You know what they call alternative medicine that works? It’s called medicine.

Is the healthcare system designed to extract as much value as possible from people? Absolutely, but unlike a chiropractor they aren’t likely to leave your paralyzed from a routine visit. “Alternative medicine” only really exists due to a historical choice by the FDA to not regulate supplements back when supplements were an absolutely tiny market and now the supplement industry is as big as the regulated medicine industry. One of these things is regulated so it won’t kill you/destroy your life, the other isn’t. I’d rather take the safer route.

Of all of the musicians I’d assume are super pleasant to interact with in public Fred Durst is not one of them, but honestly I’m happy to hear that

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

Why do they always send the poor?

I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

Italians in general weren’t even considered ‘white’ untill… the 70s?

Why does this just make me think of those tweets from when Luigi was arrested

we’re finally on the verge of learning once and for all if Italians are White

And once he received terrorism charges

The final answer on “what are Italians” is apparently “middle eastern”

I mean this is generally a sign of growth by the content creator, shifting from whatever “personalized” ads the ad network decides to show, to having their own relationships with advertisers and doing their own ads. Honestly its a good thing because it means that the people making the content also have full control over who they sell ad space to and how that ad space is used, and if viable platforms other than Youtube existed, they would be able to to run their videos profitably without excessive user tracking

I mean choosing to believe things won’t get any better is just pessimistic thinking, plus its counter-productive because if you don’t believe in a better tomorrow how can you make today the first/next step towards a better tomorrow?

The best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. Why not be hopeful about the future and lay the groundwork to make some small improvement to your corner of the earth?

Holy crap I’ve never seen any of this before but now I’ve watched the entire first season and need to watch the rest

I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids.

The child tax credit makes a huge difference. It’s something like $6k per kid per year when they’re under the age of 8 I think it was? When you’re only making around 40-50k per year, an extra 8-10k each tax season is a huge opportunity to improve your finances. I knew one family that had 3 or 4 kids, probably made about 40k per year, they’d stop paying their electricity bill during the winter because the utility can’t legally disconnect you from your heating source in the winter then pay off the debt each tax season.

Additionally many of our social safety net programs are based on family income, with the income threshold increasing as family size increases, so a family making 50k a year with 1 kid might not qualify for food assistance, but a family making 50k a year with 3 kids probably will. Medicaid also will cover fulltime childcare in many states, further negating the financial hurdles of having kids, and once the kids are old enough you can have the older kids babysit the younger ones further reducing costs (of course parentification is very pervasive in this way!) there’s a lot of hurdles that this funding can bypass (then of course put parents in a tight spot that they have to figure out when a new technicality is added to kick them off of these benefits)

Green estimated that food makes up just 5% to 7% of household spending, but put housing at 35% to 45%, childcare at 20% to 40%, and health care at 15% to 25%.

Yeah that tracks. For my family we spend about $500/month on groceries, around 35% of our income on housing (call it about $1600/mo including utilities), and until our vehicle was paid off around 25% of our income went to that.

We got lucky in that we had a family member willing to babysit for us while I went back to college then when they started getting too toxic I snagged a job making just enough for my wife to be a stay at home mom. We absolutely could not have afforded kids if it weren’t for either of those factors didn’t work out. We’d probably still have my wife and I working opposing shifts and both being just sleep deprived enough to be biting each other’s heads off and possibly divorced by now (we had the opposing shifts thing going when we got married, and when she had a week off for her wedding, we both started getting good sleep again and stopped fighting and I had a second honeymoon phase as I was like “oh yeah I remember why I fell in love with you again!”)

The argument could be made that kids conceived right now will be the next richest generation as we have to be rapidly approaching the breaking point with the current second gilded age

Don’t forget Will Smith was a Rapper and DJ first, ended up deep in a financial hole because he didn’t save any money for taxes following his musical success, took the role on Fresh Prince to try to keep the lights on and then Fresh Prince ended up being super successful and leading him to his second and even more successful career in acting

I think part of it is that in hindsight it’s a super fucking trans-coded film. I bet the Wachowskis didn’t realize it until later either. Honestly I love it and I think it adds another whole layer to everything.

I still appreciate that he actually acted out the AI clips of him eating spaghetti

Edit: found it on Instagram and I could watch the clip in a private tab successfully, didn’t see any better hosts on a quick search though

I recently rewatched it and it was a good romp for sure. I never read the comics but apparently it was super unlike the comics it was based on which was part of its problem. Generally pissing off your core audience of fans in an adaptation is bad for the outcome of the movie

I suppose I could see Inception as being a very risky film based on the script, to be completely fair

Its very cyberpunk for sure! I think it was Cyberpunk Edgerunners where in the background of many street scenes there’s folks just zonked out on the street with little fap machines going nuts on their junk while the world passes them by, completely oblivious to everything