scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why can't someone create a public alternative to health insurance in the USA? 2 weeks ago:
Not exactly. In theory corporations need workers so they should benefit from a healthy public.
In reality, their needs for workers are met. They’ve been exporting and automating jobs for decades. So even with the system leaving lots of folks behind, enough are left over to occupy the jobs that are needed. If anything, we have more healthy people than corporations need - what is lacking are skills.
And so in a very American sense of “business first,” the current system is operating just fine. People and their health have no intrinsic value here.
- Comment on Why can't someone create a public alternative to health insurance in the USA? 2 weeks ago:
And now they say Obamacare didn’t go far enough and is kinda weak. I could strangle them.
- Comment on Why can't someone create a public alternative to health insurance in the USA? 2 weeks ago:
Blue Shield of California is a “big corporation” that employers here often contract with for health insurance, and it is a non-profit. Somehow this doesn’t really result in a dramatically different experience.
- Comment on YouTube ads have ruined the good, old-fashioned Rick Roll. 5 weeks ago:
There was a vociferous but somehow under the radar outcry about this back in 2018 and an incredibly simple solution was widely suggested: demonetize the video.
However, the highly viewed video is a significant source of royalty revenue for Mr. Astley, which, as he well argued at the time in a series of tweets, is only just compensation for the way his image has been turned into a joke literally hundreds of millions of times now.
Mr. Astley implored YT not to bow to pressure and demonetize the video. YT famously replied “don’t worry, we’re never going to give you up, never going to let you down.”
- Comment on It's pretty cruel, particularly for non-native English speakers, that 'lose' and 'loose' seemingly switched spellings, meanings and pronunciations with each other when no one was looking 5 weeks ago:
English is idiosyncratic as hell. Didn’t someone famous call it “not a language but 3 languages in an overcoat.”
Adding to this specific instance is that even native speakers spell things wrong. They loose their keys, etc.
- Comment on It's pretty cruel, particularly for non-native English speakers, that 'lose' and 'loose' seemingly switched spellings, meanings and pronunciations with each other when no one was looking 5 weeks ago:
I would lohz my shit if we had to pronounce it that way.
- Comment on Bluesky hits 20 million users 5 weeks ago:
I’m with you 100%. The Twitter product has always been a clunky pile of bullshit for me. But somehow it became the default public space and choice of celebrities, etc and I think that has been 98% of its appeal.
- Comment on Apple's controversial iPhone accessory may have been discontinued 5 weeks ago:
You make a good point. When a small number of people complain loudly but most people don’t care, I’m not sure that’s “controversy.” The majority don’t care but this accessory is for the minority who do, and they hate it, so yeah “hated” would not be overstating it :)
- Comment on If Orange Dickhead dies before taking his oath again will sucession still be applicable? Like Vance the new pres and Johnson the new VP? 5 weeks ago:
Two assignation plots though, and that was before his presidency was assured. I’m not hoping, I’m not calling for it. But the impulse definitely seems to be out there to pop a cap in this man.
- Comment on If Orange Dickhead dies before taking his oath again will sucession still be applicable? Like Vance the new pres and Johnson the new VP? 5 weeks ago:
It would be really interesting watching Vance try to carry on Trumpism without Trump. He’s already strained to convert himself into an angry, insane Trumpian after starting out in quite a different place. Could he continue dancing if the music stopped?
- Comment on There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation 5 weeks ago:
If we could get 100% of people to do anything then the world would be a utopia tomorrow. Spoiler: that isn’t going to happen.
To keep it on point here, /u/Anticorp got yelled at above for saying that COVID is here to stay, as if this is some apathetic, defeated attitude.
I would posit that any hopes and dreams predicated on getting literally everyone to do literally anything are laughably naive and not even worth discussing.
- Comment on There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation 1 month ago:
Maybe people who lived in red states developed this notion that no one put in the effort but where I live we certainly did on a large scale and it did not eliminate the virus. Other cultures who already had a healthy practice of masking when sick still got hit with COVID. This notion that we could have eliminated it if people had just put in a tiny effort… I don’t know where y’all are getting that from.
- Comment on There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation 1 month ago:
Why are you hooting as if we’ve eliminated the flu? Strains come and go. The flu is very much here to stay and continues to kill people every year. We also masked and distanced for a very long time and didn’t eliminate COVID. I am struggling so hard to see what your point could possibly be other than to take a shrill tone with this person for having the audacity to face reality.
- Comment on There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation 1 month ago:
It’s benign in the sense of fatalities, but the lingering health issues from it seem more and more common now. I even know someone who is dealing with long term health symptoms that began right after dose 2 of the vaccine (I’m not an antivaxxer but this correlation is hard for them to ignore as they face their daily struggle to be the person they were before).
- Comment on There should be a term for people who never really returned from the pandemic's social isolation 1 month ago:
It’s amazing to see a perspective from such a different place on the spectrum. Spending more time with the kids is fine but watching them stagnate with little social life was really hard. I think it’s highly dependent on their age. Under 3: pure bonus for the kid because the parents are home more. 3-5: terrible for the kid because this is the time they’re supposed to be developing socialization with friends at preschool/school. 5-10: bummer but they got through it. My son got hit right in the 3-5 period. His social skills and life have still not fully cleared the cloud this put over him. Daughter was in the 5-10 and was able to get something out of remote school and limited access to her friends. Son got a raw deal.
It was also just physically so trying. You know how your day just goes differently when the kids are sick and don’t go to school? You have to attend to them the whole day through to make sure they are okay and not just stagnating on the couch and you can’t necessarily leave the house or do errands etc during the day like you normally would. It was like that, but for over a year, with lots of added stresses involved from the pandemic itself.
A scarring time. My job gave me something to focus on from home. But my wife, who is a full time parent, says she has never recovered.
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 1 month ago:
We sense less and less as we get older. I’ve learned this from observing my kids and seeing them react to things like needles and spicy food with such greater sensitivity than me. I can remember being like them, too. But I just plow through experiences now with less sensation of them. Part of it is that my senses are slightly more dull, but also important: my cognitive filters are much more established and sensations that are outside of them get little notice. Meanwhile my kids are like raw nerves at the mercy of every experience that comes their way. Bubble gum probably doesn’t blow your hair back anymore either but I bet it was awesome when you were a kid.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 1 month ago:
I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 1 month ago:
I’m also a lefty and often find myself going against the extreme grain here. The narratives about everything being a scam designed to steal your balls, the generational hatred, the cynicism and fatalism…
- Comment on Dropbox lays off 20% of staff, says it overinvested and underperformed 1 month ago:
It’s a neat utility and all, or at least it was neat back when the cloud was novel. But I don’t understand how what’s basically a minor iCloud feature became a publicly traded company of gigantic size.
- Comment on We should have elections with no candidates. 1 month ago:
This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 1 month ago:
How are they defining the end of the universe?
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 1 month ago:
Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and never would have.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 1 month ago:
I can’t define better. But I can tell you who can. The people around you that you trust can tell you when you’re better and when you’re not. They will not tell you you are better drunk or on meth. (unless they are also drunk and on meth - that’s codependency, not trust).
If you’re really, really lucky you will find a life partner who knows you top to bottom and will tell you when you’re better, and be patient enough with you when you’re worse to really know the difference.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 1 month ago:
It’s entirely okay to use medication to improve your mental health. There are serious things like depression, anxiety, and mania out there that are chemical in origin and there is nothing wrong with using chemistry to get rid of them.
You should do this with the help of a good doctor and trusted people who can help give you perspective on how you’re doing. When you say “take drugs to make yourself a better person” I can’t tell if you are looking for permission to get high or addressing the topic of mental health meds in earnest.
- Comment on Having $270 billion dollars and spending the bulk of your time trying to make more money is like weighing 900 pounds and thinking "ooh, I bet I can get to 1000". 1 month ago:
I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all live to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.
I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 1 month ago:
I guess I’d rather have it than not have it, but I don’t really understand how it would make YT unusable to me if I didn’t know how many other people viewed a video. How often are you using those numbers to make important decisions between videos about what to watch? I tend to go by the topic and subscribe to creators whose videos I like. Very occasionally I might be looking for a guide to an obscure level in an obscure game and there may be 3 similar looking videos about it, but one has 200 views and the others have single digits, and I agree in that situation it means something. But otherwise I just never pay attention to it. What do I care if 2000 or 200,000 people watched a video that looks interesting to me? Some creators I subscribe to have just a couple hundred followers. I don’t care.
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 1 month ago:
This is inane but damn if it didn’t give me a good laugh :D
- Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know 1 month ago:
Personally I find the highest viewed videos on YT to be the absolute shittiest ones.
- Comment on Data Show That X Continues to Lose Users in EU. 1 month ago:
It’s going to converge with Truth Social eventually and at some point they will just merge.
- Comment on What is the argument for making poor/working class folks shoulder the burden of taxes? 1 month ago:
No man read the top dozen voted root comments and you will see the narrative: rich people are using their political access to fuck you and get richer. The OP doesn’t even acknowledge progressive tax brackets. The entire system apparently is specifically designed to direct money out of starving people into the super wealthy. That’s the narrative. It’s right up there with “CEO don’t do anything” and “you shouldn’t recycle because it’s just a scam cooked up by Big Plastic.” It’s actually hard to be a good liberal when those around me are dripping with this kind of horseshit nonstop.