The word "educator" has grown in prominence in the past 10 years, but it's not a real profession. I completely understand why people involved in education administration like to use it - because it makes it sound like they're directly involved in teaching students, when in reality they are part of the gigantic bureaucratic structure that is siphoning money away from actually teaching students.

Teachers should call themselves teachers and be proud. It's a noble profession. Administrators, assistants, program coordinators, etc should just call themselves administrators for short, because they aren't educators. Being involved in education, and being an educator, are two different things.

People can stop with the performative outrage when someone says "ethnic food", you understand exactly what they mean. Yes, since food is an element of ethnic culture, all food is "ethnic", but words and phrases have multiple meanings and, again, you understood exactly what they meant and it was Mexican or Chinese, not a burger place.

It's pretty much impossible to go to a public campground these days and just tent camp, without being sandwiched between giant RVs. They block views and also, often, the sun itself, and they are constantly running their generators so they can watch TV or whatever they do in there. Brightly lit strings of poorly aimed 5000K LEDs are common at night, so if you wanted to enjoy your flickering campfire or watch the stars, good luck. Often they have a whole living room set up outside with artificial turf, a huge canopy, chairs, etc.

If I wanted to camp in a semi truck parking lot I'd go pitch a tent in a truck stop. Camping as many of us knew it growing up, is pretty much gone.

Public parks love these types of campers for some reason, so nothing will ever be done about it. You would think they would designate part of their campgrounds as tent only but very few do.

Can't speak to private campgrounds, I assume it's even worse.

"Content creator" is a great term for influencers because it's completely devoid of any sense of talent, artistry, or craftsmanship. Its awkwardness as spoken serves to underline that fact. In fact I can't think of any other better ways to phrase it that aren't outright insulting. Anyone making actual worthwhile "content" can still go by the more specific descriptor: artist, essayist, filmmaker, historian, whatever.

Leisurewear: things like sweat pants, track suits, pajama pants, leggings. Out and about: anywhere you're not immediately and obviously coming to/going from working out, or in the case of pajama pants, literally anywhere at all outside of your home.

It all is so declasse and even trashy. No we don't dress as formally as they did in the 1950s, but being the tip of the spear of plunging standards by wearing Tweety Bird flannel pants grocery shopping or skin tight leggings out to dinner makes you uniquely classless.

If your behavior is driving the eradication of standards, yeah, your choices are bad.

Have some respect for yourself and others and throw on actual pants at least, even if you still must wear a hoodie with them. A collared shirt would be a bonus, but again, pants are the bare minimum here to seem respectable.

It's ironic, because even wealthy people are doing it, especially leggings everywhere. But that's the era we live in, where the wealthiest among us are often th

"Retard" is the perfect length for an insult and lends itself very well for emphasis. It rolls off the tongue in anger or disgust very well. Like with most insults, nobody even thinks about what it actually means (see: "motherfucker", "dumbass", etc) any more.

Furthermore, nobody calls the intellectually disabled "retards", and "retarded" is also quite rare now as is "mental retardation". So "retard" is perfect for repurposing as a general purpose insult. People who get up in arms about this are basically saying that the mentally handicapped are retards, which they are not, a "retard" is NOW your dumb friend who you are making fun of, and not an intellectually disabled person you never met.

Get angry about something else. Removing the slur from the intellectually disabled is a good thing.

Nobody likes ads.

But having ad breaks you can ignore, or grab food or drink during, or have a chat with a friend during, is way better than having ads all over jerseys and the stadium at all times. It's also such trash companies, like airlines from middle eastern dictatorships, credit card companies, and gambling megacorps. Just fucking garbage slop that you're staring at all game and in every promo photo of players and wearing yourself if you buy the jersey.

People are dressing their kids in gambling jerseys or Amex or fucking Etihad Airways! That's psycho actually.

Meanwhile, yeah, again, ads suck and therefore commercial breaks suck too, but as stated you can ignore them, mute the TV or whatever. And you can just get a jersey for your kid that is normal, just the player's name and the logo of the actual team.

The only semi-cool jersey ad is for that one that's an Ed Sheeran tour. That one is almost as awesome as commercial breaks.

Gambling is a net negative, full stop. Some people are really susceptible to it and will lose enormous amounts of money, going bankrupt and forcing society to finance their addiction. Yeah, it's fun, but it's just not worth it in terms of overall net harm.

I'm not a fan of the lottery or casinos either, but at least forcing people to clear the hurdle of leaving their house and going in person is something and it can be semi-justified as longstanding tradition.

App-based gambling (online gambling, basically) has pretty much no limits and someone can wager at any point they're conscious. So you have a megacorp using algorithms to essentially game as much money out of people as they can, and some people are going to just get wrecked by that, and society bears the costs. Furthermore it makes gambling such a lowest common denominator activity without any charm whatsoever, if it

I'm appalled by the state of LED lighting.

I would rather change every incandescent in the house for the next 20 years, than figure out all this.

I have an attuned sense for good lighting. I just do. So if I want good LED lighting, that doesn't look flat or cheap, I have to figure out the Color Rendering Index. That's a single number which tells you how good the LED is at showing true color, except, it's a scalar value that describes a 2D vector of possibilities (magnitude x spectrum). So not all CRIs that have the same value are the same quality.

You mean I have to figure out which LED bulb is gonna make red look red?

This is all setting aside color temperature, which at least is pretty straightforward. I've been a 2700K man since day one.

But there's the dimmer situation which is the complete wild west. Not all bulbs work with all dimmers, not all dimmers do a good job for all bulbs, and if you choose wrong you'll either get a dimmer that doesn't dim all the way, or you'll get f

People are doing a lot more talking about cold temperatures using the "feels like" number. This has happened a lot more in the past few years, probably because apps are highlighting this number more. Using feels-like is narcissism-driven, because the feels-like number is always lower, so it sounds like the weather is worse than it really is.

People argue that the feels-like number better reflects how cold it actually is, but of course that's wrong because if it's windy, you dress for the wind, and if possible you stand where you're out of it.

The feels-like numbers also don't factor in the sun. 20F, cloudy, and windy feels a lot different than 20F, sunny, and windy.

So basically this is all just a way for people to dramatize the daily weather more and narcissistically increase their victimhood and suffering.

Obviously, wind chill serves a useful scientific purpose.

I was gonna go try to feel righteously validated for a pet peeve of mine over at Unpopular Opinion, but it's closed. Then I saw this post and it describes some concerns with moderation policies, but the link it references has a bunch of crossed-out text, and I was just wondering if someone is willing to write out the detailed explanation of what happened and what the controversy is.

Primarily I'm wondering if certain instances have reputations that might color what people think about my community just by virtue of it being hosted on a particular instance.

There's also the question of instance-wide content moderation or something, not like I'm trying to be edgy, but like some instances might not like curse words or discussions about heavy topics like suicide, or something.

Also I'm wondering if it's somehow harder for people from other instances to find communities (I understand that subscribing is easy, but finding may be different?)

Appreciate details...

I completely support corporations or public agencies going their own way on web updates rather than using a microblogging platform like Twitter, but for fucks sake it's completely pointless to post an update without the time and date (and ideally and expiration). For example I was looking for trail conditions in a state park near me and I have no idea when the conditions posted are for. Now, I can go onto the web archive and figure it out, if I want to, but that's not what most people will know how to do.

Date everything.

Any topic is good. Don't care about format or where it's published as long as I can access it (substack, random PDF, journal, etc). Looking for deep and rare thought, but essay length for a short reading.

EDIT: Also I am particularly looking for stuff not as much in online or nerd culture.

I swear sometimes I feel like I'm reading a bad newspaper comment section, like everyone is a poorly trained AI that just spouts default politically-oriented replies. The New York Times comment section for any given topic (not just current events, also culture etc) is way more interesting than most of it here.

Note this also applies to a LOT of reddit but there are some subreddits that are more interesting. A lot of them have their own circlejerk but at least when I first find them the "game" is new so I'm eager to read what people have to say.

Where on Lemmy is the actually good or interesting discussion happening, please, I really want something better, I am eager to contribute too, it's one of my resolutions for 2025.

Problem statement: I have a bunch of links to sites that update infrequently (think monthly or quarterly magazines) and I want to remember to go read them when they've updated.

RSS isn't a great solution since almost all sites spam out constant low-value content which I'd prefer to not be bombarded with - I just want to see the main updates, similarly to how I'd have received a magazine in the mail, in the past.

The basic answer here is just keep a list of links and remember to click them, and that's what I do, but it feels like there could be a better solution...

How do you handle this?