I still remember where I was when I saw that things had mathematically tipped past the point of no return for Hillary. It wasn’t a huge shock to me, but that’s mostly cuz I saw the writing on the wall when Hillary’s entire schtick for a while had been “no worries, we’ve got this, it’s not even a problem.” Democrat victories have historically hinged on whether or not they can motivate people to vote, and Hillary’s entire strategy did the exact opposite of that. Every single person independently went “she’s been saying for months that she already has it in the bag, so why bother voting?” And that led to her losing a lot of votes.

Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

And the big issue seems to be that the two sides have drastically different definitions of the word “love”. There was a study a while ago, which found that conservatives are more likely to have liberal friends, while liberals are less likely to have conservative friends. It sounds odd on the surface… But the reality is that if a liberal hangs out with conservatives long enough to become friends, those conservatives will eventually get comfortable. Comfortable enough to start using hard slurs, or they will call the liberal “one of the good ones” as if it’s a compliment.

It’s no wonder that liberals are less likely to report having conservative friends. Liberals have tried, and have been burned by all of the conservatives that they got close to. Meanwhile, the most offensive thing a liberal does around conservatives is just… Exist? Relatively speaking, it’s easy for a conservative to keep liberals around, because the liberal isn’t constantly trying to undermine the conservative’s right to personhood. Whether or not you can own guns isn’t an immediate existential threat to a conservative.

If you mean changing which app natively gets used for texting, that’s not something you can do on iOS. You can choose to open a different app, but if I tell Siri to text someone it will always 100% without a doubt no way to circumvent it use the standard Messages app. iOS doesn’t let you change your default for texts.

Hell, they only allow you to change your default web browser because they were dragged into court kicking and screaming. And even then, all third-party browsers are forced to use Safari’s engine for the backend, and aren’t allowed to use their own engines. Even Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are just reskins of Safari on iOS. And even then, any apps that open an in-app browser will still use Safari even when your default browser is different. For instance, I’m browsing lemmy on Voyager, and it opens all links in a built in Safari browser, (even though my default browser is set to Firefox.)

And it’s probably worth noting that self storage businesses have been thriving for the past two years.

The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.

It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.

Jod Himself could descend from heaven, and decree “actually it’s pronounced jif…” And I’d still continue pronouncing it gif.

I’d argue that this is petty, because you’re still technically able to get support for your issue in the end. It just takes a lot more effort in everyone involved; More effort on your end to actually get support, and more effort on support staff because they have already answered your question a hundred times further up the thread.

I’ve never heard anyone try to say URL as anything but an initialization. Do some people say “earl” or “yerl”? At best, that would have me confused.

I’ll disagree on the last two though. Both are more syllables than simply saying “sequel” or “gooey” instead.

This is fine for numbers that only have one separator. But they get difficult to read when they get longer. No reasonable person can read 957245815627 and functionally parse it in their minds. Can you tell at a glance, without counting digits that the number is nine trillion? Ninety billion? Nine hundred billion? You could be off by entire orders of magnitude and not even realize it until you stop and count the individual digits.

Breaking it up into 957,245,815,627 helps the user visually see the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions the same way we use them in language. The comma is a stand-in for the place descriptor. 957(billion)245(million)815(thousand)627. So now your brain can easily parse that there are 245 millions in this number, instead of accidentally seeing 724 or 458.

Yup, the issue is that it’s sort of like “Christian” in that it describes an extremely wide spectrum of worldviews. Are you a Southern Baptist who thinks everyone will burn in hell, (and makes it their life’s mission to scream that in everyone’s faces)? Or are you a Unitarian who just wants to follow the golden rule while smoking your weed? Both are Christian, but would fundamentally disagree with each other on what the proper definition of a “true Christian” is.

Many feminists would be better off describing themselves as egalitarians instead. But that’s not as trendy or as widely understood, and may be a little too broad if they’re mostly focused on women’s rights. Meanwhile, there are full blown TERFs who try to pick and choose which women should have rights, or feminists who swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and land squarely in misandry instead. And if you’re going to counter by saying that those aren’t true feminists, then you have fallen into the exact same problem that the above listed Christians have. Whether or not you agree with them is secondary to the fact that they’re using the same “feminist” title that you are.

Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?

Likely some sort of health insurance initiative. Lots of health insurance companies will give discounts to companies that can prove they have taken steps to improve their employees’ health. So things like mandatory smoking cessation classes, drug tests, gym memberships, etc are all encouraged by insurance companies.

My former company actually did things backwards; They offered a $20 weekly stipend to anyone who committed to stop smoking via a monthly smoking cessation course. It was basically just a monthly 30 minute video you watched, then answered some questions about… You could do it on company time, so it was an easy $80 per month that you were leaving on the table if you refused. The backwards part is that they didn’t offer the same stipend to people who never smoked in the first place. So all of the non-smokers suddenly signed on as smokers, signed up for the smoking cessation program, and immediately “quit” smoking so they could get that easy extra cash. I even used to keep a pack of menthols in my desk drawer, in case I was ever questioned about whether or not I really smoked. The first month they introduced the program, the company’s insurance must have been screaming, because every single employee suddenly reported as smokers.

A girl got killed by a school bus.

She had been cheating on two different guys, and they found out while on the bus. They started to fight, and the driver pulled over to kick them off. While the driver was pulling away, she decided she wanted to watch the fight. So she forced the doors open on the (now moving) bus, and jumped out. Apparently this was a semi-regular thing for her to do.

What wasn’t regular is that, upon landing, she tripped and rolled under the bus. The rear wheels ran over her head, and she was killed.

The school offered a day off of classes and free grief counseling for the students who were affected. Suddenly, everyone who had ever passed her in the halls was her best friend. It also started a “careful that you don’t get hit by a bus” trend among students, where pretty much any activity was countered with some form of “make sure you don’t get hit by a bus!” Going to basketball practice? “Don’t get hit by a bus on your way to the locker rooms!” Need to go to the library? “Make sure you don’t get hit by a bus on your way!”

It peaked when a student asked a teacher to go to the restroom. She was always a very prim and proper type. She quickly answered “yes, just don’t get hit by a bus on your way.” She quickly realized what she had just said, and looked horrified, which just had us all rolling.

My Steam and RuneScape accounts are both over 20 years old, and I still use both regularly. Hell, RuneScape is even available via Steam.

As far as the actual oldest account, I think I have an old Yahoo! Mail account from like… Late 1997? Early 1998? Back when AOL was still sending out free demo discs in the mail.

My wife recently had to get an array of bloodwork done. It was ~$700 after all of the office visits and lab stuff had been completed. And that’s all out-of-pocket, because our deductible (how much we have to pay per calendar year before insurance kicks in) is several thousand dollars. And we pay them ~$600 per month out of my paycheck for coverage, for just myself and my wife; If we ever have kids, the full family coverage (as opposed to just two people being covered) spikes up to nearly $1600 per month.

The monthly premium being $600, plus the deductible means we end up paying ~$10k per year before insurance even begins covering things. And even after the deductible, they only cover 80% of the bill, and we’re responsible for the remaining 20%. So if one of us has an extended stay in a hospital with a $150k bill, we’ll end up paying the $3k deductible, plus $29,400 (that’s 20% of the remaining $147k.)

And all of that is assuming everything is “in network”. Insurance companies have networked doctors, who have contracts with the company. If you see an out-of-network doctor, the insurance will often refuse to cover it, or cover it at a vastly reduced rate. Not-so-fun fact: Nearly all anesthesiologists are out of network, because they have a separate labor union that refuses to sign network contracts with insurance companies. So if you go into a surgery, even if you insist that every single doctor, nurse, aid, etc is in network, you’ll still always get an out-of-network bill from the anesthesiologist.

Oh, also, dental and vision are entirely separate plans. Because somewhere along the lines, insurance companies decided that you need to pay for a totally separate plan to have functioning teeth or eyes.

There’s a reason medical debt has historically been the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US.

I once got pulled over for drinking a can of Arizona sweet tea. Drove past a speed trap while taking a drink. They lit me up, and I was confused as to why because I wasn’t speeding.

Cop gets to my window and immediately asks if I’ve been drinking. Not even a “do you know why I pulled you over” or a “how are you tonight?” Just straight to “are you drunk?” I was confused, (and a little offended,) but answered no. He shined his flashlight into my car and asked what was in my cup holder. I turned the can around so he could see the label, and went “Uhh… Tea?” He deflated, have me a curt “have a nice evening” and turned on his heel to head back to his cruiser.

He 100% thought it was a beer can, and had hyped himself up for the easiest arrest of the evening.

Shoutout to that influencer who was pulled over for drinking Raising Cane’s dipping sauce while driving, cuz someone thought it was Jell-O shots and called 911 on him.

Honestly, +1 for SpeedQueen. That’s the brand that every laundromat uses, because they’re basically the Crown Vic of washers; They’re uglier than sin, but they’ll run for literal decades with very little maintenance. They do exactly one thing, (clean your clothes), and they do that one thing very well. They’re the “somehow my grandma’s appliances still work 70 years later, while mine all break after three years" of washing machines.

SpeedQueen doesn’t have any of the modern bells or whistles… But that also means there’s nothing to break prematurely and turn the washer into the world’s largest paperweight. Samsung washers, for instance, have infamously shitty LCD panels, which are notorious for dying right after the warranty expires. And when it dies, the entire washer is dead until you replace basically the entire control interface. SpeedQueen doesn’t have this issue, because they don’t even have LCD panels; everything is just physical knobs and buttons. If something ever does break, it’s just a mechanical switch that you can swap out in 15 minutes with a YouTube tutorial.

Windows 7. Some may say 8.1 if they were willing to tolerate it, but most will agree that Win7 was the last “true” OS that wasn’t riddled with adware and telemetry collection.

Microsoft lost a lot of money on Win8 (and by extension, 8.1). That made them rethink their business model, and they shifted away from selling the OS. Instead, they gave the OS away and made money on the data collection. Because Win8 made them realize that the world didn’t want or need a new OS every other year.

It’s the same reason people don’t upgrade their cell phones every year anymore. At first, the hardware changes were meaningful, and you actually got large upgrades with every new iteration. You were noticeably behind if you had a phone that was two or three years old. But now that modern hardware design has slowed down, (and hardware changes are more akin to updates on existing hardware), people don’t feel like they’re behind if they put off upgrading for two or three years.

And this reluctance to upgrade hardware meant people and businesses weren’t constantly buying a new OS every year. So Microsoft lost a lot of money when Win8 launched and everyone collectively went “actually, I’m good with my current computer.”

This is the same girl who has that unhinged photoshoot with the garden gnomes