For advanced STEM degrees, there are people who just enjoy learning that sort of thing and applying their knowledge.

In the same vein, some folks are just attracted to dangerous and difficult jobs because they get a sense of purpose or identity from it.

Others it’s community. I knew a guy who did 20 years active duty military, then joined the national guard, then took a job for the same national guard unit as a DoD civilian and stayed on until they forced him to retire. They had practically drag the guy out. He never did anything but bitch and complain about the work he spent more than 40 years doing, he sounded like kinda hated his job, but he liked being a part of the military.

Well, if you take good old-fashioned violence out of the picture, money. Or specifically a lack of it.

Sanctions, selling off US debt, more retaliatory tariffs, blacklisting US investors and companies, anything that pulls cash out of the US economy and puts it somewhere else. Turn off the money tap, make the mega-donors hurt bad enough and the dystopia machine will eventually grind to a halt. Don’t think for a moment that the current squad of high-functioning sociopaths that are enabling this are principled enough to stay the course after a few of their mega-yachts are repossessed. They’ll flip sides again and again just to try and keep that horde they’ve built up. Someone just has to prove to them that the threat is serious, because right now, they think everyone else is helpless against them.

Additionally, the majority of Trump voters cited the economy as a primary reason for voting for him. A good portion of them were probably lying to cover for being racist and just wanted to see POC and the LGBTQ+ community suffer, but if you crash the US economy hard enough, you can still hijack a big chunk of Trump’s public support. It’s the same as with mega-yachts, but here we’re talking pickup trucks, ATVs, and rent-to-own furniture.

Few problems with this. 1. It’s slow. 2. It’ll hurt everyone else economically because US businesses have hooks set real deep in a lot of places. 3. Other nations have a wealthy elite with similar sway who want Trump in power for various reasons and might not play along. & 4. Whoever replaces the US might turn out to be just as big as bully in a few years if we’re not careful.

Still, it needs to be done.

EDIT: It’s like the old saying goes, everything is about money, except money, which is about power.

As others have said, I use a client that doesn’t display them, so it never dawned on me. And in general, profile pics have never been a big deal for me. So if the app or site doesn’t make me do it as part of the account set up, my profile pic just stays as the default.

You can set profile pictures on Lemmy?

Yeah, no one would have even blinked at that from what I recall. Unless you tried to take it onto a plane or into someplace high security like a courtroom it was something so mundane that it wouldn’t have been brought up.

Making an issue out of it would have been akin to saying “Did you hear about Bob? He always has his car keys with him. Watch out for that guy…”

Honestly, after scrolling through this thread, I gotta wonder when carrying a pocket knife became something abnormal to a decent percentage of the population.

It was never universal, but as young lad in the late 1900’s it was unremarkable for most people to have at least a little pocket knife with a nail file on them most of the time and never anything sinister. There were places you couldn’t take them, but for the most part we lived our lives surrounded by people with concealed knives and never thought twice about it.

Never tied an onion to my belt though.

EDIT: If it’s mostly a backlash against the EDC crowd, I kinda get it, but still it seems pretty harmless in moderation.

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Check out the Gerber Armbar.

I carry a skeletool from time to time. Same deal. It’s light, simple, and the pliers work well.

Same here. Growing up, you got a pocket knife for Christmas or your birthday some time around middle school (usually a Swiss Army or Boy Scout knife) and it was just a thing you carried like your wallet or house key.

Multitools changed the tradition a little, but didn’t end it. Largely it meant another round of all us kids getting a multitool for Christmas.

I’m not a big EDC guy, but I still habitually have a good penlight and one of these on me most of the time: https://www.gerbergear.com/en-us/shop/multi-tools/all-multi-tools/armbar-drive-onyx-30-001585

The scissors and screwdriver come in handy more often than the blade. So these days if I give knife/tool it tends to be something like that rather than a Jackhawk 9000 sort of thing.

The phenomenon is sometimes called the Naccism of Small Differences or the Law of Triviality. It appears in just about any group of people to some degree. It’s a wild and weird little bit of human behavior.

From others in general - Always invest in the things that separate you from the ground; shoes, tires, and your mattress.

From a coach I knew - Every so often sit down and make sure your actions fit with your goals. It’s easier to get off course than you think.

From my father - The Hassle Factor. A job can give you three things, enough money to make up for the time you don’t have, enough time to make up for the money you don’t have, and a sense of satisfaction. If you aren’t getting at least two of the three, the job isn’t worth the hassle.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it.

I’d rather have two cubes and a vehicle that doesn’t reek of midlife crisis.

Holy shit. It is, isn’t it? Perfect!

What an utterly useless thing. You add axles to bear more weight. Unless you’re hauling a big tungsten cube, the truck isn’t big enough to carry a load that would need three axles.

It’s even dumber than those Jeep Gladiators, the #1 pavement princess in my area, which sacrifice departure angle for a ridiculously small amount of cargo space and less load capacity than an entry level pickup truck.

Just stupid.

I know. I have a problem. =(

Oddly enough, I don’t claim to really love language for the sake of language, but it’s pretty useful in my day to day so I try to use it well. I like your post, so, in the spirit of negotiation let’s use the term baseline instead of rules.

The bulk of educational and informational works on the English language gives us a kind of baseline for our written language. When someone deviates from that baseline, most of the time we can still understand them because we can see how it differs and can infer their intent based on context and that baseline.

The dictionaries, style guides, and grammar texts that give us our baseline exist to facilitate written communication, not stifle it. They’re the result of hundreds of years of these kinds of negotiations, not just arbitrary choice as so many people claim. Good grammar isn’t just a cudgel to beat the creativity out of kids, it’s the benefit of centuries worth of experience and study. Just as new ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, we also shouldn’t disregard past practice simply on the basis of it’s age.

Baselines do change. But it’s a slow process, not every popular new deviation will stand the test of time, and many antique forms are still present in our modern language. Think of it like scientific progress. Some ideas are validated by experimentation, others are proven wrong. Our understanding of the universe is more complex now than centuries ago, but there are still numerous constants that have been proven time after time. Our language has grown more complex too, but that doesn’t mean that some very old ideas about how to communicate in writing aren’t still useful today.

But you’re very, very right about shame and reactions, and I’d be dishonest not to admit that. It’s too easy for armchair grammarians to treat language as if it exists in a logic vacuum separate from human emotion, and that’s simply not the case.

Omitting a period from a text isn’t a crime, I freely admit that I’m often a grumpy old asshole about this sort of thing when I shouldn’t be, and you’re 100% correct that people shouldn’t be shamed over it.

At the same time, the reverse is also true. Not every plea for punctuation and grammar is creative or ideological tyranny, and if some people react poorly to a text that omits punctuation, that’s not something the author has a say in either.

At any rate, I hope this comes of as intended, a genuine, if overly lengthy explanation from someone who supports the widespread use of punctuation, and not just Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud. =)

I still send =), =D, and =P.

I’ll just go ahead and get in my coffin now.