shikitohno

I had a different, fun experience. My lab work was actually what got me diagnosed, but to make sure I'm taking the right dose and my medication is being effective, I need to get labs done about every 3 months. Insurance decided that nobody could possibly need lab work done more than 3 times a year, so I got a nice $2,000 surprise bill in the mail for the last labs of the year.

No, of course not. Can't have him getting distracted from advancing his handlers' agendas by handing him a snack, now can we?

And the Lamy ballpoints can finally have a decent ink, now that they're making them with the Jetstream ink. Pretty sure it's a Japan exclusive for the moment, though.

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Depending on where you draw the line, Lamy might no longer count as a European brand, since they were recently bought out by Mitsubishi Pencils.

That aside, you've still got Pelikan, who do make some entry level fountain pens.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that's not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I've had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples' biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet "communities" really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I'm closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.

Metallicy

Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.

I don't think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn't be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you'd probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.

From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it's bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.

Or, I don't know, just go after the companies and individuals found employing people who don't have a legal right to work in the country, with fines that can't be dismissed as a cost of doing business and prison time for those responsible. If there were truly significant consequences for employing people who cannot legally work in the country, people would stop offering exploitative jobs to undocumented immigrants and I can't help but imagine that people would stop coming, once the primary reason they currently come ceased to exist. Probably also much more cost-effective to track down and nail a single employer, operating out of a fixed location, rather than chasing down 500 individuals working illegally for that company.

Of course, the flip side of this is that cost of living would suddenly see a huge spike once the restaurant, agriculture, construction and sanitation industries, amongst many others, no longer have ready access to a whole labor pool that can be easily exploited with minimal, if any, consequences. If people think groceries or eating out is expensive now, wait until they see the prices when those industries have to pay prevailing wages and benefits to US citizens in order to have staff.

It'll get me at least a few years of happiness, and perhaps make my ensuing case of diabetes mellitus more appropriately named than that of most peoples'.

Says the guy backing the same group that lost 4/7 presidential elections since 2000, including two (against Trump) that people thought nobody could possibly lose, since he was that terrible a candidate. You guys are killing it at getting people to agree with your platform, and it's totally in line with what the broader population wants.

Great stump speech for why your preferred party isn't just a bunch of people hostile to anyone who disagrees with them. With people like you representing them, I'm sure they'll be able to win consecutive elections, rather than just getting the odd touch of power when people get tired of the GOP's nonsense. Keep telling yourself it's the voters that are wrong and stupid, and not your party, buddy.

People just don’t like them because they aren’t good enough.

It's more that they're still all in on incrementalism, while the problems people face are worsening by leaps and bounds, and they're actively hostile to members of their own party who advocate for advancing the sort of large-scale, structural changes needed to actually resolve the various crises bearing down on the working class. They're also at odds with their base on major issues, such as healthcare reform, a robust social safety net that isn't means-tested to death, and their obsession with supporting Israel, because they've been captured by the purse strings of their major donors. It certainly doesn't help peoples' opinion of them as embodying the out of touch elites who are deaf to the plight of the working class when party leadership comes out against [https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-pelosi-rejects-stock-ban-congress-2021-12?op=1](Congressional insider trading) that our representatives are notorious for exploiting to enrich themselves via privileged knowledge they gain through their positions.

If they didn't dump millions of dollars into primary challenges to progressive candidates that represent a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal order the Dem leadership so dearly loves, even when it means ultimately losing the race to a Republican, I doubt people would be so hostile to them, and the party would probably be in a better place. When party leadership won't resolve their issues in a satisfactory manner, won't listen to and incorporate criticism from their base, and actively fight their efforts to get elected officials who more accurately represent their views and values, it shouldn't be a surprise that people decide to go elsewhere.

You can't publish enough TikToks and youtube videos to media manage your way out of a hostile, out of touch group having a death grip on the party and refusing to admit that, perhaps, the present situation is vastly different today than it was 3-4 decades ago when they were first elected.

There are plenty of people, both politically engaged and those who only show up to vote every 4 years, who are legitimately dissatisfied with the Democratic Party's deafness to the problems facing the average voter, and as long as the Democrats and their supporters continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it's all down to a hostile media environment, the further down the path to complete irrelevance they'll find themselves.