There’s more of an urban/rural divide here than you’re describing. Their experience in Houston, New Orleans, or Atlanta is going to be a lot different than small town Louisiana or Alabama

You said “have metabolic syndrome,” not “are not in optimal metabolic health.” These are different.

We should also clarify this isn’t just a western issue, but global.

While it’s definitely not a great number, no, “the vast majority of people in the West” do not have metabolic syndrome. The actually number is about a third.

Snoring is one symptom of obesity, but also has a number of other unrelated potential causes, such as enlarged tissues in the nose and throat or enlarged tonsils. Snoring by itself does not mean you have a metabolic syndrome, nor does it mean you have sleep apnea.

This is not true. There are plenty people who snore but who do not have any negative effects from it, e.g. sleep apnea.

Please don’t blame the politicians who are trying to protect us from big business over big business that doesn’t care whether they poison us as long as they make money.

There isn’t an effective mechanism to determine how carcinogenic or teratogenic every application of every substance is. There’s simply way too much variability. Knowing that a product contains chemicals from California’s list (roughly 900 I believe) of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects gives you the information you need to make decisions about how you use it. If something has this label, don’t let your baby put it in its mouth, for example, or don’t sand it down and breath in its dust, or wash your hands after you use it before you eat.

This warning is fantastic and is not supposed to give you all the information. It only tells you that one or more known dangerous chemicals are present in a product, which is still invaluable information.

This is terrible advice

At its core this has nothing to do with Israel, the Heritage Foundation is only using that as a pretext to subvert Wikipedia. Wikipedia is at present a source of evidence-based information that often runs counter to the far-right lies they want you to believe.

Oh, I’m fully aware that’s how you define the term liberal, along with much of Lemmy. As soon as you get off your screen is where that ends though, because the overwhelming majority of people in the US use a different definition. I’m not talking about pre-WWII Germany or the New York Times. I’m talking about a huge segment of our society for whom “liberal” and “progressive” mean the same thing and who the left-most among us continuously deride, ensuring unending division in the face of fascism.

Dude, took the words right out of my mouth. Any excuse to blame “liberals” rather than the actual fascists. “But the liberals enable the fascists!!?” Fuck right off. I live in Texas, and my circles are predominantly college-educated, white, and middle-class (whatever that means today). We are the epitome of the liberal constituency, and there isn’t a single goddamn person I know who would’ve voted for Trump over Bernie Sanders. All these cynical motherfuckers saying “liberal failure!!” are mistaking corruption and incompetence among the Democratic Party leadership for a coherent political philosophy.

The two examples at the beginning are completely separate examples, not rewrites of each other. The comparison is in the readability for beginners, not the content.

Viacom and CBS re-merged in 2019 and are now Paramount Global. So 5 media companies

The MBAs relentlessly seek power and money. I worked many years for a large hospital system that I watched transform from clinician-run, with nurses, doctors, and social workers in almost all leadership positions, to MBA-run, with people with no clinical experience in almost all leadership positions. Everything just got worse and worse over time as decision after decision was made that compromised clinical integrity in favor of saving a few dollars. I don’t work there anymore

4. A ton of people rely on the advice of financial advisors who don’t have their interests in mind and who sell them mutual fund packages with high expense ratios that do poorly long term. These people generally lack the financial knowledge to know any different.

To this point, not being direct and being overly concerned with what other people think could even be directly driving OP’s issue

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8928588/

My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?

I had a conversation with management and they told me I don’t open up, which is fair and true and told me to be more empathetic with my coworkers.

Except that I can’t and I don’t care about most of them. As said, I just want to work and go home. I consider most of them childish, gossipy and immature. Of course I didn’t tell management this.

It seems possible to me you’ve missed the message delivered by your supervisor. You plainly state here that you despise your coworkers and your supervisor is saying you need to approach your coworkers with more empathy. To me, that sounds not like you’re just trying to keep to yourself, but that you’re probably acting like an asshole somehow in giving the cold shoulder to everyone.

I think you’re really struggling with “black and white” thinking here, to think that you would have to debase yourself and pretend to have a bright and bubbly disposition in order to be pleasant and respectful toward your coworkers. You don’t have to be mean and disdainful in order to maintain your personal boundaries at work. Your supervisor might have been on to something, because developing empathy with your coworkers can help you let go of your disdain for them and will probably help you function more effectively in your role.

I worked in healthcare a long time, and the field is certainly dominated by extroverts, but I’ve known plenty introverts in all hospital roles who got along just fine. Healthcare is not a job you can do by yourself. You are always going to have to function as part of a team. If you hate other people so much that you’re just going to move from job to job hating everyone you work with, and you feel like you have no other option than to do this, maybe consider speaking with a therapist to try to develop new ways of relating to the world instead of just being miserable.

It sounds like your question is not actually about what to get him for Christmas, but instead about how to cope with the situation and maintain a relationship with your son

Mortgage interest rates are very high at the moment, and many people “feel” like that’s never going to change, but it very likely will, significantly increasing what they’ll be able to afford. Home prices in my city have been falling for a couple years since they went out of control bonkers during the pandemic, and I don’t think they’ve hit bottom yet.

Point is, these things are typically cyclical and temporary

Check out much of the Midwest. Check out Detroit.