons?

Likewise, how many of your reactions people-please in ways that help you keep friends you actually want to keep, and how many start to be detrimental to you because people are starting to abuse your new habit of people-pleasing?

To learn where the line in your life is for either response, you need to look at what YOU’VE recently done, and figure out if that’s the person you want to be, if the benefits/detriments make sense.

For example (example pulled out of my ass), if you go out with friends and pay for stuff for everyone SOMETIMES, that is one thing. If you NEVER do it because you’re angry they’re taking advantage of you…well, if you never do it, how could you be paying for everything “all the time”? How could that even be possible? Sure, the anger is there, but is it based in reality? Might be you’re just angry to be angry–and it’s good to look at that. Fact-check emotions against reality to re-calibrate and see what’s going on.

But by the same measure, if you over-correct because you feel bad about being an asshole in the past and you desperately don’t want to be that person…you might be paying for everything all the time…which actually IS unfair to you, and if you examine a situation and find you’ve over-corrected and this is happening, an appropriate balance might be to scale it back. But you want to CHECK and look at your pattern across time to see if that’s going on.

(Patterns across time tell you more than isolating one event out of context.)

You’ll probably find instances where you FEEL one way and want to fight/fawn/(freeze/flee), but to continue to grow you probably need to stop and look at your recent patterns and fact-check your emotions against what really happened.

For me, since learning to “fight” was a part of my journey away from “flee/freeze”, I tend to reserve “fighting” for situations where either A) I’ll get genuinely financially fucked if I don’t (not just a dollar here or there, but something that’ll affect food/rent/real-life survival stuff), or B) I’m interacting with a community and there’s toxic folks coming in. Sometimes a community with toxic people simply need someone to stand up and call it out to counter the bystander effect, then people will rally behind you.

Also, a note: When you draw a boundary, even if it’s a very rational and reasonable one, it is not uncommon for SOMEONE to get upset by it. This is not the same as everyone getting mad at you because you’re constantly an asshole. Again, the proof is in the pattern…if no matter what you do people seem constantly angry at you, that’s probably you. But if that reaction to you has stopped, but a few people get upset if you actively set a boundary on something–that’s human nature. There are OTHER people out there who definitely want to take advantage of everyone around them, and that’s sometimes you, so if you set any sort of boundary at all no matter how rational that’ll still be “too much” for them.

That’s not necessarily a sign that you’ve “back slid”, it’s just that 20-30% of people are shitty people no matter what.

I also grew up in an abusive home–but I had a freeze/flee response to conflict.

So, there are several “defense” tactics when it comes to conflict. Fight, which you grew up with. Freeze (do nothing and hope they don’t notice you), Flee (leave the situation), and Fawn (people-pleasing).

When people say not to be a people-pleaser, they are generally talking to people who have an oversized urge to please as their defensive tactic. If you are a person where “fight” is your go-to, toning it down so you can properly interact with people isn’t a bad thing. It’s what YOU needed to do for YOU to gain necessary social skills.

But other people out there have “Fawn” as their defense mechanism. That is to say, whenever there’s conflict, they try to placate other people as their technique to de-escalate. And this becomes a situation FOR THEM where they erode their own boundaries trying to please other people whenever in conflict. It becomes a problem when other people take advantage of them because they tend to fawn and give other people things too much, and it causes harm in their life where work/spouses/friends abuse their placating nature. At that point, people who “fawn” need to try to do what you did with your fight response, and set more boundaries and say “no” more often without placating.

A good portion of “general advice” on the internet does not point out that “context matters”. But it really does, the patterns and personality and past of the person taking advice matters, and when it comes to someone who grew up in an abusive home learning how to master their defense mechanisms, different people will need different advice.

If you were truly as belligerent as you say before, I’d be honestly surprised if you over-corrected to the point of people-pleasing becoming a detriment, as it’s extremely hard to shake these things. They almost seem to be inborn personality traits that are ramped up into extremes if one is in an abusive situation. I have a friend who had a journey similar to yours, with a “fight” defense mechanism mode, and he’s done a TON of work breaking the “fight” response, but you can still catch him in moments where he goes into “asshole mode”.

And I’m the same, I’ve grown and improved, but I still default to “freeze” or “flee” in conflict situations that are especially stressful. (My growth has been embracing a “fight” response when necessary, and also a “fawn” response when necessary.) Him and I made opposite journeys…I learned to be more aggressive because it was necessary, and he toned his aggression down (because it was necessary to avoid driving away people he loved).

Also, the “it’s species they know” thing is often exactly the problem: there are species on one continent that look exactly like a species on another continent, but one of them is edible and the other is deadly.

Yeah, I’ve heard this is a thing with some immigrants with East Asian background. There’s a species of mushroom in Asia that is totally edible, but its look-alike in North America is deadly.

So every year there’s a handful of people who accidentally poison themselves, because they didn’t do research on local mushrooms (or the info that’s available is in English and they’re not all that fluent in the language.)

Until you know a few very different languages, you don’t know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don’t need those opinions. They just get in your way.

This is wise advice for ANY domain of knowledge.

Lotta people get a little fragment of knowledge on something, then shut down their brain and stop accepting new input. But life is change, and to be able to change and learn new things you need to keep your mind open. Being able to relax on having opinions and keep learning and moving along is very important.

I always take a peek at the comment history when I see things like this. And this guy basically just woke up to say things like this in one specific thread.

I’m no longer a mod of anything these days, but if I had a mod-hammer I’d send you into the next galaxy.

I can’t speak much about Europe, but when I was in the beverage industry about 10 years ago, energy drinks often had ADDITIONAL ingredients (supplements) far beyond caffeine.

If you look on the back of those energy drink cans in the US, they don’t say Nutrition Facts, they say Supplement Facts. That is important, it tells you how the item is classified and whether it has to follow FDA rules on Foods or FDA rules on Dietary Supplements (like vitamins do).

And if you look at the list of ingredients in many energy drinks (I have a tub of powdered GFuel before me so I’m refreshing my memory using that–it says “Supplement Facts”), you see a lot of ingredients like L-Tyrosine or L-Citrulline Malate which never appear in anything categorized as a food with the “Nutrition Facts” label on it. These fancy designer ingredients are basically newly-developed things that do not yet have a long-term proven track record of safety when eaten regularly on an everyday basis like a food.

A “food” is expected to be eaten regularly, so the standard of safety is higher for ingredients that go in a “food”. There’s a specific list the FDA has that lists ingredients considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe). New ingredients have to be evaluated by the FDA to determine whether they can be treated as GRAS, or if they have to have additional regulation if a corporation wants to put them in a food, drink, or supplement.

Corporations, unsurprisingly, LOVE to throw all sorts of newly created ingredients in things, for marketing purposes, so they do a lot of shady shit like labeling their product as a dietary supplement–but marketing it as a food so people think it’s a food.

Something classified as a “dietary supplement” (as many energy drinks are) is not meant to be eaten regularly as a food item. It’s meant to be consumed less frequently to SUPPLEMENT other things you consume or put in your body. However, people often treat energy drinks as a “food”, as if they’re the same thing as pop or juice, which could potentially be dangerous to your health because the ingredients in them have not yet proven they have a track record of safety when consumed frequently in food-like amounts. (I’m not really talking about caffeine here, I’m talking about all the OTHER stuff they throw in it.)

Whether a drink is classified as a “supplement” or a “food” is important. It is a big thing, because the regulations for what can be put into something that’s a “supplement” is looser than what can be labeled as a “food”.

I don’t know exactly how Europe draws the lines or what the regulatory landscape is there regarding energy drinks, but it sounds like this ban is possibly because Energy Drinks tend to have ingredients that push the boundary on what is safe eaten in large amounts like a food and what might be more harmful like a drug. Europe is generally stricter than America when it comes to food safety.

Danish hosting firms CloudNordic and AzeroCloud have suffered ransomware attacks, causing the loss of the majority of customer data and forcing the hosting providers to shut down all systems, including websites, email, and customer sites.

I’ve had good experiences with Namecheap for domains. Some of their support people are also in Ukraine, so if you’re of a mind to support them, giving them your business will do that at least a little.

One word of advice–it can be smart to have the domain name with one provider, and the hosting with a different one. That way if your hosting situation goes bad for whatever reason, you still have control of your domain and can point it at a new host as quickly as you can buy space and they can provision it (with time for DNS to propagate of course).

Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When I did webhost support, I saw WAY too many small business owners get into pickles because they had hosting AND domain with the same provider, and when something went wrong with that provider, it was just such a huge PITA to get control of the domain.

No recs for hosting, I don’t currently have a webpage up (just email) and my knowledge is way out of date, from like 2008 when I worked for a webhost as support.

Internet Explorer tried real hard to do that. Pages were literally built only to run “properly” in IE.

Curious what round 2 would look like.

This dude’s posting history is weird as shit.