5,170 karma · joined December 25, 2020
Isn't that kind of always the bargain we're making? We can use someone's work as long as they're willing to let us, but if they change the license, we might not be able to continue using it.
Who wants to admit their problem with someone is that they see something in that person that they don't like in themselves and it's making them uncomfortable? Heck, if they could clear that up internally, there wouldn't be an external problem to resolve.
I am extremely forthright and literal. I am the one you can count on to come out and just mention the elephant in the room and ask why people are acting weird around it. And I can assure you this does not work. There is an entire game of communication through social nicety that completely falls apart if you ask the question out loud. You either figure out how to play it and read between (all) the lines, or you end up the awkward weirdo because you won't just let people keep their useful fictions about their discomfort with themselves.
And for all of you bristling at this, telling me it can't possibly be like that, that I'm judgmental for calling it exactly as I see it, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
We all do this. We lie to ourselves because living with our self-contradictions is unpleasant. It's much easier to ostracize the person who brings that out into the open than it is to live with our internal inconsistencies.
And the kids must be young enough that they're not in school, if the childcare figures are to be plausible. $32,773 for two kids? I'm not remotely in a low cost of living area, but you're not paying that kind of rate even for twin newborns. It's less than half that for after school care.
The problem is that it's taking average figures as though people who are financially struggling are paying average costs for things. That's never been the case. People who don't have money have always had to be careful about how they spend it.
It's a decent point that "3x food costs" is likely too low a benchmark. But it doesn't come close to justifying 16x.
I really do pay $15 a month for my phone plan. I've never hit my 5GB data cap.
I do have $30 home internet. So even if we assume two adults and home broadband, we're talking $70 including hardware, not $200, but there's nothing I do on my home WiFi that I absolutely need and couldn't do from my phone while staying under the data cap. But I'm not financially struggling, and it's an expense I'm happy to pay. It's not something I need.
Those are the actual costs of my phone plan. I've never once come close to the cap because I don't stream music/video on my phone. It's not a need. I can load all the websites I must access and look up maps everywhere I need to go. And it's a pre-paid plan. No credit check required.
People who are really struggling simply do not NEED to spend more than $20 for phone service.
> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.
We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.
You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.
There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.
It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?
It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.
I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.
The point of small talk is to get to medium talk. It's not directionless. Medium talk just means you've found a topic that both of you are interested in enough to talk about it for five to ten minutes without getting bored. That you both know the host is one of the few things it's culturally safe to assume anymore. Both of you met the host doing something you like well enough to associate with a person you met doing that thing when you're not doing that thing, so if either of those things happen to be an appropriate subject for medium talk, great. Now you're out of small talk and just "talking to this person I just met at this party about a thing we both like." If you're lucky, it's something you both actually like a lot, and then you have a basis for large talk, and large talk opens the door to casual friendship.
If you don't happen to draw a medium or large talk topic out of the gate, that's when you poke around the edges of the small talk, looking for things that could be fodder for medium talk. If you try looking for three or four and aren't getting anywhere, you've still filled the appropriate 5-10 minutes not to seem like a jerk, and now you need a snack, or a drink, and a new conversation partner.
It helps a lot if you're genuinely interested in a wide variety of things, enough that you can ask intelligent questions about them, because it increases the likelihood that you can find a shared interest with this person you've just met. That's not just "attentive listening." It's "finding out why someone cares about something interesting to them because you sincerely want to know."
If the other person isn't engaging with you at all, isn't trying to find one of these topics with you, they actually just don't want to talk to you. That's how people communicate this. It's not usually personal. They haven't known you long enough for it to be really personal. They may not even consciously realize they don't want to talk to you, but it's still true, and you're doing them a favor when you recognize that and excuse yourself.
Most people love talking about themselves and things they like to do. If you can keep them doing that, they'll remember fondly the "great conversation" you had.
Fair warning: It won't get you past the third or fourth interaction, at which point you probably actually need to have something in common, but it's an easy way to get through parties.
With the analysis you provided of the email, your report definitely deserved to be taken seriously, but Coinbase could easily get dozens of emails reporting "compromise" of the personal details you provided that were obtained by good ol' fashioned OSINT and poor personal privacy practices.
Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.
The private key is a 256-bit number. I don't think even 13,000x faster than supercomputers is going to get your cracking time under the time for a 10-minute block. 2^256 is a really, really, really big number.
You're making me feel lucky about what was otherwise a very unpleasant experience!
They were almost as offended as the people in Barcelona when I ignorantly tried to speak to them in Spanish.
Multiple doctors told me it would not be possible to decrease the score without medication, one of them even while holding the results in his hands proving that I had done it.
"I was correctly diagnosed with it before." "Correct." "I do not have it now." "Correct." "It is not 'in remission.' I just do not have the disease." "Correect." "But it isn't curable." "Correct." "So if it wasn't 'cured,' what did happen to it?" {head tilt} "You tell me. Follow it through. You used to have it. You do not have it anymore. It's not in remission. But it also hasn't been cured. What does that leave?" "#$%^! I don't know! That's why I'm here, asking you! As far as I know, all it leaves is contradiction and impossibility!" "Now, now. There's no need to be difficult."
(This is almost word for word the last conversation I had with my GI. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not paraphrasing. I went through it exactly like this, and she responded to me exactly like this.)
I say that just in hopes of encouraging you that healing might be right around the corner and you just might not know it yet. I certainly didn't know it was about to be over when it ended.
When they started talking about putting me on immune-suppressant drugs during a pandemic, I thought that didn't sound like a very good idea, but maybe my body could sort itself out if I gave it the opportunity.
Not a terribly sophisticated take, but it works for things like not popping blisters or picking at scabs, so it seemed worth a shot.
It was meant to be an elimination diet with reintroduction, but every reintroduction attempt failed miserably for 20 months. Then, suddenly, it was fine.
I still mostly eat food I would recognize in its ingredient form instead of highly processed stuff, but if everybody's going out for pizza, I can have a couple slices and be fine. I just can't do that all the time.
I wanted it to be soft/easy to digest, but also nutritious. This was at least a wide enough variety of nutrients that I didn't feel miserable (just bored).
The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.
During my own IBD journey, I've managed to stump the heck out of two different teams of GIs. I had been diagnosed with UC by biopsy during colonoscopy, and then at my last colonoscopy, despite not having been on medication for more than two years, they determined not only that I don't have it now, but that I never did. They told me "remission" would look different from "this bowel has never had IBD." But they also insisted I had not been misdiagnosed.
And yet they told me with a straight face that it is incurable. I had it in the past, confirmed by pathology. I don't have it now. And it's incurable. I give up.
In the end, I don't care enough to fight them about the contradiction, because the part I most care about is the "I don't have it now" part, and we're all in agreement on that.
(Note for any who are interested: I stopped medication after successfully reducing my inflammation markers within normal limits by eating the exact same thing for every single meal for 20 months with no cheating of any kind. They told me that shouldn't have been possible either, but it worked. And yes, it was as miserable as it sounds, but less miserable than living with UC.)
This is one of the bleakest, most discouraging comments I think I've ever read, and it's hard for me (in a sad way) to believe anyone might actually mean it.