I am a ML and everything I have seen of Jenkem’s posting here makes me think they are probably a leftist.

We probably don’t agree on everything, but they’re no liberal.

We both know it wasn’t even Che Guevara T-Shirt socialism. It was definitely “I think the nordic model is pretty cool” socialism.

the only viable left leaning political party in the US?

I might be misunderstanding you, so I apologize if that is the case, but if you are referring to the Democrats they are far from left leaning. They aren’t even center leaning.

You can’t even say they have a better track record than the Republicans. They bomb countries as much (or in recent years even more) than the Republicans. They advocate for wars. They fund ICE even more than the Republicans. They stand up just as much for reproductive rights (read: not at all). They just do all of it while waving a rainbow flag.

I really hope you meant the Greens or the CPUSA; which have their own issues but are certainly more left than either the Democrats or Republicans.

I am childfree, she wasn’t. 100% not going to work, but we ended on good terms all things ocnsidered.

I used it a little bit, not extensively. I watched Diggnation with Kevin and Alex though semi-regularly, as I used to watch TechTV prior to that.

Living in Japan, this almost didn’t register to me. I have literally never met anybody that didn’t have one. When you move out, you use your family’s old one until you can buy a newer one.

Everyone should have one, absolutely.

Their point is the double standard. Either apply it consistently or not at all. If athletes are representing their country in all aspects when competing internationally, all athletes should be held to that standard.

If an athlete refused to shake a USian athletes hand because of the war crimes of their country, including ones ongoing at this very moment, you would be on board with it then? There would be precious few handshakes that could be given out on international sporting stages, that is for sure.

Some prefectures offer free childcare services, but it depends a lot on where you live. Historically they aren’t services that have been used a lot, there is something of a cultural expectation that you or your family watch kids. As an example, babysitters/nannies are basically unheard of unless it is a relative. My girlfriend’s sister has a child and either the sister is home all day with the kid or her parents watch it; she even leaves in an prefecture with free daycare services.

There is a fairly decent maternity leave that most new mothers do end up using. There’s an initial lump sum payment plus you get about 2/3 your salary for up to a year (I think those times are right). Paternity leave technically exists as well but I have never met anyone who has used it.

My brother had ferrets. I loved them, awesome personalities and adorable, but ferret-proofing your flat seems like more work than child-proofing. Even then they can and would get absolutely anywhere they weren’t supposed to be. They’d always get out again, but not after making you stress for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to extricate them.

The smell was omnipresent too.

I used to keep snakes, they are so misunderstood. The couple times I was bit (non-venomous) over several years of having snakes were honestly both my fault; once I had fed her and didn’t wash my hands properly afterwards, and once I didn’t notice she had started shedding and so was a bit more defensive than usual. They’re not typically aggressive at all and are usually content to just chill with you as much as anything else. Humans are way too large for a snake to ever consider you food, so they’re not really going to be trying to hurt you except as a last resort in self-defense.

I especially hate the slimy stereotypes because I always found my snakes super pleasant to hold, snakeskin feels great. I’d like to get one again, it has been a long time.

Obviously you run into a lot of other issues with a sudden change but we are frankly pretty overpopulated and could use a decrease. It turns out that a system predicated on infinite population growth with finite resources can’t be sustained forever. Especially with how finite they are in our case.

I think even worse than our population issues is the overcentralization though. SO much is based around Tokyo, the vast majority of jobs are located there, especially if you want any upwards mobility. It’s even worse if you include areas like Chiba and Saitama as part of the greater Tokyo area. Even the other cities pale in comparison to opportunities in Tokyo. If people could spread out a bit more, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is now.

I was lucky enough to be able to move out of Tokyo last year thanks to my work. I am not in a super rural area but I definitely never want to go back to Tokyo if I can help it. I am in the mountains around Mt. Fuji, and get to work overlooking a spectacular view of the mountain. Don’t have to deal with packing into crowded trains in the summer when everyone is dripping with sweat.

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Unless you were on explicitly communist subs, reddit was extremely hostile to communists. You could definitely get banned from some subs just by association.

Porn was everywhere though, yeah.

Outside of some fad diets, there isn’t really much of a push among anyone to cut plants out of your diet though. There’s no need to make fake plant-products generally.

If we include seafood, I definitely do.

But to be fair, I don’t think the average person is eating that varied a diet. I am not going to make the claim people on a plant-based diet can’t get protein, they can, but they probably aren’t getting 10+ different sources of it either.

It’s the only browser we can use in my office, so have gotten pretty used to it. It’s honestly not that bad, they’ve come a long way since the IE days.

It’s not my home-use browser, but it’s absolutely serviceable.

I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.

Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn’t be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!

Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn’t be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.

A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.

As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.

The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.

The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren’t a smoker already, don’t start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it’s still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It’s one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.

If you don’t vape or smoke already, don’t start though.

My country is exceptionally bad about this.

Buy a plastic package of crackers? It will be filled with smaller packages of crackers all wrapped in plastic with a plastic freshener pack for each one. I am not exaggerating. I am not sure I have ever bought something that didn’t have at least two degrees of plastic wrap.

We did stop giving plastic bags out at cashiers unless requested, but that means shitall when everything you buy is triple-wrapped to begin with.

People on lemmy.ml thinking we just really enjoy Mali.

It’s actually been super refreshing to, generally, be able to say I am a Marxist-Leninist and not immediately get downvoted into oblivion. There are still some of the kneejerk reactions to the CPC, but even then people seem more willing to engage on good-faith even with disagreements.