Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.

But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.

So here’s the thing. Right off the bat it’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even seem to understand how the pre-order works for the Steam Machine – and that’s even with me agreeing with at least some of your overall sentiment. What compelling reason would they have to shut down the pre-order page earlier than advertised?

Honestly, none of us really know for sure 100% factually whether the Steam Machine will sell out or not, but it’s hard to take your questioning of it seriously when your understanding is so limited, and that’s the nice way of putting it.

Personally, I won’t be surprised either way. I suspect it will sell out, but like you, me, and millions (billions?) of other people, I also know that the price is laughable when appraised only by specs and anticipated performance metrics, so it also would not surprise me if they struggle with sales.

Humor is lost on the humorless.

Someone who lived at my current address back in the 80s and 90s and who died almost 25 years ago still gets mail delivered here.

But also, does this mean that people with very common names are nearly second death immortal? Should I change my name to John Smith so that I don’t die that second time until the very last piece of mail gets delivered to the very final John Smith that ever exists? I need to know. I NEED TO KNOW.

And for the past 40 years, people and companies have been selling their “user data” from one entity to another, so it really doesn’t require any particular one of them to last more than an average human lifetime.

Granted, I’m 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% sure the comment you replied to was really only making a joke, so no pedantry is really required.

About 4 or 5 years ago, my neighbor’s adult children (and by extension my neighbor) got really big into the raw milk craze. For awhile, he’d mention all the benefits compared to store bought milk that’s homogenized & pasteurized and supposedly it’s those processes that make it unhealthy.

I don’t remember exactly when they stopped talking about raw milk, but at some point that topic stopped coming up anymore. Then one day, my neighbor told me he was going over to his daughter’s to drop off a gallon of (store bought) milk, and I replied with something like “I thought she only drank raw milk”.

That’s when he told me that the family stopped drinking raw milk a while ago after everybody got sick from a bad batch.

Anyway, I have had raw milk as a child one time when a local farmer dropped some off for us to try. I don’t recall it very well since I was pretty young but I vaguely remember not liking it because it tasted too much like the way cows smell and it was thicker (more viscous) than I was expecting so there was a bit of “gross factor”. I’m sure it wouldn’t be gross if I had grown up drinking it, though.

I don’t know about the southern border of Texas, but much of the Southern / South-Eastern USA is experiencing varying degrees of drought this spring with very little relief in sight. The last time things were this bad in my part of the country was about 20 - 25 years ago.

I wonder how that will play into the spread of these parasites. Will they spread more quickly due to sicker/weaker wild populations of host animals spreading out trying to find ever more scarce food and water resources?

It’s not quite the same thing, but that prior major drought I mentioned from a couple decades ago is widely discussed as having been the source event for the spread of fire ants to my area. A lot of our agricultural products like animal feeds are grown, produced, and consumed locally. However, in drought years, things like hay have to be transported in from other parts of the country and it’s believed that the fire ants hitched a ride from out of state that way.

Nearly half is less than half.

Truthfully though, there are just some statistics that sound absurd and counterintuitive at first glance, but start to make more sense once you spend a moment thinking it through.

For one, the USA is in the midst of a K-shaped economy / K-shaped recovery. People above a certain level of wealth and income are literally doing just fine. In fact, many of those solidly higher middle class individuals are doing better than ever. Those folks are largely, not terribly anxious about finances. Now, I’m not claiming that group is literally half the population, nowhere near it, just that it represents a solid chunk. Then there are the unrepentant MAGA folks. You know, the ones saying “the current economic situation is entirely Obama’s/Biden’s/Democrat’s fault” and/or “I don’t mind this economic hardship because I trust the president” and the majority of voters back in 2024. Hate to break it to you Lemmy Communist Socialist Liberal Leftist Demon-warshiping Atheists, those MAGA voters are the salt of the Earth type people. And there are a lot of them. And they aren’t worried, or at least won’t admit to it. Because Trump is their god and that would be a sin. Then there’s a whole contingency of people out there who have lived paycheck to paycheck for the past several decades. Doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, they spend whatever they get the minute they get it, so they aren’t any more worried about it than they were back when Obama was president. Plus, let’s not forget the huge contingency of people who are virtually 100% politically disengaged. You can pretend like it doesn’t exist, but all you have to do is look at the voter participation rate for your local elections or even for the average mid-term federal election. Obviously that doesn’t directly translate 1-to-1 with people being anxious about finances in relation to Trump’s handling of the economy, but once you start highlighting the political angle, people turn off.

I could keep going with listing all the different segments of people who aren’t or would say they aren’t anxious, but I won’t. The point really is that there are a lot of such segments, some of them large, so by the time you stop to add it all up, it starts to seem more understandable that only “nearly half” said they were anxious.

PFAS compounds have been detected in literally the most remote places on Earth. Are you sure your spring water is isolated enough?

Either way, reverse osmosis (RO) filters remove virtually all the PFAS from water. I’m not discouraging you from getting 100 gallons of spring water from a VERY isolated source, just wanted to mention that there are possibly other options for those of us who don’t have the ability to get 100 gallons of spring water from a VERY isolated source.

I don’t know you. You might be a loser, but you probably aren’tish. However, not having 200+ guests at your wedding does not mean you are a loser. Having only a handful of guests at your wedding does not mean you are a loser.

Usually there’s an element of one or both parties getting married have a familial tradition, culture, and/or history of large marriages as well. Often at least one of the people getting married comes from a large family, but not uncommon for both. Also, one or both sides tends to have money and/or generational wealth. Having that kind of money means you can afford a big wedding with 200+ people, but also generational wealth tends to give people and families the luxury of attaining and maintaining long term & multi-generational ties as well as a sense of duty to one another.

But also, it might be easier to to have 200+ people come to your wedding than you realize, depending on circumstances. Like if you and your future spouse come from large / larger families, don’t have tons of mutual friends/acquaintances, and things like that, and you invite pretty much every relative, acquaintance, friend, coworker, neighbor and so on, you’ll probably get more folks in attendance than you might expect. Particularly if you give them long enough notice that they can plan for it and you’ve picked a good location as well as time of year to make it happen. Also wouldn’t hurt to provide support for accommodations, food, travel for those who might struggle to afford them.

In my part of the world (eastern USA), some do. Chocolate and coffee prices, for example, have backed off their all time highs. For coffee, it’s come down a lot, presumably after the tariffs were invalidated.

And the president isn’t worried about Americans’ financial situation. He said as much just today.

It’s actually ridiculous how Republican leaders are held to COMPLETELY different (aka NO) standards.

I think there are still “read-only” clients. I haven’t looked in awhile, but I know there were some available via F-Droid (alternative app store) long after the API was cut off. I assume they use standard web scraping for grabbing content.

Also, I’m not sure if it still works, but I think you can still use open source clients that rely on the API, you just have to compile/build them yourself using your account’s own personal API key.

I haven’t looked into either of these in a while and definitely not an expert on the topic, but I’m sure if you’re interested there’s enough info out there to find a solution that works for you.

Why would they need to block that kind of content to begin with? Wouldn’t the Christians using their network simply not even try to access that material? It’d be like me remodeling my house to keep great white sharks out of my bathtub.

As was predicted because this entirely predictable outcome of making him president is exactly what was expected. And guess what? It’s going to get worse.

I’m getting Faces of Death vibes from that music in the video (at least in the tent scene).

Don’t water your Raspberry Pi.

I see this every day. I try to stop and just take in the moment. But I can’t. I can’t stop. I can’t take in the moment. And it was only for a moment, now it’s gone. And now that it’s gone, I can’t stop thinking about it. I try to stop. I can’t stop stopping. But I also can’t not stop stopping. It’s my struggle. It’s what I struggle with the most. Stopping.

That’s not the face I make. Usually there’s more eyebrow commotion going on as I try to figure out why it’s taking so long to load the video or why I’m getting some random error message that means nothing to a rando trying to watch a video on their phone.

BMI is a general guideline that offers a reasonable approximation of body mass at the population level. That it also offers a reasonable estimate on the individual level, when all other factors are taken into account, is a plus.

Medical practitioners aren’t out there widely telling otherwise obese people with missing limbs that they’re a perfectly healthy weight or that all mass is fat.

When you read unverifiable anecdotes about a dumb doctor telling a power lifter that they are obese, don’t take it as gospel. When your doctor tells you that you’re a perfectly healthy weight because you’re missing a leg, even though you don’t exercise, eat like shit, and have a 50 inch / 125 cm waist, that’s when you start asking questions and find a new doctor. Most of them aren’t like that.