This is why they’re known as wedge issues because there’s no compromise.

Mid 20s is way too young to be experiencing chronic pain caused by normal aging. That being said, it can be caused by being out of shape. If you’re not eating right, keeping active, and keeping a regular sleep schedule then the pain might be because of your lifestyle. If you dont think you’re out of shape, then you definitely need to talk to different healthcare providers and stress how your chronic pain is interfering with your life.

I prefer my pondering orb

The hivemind comes from people caring too much about their votes or karma. Nobody likes seeing their post or comment downvoted to oblivion so they’ll play things safe and just post something they know everyone will agree with. I’m not sure you can have a voting system without having some kind of a hivemind.

I have over 100 communities in my block list. I scroll through All and if I see a community over and over that I truly don’t care about I just add it to the block list. Scrolling through All becomes a way to find new communities I like instead of being 500 posts I don’t care about

I found this Economics Explained video on the German economy pretty interesting. They suggest that Germany is losing its edge when it comes to advanced manufacturing but that isn’t really as bad as it sounds. America and China are massive economies and neither specializes in advanced manufacturing but in international trade. They suggest that Germany is simply moving into becoming another country that specializes mostly in international trading instead of producing things domestically.

Lemmy.ml is a tankie instance that loves China and hates western countries. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest Lemmy instances because it’s run by the main devs of Lemmy (who created Lemmy because they were frequently banned on other sites for bootlicking for China). Thankfully, Lemmy is open source and the nature of how it runs allows everyone to ignore the weird ideologies of the devs.

While I do think expensive caskets are a waste of money, they’re actually one of the least marked up products sold at a funeral home! Typically, caskets and urns are sold for twice what they’re bought for wholesale. This is mostly because anyone can sell caskets and urns so they can’t have ridiculous markups or people will go elsewhere for them. Urns for example are almost always bought off Amazon instead of at a funeral home.

The products with the highest markups were insurance based. Estate Fraud insurance (if someone steals the dead person’s identity, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in correcting it) and Travel insurance (if you die on vacation, the insurance company will pay any costs involved in bringing the body home). Both of these insurance policies had real costs of about $10 or $20. They’re often sold for $300 to $500.

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest “secret” is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell “famous people funerals at a reasonable price”. You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I’ve found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.