I don't know about anyone else, but I hope to never be interesting enough to be honeypotted

There's a difference between blocking a constant feed of toxicity and doomerism and not paying attention to what's going on for the world. Tons of people around the world have been trying to find the right balance for their mental health

Ehh Mastodon manages to avoid a lot of that where Lemmy falls flat

The depressing thing is a lot of these wonderful regional accents are slowly dying off thanks to the significant exposure to national and international media that people consume. Like you'll still encounter older individuals with these regional Midwestern accents, particularly in smaller and more remote communities, but the accents are slowly disappearing (or more accurately, speakers are slowly subconsciously moving to a more generic Midwestern accent that's more widely understood)

Mexico is even technically a US of A, because they're the officially (when translated to English) the United Mexican States, and in America

Yes $200/week for groceries is plenty for one person who spends carefully. I don’t spend anywhere near that much.

That's a heck of a lot more than I spend on my family of 4 for groceries! Even with an added allergy that means some of the stuff that's normally $2-3 we have to get ~$10 variants of

They were surprisingly edible. Honestly the chocolate chips provided the needed reprieve from the cumin, but we did end up tossing about half of it after a week of nibbling at it and laughing anew about the mistake

My wife was making banana bread and a similar disaster was waiting to happen as the Cinnamon and Cumin are sold in nearly identical-looking containers. The inevitable happened and we ended up with banana bread that tasted like it was seasoned with taco seasoning!

You better know I'm a million times more humble than thou art!

Energy has historically been much cheaper in the US than the rest of the world. I remember hearing somewhere that in cost per unit of gasoline the US is something like 30-40% cheaper than Europe. During this gasoline price spike and the last one, I did find a part of me hoping it would sustain so that lifestyles would adjust to be a bit less careless about fuel consumption.

What I've observed, living in a rural area of a rural state is that once gas prices get up to around $4 per gallon, people start making small changes to save fuel. If they have a gas gusling truck and a comparably more fuel efficient SUV they might drive the SUV more. Workplaces become more thoughtful about making their employees drive in unnecessarily. Car dealerships start advertising fuel efficiency rather than hauling capacity. People will think twice about extra trips out, or select closer trips.

Once the higher prices are sustained for a few months, I expect that super commuters will start recalculating if they can still afford their commute or need to change jobs. Folks in the market for a new vehicle may buy a more fuel efficient vehicle, and new lifestyles will bed in with a bit less driving for most people

Once the higher prices are sustained for a year or more is when I expect more noticable changes to take effect. Sales of fuel efficient vehicles will likely tick up, electric vehicle sales may also increase, solar panel installations will likely increase, and the most inefficient vehicles on the road will become a bit less common. This is the timeline I've observed and expect respectively for gas prices remaining around $4/gallon.

Now if they go really insane and get up to $6-8 per gallon average for over a year, that's when I'd expect a big uptick in people choosing to go car-free or car-lite, I'd expect to see a lot of new companies starting up to try to capitalize on the demand created by the fuel crisis, and I'd expect established companies to begin investing in more R&D into more financially risky and exotic solutions that can be expected to save energy

It's a deceptively simple math problem. You only have so much surface area to cover in solar panels and solar panels only produce so much energy per square meter. You can fit maybe at most a kilowatt of solar panels onto a vehicle if we're being generous, and those panels aren't going to have optimum placement for power generation, and solar panels don't generate their peak output for more than about an hour per day, so the rest of the time will be significantly less than that. Let's be generous and say 3 kilowatt hours is being generated by those panels in an 8 hour workday of being parked in the sun.

3 kilowatt hours is a lot of energy, but let's not forget that about 20% will be lost to battery and circuit inefficiency, so 2.6 kilowatts is ultimately useable. But here's where it really falls apart: electric cars are extremely energy-hungry because cars in general are super inefficient. You're literally moving a ton of plastic glass and steel around, accelerating and decelerating repeatedly, all to transport on average 1.2 humans. Electric cars consume about 150 watt hours per kilometer in their regulatory tests. Some are more efficient, some are less but no matter what it's a ton of energy. That generous estimate of 2.6kwh will give you a whole 17 kilometers of range.

In short, the solar panels on electric vehicles are for show. They exist to trick buyers into believing they're more efficient than they are, and probably they'll help ensure a parked car doesn't lose too much range just from sustaining itself while parked. Also private cars are an extremely inefficient method of transportation

Reading between the lines, this definitely sounds like a form of sex addiction that you're experiencing. Any kind of addiction is best tackled with professional help, and second best with the help of friends. I would strongly suggest in addition to seeking professional help, also talking to your friends saying "hey this is something I'm struggling with" and if they can be accountability buddies that's even better!

Any addictions I've kicked and lifestyle changes I've made have been most successful by slowly adjusting. Quitting cold turkey is the easiest way to fail. Unlike my changes which were kicking coffee/caffeine, and reducing screen time, yours is is a perfectly healthy process gone awry, so your goal may not be complete elimination, but just a reduction back to a healthy level. You seem reluctant to share your current baseline, and I won't push, but the easiest place to start is to say "I can wait another 20 minutes before I do that" and put it off a little, and just keep putting it off a little longer.

Maybe you might find doing a healthy habit every time you feel the urge to musturbate helps, such as doing 5 reps of a calisthenic exercise (excercise is also helpful in redirecting the blood that would otherwise be headed south!) or drinking some cold water (when I was quitting coffee I'd put my glass of cold water right next to my coffee. Every time I would reach for the coffee, I'd redirect my hand to the water and only go for the coffee if I still felt I needed it after the water, which most of the time I didn't!) or maybe you're just needing something to do with your hands and that's how you end up masturbating some of the time. In that case, have you tried investing in some kind of fidget toy? Maybe try keeping that in your lap so every time you find your hands going for something to fidget with you can move to the fidget box or whatever instead.

It's all about slowly shifting your normal, the same way that habits are formed just in reverse. It's not going to feel like you're making a big change at any point but tracking progress can help. Keeping a daily log of how many times you masturbated, when and for how long can help to see the trend. I would also suggest including the consumption of sexual content in that log. Just like masturbation it is perfectly healthy and fine for adults to consume sexual content, but too much of anything is going to be bad for you, and you'll probably want to figure out your current baseline and goal for that as well.

Small steps can make a big impact in the long term. Just being able to set a small goal each day of "I'll wait a couple more hours before I do that" or "maybe I'll tackle cleaning today's dishes before I rub one out" can add up faster than you might think. When I was quitting coffee, reducing from 64oz per day down to about 12oz per day only took a few weeks of active effort and was relatively easy with these methods, but eliminating down to zero took actual commitment. Reducing my screentime also took a few weeks to adjust the habits and baseline so that now I reach for a book or go work on a project instead of playing a video game for 4 hours. I haven't pushed it to zero and that's not my goal, so I'm close to where I want, I just have to keep this new baseline for a while so that it sticks