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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2024

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  • He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.

    When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There’s a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.

    These days, I don’t know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it’s become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I’m pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn’t legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.

    I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.

    It’s kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.



  • There are countries that do, but you’ll still need to demonstrate that you have the financial means to support yourself without working or needing recourse to public services for the duration of your study, so there’s still a fairly significant financial barrier to entry for most individuals. If you have the money to put down for 3 years of rent, food, utilities, etc, while you complete a degree in Europe, I imagine you’re generally doing pretty okay for yourself in the US.


  • Respect is a two-way street, though. People don’t deserve to be disrespected or dehumanized just because they’ve fallen on hard times, it could happen to any of us, after all. My respect for crackheads is about as limited for my respect for the guys jerking off to lone women on the subway, though. If the system has chewed you up so thoroughly that you need to smoke crack to get through the day, you have my sympathy Go do you, hope things get better for you. On the other hand, I’ve got effectively no sympathy for the crackheads where I used to live that would get high as hell, then shit in the staircases, get into fights with the only elevator in the building until it broke, or just sat outside all night, screaming and blasting music.

    I’m a reasonably healthy younger person, so having the elevator out of commision for months at a time because of their antics was a nuisance, especially when it came time to haul groceries up to my apartment on the seventh floor, or bring my laundry down to the basement to wash it. It was outright dangerous for more elderly residents on the upper floors, who essentially became housebound, though. My mother-in-law couldn’t deal with all those steps, and there were elderly people on higher floors put at risk because paramedics couldn’t reach them nearly as quickly if they had an emergency, not to mention the challenge of bringing someone down a bunch of narrow stairs on a stretcher.

    Just because they’re suffering at a given moment doesn’t give them the right to degrade everyone else’s quality of life, if not outright endanger their lives.



  • Got a concussion in a pillow fight. I was in the top bunk in a lean-to at summer camp when I was maybe 13 or 14. Forgetting the low ceiling above me, I jumped to my feet, planning on launching a pillow at someone poking around another bed. Promptly slammed my head into the ceiling, knocked myself out and wound up going to the doctor shortly after. Pretty sure I still have a disc somewhere with images of the small minor brain bleeding I got as a result.


  • Go to another account she hasn’t messed up on her phone, and make her watch as you use the password manager to get in. Then, you can tell her for sure that the tech is working, and you’ve done your part, but you cannot fix her behavior. If she wants to keep resetting her passwords all the time, that’s on her, otherwise, she’ll have to put a small amount of time and effort into adapting to using the password manager.

    If she isn’t going to follow your suggestions and advice, why is she asking you for help? If she sincerely wants help, she needs to make an effort on her side to follow through.

    This is a problem with psychology and boundaries, not a tech issue.


  • While simple, it can honestly be kind of fun to just go in and let them know. When I was recently laid off, it went something like this.

    HR: “I know this might be a shock–”

    Me: “Yeah, you’re letting me go, I know. Here’s my work laptop and badge, I’ve got all my stuff in a box outside, what do I sign? Trying to catch the next train home, so I have like 20 minutes.”

    It totally threw off my boss and the HR lady trying to do their sombre, dignified thing, and was pretty funny to watch.


  • I’m not sure that’s really the sort of architectural change that was intended. It’s not fundamentally altering the chips in a way that makes them more powerful, just packing more in the system to raise its overall capabilities. It’s like claiming you had found a new way to make a bulletproof vest twice as effective, by doubling the thickness of the material, when I think the original comment is talking about something more akin to something like finding a new base material or altering the weave/physical construction to make it weigh less, while providing the same stopping power, which is quite a different challenge.



  • @hraegsvelmir@lemm.eeto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    64 months ago

    Despite growing up in the 90s, a Commodore 128 was the only computer we had until maybe 1998, when we upgraded to some sort of Macintosh. It was just Frogger, Montezuma’s Revenge and OutNumbered! for me on computers until we finally got a Dell of some sort running Windows XP in like 2004.

    I got all the pain of different OSes growing up, but now it’s just Linux and OpenBSD for me these days.


  • If I could get away with not having a cellphone, I would honestly much prefer to not have one. Unfortunately, the modern job market and my wife wanting to be able to reach me make it unlikely that I could do so without suffering some fairly major issues.

    Initially, I quite liked the idea of being able to consolidate multiple devices, like an e-reader and music player into a single device, but I’ve really come to resent the expectation that I should always be available to contact at all times.

    If I could ditch mine, I’d really rather just have some sort of portable device in a similar form-factor that could play connect to WiFi, play music and podcasts and work as an e-reader. Bonus points for some sort of offline map/navigational capacity. I don’t want to get texts or phone calls, and only be able to access email and the broader internet when I’m somewhere with WiFi.

    I like to think I’ll eventually get to a point where I can do that without having to worry about being unable to get jobs for not responding quick enough. Unfortunately, it seems like more and more things are trying to make cell phones an unavoidable aspect of participating in society, whether it’s banks only offering OTP texts for 2FA, or so many venues no longer even offering the option to print your tickets at home, but instead requiring you to display your ticket in an app on a device with an active data connection.




  • Not trying to be facetious, but you just kind of do it. I think it might be something that you just subconsciously keep track of once you really become aware of it. I remember it seeming like magic until I was maybe 15 or so, and then I had landmarks for each direction in my mental map and could figure things out in reference to them. After a bit of that, I could mostly stay oriented when traveling by land, and now it’s not an issue even when I fly somewhere. I went to England for the first time last year, and I had the cardinal directions sorted probably by the time I’d walked from the train to my hotel.

    Once you’ve got it down, you just sort of do it on autopilot.



  • I got invited to some sort of literary award ceremony at the French embassy a few years back. I, uh, severely underdressed for the occasion. I got the invite for participating in the Albertine book store’s bookclub, and for whatever reason, my brain went, “I can show up to this like I would dress for a bookclub session, it’s the same people.” Spoiler, it was not, and I really should have been at least in a button up and slacks, rather than my hoodie and jeans. As luck would have it, the gentleman who won the award, Emmanuel Dongala, was sat next to me during the speeches. I can still remember the look of “What the classless, American fuck is this guy doing?” as he took his seat next to me.

    On the other hand, I went to my first opera at the NY Metropolitan Opera last year basically dressed the same way, and it was surprisingly entirely fine. Turns out, very few people want to be sat for hours in formal attire when hardly anyone can see you in the dark, anyway.


  • Turns out the “Please don’t vote for fascism” vibe isn’t very appealing to the country.

    That was one vibe. Unfortunately, the rest of the vibe from the Democrats have been, “Well, things are actually pretty good, just look at our charts. Economy is doing great!”. I think that’s where they really failed the vibe check, telling people not that they will improve things in a major way, but that the status quo is mostly acceptable and they’ll keep things from getting worse.

    Change was the order of the day, and they ran a campaign on stability instead.