That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

Isn’t there still time for this. I don’t really follow all this too closely, but I heard someone say that the recent debate was a first because neither has been fully endorsed by their party as the person who will be on the ballot. IDK if that is true or not, I just live here (on the internet).

My cat is a person.

Just don’t try to force it on your pets.

Cats are obligate carnivores.

When I need to sleep and can’t, my go to is a relatively mindless game that I’ve gotten exceedingly good at automating my way through. Something like Sudoku, solitaire (specifically Klondike), or something. Usually on a digital device so I don’t have to move too much to play and I don’t have to worry about physical cards, shuffling, etc.

If it’s a particularly bad night I can pair that with some music. I find either ambient trance or something similar, to be the best for this. One of my favorite “go the fuck to sleep” albums is called “Dreamland” by Robert Miles (may he rest in peace). Alternatively, I find nature/rain/thunderstorm sounds to be particularly calming for me, though YMMV. The calm pitter-patter of raindrops falling seems to really put me in a sleeping mood.

Combining these generally gets me ready to snooze the fastest. The other option I have is mediation, but you need to be practiced at getting into the right headspace for it to be effective. Meditation isn’t really what you’re after since you have said that basically sitting around with nothing going on is when you start to panic, which is generally how mediation begins, so I’m not sure it will be super helpful.

The only additional advice, which is a bit of an offshoot from the mediation thing, is that trying to not think is a contradiction. You can’t try not to do something; unless you have some issues with impulse control, the “act” of not doing something is the antithesis of trying. You can’t try to clear your mind, you clear your mind by not thinking, if you’re thinking about clearing your mind, then that’s a thought which, if present, precludes you having a clear mind.

You have to stop thinking, not just try to put things out of your mind, but stop all active thought and analysis. It is way easier to say, than it is to do, and I wouldn’t pretend it’s easy at all. I learned how to do this through meditation, and it’s a fat departure from how you normally operate mentally, and not an easy thing to achieve. One of the strategies I’ve used is when your brain assaults you with a thought, you recognise it’s existence, but refuse to interact/engage/analyse it at all, and just let that wash over you, and into oblivion. Again, easier said than done. Not allowing your thoughts to latch onto ideas and allowing your mind to be quiet, without commenting on, about, or examining every passing thought, does not come naturally.

I think of it a bit like this: take the example of your mind being a street in a busy city, every individual on the street is an independent thought you might engage with. This idea is a bit like sitting by yourself and watching everything around you without getting involved. Someone walks past screaming about some topic, like how the world is going to end and you just watch them walk by and don’t comment on the matter. You recognise they’re there, you just don’t get involved. Your passive demeanor does not and should not imply you either agree, nor disagree with their statements or viewpoint, you are just present, observing them making a scene. Eventually they move on to yell about it in another location and you give it no further thought.

I hope that makes sense. Of course, modern society with all the social interactions we have, whether online or in person, always gives us the option to engage in discussion about everything and we’re often encouraged to do so. People will outright ask for your opinion when having IRL conversations at times, which is a prime example of this conditioning. If you’re able to break away from the need to have an opinion on everything and anything that crosses your path, and value people’s opinions exactly as much as required, which isn’t much, then you can break free, and you don’t have to bother yourself with everyone’s opinion and making yours heard. IMO, there’s no value in sharing your opinion, especially when the recipient of that opinion has their own opinion which obviously will not change based on what you could say, so why bother even having one? It takes mental effort and time away from what’s important to you to engage in such trivialities, when the outcome is unaffected by anything you think or say. Why invest the time and effort having an opinion when nobody cares what your opinion is enough to for it to have any impact on what happens? This isn’t a value statement about you or your opinion, this is a value statement about any would be recipient of your opinion, they don’t care, that’s a problem, but it’s a problem for them to solve; your opinion is valid, and if they can’t see the validity in your opinion, why waste your time and effort creating one just so they can ignore it.

You cannot control the actions of others. You can’t change what they care about. Both of these things are issues that the opposing individual must address about themselves, that you have no way to change about them. Save yourself the grief, and just don’t bother with it. It sounds like you have enough on your plate, you don’t need to add their crap to your pile.

With all that being said, it’s a radical departure from the accepted social “norm” so it’s a lot of stuff that’s easier said than done. I’m sorry that you are going through this. I don’t know all the details and I don’t have the answers; but I’ve been though some rough shit, and it always sucks. I value you and your opinion, so if you want to reply, I’ll be happy to hear anything you wish to share. IMO, it sucks right now but the fact that you’re reaching out to anyone for help is a positive sign. Do not be afraid to ask for the help you require, it is not a sign of weakness to need help, it is a sign of strength and character to recognise that you require assistance and you are willing to ask for that assistance. It’s brave and demonstrates a strong understanding of when you are unable to handle things alone.

We all need a little help sometimes. If you want to DM me, to inquire further on anything I’ve said, or to simply rant/vent, or if you just want to chat about technology (or literally anything) as a means of distraction, I’m happy to oblige. I believe my matrix account is linked to Lemmy, so that’s also an option.

All the best OP.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I was going to say that Trump, being a proper name, isn’t a word, but my brain rebooted and I remembered that Trump is absolutely a word.

Version 1.0 released in 2016. I’m pretty sure my process pre-dates this tool.

Looks good, but my collection is already ripped and converted, so I don’t have a need for it anymore.

I’ll keep this in my pack pocket if I happen to ever buy physical media again.

I use a private streaming application. I don’t want to say which one, but popular examples include Plex, jellyfin, emby, and Kodi.

It’s not really compatible with the DVD menu systems, though, that would be really fun if it was.

I feel like illegal immigrants is less of a problem than you think it is.

But you’re talking about the effects that would happen over multiple generations, all of whom come from essentially poverty conditions.

I am unable to count the number of people who became middle class from a poverty class family, because I’m not aware that it has ever happened. So any children of illegal immigration, who were born in the country who is now a citizen would probably fall into the poorest rentals and communities, which isn’t capable of home ownership.

I’m middle class and I had to pair up with another family to break the cycle of violence that is renting. I’m 40 and I’ll be 65 by the time we pay off the mortgage, at which time any savings from the mortgage is likely going to need to be fed into surviving, because inflation will have likely spiked the cost of everything to the point where we need that money just to buy food. I understand that’s anecdotal, though I have seen others with similar stories. The only people I know of that are doing okay, bought a house in, or directly after college when the average price of a home was half of what it is now.

So if you ask me if these people are raising house prices, my answer is no, because the vast majority of them are impoverished. Those that are not, can afford the time, cost, and effort to go through the proper immigration process, and they become citizens.

Simply: rich/middle class foreigners are immigrating legally. Poor immigrants are coming over illegally with nothing, and given how ruthless our society is, they will not escape poverty in our lifetimes, and likely not in the lifetimes of our children, or their children. By the time they “become a problem” for the housing market, they will be 3rd or 4th generation citizens at a minimum, using their meager generational wealth to finally hoist themselves out of poverty.

My bad, it’s been a while.

No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.

I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.

Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn’t want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.

I’m sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don’t have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.

I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.

I’ve always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.

It was late at night and I couldn’t wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.

I work in IT and people question my sanity when I’m walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.

I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.

Iron man.

I think the third one?

That’s Tony’s dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, and IANAL, but my understanding is that to own land (which would contain a house), in a country, you need to have a contract with the government where the land is, thereby identifying yourself as a foreigner.

It would seem that if this insane claim was actually a problem, where foreign persons were buying homes and then living in them, illegally in the USA for an extended period of time, that such a problem would be easy to solve?

“This home has been occupied by a Spanish speaking family, and it’s owned by a Mexican citizen” would be a good reason for border services to go knock on the door and be like, who the hell are you people and do you have the legal right to be in the country?

IDK, but it feels like a problem that would fix itself.

Also, most illegal immigrants are fleeing their country with little more than the clothes on their back, nevermind enough cash to buy a house. I’m sure some rich people can do this but are they really the problem? If they want to live in the country and spend their wealth here, why would we want to stop them?

The whole argument is nonsensical to me.

I like this one more.

Weeeeee

I go over hand and my one handed TP game is on point.

Get good.

Imagine getting an asshole splinter?