It’s not just the people in power, though. When I look at primaries, where people actually have some hope of affecting outcomes, they consistently vote for the worst people. I mean, it’s hard for normal-ish people to even get to through the party structure to get on the ballot, and then they just get crushed. In 2020, Dems could have had Bernie, Warren, Buttigieg, even Klobuchar, but Biden won pretty handily. That’s on people people.

Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. Interesting world where people choose their nationality and legal structure independent of physical borders.

Recently saw a video where the boss of a contracting company, apparently a good guy, looking out for his employees and honestly trying to help everyone prosper from their shared work, explained that he hired new people at the 10th percentile wage from BLS statistics for their job description, raised them to median after six months, and eventually worked them up to 90th percentile over a few years.

On the one hand, making sure his people are paid a fair wage for their work. On the other, participating in an information sharing scheme to fix wages. BLS data is generally a year out of date, so he’s actually paying people last year’s wage, but the sense of implicit collusion only increases as the data becomes closer to real time.

Glad the Biden administration is closing the loophole, but I’m skeptical that it will really work in today’s information-rich environment.

In the 4(?) days since I got my first anti-adblock popover, I’ve completely stopped watching random videos. My few favorite channels I’ve watched in incognito without harrassment, and the only thing I’ve noticed is having more time for other things.

If those content providers were on some other platform, I’d go there, but that’s honestly asking a lot of them for a small slice of their subscribers.

Who are these kids under 20 with $14,000 to give out to scammers? Retirees with a spare $35k, I believe, but I’d really like to see the distribution for both. I’m guessing the means and medians are very different.

No sweat, friend. I was just using the opportunity to extend the “It’s all Reagan’s fault” train. And Donald Regan was a real guy appointed by Ronald Reagan. They didn’t have the diversity of names we do now, so a lot of them repeated, rhymed, or required a middle initial to differentiate. Like all the George Bushes - GWB, GPB, GHWB…

Yeah. https://www.educationnext.org/remembering-nation-risk-reflections-politics-policy/

Abolish the Department of Education. School choice vouchers. Standardized testing. All these memes started with Reagan. Not Regan, his Secretary of Treasury, but a lot of people confused Ronald Reagan and Donald Regan, even at the time.

Onion & carrots, anywhere from 1:2 to 1:1 by weight, boil in just enough water to cover, grate in some fresh ginger, salt, puree. Add more water if it’s too thick. Throw in some chicken bouillon if you like.

Lean in to that, fam. I’m visualizing a flag sporting a toucan beak with a red dot in the middle over the word BEEXIT. Every revolution needs a flag.

Another non-marginalized person here.

Restricted spaces are necessarily smaller than non-restricted. Less content. Less interaction. Less everything. If hateful content is really rampant, then that can be a valid tradeoff, but separate systems are never equal, and it is always the minority/marginalized system that suffers. You’ve described exactly why: “I would find a new instance and continue to be receptive to LBGT+ discussions that come up on Lemmy.”

As I look elsewhere in this thread, the comments I see people reference as “against Beehaw goals” are just people being rude assholes, not misogynist, racist, or homo-/trans-phobic. Creating a space where everyone is polite and universally friendly seems a very different objective than creating a space where marginalized people feel safe. If that - universal friendship - is the real goal, then Beehaw very definitely needs to close off interactions with non-vetted, pseudonymous users, and accept that it will look like a virtual ghost town. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether it stays with defederated-by-default lemmy or moves to some other forum platform.

The middle ground, where you accept that some people are just rude, but still provide a forum where marginalized people feel they can share their experiences without threats or repercussions, needs strong, active, focussed moderation. Have to be able to block users and communities from other instances, delete posts/comments that originate from other instances, and do local moderation of communities hosted on other instances. Have to have enough moderators to respond quickly to user reports, and probably an automod-like system to catch serious issues before users do. It sounds like that is not within the current capabilities of lemmy. So, I can see why the admins think that the lemmy framework is incompatible with their objectives. Probably, a lot of the people who joined post-Reddit are incompatible and uninterested in those objectives.

I can see where the lemmy framework worked when no one used it, and I can see why it would immediately fail in the face of hundreds of thousands of new users. If millions are coming, it will only get worse. No doubt, the admins are aware that they’ll lose 80, maybe 90% of their userbase if they leave Lemmy, but it’s not so long ago that their userbase was only 10-20% of what it is today.

If I lose this little window into cultures I would not otherwise see, I will be a lesser person for it, but I can accept that it was not meant for me in the first place.

I mean, BMI was openly developed, is systematically calculated and described, has been open to evaluation by experts for decades, and has been part of hypothesis development for similar decades. It is, in fact that systematic study that revealed where its use as an estimator or predictor of health had been overstated.

When science falsifies a model, it does not retroactively make the model pseudoscience.

I thought Apple was on to something with their cylindrical form factor. It’s inconvenient from a mobo perspective, but a central core motherboard, with CPU, GPU, even memory and M2 sticking out like fins. Get the mobo down to segments like 25mm x 250, and stack the whole thing over a massive -like 250-350 mm- low rpm fan would be great for heat management and noise. Heck, put it in a venturi tunnel driven by a 500mm fan.

It’s just part of the code. “Globalist” is often especially about Jewish banking families, eg Rothchilds or Soros. Similar to how “urban” in the US is often code for ‘black,’ even though most of the people who live in urban areas are white. Dog whistles: words that communicate specific meaning within a community without being recognized by the larger population.

It’s not a hardship, though. I’m healthy with no chronic conditions, and I’ve made the specific choice to go with a HDHP to get the HSA, which I treat like a pre-tax Roth IRA. If some catastrophe happens, it’ll be easier to pay for surgery out of the HSA than a real Roth, but I don’t expect to see doctors until Medicare. I don’t even pay for glasses out of the HSA, because its future value is too great.

This is a perfectly rational individual choice to maximize my personal benefit, but it is terrible policy at the population level. It means there are less resources available for the small minority of people who do have expensive health issues, because I’m diverting my insurance premiums into a retirement fund. This is a recurring theme in right wing policy - it’s fine for people whose lives have no major complications, and people with special circumstances are too few to consider. You have to look out for yourself, and a few people will fall through the cracks, which is a borderline sociopathic attitude.

Individual, ACA. $7000 annual premium, $6500 deductible, $6700 max out-of-pocket, so it really only covers catastrophic care. 2023 HSA limit is $3850, up from 3650 in 2022 because of inflation. Please excuse me for rounding - that $350 makes all the difference.

Car insurance is to pay for the damage your accident does to other people. You probably have the optional coverage that also pays for damage to your own car, but that’s not why insurance is legally required. You can get repair insurance, but it’s generally ‘not worth it,’ because no one gets it, leading to a small premium pool and minimal risk spread. Kind of like low premium, high deductible plans do for health insurance.

I think the HSA is a big attraction for the GOP - tax advantaged encouragement to get more people investing more money in stocks. Practically, though it also means more people effectively self-insuring. My deductible is $6500, but I’m allowed to put $3500 into HSA, so 2 years’ HSA savings covers the deductible. Fine, for individuals that are reasonably healthy, but it reduces the pool of money that insurers have to pay benefits to people who do have claims.

Essentially incentivizing individuals to sabotage the system.

I mean, if you’re a Nazi, the new Xitter is definitely a better experience. He knows exactly to whom he’s pandering, which is how you get invited back to Fox. There’s going to be a lot of competition for the segment of MAGA that loves the fascism and xenophobia, but worries that Trump is too toxic to win big cities.

Got a cabinet in similar state: got the doors cut, fitted and filled, just need the hinges. But the doors will stay if you lean them and maybe a little wedge. They’ve been like that since July. 2002.

There’s definitely an arms race - if it’s cheaper to pay an SEO to get your pages shown, then you pay the SEO; if it’s cheaper to pay Google advertising, then you pay to play. I’m sure Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to filter SEO techniques to get better, authentic results, but it seems like a losing battle at this point.