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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • There’s also a severe shortage of medical professionals ever since covid in all fields all over the country (but especially in rural and rapidly-growing areas). Good luck actually getting a medical appointment, and even if you can swing one standards have been weakened so that what would normally be a visit with a doctor (or the field’s equivalent) is now a nurse practitioner or other less-educated title. If you want a “real” medical professional you need a referral, and again, good luck getting that appointment scheduled. Everyone working in medicine is overworked and burned out. Unless you’re actively bleeding out, seeking medical attention, especially routine checkups and preventative screening, doesn’t feel worth it anymore.

    I’m not too surprised to see cancer deaths being one rare area that’s decreasing; besides strides in treatment, most cancer sufferers are older and thus wealthier and also have Medicare, plus they also probably already have a primary care physician from pre-shortage. The hardest-hit in the medical care shortage are the young and people who have recently moved, and find themselves running into the wall of “no one is taking new patients.”






  • I’m a fediverse supporter (obviously, that’s why I’m here), however what you’re looking for requires a critical mass of users that the fediverse (at least the Lemmy side of it) will never achieve as long as two very critical problems persist:

    1. sign up is confusing. People are used to clicking “create an account,” inputting a user name, password, and maybe an email, and then BAM they’re a user. I realize the whole instance thing is the entire point, but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they’ve even started using it.

    2. the site (or at least lemmy.world) is sooo slooow. Basic functions like loading images take me back to the dial-up era of “click the image then do something else while it loads,” which is downright ridiculous in the 2020s. Again I’ve stuck with it because I want to support the fediverse, but 99% of users won’t.

    And no, these aren’t “features not bugs” unless you want to keep the site small and homogenous.



  • Japan is an outlier for numerous reasons, the biggest of which is that housing value there decreases over time (without going into the causes, the result is a feedback loop where housing isn’t built to last because it’s a poor long-term investment, so it depreciates like other semi-short-lived products, such as cars). This isn’t something the government planned, it came about naturally. So I wouldn’t say they’ve “solved” housing so much as their situation has made it a non-issue.



  • I run outdoors year-round in weather down to 20°F in a climate with high humidity. Above 40°F I wear old beat-up tshirts, a thick hoodie, and leggings-style running pants. Below 40°F I replace the T-shirt with an REI house-brand light- or mid-weight base layer, and I toss a pair of cotton exercise pants over the running pants (I bought those years ago for less than $15) and wear a cheap woven hat and my junkiest gloves. If it’s raining I’ll replace the heavy hoodie with a water-repellant windbreaker + light weight hoodie.

    In other words my running wardrobe is comprised almost entirely of my oldest, most beat-up clothes, most of which were originally just cotton or other cheap non-technical materials purchased years ago at a fast-fashion store at the mall or used from a sporting goods store. I do invest in decent socks (I highly recommend darn tough for their durability), but unless you’re braving truly cold temps, very long workouts, or cannot return indoors shortly after working out,* you really don’t need anything fancy for year-round exercise. For what it’s worth I’m also a woman and I get cold very easily.

    *The main problem with cotton is that it will not keep you warm when wet, so if you like to take a long cool down walk or hang out on a park bench for thirty minutes post-workout you should go with wool or synthetic material so you don’t freeze in your sweat-soaked clothes. But as long as you’re returning to a warm indoor space before your exercise warmth dissipates, this shouldn’t be an issue.




  • The difference is if the primary (sometimes only) admin of your instance loses interest, goes to jail, or gets hit by a truck, your entire instance could be dead in the water, whereas there are way more safeguards to “established” social media like Reddit and Twitter. Plus the issue of “well shit my instance got defederated from most of the fediverse because it turns out the admin is an asshat” is completely nonsensical on platforms without instances. Example: before I knew that Lemmy had a tankie problem, I almost signed up on lemmygrad because I thought it was just a witty pun…

    Plus when you say “point them to lem.ee” what scenario are you imagining? Because “you should join reddit” or “our business is on Facebook” or “Twitter is a great resource for artists” are all straightforward and easy pieces of information to convey and pick up. “Join Lemmy, a subset of the fediverse, I signed up via lemmy.world although I hear lem.ee is also good, but don’t let that stop you from picking another instance” is like… Dude, people just want to go to [site].com, click on “sign up”, enter a username and password (and maybe email) and that’s it. Just having to explain to people that “lemmy.com” isn’t a thing is already too complicated for most folks.


  • Lemmy (or at least lemmy.world) was bonkers levels of buggy last summer during the reddit blackout. Like, literally unusable levels of buggy. Getting the word out that it’s (mostly) bug-free now would probably be good, because I’m sure there were many redditors who tried it and quickly swore it off as a pile of shit.

    Otherwise I’m in agreement that the instance-selection part of sign-up is a huge barrier, because what instance you choose is actually really important but it’s overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Plus not being able to migrate your account/communities/posts to another instance if yours goes to shit/shuts down/turns out to not fit your needs makes the fediverse feel really unstable.



  • Societal pressure to have children is a huge factor for sure. I’ve heard from previous generations in my family that during the baby boom era, rumors would circulate in their community if you didn’t have enough children, like “something must be wrong with the Johnsons down the street because they only ever had two kids” (and this was in upper-middle class WASP America).

    Obviously this attitude continues today in certain communities (Mormons, small rural towns, etc), but it’s no longer as prevalent.




  • No, property tax is basically the only direct motivation in place for home owners to vote for politicians and policies that will keep housing affordable for future generations and people who don’t already own a home. Otherwise why wouldn’t home owners want to see housing prices skyrocket in value if there’s no financial downside for them (and a giant payout when they do sell)? As mentioned in other comments, some states have tried property tax caps, and the result is creating a system of haves and have nots based entirely around who was lucky enough to buy into the market before it shot to the moon.