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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • So they want to ban taxpayer funding.

    I’m not an American, but how much tax funding goes into regular healthcare, and where the fuck does that money go? Because we hear horror stories over here in Europe that an ambulance callout in the US costs thousands of dollars, giving birth costs thousands of dollars, moderately wealthy people with health insurance have been bankrupted by cancer. In many European countries stuff like that doesn’t really cost you anything. In the UK for example, a visit to your GP is free, as is most medication. In other EU countries a GP is about €65, unless you’re on social welfare, in which case it’s free. And if your GP refers you for a scan or procedure, you generally don’t pay anything. The issue with free healthcare is the waiting time. You can choose to go private to cut the waiting time (in which case you need health insurance, because an MRI + overnight in hospital + procedure + plus drugs might cost €5k). But where a condition is considered an emergency (heart attack, road accident, possible cancer diagnosis) there isn’t a long wait for life-saving treatment. If a car runs you over, an ambulance brings you to the hospital and they treat you - no money change hands. My older sister had terminal cancer, and throughout the entire thing she paid €0 for various operations, scans, drugs and 2 ambulance callouts. She had health insurance, but with cancer, regular healthcare kinda supercedes it. Healthcare gives your more options, but she found that the “best of the best” oncologists and cancer treatment were available for free at the public hospital.

    So, a very long run up to my question: WTF healthcare actually gets taxpayer funding in the US, and how are basic things like an ambulance or insulin insanely expensive?


  • It’s such an odd word. Not like “fuck” or “cunt” or something like that. You are literally not allowed to write it or say it. I’m not even sure people let themselves think it, instead thinking “n word” inside their heads. I can’t think of any other word that is so much like actual god-fearing blasphemy. And yet, you can buy a random rap album and the word will be all over it. It’s even used as a term of endearment between black men who grew up together.

    Can anyone think of any other word that is treated almost as if it has magical powers?


  • It’s just word policing. It’s a bigger thing in America because that country is basically split down the middle into two groups that fucking hate each other. Republicans think Democrats (or “liberals”) or morons who don’t believe in biology (eg: sex) and they want to abolish the police, but yet they are fascists who want to police your thoughts. Democrats think that Republicans (or “nazis”) are morons who don’t believe in biology (eg: evolution) and they want everybody to own 100 automatic weapons and infinite ammo, but don’t believe climate change is real.

    Pretty much everything that everybody in America thinks and says it’s polarised by this filter. If you accidentally say something remotely centrist, both sides will call you a fascist and throw you into the bin. People are desperately trying to signal membership of their group, so they latch onto bullshit like “Which word-de-jour do you use to refer to dried crickets?” (Wait for the answer to this question, pitchfork in hand). You hesitated! You are a literal Nazi!

    You can see it throughout this thread. People kinda admitting that they’re just words and that they change over time BUT don’t use the wrong one or else.

    Unfortunately this bullshit has worked it’s way into other countries, even those that don’t have the same underlying political polarising filter.


  • Language changes over time. Sometimes it’s a slow gradual adoption of new terms, sometimes it’s a cool new slang, and sometimes it’s word policing. I understand that, historically, a certain type of person would use the word “females” instead of “women”, but I can see a shift happening where there number of people using the word “female” is on the increase. Let’s say you’re having a conversation and specifically want to refer to female people - you can’t actually use the word women, which used to imply “female” but now includes males who transition. So depending on context, and what you need to communicate, the word female can be absolutely critical, whereas the word woman may not suffice.



  • snailtrail@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldHow much swap?
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    1 year ago

    Hibernate and suspend are different. I configure my laptop to suspend for 3 hours before hibernating. That means I can close the lid for lunch or a commute and instantly resume, but if I leave my laptop in my bag over a long weekend, the battery isn’t drained. Does it save much battery? Dunno. A few % over a few days maybe.





  • This is true. When the original Fairphone came out I didn’t get it because I had a working HTC. My next phone was purchased as an emergency when my current phone fell into water, so I had to walk into a phone shop and buy an immediate replacement. But that was the day that I decided to buy the Fairphone 3… Because the phone that fell into water was sealed and glued together, and there was no way to remove the battery or dry it out. It buzzed and beeped to death in my hand taking all of my data with it (internal memory only).

    I’ve been rocking the FP3 since then. Upgraded the camera, replaced the battery twice, and once replaced the lower assembly because the usb3 port got damaged and couldn’t hold the cable.

    My wife has the same phone now. So I could upgrade to the FP4 and use my FP3 for parts, in case she ever breaks a screen or needs a battery. But why bother? This works just fine.


  • If the wedding designer has a “blank wedding site” package premade and refused to sell it to them then I don’t think that’s right. But if all of the websites are bespoke designs where the designer must create something for the couple, it’s fuzzy.

    Personally, I don’t know. There is, and should be, a line between personal life and work life. But depending on what you do for a living, the line can be a thin one or a thick one.

    For example, if I churn out hundreds of identical 3D printed characters and sell them at an open-air market, I shouldn’t be allowed to single out a customer and refuse business just because I don’t like the look of them. But if I’m a graphic artist, I shouldn’t be compelled to draw something that I find objectionable. Eg: I might be a woman who has been sexually abused in the past, and someone wants a sexually graphic depictions of a sexual assault (like the Guns ‘N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction” cover).

    Those examples are easy to comprehend because they’re extremes. The difficulty in interpreting the outcome of the case is trying to bring the examples closer to the center.

    Can you refuse to sell handpainted greetings to someone you don’t like? No. It doesn’t matter that it’s a creative endeavour. If you created the product without coercion, and are now selling them at a stall in your local town, it’s not ok to refuse a simple transaction because you don’t like the buyer. What if you also offer a service of writing a message in fancy calligraphy on the inside? Can you refuse to write something you find objectionable? I think so.

    I don’t think it comes down to who your customer is. I think it comes down to what you’re being asked to do.

    Edit: lol, what a typo. Thanks swype keyboard!


  • People are probably thinking “fuck it, let’s go with the upheaval! Let’s get rid of the silly base 60 system!”. Ok then. First, we could divide the length of a year into 100 days. Wait, no, that has to be 365 because otherwise the seasons would get out of whack.

    Ok, but we could definitely have 10 months right? They did that before. Perfection. So every month should have exactly … Uh 36.5 days… fuck

    Well, how about having 10 day weeks? Shit. Same type of problem.

    Fine, let’s ignore months and weeks. What about the 24 hour day? Instead, we could break the day into 100 units. Each unit would be 14.4 “old minutes” long. That seems fine. You could subdivide that into 100 subunits, each of which would be about 8.6 “old seconds”. To keep things reasonable the final divisor would be 10, so our new short “human counting” units would be about 0.86s. Groovy. Pity that years, months and weeks don’t work out.

    So why are there “really” 360s in an hour? Probably for the same reason that there are 360⁰ in a circle. Early astromomers and mathematicians probably thought that the universe was a perfectly created system. They likely modelled dates and geometry on earth’s annual journey through the sky, but we’re a little bit “off”. Like how the months are supposedly lunar. We only discarded the idea of perfect celestial spheres relatively recently.