The council says exports to Canada fell 63 per cent last year.

Imagine if your income fell by 63%. It’d probably get your attention.

Good, solid 8. Just had breakfast and ready to get on with my day, but could have used a little more sleep.

So, I’ve been learning swing dancing over the last few months, and as a consequence, I’m meeting a lot of new people. There is a girl I had run into and danced with a couple of times at different events, but don’t know her name. She dances well, but often “takes a beat” for herself, throwing in her own footwork, which is fine, even if it is a bit awkward and causes me as lead to have to adapt. I am just there to have fun, and I want my partners to have fun as well. Anyhow, I ran into her at a dance the other day and got her out on the floor. As we’re dancing, I noticed that she never makes eye contact with me, and it occurred to me that this girl might be on the autism spectrum. Intrigued, I start wondering if I can get her to make eye contact, and notice that she is studiously avoiding looking at me when I am looking at her. Throughout the song, our eyes were in a game of pursuit and evasion. As the song is winding up, I pull her into a cuddle for a side-lean dip finale, and I put my face about 6 inches or so from hers. There was no avoiding my gaze, and we lock eyes with full-frontal contact. There was a microsecond of tension, and then we burst out laughing as the song ended. It made my day and I know it made hers.

Jesus, I wish the Supreme Court would issue a ruling striking this nonsense down. He’s destroying commerce and credibility, wreaking havoc that will take decades to correct if it doesn’t lead to a complete collapse of the U.S. as a unified nation.

Nika please.

Which Lord are you referring to? Please be more specific.

Looking forward to the airing of the grievances.

I’m an attorney and I’ve met more than a few with “Dark Triad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) personality traits.

An special tariffs were levied on Spirit Halloween store.

I bought a Kobo as well, after having a ton of DRM issues with books I’ve bought on kindle. I love the Kobo!

I recently picked up a sewing machine at a garage sale for $40 and it has been a game changer for me and has really upped my look. All my clothes are now tailored to fit my body, and it makes a huge difference. I’m a middle-age man, but am very fit. However, most off the rack clothing is cut for the average American male physique, which means that shirts that fit me in the shoulders generally have tons of extra fabric around the mid section. Now, every short sleeve shirt I buy gets “the treatment”. I take up the sleeves to mid-bicep (because showing bicep is the male equivalent to showing cleavage), take them in to hug my biceps, and then taper the shirt to the waist to show off my trim waistline and emphasize my shoulder to waist ratio. Quite honestly, it’s amazing how much more attention I get based upon that one simple change.

It’s a bummer because reddit used to be really cool. It’s like when you discover a cool little cafe or something that you love going to. Eventually more and more people discover it, and it becomes a bit more crowded, but you still go. Then it gets written up in some magazine or something, and the crowd becomes nuclear. It becomes a tourist trap flogging merchandise, and they turn it into a chain, with the food semi-preprepared for mass consumption. The experience sucks and what was a special spot is ruined.

I’ve noticed that the lemmy front page has a much greater turnover than the reddit front page, which is nice.

Honestly, reddit drove me away. I got tired of being hounded by engagement bots asking inane questions, and in the wake of reddit going public, the comment police regularly were nitpicking my comments, reading into them intolerance that simply wasn’t there. I was just sick of it all. Reddit has a much bigger userbase, but lemmy is more friendly. There are occasions where it would be nice to post something niche and have a robust discussion, which requires a site with more mass appeal, but I’m not interested in all the drawbacks of dealing with reddit.

There is no good answer, and you have to find what is right for you. I’ve been around too many toxic people for too long, and at this point I feel like I don’t owe anyone my time or attention, family or not. Setting solid boundaries has worked wonders for my mental health. While I would love to have a good, healthy relationship with my family, I cannot make that happen by myself. They have to meet me halfway, and when they engage in behaviors that I wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else, it reminds me that I shouldn’t tolerate it from them either. People get so hung up on “but he’s your father” or “it’s your family,” but the people that say that have no idea what I’ve been through and no frame of reference. It is absolutely 100% the right thing to minimize or eliminate contact with abusive people, even if they are your family.

I feel for you. My parents also drank the Koolaid, but my mother is dead now, and my father has slipped even further down the rabbit hole. He’s also a horrible person in general, and while I used to engage with him if he were behaving himself, I’ve effectively gone no contact now. I’ve only spoke with him once in the last few years, and when he launched into a racist anti-immigrant tirade I told him not to be a coward his entire life and hung up on him. It was on my birthday.

Life is so much better when you cut shitty people out of your life, even if they are family.

Interesting. I live in Southern California, and have been learning Spanish on my own using the comprehensible input method. I have pretty decent comprehension at this point, and could really use some practice speaking. I’ll look into this.

This is a good idea, thanks!

Sounds like a pretty clear violation of the right of publicity.