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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yeah, this was my first thought as well as soon as I read the image. We have tons and tons of literally empty housing units. Even if you take away the ones that are only temporarily vacant while searching for a new tenant, you’re still left with a bunch of housing units that sit empty, waiting to be flipped for a profit by real estate investors.





  • I want people to know that life was the greatest fucking thing to ever happen to me. I loved it all, even the parts that sucked, just because I got to take it all in. The highs of joy, the lows of sadness, the good, the bad. People will say “Too bad he never got to live a full life,” but I say FUCK that! This was fucking incredible! This IS a full life because it’s the one I got, and just the chance to experience this universe is so unbelievably goddamn beautiful

    I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, but that particular line resonated with me. When I was in college, one of my professors said something pretty profound that I think is relevant to this. I can’t remember if he was quoting someone of if this was original, but I’m paraphrasing it here:

    “Everyone who has ever lived was alive during the greatest time to be alive.”

    So I think you are absolutely right. Life is a blessing and you got to be here for the best life had to offer, and that’s awesome. We are all but motes of dust, and the span of a full life versus a life cut short is inconsequential in the grand scheme. I’m sure you’ll leave something behind that will be worthwhile and will help carry your memory forward in time.




  • Lemmy is basically a full replacement. The only time I find myself going back is if I’m looking for information on a niche or obscure topic and reddit seems to have a lot of those communities while Lemmy doesn’t (yet).

    I also get Google search results from Reddit too, but the mass scrubbing of data has turned any thread older than a year or so into a mass grave of deleted comments and sometimes context is missing which is sad but I also hope that people will learn from this and Google will start actually getting their search engine algorithms out of social media for that reason.


  • Looking over my original post, perhaps my phrasing wasn’t clear. Yes, this is one way to decrease costs, but it comes at the expense of comfort. Airline companies are no stranger to this process, and have been rolling out new methods of packing as many passengers onto a plane as physically possible since the very first commercial airplanes took flight.

    Awkward and regressive ideas like this, where the airlines are contemplating stacking people in uncomfortable looking double-decker seating to save precious inches of space are only coming out now because no significant strides have been made in making air travel less expensive to operate as a whole. It is always going to be easier to shave off a few inches of legroom and pack in another row of seating in the next generation of jet airliner than it is to invent a new type of jet fuel that is cheaper and burns cleaner without sacrificing performance, or developing a new more efficient fuselage that can fly just as far as a conventional plane while carrying less fuel, etc.

    It would be nice to see air travel improve for a change, rather than continue to get worse and worse over time out of necessity.





  • I used to use it way back when it first came out and I was a huge fan, but about the time Chrome was becoming a mainstream alternative I started to have a lot of difficulty with adblockers not working and webpages that refused to load on anything other than Internet Explorer or Chrome, so I switched.

    Heard about some of the shady shit going down recently in the Googlesphere and decided it was time to switch back and I’m happy to report that everything runs smoothly again.



  • I’ll commiserate with you on the fact that the healthcare system is totally broken. My Mom has had a problem with one of her leg nerves for over a year and a half now, and she has been going in to see specialists, getting told “this is what you have, here’s what we can do”, getting the prescription/treatment, having it not work at all, and then gets told to get back in line for another appointment with several weeks, if not months, of lead time. Even when she gets put on a priority list for when there are cancellations, there’s almost never a cancellation that let’s her get in earlier than her original appointment.

    In her case, I’m not blaming the doctors. They are trying their best. I just don’t understand how it can take 1-2 months per visit, or even upwards of 6 months, and meanwhile she is in agonizing pain whenever she stands or walks too long.

    Meanwhile, I just paid out $6k in dental bills this year alone because my regular dentist missed a cavity until it became bad enough that it required a root canal, but they tried to fill it first and it didn’t work, so then I had to pay for the botched filling procedure (partially covered by insurance), and a root canal that sadly doesn’t seem to have made the tooth any less sensitive, and copayment fees to other dental providers for second opinions because my tooth still hurts even after all they did to it and I want to know what else could do to help, and now I am looking at paying another $3000+ to have the tooth extracted and replaced with a prosthetic implant, which was an option in the first place but they encouraged me to try the fillings and the root canal to “save” the tooth first. Now, I’m trying to wait until January 1st to have my benefits reset so it softens the blow significantly, but until then I’m suffering with this zombie tooth rotting away in my mouth.

    The healthcare system in America is fucking garbage and needs to be destroyed and rebuilt with a human-first mindset, not a for-profit mindset.

    I hope you are able to get the treatment you deserve. Stay strong and stay positive.