This is my favorite one.

I can’t think of a smaller city in the US that fits “so many have heard of it”

You included London but didn’t include London? Shameful.

Good lord this makes me happy I’ve not worked in corporate and stayed in blue collar work.

Someone steals food in a shop, that someone’s gonna have a bad day and the boss yells at anyone “whining”, including the guy who got his ass kicked.

How to fix: Bloody revolution, that’s about it.

I disagree with this. It’ll take some revolution, but can be avoided bloody.

On revolution I do say vote. The 2022 election was a turnout of 52% of the voting age population. Just barely over half, and that’s the second highest turnout to a nonpresidential election year since 2000. All the oxygen always goes to the Presidency but what OP is dealing with comes up in local elections, and the local and state shit deals far more with your day to day than the national. Hell, when national laws even come up, weed is still schedule 1 “more dangerous than cocaine” to the federal government but just about every state has legalized it.

It’s not a quick solution, and it’s not as simple anymore as “go out and vote” but gotta kick everyone up who hasn’t given a shit (if they’re not voting, think they’ll back you in a revolution?). It’s a fucking slow ass slog that takes daily fighting, like I’ve got a group that I’m the one who posts the ballots, the dates, the links, honestly do everything but bang on their doors and drag them to the polls but it’s a little bit that helps. As I saw “A vote is not a valentine. You’re not professing your love for the candidate. It’s a chess move for the world you want to live in.”

The Republicans have been doing that for years, they’ve never let a single dem run even for superintendent across the country uncontested. They worked slow and methodically to get the supreme court. Their revolution can be argued to have started as far back as Nixon. We’re arguably at their end game, but it seems like they’ve overreached this time, it’s time to start clawing back territory.

The reason though I’m against a bloody revolution is, yes it’s useful as a last resort, but it honestly is at that in the chess analogy above picking up the table, throwing it in the room and starting a riot. You hope you come out okay but at that point it’s really up in the air who comes out on top. Guillotines come up a lot, and France is doing pretty well right now. But remember between modern France and the guillotines was a messy time post revolution that was stabilized by someone who declared himself Emperor and attempted to conquer all of Europe.

Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

2016? Shit the press gave him all the free press when he was doing the birther shit with Obama.

I have one for those that worked at Disney World. “What time is the 3 o’clock parade?”

At this point there’s a con happening all over the country all throughout the year. Dunno where “south” is for you but the big one I know about is Texas Furry Fiesta in Dallas in March.

Granted Texas has like 4 of them going nowadays by itself lol.

I have the aftershockz Air. Aftershockz as a company apparently changed and went to Shockz when I got my second set so there I got the openrun. I still find my using the Air for my work time which is my more used one, but I think I got used to the fit of it (ran with those for like 3 years) but the openrun works pretty well IMO.

I’ll toss in as I have two, a set at home and at work.

For music, they’re honestly kinda meh. They’ll get the job done if you want some music but lets be frank you’ll find better sound quality headphones out there.

The reason I absolutely find them game changers is they allow me to wear them when I’m at work. I work on mechanical equipment in hospitals, so I need to hear what’s going on around me, one earbud can block up a side but this means I can hear when someone is talking to me. Also I found that earbuds didn’t fit me well so would potentially fall out, these wrap around the back of the head and stay in place, even when I’m working in some strange positions. And when I’m pulling out the power tools and things are going to be loud, I stick in earplugs, and I can hear what I’m listening to better even.

Phone work, I was shocked because my last job I was in a cargo van with minimal insulation so A LOT of road noise, but I’d hear the person I’m talking to with little issue and they could hear me well. Makes hands free phones a lot better.

I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and the like. I mean chew through so many of them it’s not even funny. Because of that sometimes I found with the single earbud one you’d have something in stereo, well that single earbud messes it up and you gotta set it to a mono sound. These you’ve got that dynamic sound going.

So in short, if you’re going for audiophile level stuff, pass on these, but for daily drivers in day to day life they’re on the top ten things I’ve ever bought.

Pen, pocket journal, wallet, phone, and whichever pocket knife I grab that day.

I’m really a simple person, but I"m going to go into my favorite pocket knife and I’m angry that it’s not made anymore. The SOG Q2. It’s a “baton” shape" IE, slightly longer than a standard pen. Has a flashlight, bottle opener (with flatehead screwdriver, in other words beveled the bottle opener) and knife. The opening mechanism is such I’ve never had it accidentally come open on me, can be opened one handed, and to keep it from closing you’re literally holding the body that goes over the knife.

I’m going to assume this isn’t “lottery” ultra-wealthy where you can spend it all and suddenly be back to destitute. So you say you wouldn’t live that differently, and immediately begin with “quitting work.” That’s the first step, because being wildly wealthy does change you incrementally because in this situation you’ve just bought yourself a commodity that once spent can’t be bought back, time.

You now have 40 hours a week that you were giving to someone else. Add on 5-10 hours for commute time (.5 to hour commute) that can get up to 50 hours for whatever the hell you want to do.

Buying a new car just a quick glance at Carmax and you’re looking at around $13,000 for a standard sedan. Not many have that pocket change going around, much less to buy the house that at low end houses cost $100,000 so you’re done, no worries, no muss, no fuss and you didn’t give some company your money in interest because you bought for cash. And on buying houses, as competitive as the market is, buying with cash right now at least in my region is about the only way to do it.

So lets assume you’re working from home right now, you gained back 40 hours. Hey, I want to have a party/trip/etc! Well, your buddies are all working, possibly can’t afford to go on trip, night out to eat. Offer to pay, but it’s still the getting the time off. They’ve got bills to worry about, the ones you’re not even thinking about. Sometimes they’ll show up, other times, not so much. So either you’re out fishing and working on your hobbies during that 40, or working to a new project job wise which really by this point is how the wealthy keep getting more and more money because build up a new thing, hire someone else to run it, passive income. But you don’t have your friends to hang out with, travel and the like, you’ll run into the others that don’t have those concerns because you can buy your way around inconveniences (airport seats are uncomfortable, but those lounges are nice. Why have to take connecting flights? etc) those are also going to be the ultra wealthy. And they have a standard of living that will look more and more “normal” to you. Little bit of peer pressure, little bit of “take a ride in my Lambo” and finding it fun, it’s a frog in the pot situation, you’ll go back to your roots and go “How did I live like this?”

That’s not cool man…

They said medieval, that is way too late.

I remember an old reddit post about what it’s like to not like football by replacing it with archeology. I felt that in my soul.

Personally, I enjoy the drinks I’m drinking. And no, I’m not saying where it tastes like candy but I drink in the manner of responding “I don’t understand the question.” when I’m asked “What would you like with your gin?”

Part of what I drink helps because slamming it hurts, but I like that slight burn when sipping (Why yes I like spicy food too but I digress), that burn is a nice speed limiter so it takes a while to even get a buzz. There at the slight the term “social lubricant” shines. I’m not deep in my head, all the worries, anxieties, etc I can actually set aside and enjoy my time rather than going through the list of shit I need to get done a thirtieth time.

If you don’t like it, it’s perfectly fine, getting drunk is not something necessary to live life.

IMO the “getting scarier” is the swinging back part. Grew up in the same time, my parents were big on “No identifying information to anyone on the internet!” I joke with them now that their generation, the ones that told us to stay off post all their business on facebook and the like.

But that’s the thing, you have a small segment of society that was the internet nerds that didn’t trust anything on the internet, hid themselves and the like, but now like you say it’s the corporate walled garden that’s sanitized and happy, which makes that veneer of trust. And boy do people trust it, posting anything and everything.

Odds are lower in percentages of being genuinely victimized as a child, but the lack of paying attention what’s posted has lead to a lot of effects, so people are getting worried again.

There was a lot of build up before, depression got bad. Honestly can’t go through absolutely everything that was going on. The final straw was locking myself out of my house and car in a town where everyone I knew was about 100 miles away, and I had a box cutter on me. I had the medical knowledge of how to cut to make sure it’d work. However I knew my dad, a paramedic who would walk away from horrible fatalities without a reaction was deeply bothered when a kid committed suicide, and I am an only child. Called the police on myself, took me to the hospital where the stress literally made it where any light whatsoever was a painful headache. Still comes back on high stress times.

Dad made me promise I wouldn’t take my life. The depression hasn’t left, it’s not as desperately bad as it was then but it’s still there. But been alive for about 15 years since.

Here’s something tangentially related that makes it difficult to find older options, the support. In the US a piece of medical device has to be supported for 7 years. My hospital has these bladder scanners that are in quite a few departments, regular fixture in hospitals (ultrasounds). Jan 1 2024 was when our came up on the 7 year mark. To do preventative maintenance calibration required logging on their server, guess what’s no longer accessible? So to stay in compliance all of us in the biomed department has to figure out how to get new ones to replace the 10 $11k each paperweights we have now.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa…

A’ight, you’re gonna have to actually give the details on how this is done if this is your “Too lazy to cook” recipe