Another idea is an asking system that compiles answers from the web while also posting the question here. Gives the benefit of immediate answers while also populating the fediverse.

As a libertarian I appreciate their government’s not razing all that shit, and just letting people do what they need to do.

A friend of mine is homeless in SF. His mental health has dropped significantly ever since the city forcibly moved him from the spot where he was camping to a shelter. He says he was doing much better in the tent than in the shelter.

Isn’t anything non-committal from your source of income a red flag?

Depends on what’s outside my home.

Thus far in life I’ve only been able to afford living in cities, so the blinds stay closed 24/7

I’m all for paternity leave, but there is a conflict between taking time off to take care of your newborn, and taking time off to breathe.

Newborns aren’t exactly a vacation.

I don’t feel rage when I watch the news, even when I see stories I don’t like.

Have an AI summarize it for you?

I guess that’s why they call them singers?

Ethics is more complicated than you think it is.

There is absolutely no reason that the set of rules you learned first would be the actual set of rules that governs people.

As you have learned, being non-aggressive is not sufficient strategy to avoid others’ aggression.

There’s no reason to think it would be, except that it was in kindergarten when large authority giants would easily overpower any aggressor, and would by policy do so on behalf of the nonagressive ones.

Don’t confuse kindergarten rules for global culture. Huge mistake.

Actual culture evolved from nature, and in nature in order to protect yourself you must retaliate when attacked. Every organism has weapons. Every organism.

Meditate on that. Why would every organism use some of its previous energy budget building weapons? Why would evolution select for that 100% of the time?

You’re being thick-skulled.

We are telling you what the problem is. Listen, or continue to have the problem. It’s your choice.

If you define winning as everybody always liking you and nobody ever having a bad opinion of you then yes, you can never win.

The trick is not to define “winning” as some impossible task like everyone always liking you.

You know you’re allowed to print off a new copy

Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s like saying one can grow an orchid over six feet tall. One can get a PhD. One can bench their body weight.

Not that it happens all the time, but that it’s possible.

I’m only saying that it’s possible to resolve differences in “beliefs” using mutual presentation and examination of evidence.

Of course perception cannot be articulated, and can differ, and so may present unresplvable differences. But those differences can be reasoned about and recognized. A person is less touchy about their perceptions than about their values, so if you can prove to me something like “You tend to see 90 degree angles as acute”, I can (a) be thankful about that and (b) work around it.

It’s harder to do that with values. Values are built into a person like perceptions are, below articulated knowledge, but they’re also (by definition) too important to “work around” or “correct for”.

My brain’s been fried at times too man, from drugs, trauma, brain impacts, etc.

One time I had a mold problem in my apartment and didn’t know how to handle it and part of the problem was the mold itself was making it hard to function mentally and otherwise.

In that case, having a premium subscription to chatgpt helped. Meaning having access to GPT4 instead of what they had free at the time which was GPT3.

The LLM wrote me up a step by step plan for exactly how to determine if I had mold and then whom to email when and how and in what sequence to handle it.

It was really helpful.

If you can afford it, $20 to have a month’s access to talk to GPT4 or maybe Claude 3.7 might be a good idea.

If you can’t afford it, I can spot you a month of one of these. AI isn’t necessarily superhuman in terms of precise reasoning, but it’s already superhuman in terms of just being able to articulate knowledge about all sorts of crap.

Really useful when your brain’s recovering from being cooked or fucked up, too.

If you can’t bring yourself to sleep in the bed, a nice warm ham should substitute nicely.

In my experience with bedbugs, the way I found out I had them was my sleep schedule reversed. I just found myself up all night and only sleeping during the day.

Only later did I discover it was due to bed bugs. My subconscious responded to them before I became aware of them consciously.

The reason I say this is that you mentioned your being a light sleeper with PTSD.

Bed bugs will affect your sleep. You need to take this into consideration when planning your life.

My advice leans toward saying fuck that place and finding a new one, and the reason isn’t the bedbugs but rather your landlord’s dishonesty.

Your landlord is either lying to you (concerning) or to himself (double concerning). The fact your landlord has taken anti-bedbug measures and yet claims there are no bed bugs is a major red flag.

Bed bugs are hard enough to deal with when everyone is on board and communicating, and not in denial about their existence. One of the hardest aspects of bed bugs is they’re easy to be in denial about. If anyone is showing signs of denial, that is in turn a sign that this might be an unwinnable bed bug fight.

It takes a lot of coordinated, disciplined action among a group of people to eradicate a bedbug infestation. If someone in the group is lying, that’s a very bad indication for the group’s ability to succeed.

My advice would be to confront the landlord about exactly what the fuck is going on with the bedbugs, what the history is, etc. Then, based on how authentic and trustable your landlord presents in that conversation, decide based on that.

Get some soylent and take it with you to the job site. You just unscrew a bottle and you can chug 320 calories in a few seconds.

Easy, clean energy. Doesn’t have to replace your meal either. Just something you can ingest very rapidly even if you don’t have an appetite.

In other news, nuts are very calorically rich for their volume. So if you’re just wondering how to get a lot of calories with something you can take on-site, a big jar of mixed nuts can’t hurt. Keep it in your car or break room.

Don’t fucking cut him loose!

What the fuck. If you’re gonna do it, own it. if you’re not clear about it being the right thing to do, don’t do it.

Friends are precious in this life.

Start by figuring out where you and your friend differ on morals. That’s what good fiction is for: gives you something to discuss ethically without it being too personal an issue to see clearly.

If you have the same values, then having different worldviews is to your mutual benefit.

I think friendship is the only context in which political change can happen, especially in today’s hyper-political climate.

Friendship is the only place people of opposing viewpoints can ever have a civil discussion (or perhaps more importantly, get un-civil and have the conversation continue).