They don't even wanna "waste money" on depression, and I feel very emotionally vulnerable and have low self esteen when I ask about these things, especially for their financial support.

But I'm honestly just... idk, I'm too broken to even work, I don't have the willpower to do basic survival stuff.

The idea of suicide just keeps coming up.

My parents could afford it, but I'm just gonna keep feeling like a burden if I ask them for help.

But its their fault I even have depression in the first place.

But like... idk...

Don't wanna do this. Its so hard to keep going.

I am absolutely not calling a fucking hotline, don't wanna get locked up, under this [USA] political climate.

I'm honestly just stuck with parents, because the moment I end up homeless, is the moment I'll end up in prison, since... homelessness is de facto outlawed.

Don't even wanna go outside right now tbh.

I just cry all the time, because wtf is this existence. I wasn't even supposed to be born. What the hell.

The last time I was by myself was that ine time I ran away from home as a child. Those memories still haunt me.

And... because of that. I tried college, and even tried to just live on campus once, and I couldn't handle it. Had to withdrawl. I overdosed on antidepressants, idk what I was doing. I actually just have zero self control and did it several times, misusing antidepressants, always ran out before the proper refill date. I have since stopped going to doctors after thr doctor I had think I'm drugseeking and just cut me off, gave sone referrals, then referrals told me they can't help me, I don't know where to look anymore. So many low star rating reviews for these things.

Too much anxiety being alone, probably a remnant of that day in my childhood. I think I have separation anxiety, which is ironic since these are also the same emotionally abusive parents.

So... idk... what to do?

Life is just over.

I'll end up in prison, or a concentration camp, or shot dead on the street.

Idk how to live. I don't have much life skills.

Family is hostile.

Society is hostile.

Government is hostile.

The economy is hostile.

My brain is fighting me.

My physical health is deteriorating. Pre-diabetic, probably diabetic by now, idk, haven't seen a doctor for a while.

My hands just shake if I go like 4 hours without food.

So I'm pretty much dead if I try being independent, wouldn't survive long.

Idk what to do...

It should not have been surprising that the Trump administration would use the cover of a government shutdown to withhold food-assistance benefits from the 42 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). After all, Republicans have had it in for food stamps for nearly as long as the federal government has tried to address hunger.

Federally funded food assistance was first introduced in the United States in 1939, with the twofold goal of helping farmers offload surplus crops that were depressing prices and helping Depression-era unemployed people get food. A classic New Deal initiative—partly the brainchild of Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Iowa-born secretary of agriculture and later vice president who ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket—the food-stamp program began as a way to connect people who needed food but couldn’t buy it with people who had far too much food but could not sell it. It allowed low-income Americans to buy orange stamps equal to their normal food budget and receive additional blue stamps for free, which could be used to purchase surplus farm goods.

Writing in The Nation in 1940, the journalist Jane Whitbread celebrated this early version of food stamps as “a triumph of simplicity,” an elegantly designed program that had managed to win “wholesale acclaim.” She wrote: “With remarkable deftness the stamp plan smooths hurt feelings by helping the farmer, feeding the needy, and paying the grocer, too.”

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

• Julian (myself) and Ted (tallted@mastodon.social) began the session discussing moderation tools in USENET
  
  • There are comparable systems to how the threadiverse propagates content. Messages are sent to a remote server who is then responsible for distribution.
  • In relation to moderation, there was more ambiguity. Local users could set up their own kill file but whether moderation could be done from the remote server was not discussed.

  
  

• We discuss more about actions done to contexts (aka topics, threads)
  
  • Ted recommends a read through RFCs 2821 (SMTP) and 2822 (Internet Message Format)
  • Dmitri (dmitri@social.coop) joins at or before this point, and points out that there continues to be confusion over the context property and @context.

  
  

• Example actions are offered: Removing a context from an audience, and locking a context from new contributions
  
  • Re: crossposting, Ted discusses the need for implementor changes to allow for contexts to be a part of multiple audiences
  • ed: much of the discussion at this point shifts away from ForumWG terminology and toward email nomenclature for ease of understanding. ForumWG nomenclature is used for these minutes
  • Dmitri points out that a breaking change to AP might be needed in order to break apart header (addressing/recipients) and body
  • Julian asks why, and Dmitri mentions signing difficulties wrt bto and bcc.
  • Julian asks if anybody uses bto and bcc, and Dmitri says "yes, absolutely", and said we should check out darius@friend.camp's Fediverse Observatory for the answer

  
  

• Julian says that as currently implemented, resolvable contexts do not necessarily need to be inherited. Lemmy explicitly does not want to inherit contexts, and their published contexts always refer to a local representation (ping nutomic)
  
  • Julian steps through an example. NodeBB A federates context /topic/1, NodeBB B receives the topic and assigns it /topic/4bdffa. A later Removes the context. B doesn't know what A/topic/1 is so needs to resolve it, get its' root post, and see if it matches any know context on B, then act on it.
  • Ted and Dmitri caution that this is difficult and messy, and strongly recommend that the root-level context must be inherited

  
  

Hope you're not hungry!

American inspections of foreign food facilities — which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the U.S. market — have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers.

About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.

The stakes are high: Foreign products have been increasingly linked to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered disturbing lapses in facilities producing food bound for American supermarkets. In Indonesia, cookie factory workers hauled dough in soiled buckets. In China, seafood processors slid crawfish along cracked, stained conveyor belts. Investigators have reported crawling insects, dripping pipes and fake testing data purporting to show food products were pathogen free.

In 2011, Congress — concerned about the different standards of overseas food operations — gave the FDA new authority to hold foreign food producers to the same safety standards as domestic ones. Although the agency’s small team remained unable to visit every overseas facility, inspections rose sharply after the mandate — sometimes doubling or tripling previous rates.

Now, the U.S. is on track to have the fewest inspections on record since 2011, except during the global pandemic.

Despite traveling to Vietnam a half dozen times to write about the cuisine, until now I had overlooked phở as a subject, perhaps because of its ubiquity on every Vietnamese restaurant menu. But one day while enjoying a bowl of it in New York City, I thought: Phở is the national dish of Vietnam, devoured from Ha Long Bay to the Mekong Delta. But where did it actually originate?

I knew its roots were in northern Vietnam. I also knew that phở bắc—northern phở—is different from the phở I’d been eating most of my life. In the U.S., we’re usually served the southern Vietnamese version, whose broth is sweeter and more herbaceous, and the dish comes with a side of sprouts, Thai basil, cilantro, hoisin sauce, sriracha, and jalapeño. In the north, the broth lacks the same sweetness, and the side accompaniments are usually pickled garlic and sliced red hot peppers. I’d fallen hard for northern-style phở.

When I asked friends in Vietnam about its origins, their responses varied. Some said phở—most easily pronounced fuh for English speakers—was first created in Hanoi. Others pointed to an outlying province. To complicate matters, theories differed about the influence of French colonialism and Chinese occupation. To trace the soup’s roots, not to mention find the best bowl of phở in Vietnam, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the capital, Hanoi.

Epicurus said: “Death has nothing to do with us, because as long as we exist, death has not yet come; and when death comes, we no longer exist.” Death, as a state, essentially means the passing of life and the time that follows. Mere ending does not harm a person. The reason death is frightening lies in the tricks of human imagination.

From what I have observed, there are three main reasons why humans fear death:

First, pain. This is easy to understand. Pain evolved as a reminder of the body’s condition. Death is the worst state the body can reach, so approaching death often brings unbearable suffering. Yet pain can be avoided. To avoid being blocked, I will not expand on this point here.

Second, the influence of ingrained ideas, expressed as regret. When facing death, people often think: I have not yet done certain things; I cannot let go of someone; I care about how others will judge me. But everyone must die. Not only is there nothing one can manage after death, even in life one cannot have everything as desired. To understand impermanence is to understand that regret is inevitable. Accepting impermanence removes this source of fear.

Third, the fabricated “afterlife” of religion. People fear going to hell. The afterlife is an extremely effective tool of socialization and power. To make people fear death is to make them love life. Further, reincarnation explains the shortcomings of this life and compels people to live cautiously, accumulating merit to secure a better next life. In this way, dissatisfaction is reduced and social stability maintained. In my view, reincarnation is the most cruel idea in human cultural history, with the afterlife close behind. Both prevent people from becoming themselves, wasting their only life within dogma.

Suppose humans could live forever—would death then cease to be feared? No. This is the same mistake as the claim that death gives life meaning. Both commit an error regarding time. Neither depends on death itself. The first grants humans endless time to experience everything without end, removing the urgency that death brings. The second treats death as a deadline, thus giving life “meaning.” Wrong. It merely makes people aware of limited time, motivating them to attempt what they otherwise would not. But that can still be meaningless. Meaning must always be created by humans.

I believe the latter is more worth learning from. At least it honestly faces the fact of life’s finitude and encourages people to do what they wish. The former is nothing more than the ultimate fantasy of those clinging to life or power, teaching people to live timidly, never daring to realize their desires, always waiting for “next time.” They become machines of endless experience, stripped of human selfhood, reduced to walking corpses.

My personal view of death is as follows:

Death belongs only to the individual’s subjective experience. No matter one’s identity, no one can experience another’s death.

Life gives death its meaning. We must first exist to experience anything; thus death, as the end of all experience, naturally carries fear.

To evade death only invites greater disaster. One should face death and accept it. Death is not reasonable, nor unjust. It is simply the end when time has run its course.

Finally, I leave you with Nietzsche’s words: “Every day on which one has not danced is a day betrayed to life.”