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Joined 4 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.


  • No, it just doesn’t make sense to me to do so. I mostly play single player games, so special skins to show you preordered are pretty pointless, and the most you tend to get is a discount on some DLC that I can just buy later, once I know I’ve enjoyed the game enough to warrant it, or items to give you a stat boost.

    It’s not like preordering a physical game, where at least I get an art book or something in exchange for handing my money over.



  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.




  • The wild part is what’s cut off in the bottom section.

    However, "Much of what he championed—patient advocacy, increased access to dental care, and advertising—has come to pass in the U.S.

    So I guess, possibly not as bad as the opening line makes him sound, and perhaps even an improvement over the standards of the time

    Some other choice sections.

    The band attracted large crowds and hid the moans and cries of patients who were given whiskey or a cocaine solution that he called “hydrocaine” to numb the pain.[2] He charged 50 cents for each extraction and promised that if it hurt, he would pay the patient $5.

    he Historical Dental Museum at the Temple University School of Dentistry has a display dedicated to Parker, with his necklace of 357 teeth and a large wooden bucket filled to the brim with teeth that he had personally pulled. The bucket of teeth sat by his feet as he lectured the crowds on the importance of dental hygiene.

    Almost sounds like the guy may have been maligned by his fellow dentists for calling them out on their BS.




  • 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.