As you might remember, it used to be called “information superhighway.” As it turns out, not only does it make information flow faster from A to B, it also divides people that lie to either side of the road, in a metaphorical sense.
Required reading See especially figure 3b. TLDR: Increased information access and increased connections lead to more echo chambers.

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They are all over Europe. I have three or four within walking distance. And they can hold some amazingly large items, too.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but plenty of folks - blue collar workers, technicians, engineers - have away jobs where they work in different places for weeks or months at a time, and there are landlords who specialize in providing this clientele with bare-bones furnished apartments. I’ve been there, too - in fact, one year during the pandemic, I had spent just a bit more than half of my time working and living in a place away from home.

There are many forums like that, especially if you’re not limited to one language. Most of the ones I frequent have been around for 10 or 20 years or more, but kind of fly under the radar. ilxor being a very good example. AFAIK, the latter also adds only one new user per day. I’d say that’s a good thing, even though I had to apply several times.

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

Needs more “amazing.” Seriously, screw these corporate ass monkeys.

What in the world is going on with Elsie’s hand in the “second of the five photographs?”

Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?
Same thing you described happened to me so many times I’ve lost count. Furthermore, I’ve compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn’t you know, what you see in your “profile preview” or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We’ve seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.
Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles “in case we get interrupted.” When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.
And that’s not even mentioning the bots and “controllers,” as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.
TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.

Yeah West in his seminal “Scale” kind of corroborates the whole story.

It seems, though, that the molecular changes you are undergoing do not immediately translate into increased mortality, so you’re going to have several more years of - presumably - feeling well until the big drop-off starts for all of us at about 60.
BTW, because of its wide range of topics, its solid scientific underpinnings and its excellent intellectual accessibility, this is one of two books I positively think should be taught at any school, the other one being Solé’s “Phase Transitions.”

“Darling, guess what? Blackberry jam is on the menu again.”

That 1935 piece surely seems prophetic. For example this part:

Development of the anti-scientific and anti-cultural campaign, cutting down of education

For the last five or so years, I’ve been noticing a surge of anti-intellectualism. People are not any longer ashamed to publicly dismiss “smart alecks” and “know-it-alls”.

That’s no moon.

Next-level mooning.

As the old and venerable neuromonkey once said:

Welp. Just let the nukes fly, then. First it’s “on accident,” and before long you’ve got meth addicted baby prostitute warlords running the local Walmart.

Maybe another time traveller disturbed the shooter by pushing him because what would have happened if Trump was shot dead would have been truly apocalyptic in the longer run. Maybe we just witnessed the n-th time loop without remembering the other ones and this is the first one where the bullet only grazes Trump’s ear instead of blowing his brains out so now life on Earth as we know it can continue, and we can post about it on Lemmy.

In the B2B world, there’s no escaping these banners. It’s as if GDPR never happened.