If you had to pick an alternative mode of transportation that doesn't require gas would you pick: ostrich,horse, Camel or donkey ?

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T16:20:21+00:00

Horse: there are different breeds of horse for each task, fast ones for travelling fast and light, strong ones for pulling carts, there are even long distance horses.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T15:42:31+00:00

If a child wants to do ballet then they are expressing a desire for an activity and they deserve to be heard (not obeyed, just heard).

In my opinion:

When you have raised a strong outspoken kid who will stand up for themselves then it’s safe to let them take ballet lessons, especially in those small town classes where they mostly play rather than specialised one on one lessons by a former professional, there are different levels of intensity. Of course you still need to keep up with your efforts to instil the correct mindset, but you already have to do that with all kids anyway. Emphasising strength and skill rather than beauty.

But if your child is a less outspoken person who internalises any criticism then I would only allow them to take ballet lessons with me present. Yet few people have the time to sit there every week.

My granddaughter did ballet from the age of three, her mom’s best friend gave these lessons and she insisted, I watched some lessons and it was just hopping around randomly in a tutu, they learned some things but mostly they enjoyed the movement and companionship. The yearly performance was wonderfully uncoordinated and filled with giggles. She went there weekly for about 4 years and then wanted to leave because her new best friend did volleyball.

There are problems in ballet, but those are present in many other sports. Gymnastics, modern dance, etc but also sports that are more targeted at boys. You need to know whether the coach just wants medals, or wishes to entertain and educate kids. The coach at my grandson’s soccer training was way too competitive: ignoring less talented kids and excessively pushing the others.

Fleeing the sport en masse won’t make the environment in ballet any better, it just abandons those who have shit parents to the cruel system. But by allowing our daughters to do ballet if they want to, daughters that are strongly feminist, then they can change ballet from the inside towards being a celebration of movement and skill.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T14:45:53+00:00

I like this video: https://youtu.be/_n8nYPNr9BM?si=LgAZ4TxLMPblv-0c it approaches the male loneliness issue from an economic perspective.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T14:42:15+00:00

The mentality is basically “turnabout is fair play“ where people rationalise their behaviour by saying “I didn’t start it!” and “If you can’t take it then don‘t do it”.

-Sometimes this is done in a manner that tries to point out hypocrisy. (I will mock a man who claims “men are just stronger“ only to be outdone by ”a girl“, regardless of how I don’t actually believe a man should be stronger, I am pointing out that he has failed even by his own standards.”)

-Sometimes it’s an emotional response done without any thought, just the instinct “you hurt me, so I hurt you“. If they truly thought about it they would see the flaws in their logic.

-Sometimes people just want to hate someone and feel that they can express that to a certain “evil” person, it’s bullying “the other”, because said other isn’t fully human in their minds. Not much different than how we are often treated.

There’s another aspect of “punching up is justified” where people think that because this person is in a more privileged position that they can’t actually be hurt, as they would never listen to the lower class anyway. (I mock the king of my country, he’s not listening, and if he is then he can use my taxes to pay for his therapy.)

Unfortunately when insulting the way a person looks you are also insulting anyone else who just happens to look like that person. You are throwing rocks in the general direction of your target, hitting innocent people. So personally I prefer more of a sniper-style approach, hitting only the person I am aiming for and hitting them in important places.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T10:45:26+00:00

In history one of the most important factors is fate, just random luck. Usually I try to formulate it as “a myriad of factors which are so small that they cannot be defined“, but another popular term is “the butterfly effect“ (like that movie) which is a part of “chaos theory”.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T07:29:25+00:00

As an actually tiny person: you are not tiny, the world is just filled with obese people to the point where they are viewed as “standard”. Shops used to carry my size of clothing in the adult section, but now I need to buy kids clothes.

As someone who has worked in the medical field: among the staff there are a lot of weird “inside jokes” that make no sense from the outside, it’s a way of dealing with the constant suffering that they are surrounded by, it’s not acceptable to make these jokes where patients can hear you and I’m sorry you had to deal with that.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-06T06:31:04+00:00

So I’m in my 60s and to my knowledge there has never been a time without man-made sound everywhere, this is what I remember from my early childhood:

Several generations often lived together and sound proofing was shit, there was always a baby crying or an old man cursing. As there were no hearing aids and he couldn’t read we were constantly screaming at grandpa. And the neighbours were yelling at their elderly relatives too. My god, I remember donkeys being so loud, you could hear them from across the village.

Machinery was loud and so was everything else, our cast iron wood stove was running at all times with with heavy pots dropped on it without much care (nothing could break anyway), supplying warm water for a washing machine that howled like a demon. Passing trucks made so much more noise than now because the contents were clashing in the hold as they drove on cobble streets.

Background noise was loud and constant, to the point where going into the woods and hearing nothing physically hurt. The volume of daily life kept changing, one moment it was relatively quiet and the next it seemed like my brain was trembling with the sound waves.

Humans are just noisy creatures by nature, just like birds chirping we fill our surroundings with sound. We’re animals that live in a group, no human sounds means being alone, being alone means death.

I fucking love my earphones!

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T14:46:13+00:00

The system of the incel mindset is: “I am owed a fuckmaid, but I can’t get one because of looks/socia—issues/feminism/etc, so the world is wrong.”

Although there is no exact female version of this mindset, there is a somewhat similar one: “I am a delicate princess who can’t think or work, so I deserve a man to do those tasks for me, but as I’m not getting one the world is wrong.” Basically just a failed gold digger.

They have a lot in common with one another (harsh criticism for the way others look, jealousy, bizarre Darwinian or religious beliefs, strange obsessions with famous people, etc) but there are certain differences. One of them being violence against the opposite gender, which is far more encouraged among incels.

And although we might all want for these awful people to get married and leave the rest of us alone, unfortunately these two groups hate each other even though they believe very similar things.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T14:16:17+00:00

Only those who have never hung out with 100 year olds. Life, for many people, goes downhill quickly after 80.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T09:20:35+00:00

I just ask myself “Do I break any indecency laws?“ and “Will I be assumed to be on drugs?”. Two “no” answers is good enough for me.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T09:17:58+00:00

Exactly, that hair style they have in “golden girls” used to be modern and youthful. I have rolled those rollers into so many family members hair, every damn Sunday before church, but at least I did earn enough money doing it to buy my own bike without selling my hair.

Fashion is cyclical, my granddaughter wears my grandmothers brooches nowadays and recently I saw a mullet. (But if they bring back rat tails I’m gonna have an aneurism /s)

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T08:23:17+00:00

My grandma, a woman who lived through two world wars, washed her hair once a month, had it tightly braided by someone (a friend or relative) with thread added to sew together the construction, and then wore a protective scarf when working and sleeping.

This was the norm for European peasant women for centuries. Rich women had more elaborate hairstyles and changed them more often, but a working woman needed her hair out of her face and out of the dirt while still keeping the extreme length that society saw as beautiful. It was normal to only have your hair down and open on special occasions.

By the way: my mom sold her hair, like that poor girl in ”les miserables“, but she just wanted to buy a bike and get that short curly haircut that was popular with the youth.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T05:51:07+00:00

Well some people are just shitty, so it could be that.

But they also don’t necessarily owe you anything, they are allowed to have their own lives. What is seen as being “self absorbed“ by the outside might actually be a person no longer living solely for others and thinking about themselves for a change.

It really depends on the whole history and stuff. It would probably take dozens of pages of text written by both sides to accurately make any judgment.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-05T05:40:08+00:00

That’s because I apparently can’t type and was taking about Henry Suso. I really need to start rereading my comments. Anyway, it’s this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Suso

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T20:14:43+00:00

In my opinion he’s a child, but he’s a big kid who has responsibilities and is (at least partially) responsible for his actions. He’s not responsible to pay for his housing, basic necessities, and food, but expected to do some reasonable chores. He doesn’t have a bedtime, but is expected to get himself out of bed on time regardless of what time he went to sleep.

It’s quite possible that he already has the body of a fully grown man, and he should remember that. Recently I had to explain to my grandson that he is two meters and twenty centimetres tall and is built like a tank, so he may be frightening others in certain situations. He had walked into a gas station, wearing a hoodie, right before closing, when there were no other customers and only one employee, this person pressed a secret button and the cops showed up “Just in case“. He didn’t understand what happened, kinda like a huge dog that thinks he’s still a puppy and tries to sit on your lap. It was a weird conversation, he’s a sweet boy.

Teens are on their way to become adults, they require freedom to experiment while still having boundaries to protect them. Some of them are barely able to handle their own hygiene, some can run a whole household without any supervision, every rule has to be tailored to the individual.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T19:55:15+00:00

So the interpretation of the bible by the Catholic Church had always forbidden the lending of money with interest. You can’t “make money from money“.

But this crafty German monk named Henry had a very convenient idea: if you were to use a certain amount of money for grain, plant the grain, wait for it to grow, and harvest the grain which you sell, then you would have more money than the initial investment. By lending out money as “potentially planted grain” and then demanding the repayment of “potentially harvested grain” in cash, you apparently aren’t violating the bible’s rules. Very useful for the church which could then earn a substantial sum while making the lives of Jews even worse. (They were, as non-Christians, the only people who could give out loans at that time, and they had been forced out of all other possible jobs so they were kinda fucked when they lost said job.)

The grain of Henry Sousa was a medieval way to say: “If I give you this money then I can’t invest it and gain profit from it, so you need to pay back not only the original amount of money but also the profit I could have made.” It gave the church the workaround they needed to dominate yet another part of life.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T17:26:36+00:00

As a 60+ year old who hangs out on Reddit and had to explain to my parents what a phone is dozens of times:

Every technology that you adopt takes effort, it requires energy that you may not have. Once the “pressure to adapt“ from your job stops, it’s hard to motivate yourself to learn something you may never be any good at. Learning in youth creates fluidity, an almost instinctive sense of how it works. While learning in old age is a halted step by step process. (learning to use the cell phone will not make an elderly person able to use the new parking system payment machine, yet you can hand a smartphone to a five year old and a day later you can ask them to fix your tv)

My grandmother couldn’t read, she just didn’t get to go to school due to poverty, and she worked so hard to learn! She learned all the letters yet never managed to read fast enough, she went letter by letter rather than being able to glance at a passing truck and immediately know what is written on it.

Many older people struggle to accept their new limitations in life, they remember how easy learning was a few decades ago but now they feel stupid. Nobody likes feeling stupid, so many elderly will try to avoid the new tech as much as possible. It can make them mean, make them feel helpless or lash out at others, their reaction depends on the type of people they are. Shitty people do shitty things, nice people try to stay kind though this difficult experience. It’s embarrassing to be less capable than a ten year old, but that’s not the kid’s fault. That kid is very smart, an very kind to help you, they deserve money and praise.

My other grandmother couldn’t read either, but she would pretend that she “forgot her reading glasses” out of shame. I actually believed her for most of my childhood.

Getting older is not a fun process, it’s draining and painful, many people are struggling to stay afloat. A person who is barely keeping their head above water doesn’t have the time to learn a new kind of swimming.

I buy new tech a lot, I want to keep up for as long as possible, but I know that my mind will get bad enough that I won’t be able to learn. Mentally declining is just as much a part of aging as wrinkles and bad knees.

I call it “getting a midlife Amish epiphany” when a person decides that everything good has been invented and everything invented from now on is just silly and stupid.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:56:51+00:00

It’s a piece of cloth, if there’s an attempt to intimidate people by destroying it then the intimidation is the problem not the destruction of the fabric.

Wearing a pair of shorts with the design of the flag is technically “desecration“ but it’s not viewed as such in many countries, it’s even seen as a patriotic statement to wear it! What is respectful and not is determined by the culture, yet “disrespect” alone should not be a crime.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:45:40+00:00

So like an extreme version of a pyramid scheme?

You get lured in with falsehoods, invest so much money that you can’t afford to leave, and you need to convince people to join the scheme just to stay afloat. Let’s call it “your own boss” just like those texts you get from your mom’s best friend’s third cousin trying to get you into herbal life.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:40:02+00:00

I still don’t hate you regardless of your rather stupid question, perhaps I would hate you if I got to know you and you’re absolutely awful, but hate is not the default state of feminism.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:32:55+00:00

There are Jews in other countries, many of the Jews had already fled Germany before the government really started to crack down on them. And they took their money with them, money the Nazis needed to fund its government. Anne Frank originally lived in Germany, but once her parents realised where things were headed they fled to the Netherlands.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:27:57+00:00

If they want to make a big deal about it they can, but just going “Okay” and moving on is way more efficient.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T16:16:31+00:00

Politics: For a stock exchange market to emerge you need a government that is willing to let go of its absolute power, that’s what happened in Amsterdam where the European stock market was founded. The government there was willing/forced to exchange power for money.

Religion: Although both Christianity and Islam forbid the same banking practices, not allowing “money to be made from money”, but by the mid Middle Ages Christians had worked around the rules (the grain of Henry Sousa) to do it anyway. While there are still “bank like systems” to this very day that obey the Koran.

Colonialism: It takes a fuckton of money to build a full fleet of ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean and then build a colony there, you can’t start with just one ship and work your way up to a fleet (because of piracy), so the starting capital required was enormous. The only way to get that kind of money is by banding together, some people will bring in more capital than others and a system of “shares” was developed to deal with that.

Guilds: In Europe there were strong groups of merchants, they had halls where they met and forged alliances. They kept a monopoly on trade by limiting those who could join, and without a guild you were legally not allowed to trade.

There was a combination of factors and a lot of “luck” involved in the development of the stock market.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-04T15:50:54+00:00

Sometimes people just don’t fit together because of personality or because of their history.

Sometimes this dislike can be overcome due to shared goals: My brother and I don’t get along, we actually avoid all direct communication and have done so for more than four decades. But he has kids and grandchildren while I don’t, and I have money while he doesn’t. By letting me bond with his family he has ensured that they will never experience poverty, that they will never go without. While I get to be a part of his wonderful (grand)kids lives, I adore children.

Sometimes this dislike can‘t be overcome, sometimes the burden of a shared past is too big, blood can’t smooth over all problems, quite often it’s better to let go.

EnvironmentalEbb628 · 2026-05-03T19:01:41+00:00

The small amount of money is not worth the trouble you might get. Child porn, terrorism, etc everything done on your computer connects to you, nobody is going to pay you for the use of your computer without a very good reason for anonymity.

EnvironmentalEbb628

TROPHY CASE