Yeah, exactly this. I have a mortgage and a car payment so I’ve got lots of debt, but I wouldn’t consider myself “broke” by any stretch. I don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, I put 10% away for retirement, and I can afford to spend money where I want without stressing about it. Overall, pretty charmed compared to how a lot of folks are struggling these days and it’s honestly kinda wild to act like it’s comparable to anything they’re going through.

I feel like it’s one of those things where if you’re in California, people are going to have a lot of big opinions. But if we’re talking outside the state, we got each other’s backs.

4th largest*

I just read an article this morning (tried to find it to link here but couldn’t) that was talking about how it will be more difficult for Dems to lean into this strategy because most of the blue states already have independent committees to draw districts (as they should.) It basically pointed to California as our sole bastion of hope for 2026 and noted that if a bunch of the states follow suit, the Republicans will have the edge. Continues to come down to the electoral college problem with small states getting disproportionate voices.

Other people are saying it’s Vital Proteins, apparently.

Right, and Irish-Americans have more knowledge and understanding about Irish-American culture.

The other poster was making it seem like American culture is homogenous or like descendants of immigrants can’t still retain distinct cultural traditions and identities outside of generic American. Whether or not those traditions are the same as the original country of origin is immaterial. Nobody is claiming that it is.

What I don’t understand is why Americans portray themselves as Dutch when coming to the Netherlands.

Do they, though? Are there really that many Americans who think or try to pretend they are actually Dutch, instead of Americans who are have Dutch ancestry?

It honestly sounds like they are just trying to connect by sharing a commonality and something that is (probably) important to them in some way. It’s an expression of appreciation. Even if the cultural traditions carried on in the US are different than in the modern-day country–so what? It doesnt make those cultural traditions less important to the people who celebrate them. I fail to understand what is wrong with acknowledging or appreciating where those traditions originated.

Is it just a matter of semantics and an objection to the label itself “(whatever nationality)-American”?

The level of authority that you’re speaking with about another country’s culture while clearly only having a surface-level understanding is actually wild. Maybe accept that the Americans who are telling you otherwise have more knowledge and understanding of their own culture.

Yes, that reminds me of when Florida(?) started requiring drug testing for welfare recipients and ended up spending more on the tests than whatever they saved uncovering fraud.

The Mountain Goats

It’s such a a ridiculously niche joke and it’s soooo good.

Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you’d have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you’re either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren’t.

Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can’t tell if they’re available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about “proper” etiquette. It’s probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don’t mean much.

I do this to my mom as a way to be very low-contact with her. It’s a huge relief.

I used to love texting when it was only a handful of friends but these days I hate the pressure of it being ever-present in my pocket and the social expectation to answer in a relatively timely manner. (This has led me to being a horrible texter, sorry everyone.)

I miss the old days of AOL instant messenger. Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.

L-O-fucking L. You can’t make this shit up, it’s so stupid.

Zootopia. No idea how I know that.

But he said he never heard of it!!!

For real, that’s phrasing is so ridiculous as to be hilarious if we weren’t staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

As far as I can tell, you can only block communities in sync which is why you’re having to do it one by one. Jerboa you can just block the whole NSFW instance, one and done.

Idk it was like 2 years ago. I just remember looking through fediverse guides and instances were labeled as either allowing NSFW content or not, no nuance. I didn’t dig into whether the specific instances were defederated from lemmynsfw nor did I even know to look for that at the time.

There’s not that much NSFW stuff that isn’t porn but I come across it occasionally. Usually jokes, sometimes people will also be very cautious and mark shit that isn’t really. I prefer to be largely unconstrained with what comes across my feed, just don’t care for the random puss intermingled.

I didn’t want other NSFW stuff blocked, just porn. When I was originally signing up it seemed like NSFW was being treated as an all or nothing for most instances. Idk if it’s changed or if I just needed to look harder.