Insurance as a private industry is so stupid. They extract profits to protect people from catastrophic losses, but then when something catastrophic happens, the government has to step in to save the industry. We’ve seen it with the risk pools that states have had to create to keep health insurers from pulling out of rural areas, with last resort programs for home insurance and flood insurance, the AIG bailout, and the built in bailouts of Obamacare.

Why do they get to collect the profits if they don’t cover the risks?

I don’t see how 5 days is a reasonable isolation time after testing positive for COVID. I’d read that the CDC recommendation dropping from 10 to 5 was not based on science but economic considerations, but I assumed the 10 days + negative antigen test was effective.

My partner caught covid, and I slept in the basement and masked indoors for 11 days. We both tested on day 11, both negative, so we stopped isolating based on the research I’d done. I figured there was a chance I’d been exposed and been asymptomatic because we had slept in the same room and kissed 20 minutes before they tested positive.

I caught it immediately, and it had to be from my partner because I didn’t go anywhere but to a curbside grocery pickup while they were sick.

My partner had it pretty bad. They took paxlovid, and their physical symptoms weren’t too bad, but they were delusional and hallucinating. They were also being super difficult, angry and trying to piss me off for 2 straight days, almost like the way my grandfather was when he had early stage dementia. Thankfully they’re better now.

The online market for swag with stuff printed on it is massively oversaturated right now. The get rich quick grift economy has moved from drop shipping electronics to drop shipped printing.

There are a bunch of online print shops that will take an image file, print it, and ship it to a customer for you. There are also data services that scrape Etsy, eBay, etc, then sell sales data to other sellers. So even if you make a unique design that sells, competitors will steal them and be selling them for less almost immediately.

It’s not normalized on creatinine levels, they just count samples with low creatinine levels as needing a retest.

A lot of young people are getting caught in sex scams. They get flirted with on discord/social media, get invited to Skype calls where they engage in sex chat. Then they get told by the “father” that the person was underage, and if they don’t send money they’ll send the videos to the police and their family.

Say those 4 reasons to him and be firm in your decision. Do exactly what he’s doing to you in forcefully saying you ARE going.

When my father was near the end of his life, he was like that. Using the prospect of his dying to kind of try to guilt me into committing more than I was willing to. He was a bit of a prick and would take offense if I wasn’t careful in how I turned him down. When I was younger I didn’t give a shit and let him be angry, but I didn’t want to be on bad terms with him because it was clear he was dying.

Of course you don’t owe anyone any explanation and it would be perfectly reasonable to just say no and leave it at that. But I think you can turn him down in a way that preserves your relationship, if that’s what you want.

Start off by telling him that you’ve thought about it but you aren’t going. He’ll want to know why, respond with a reason he cannot counter argue. For example if you start with the concern about the cost, he could counter by saying, “I’ll help you pay”.

You don’t want to let it turn to a debate or argument, so if he tries to, don’t engage. Just say you’re sorry but you’ve already decided.

If he tries to guilt you, call him out on it.

I did home renovation work for like 8 months. Some of the people in the crew practically destroyed their bodies doing that work for 20+ years. One of the drywall guys would have to use his left hand to loosen his right’s grip on the knife because it would get locked up. There was another guy that was maybe 45-55 that walked hunched over like a 90 year old man.

I actually liked the work compared to other jobs I’d had, but the “work through the pain” culture was so toxic. Everyone would act like working hurt was both mandatory and something to be admired.

It’s fine to be proud of being a hard worker, but being proud of destroying your body for a boss that wouldn’t give a shit if you died is sad.

If the buildings vent stack is operating properly smells shouldn’t be coming out of the drains, no matter how much they pour down it.

If the vent stack is clogged or insufficiently sized, air could be forced up through the traps, but you’d be smelling sewer gas too. It’s a really rank smell you’d notice, so I think the polysytrene smell is probably coming in some other way.

I’m kind of in the same boat. I haven’t worked in over 10 years, but my disability benefits were taken away. I’ve applied for reconsideration and then appealed when that was denied because I can keep the benefits going while I wait for that to play out.

My current plan is to get a shit job just to have something to put on a resume. Places like fast food and convenience stores will hire anyone who has a pulse and can make change. Maybe you can try something like that? I’m trying to stay positive about it by telling myself it’ll be temporary.

Every 20 minutes isn’t really that surprising, especially when you’ve got the money to buy it. You’re already coming down from the peak about 5 minutes after a hit. There’s a bit of a tail, but I’ve seen plenty of people hitting the pipe the second they start coming down, and those people didn’t have millions of dollars to buy more.

I think it’s more about a fear of the DEA. They’ve started going after doctors for over prescribing stimulants.

The DEA is really just going after the doctors running pill mills and the ones rubber stamping scripts for those online prescribers that guarantee a script(or your money back). That doesn’t stop your local doctor, who’s livelihood rests on writing scripts, from thinking they need to create a paper trail that shows they’re using stimulants as a last resort.

I blame this on the tech bros who created shit like cerebral that is just a pill mill with VC funding.

Can you draw Clippy 69’ing with Ariana Grande Please???

I’m pretty skeptical of the value of these LLMs, but Google’s isn’t even good enough to call it half baked…

These models are ultimately crap in my opinion. They’re not optimizing for intelligence or correct answers, they’re optimizing for seeming correct and intelligent. All the feedback they get from users is uninformed, you only ask an LLM what you don’t know.

I used to think these tech companies knew what they were doing, at least somewhat. It’s just a bunch of business dipshits running from fad to fad burning tons of money until they fall backwards into a business. Then they monopolize it and enshittify it.

“I have 3 DUI’s and drive a truck that could run over an entire elementary school class without ever noticing. I’m busy because it’s my weekend with the kids”

If you go the VPN route make sure you do a leak test(https://ipleak.net/) before you start downloading stuff. If you pass those tests you’re safe.

You can definitely get PSX games from torrent sites, I just checked 1337.to and they’ve got a ton.

Real-debrid is cheaper and easier to setup safely for a beginner. It’s basically just a service that downloads torrents(and those weird paid download sites like nitro upload) for you. You submit the torrent file or magnet link to their website and it gives you a direct download link. Since you aren’t sharing pirated files with anyone, there’s no chance of getting copyright warnings. There are also a bunch of streaming apps(stremio is the best) that work with real-debrid to give you a Netflix like experience for pirated movies/TV with little effort.

My favorite uncle had this. I constantly bugged him to play it because I imagined it much cooler than it really was. We finally set it up and it was such a letdown.

Her campaign announcement video is so based. In the first minute she’s talking about seizing the assets of the top 100 companies on day 1.

I was arguing with someone in Tiktok comments about this. They were saying I want gay people to die because I don’t support Biden. Later in the argument I asked what Biden has done to protect gay people and they said something like, “He can’t do anything because of Congress and the Supreme Court”.

I’m astounded by these people who believe voting is the only thing we can do to affect our government, while simultaneously believing that you automatically need to give that vote to a party that doesn’t do anything for you.

Most police/emergency radio systems are trunked now, requiring more complex hardware to listen in. It makes using these apps a more compelling option, even though they’re charging money for(or inserting ads into) what is essentially public information.

More and more police agencies are encrypting their radios, so this will all be gone soon enough.