That is not a healthy response to reading something on the internet. Hope you can find some peace in your life.

I think a lot of the existing higher prices are largely due to grocery store mega corps price gouging. Smaller markets are more flexible (while paying their staff living wages). Famers markets are still an obscene value. I filled up two bags with produce the other week for $30. Granted, ten years ago that would have been $20.

Also, no one seems to mention the increased prevalence of paying with a card. Every transaction paid with credit or debit is hit with a 2-3% charge from Visa or the POS supplier. Now that so few people are paying with cash, all stores are increasing their prices to cover those costs.

Food inflation was just below 2% before the pandemic and has been just below 3% since last fall (which is roughly double normal food inflation) https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/food-inflation-in-the-united-states/ This article is grossly outdated and the claim of “skyrocketing (meaning, actively increasing) food prices” is flat out wrong.

Quotes from the linked article and this one…

Grimes sees another factor driving up consumers’ perception of higher grocery prices. “What has happened over time is that the quality of food has gone up”. In other words, America’s tastes are too damn high.

According to the study, many are changing their food shopping habits. About 37% say they are now shopping at discount grocers versus big-name supermarkets. About one-quarter of respondents (26%) say they are buying less healthy food for themselves and their families because it is what they can afford.

I’d love to know how many shoppers are continuing to buy processed foods versus learning to cook from produce and proteins. Or how many have started sourcing produce from farmers markets.

Nothing but (arguably) the love for your family should come before properly feeding yourself. It’s food. It’s what we need to survive. Everyone should know how to make a healthy meal from real, cheap, local, seasonal ingredients. I know that’s hard for a lot of people (including my own family) but it should be the case. I can not comprehend people saying they’re buying “less healthy food” to save money. Healthy food is cheap AF - as long as you know how to cook it. I just spent $65 at a fancy produce market in a major city to feed myself for the week.

I’m not arguing that prices aren’t up. But they aren’t still as high as during the pandemic and they certainly are not skyrocketing. It just drives me mad when I see people not taking feeding themselves seriously and then go and blame the government.

I would have thought “Food & Wine” would have at least offered some suggestions or links to “Cheap Weeknight Dinners” or “How to Grocery Shop When You’re Broke” to help people struggling.

My initial reason for not having kids was financial. I think a lot of people have learned it may be better to have children later in life when you can properly care for them. I know many people who’ve had their first child in their late-30s and early-40s. My aunt had her first child in her fifties. That’s not something that was common before modern medicine.

I have always had the idea that I would have a kid if and when I met the right person to share parenting with. That hasn’t happened so I’ve had to put some thought into my priorities. It’s not fair to have a child just because it’s what society says you should do or just because you want someone to take care of you when you’re old. It’s so much more than that and I think people should be more mindful of the responsibilities and long term repercussions.

I offered two reasons I personally may regret not having children. I could list several others such as the pure joy of watching them grow into adults and mimic you and your partner. If you want to say that’s selfish, to bring another human into the word to experience a universe of emotion you’d otherwise never experience, I understand that perspective. No argument.

But then I offered that choosing to prioritize your own life is in and of itself a selfish act. It’s more explicitly about you than it is about another person.

Would you disagree that going out to eat by yourself is more of a selfish act than inviting a friend to eat out with you? Sharing an experience is less selfish, no?

That argument makes sense. Though I see it more from choosing to prioritize yourself and own self interests over having children and sharing a life with them as selfish too. I guess we’re all selfish one way or another.

I’m not sure you’re going to get an objective answer to this as no one has lived a life of either having kids or not having kids, hungrythirstyhorny.

I will say that, as a single male in his mid forties who has observed a good amount of life; first, the thought of not having people to rely on in you’re old age is a little worrisome; and two, not having had someone to pass my knowledge and skills down to is a little sad. However, I really enjoy the freedom and opportunities my life (and bank account) affords me.

There is always a cost to freedom. Or, as Jonis Joplin put it - freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. Choosing to not have children is a selfish act. Whether “selfish” is a bad thing or not is subjective.

I would offer that anyone who’s going through life without children, find some altruistic outlet to participate in. You can otherwise find yourself wondering what your legacy may be or what the point of your life has been - aka a mid-life crisis.

The title’s wording suggests, to me, that people are going to TikTok for their news. That’s not what the article is claiming. It’s reporting that Americans distrust TikTok the least compared to other social media platforms.

compared to Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), respondents felt that TikTok was the app least likely to influence the news stories they saw, whether that be via algorithmic recommendations or content moderation.

By the numbers, around 61% of US adults said they felt TikTok was influencing the news they were shown, while 74% said Facebook was, 72% said Instagram was, and 66% said X was.

71% reported seeing inaccurate news on TikTok “sometimes” or “extremely or fairly often,” compared to 76% on Instagram, 84% on Facebook, and 86% on X.

I’ve never seen more TikTok than a few embedded humorous videos so I don’t know what kind of news is on TIkTok. I would venture to guess though that these numbers seem plausible.

The larger concern is that people are getting their news from social media and what these platforms are suggesting to people based on their ‘likes’ and who they’re following. If I’m only following Republican political leaders or MAGA members of congress, the business model of these platforms is to keep you engaged with more emotionally baiting content.

And, to repeat the author,

what respondents view as “inaccurate” should also be scrutinized, given that we live in a polarized news media ecosystem where information can be labeled as fake to serve a particular interest.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240618202713/https://www.businessinsider.com/social-users-think-tiktok-news-more-reliable-than-instagram-facebook-2024-6

That’s because of the need for an ally / military presence in the middle east. It has nothing to do with Gaza.

I’m of the opinion that an individual with the explicit intent to commit genocide is the main obstacle, regardless of who is supporting them.

This is of course entirely accurate. If you’ve lost your mind and forgotten who Netanyahu is.

But you haven’t because you say, “Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.”

Joe Biden is an enabler but the US is not “the main obstacle to peace in Palestine”.

I generally put short term things on index cards and long term things on digital. Or I just note something down with whatever’s most accessible at the time.

So, for work, I have a long list of tasks in Microsoft Planner I should get done in the mid-term and long-term. If someone asks me to get something done asap, I put that on paper. I’m really bad at getting things done on the digital list but I’m trying to get better at it.

Chores and groceries go on the white board on my fridge. Then I transcribe them to index cards if I need to remember them out of the house.

I try to keep a pad with me when I’m out of the house to note things down. I use a tiny little Fisher Space Pen which easily fits in my pocket.

My problem with digital is that it’s too easy to forget about. When I mark things down on paper, specifically index cards, they start to stack up and I feel motivated to reduce the clutter they create. Throwing out ten index cards because I got shit done feels good.

This is so huge. And I’ll be shocked if this makes it to the nightly / cable news outlets. We have more important things to worry about; like if someone lied about doing drugs in order to get a gun.

When I have a perfectly flat four row stack and the 4x1 tile appears.

This makes their brand more valuable. This makes stock holders more rich.

It’s difficult to make a case for “poor creatives” when the job of the CEO is to make the company more efficient and profitable. We can be as angry as we want but it’s really not this guy’s fault. It’s the fault of technological advancement - as it always has been.

If you look at all the creative or manual labor processes that have been taken over by technology, I don’t think many of these jobs have ever really recovered. The alternative has typically been to move to emerging markets where they can’t afford to invest in the technology but that’s very different now.

My first real job was interning at an ad agency (where I later became an art director). My first job was to page through stock photo books that filled a 15x15ft room. It took me hours or days to find a great picture and it was rare that a photo was “perfect” for the project. As an art director, the ability to just ask AI for the picture I want and get it in a few minutes is just mind blowing. At the same time, I can imagine the entire role of an art director could be eliminated and given to the account director. Maybe that job goes away too. This could really turn the entire creative marketing industry upside down.

Those are pretty good points. Still, you had to participate in Reddit in order to find that story.

The point is that news organizations, reporters, etc. need to start using fediverse platforms so we’re not stuck still using Xitter and Reddit. Moreover, a source from a reputable news outlet would be preferred over social media.

I mean, you couldn’t source a link to a tweet yourself and had to share a reddit post on reddit’s competing platform?

https://x.com/nazirafzal/status/1797413922057711911

Mastodon seems like it could work relatively well.

The other side of the issue though is for social media to feel “social” now, people, consciously or not, want to feel connected to brands and advertising and popular culture. Social media, now more than television or magazines used to, generates our water-cooler moments. It generates the content we sit right here and discuss - it generates memes. These fringe alternatives aren’t popular because the they lack gravity. Gravity comes from investment. Investment comes from potential; typically, potential to make money.

But yeah, group ware, et al, could work for smaller groups. The friction there is getting people to install, and give a crap about, another app on their phone.

What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.

Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the “beta testing”. I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I’m not the target demographic for their platform.

Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It’s for selling ads. It’s for maintaining your attention. It’s for engagement and making you feel a way they’ve determined will keep you scrolling.

And honestly, it’s tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn’t cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.

The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for “social media”. They’ll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.

butt game changer.