Our office allowed voting to elect a committee to determine what return to office should look like. I was elected to it. They also hired external contractors to mediate basically. Some people came into it thinking everyone should go back to office, but by the end of it we settled that being in office should be required for certain types of work activities and not for others, and apart from the required activities for in office employees could be wherever. We drafted this up into a formalized agreement and everyone was happy with it.

Then the president who did that program retired and the new guy immediately scrapped the whole thing and forced everyone back into the office overnight without any discussion from the committee or other employees.

Once I have acquired the recommended bag of mushrooms I believe I would like to go trip with you, that sounds like it would lead to the best conversations

I mean even if you genuinely thought that’s what it was asking for, just ceiling is extremely nonspecific

I feel this deeply. Others have said it already, but the thing that’s helped me the most is getting involved with the solution. Local community organizing, mutual aid groups, political candidates in your area, etc etc etc there are many options (and feel free to message me if you want more help finding them) and nothing felt ok until I could feel like I was doing something other than passively sitting around watching the country/world collapse.

Others have also said closing off news and social media. This is also a good step, but I would caution against doing so 100%. Maybe set aside a day or two a week where you get caught up for an hour or two then turn it off the rest of the time. It’s still important to be aware, particularly as the suffering is becoming more and more local and ubiquitous, but it definitely becomes all consuming if done too much.

You sound like an empathetic person, and people like you are needed to help drive change. Fascism won’t go away in it’s own or with one more election cycle to vote it out. The upshot is most organizing and community strengthing efforts are just generally positive for mental health in their own right and may lead and may lead to new friendships and activities that you enjoy

I don’t understand fully how this technology works, but, if people are using it to create sexual content of underage individuals, doesn’t that mean the LLM would need to have been trained on sexual content of underage individuals? Seems like going after the company and whatever it’s source material is would be the obvious choice here

I don’t think there is a federated alternative but there are alternatives that are at least marginally less shitty, if that helps