Ashe

This is my biggest fear tbh. I have friends I'd love to see in plenty of places, but leaving isn't the worry. Coming back is, especially being trans with a passport of my correct gender marker

Only to then be disappeared into Federal custody, have my updated birth certificate deemed illegitimate and shipped off to God knows where

New England always on top, in our own way; confusing to those who aren't from around here.

Someone I know just keeps telling me he disagrees with every policy that's bad, while also saying he agrees with Trump for 50 things per the 5 he disagrees with.

Anyway that relationship is very sour as you can imagine

This read as downplaying Canada's significance for a moment, and then immediately circled back to the US being the isolationist Pariah state it is becoming

They're horrific and apparently invisible to people. Any time I point them out I've been called crazy and told I was overreacting. Until driving around Illinois with a coworker when he started to understand the scale of it all. The more I see the more dizzying it becomes. There needs to be regulation for them

And yet we don't want our posts to be fed into AI slop, nor do we want independent hosts to pay for the massive amount of traffic generated by a massive corporate entity to trying to consume data en masse.

The gay Republican I know is also deep in denial. Sad to see in all honesty

I'll take the bear in case you were wondering too.

Care to explain what an awful choice that is?

Source?

Facts don't care about your feelings etc etc

I remember NiCad batteries still being used in power wheels toys as a kid. For all I know they may still be, but the battery advancements have been particularly amazing.

I used to be a POS tech. It's such a gross, mismanaged walled garden.

Currently I spend a lot of time advising against pop ups like that :^)

The propaganda works though. People outside of the US struggle to see, and believe that the US has its own damning problems. 2 years ago I got close to a Romanian bartender while traveling. She told me about how she held scorn for her sister, who moved to the US despite having been warned against it.

What happened to her sister is what so many of us are victims of. Debt trapping, stalled wages, poor access to medical care and financial incentive to not seek care. Not to mention the poor quality food that wears you down.

As a result, she has had to send money to both her sister and Mom, and had to cancel several contract terms and vacation seasons off to care for her Mother. Her sister couldn't help due to being in debt, and at risk of losing her job if she were to travel, regardless of the emergency.

It's a cruel system that bundles up as an image of living free. The marginally higher standard of living has a lot of cracks, but they're hard to see until you're living with them.