Anecdotally speaking:

Older & conservative folks who use nicotine seem to smoke cigarettes at a far higher rate than other groups who tend to go for options with less health impacts or simply don’t use at all. Again, this is anecdotal, but this is where I see biggest disparity in death rates in my personal life.

Although drugs and alcohol are a tit-for-tat mixed bag because it’s such a complex issue, in my experience, older, hard-right, conservative men have a very high incidence of heavy drinking and/or hard drug use that is probably only rivaled by younger underprivileged and over privileged adults. I don’t really see a lot of middle ground in that group either, it’s like they don’t drink at all or they drink very heavily, very little in between. And to top it off, in a lot of circles, conservative drug/alcohol users have to hide it because it’s not “socially acceptable” which seems like it makes the problem so much worse and the health outcomes much more dire. Liberal folks tend to be more open and forthcoming about it, and also things like mental health medications, and although heavy drinking is heavy drinking, when you don’t have to hide it, that does make it a bit less stressful.

There’s been a relatively recent, sudden, and fairly massive adoption of “all-natural” ideology in conservative circles. Raw milk. No vaccines. Pseudo-science medical care / medicine. Doctors “don’t know nothing”. This seems to be what the article is leaning towards. And once again, older, conservative men trend higher towards ignoring their health issues and “toughing it out” when they do have real problems, leading to worse outcomes. So, no big surprise if it shows up as a higher death rate in that group.

I don’t know the exact scientific definition of death rate, but I assume this is something that’s corrected for age. A lot of my examples seem to focus on older conservatives, I’m guessing that this phenomenon is seen across all age groups? I’ve only known 2 younger people (in their 20s) who died from covid. They were conservatives and no they weren’t vaccinated. One of them believed the vaccine would make him sterile and the other likely caught covid at that dude’s funeral. I know of a 17/18 year old girl from a conservative family that died from fentanyl laced drugs as well, but I don’t know what her political leanings were. Still, even if she was liberal leaning, that’d be 2-to-1 just in my small circle.

I don’t feel like the world is about to fall apart so much as its already in the midst of it. I don’t like the analogy personally, but it’s the boiling frog. Just because the water isn’t fully boiled yet doesn’t mean the frog isn’t already cooked.

That probably sounds pretty dark, depressing, and nihilistic as well as overly pessimistic and extreme to a lot of people. For me it is just a logical observation, like if I saw a delivery truck pulling out of my driveway and I conclude that I must have just gotten a package delivered.

At the heart of the matter are the two principle mechanisms I feel could hold things together. First, is people working together. Second, is technological solutions.

People will work together to solve problems, but now that things are actually falling apart, it’s more like (the other analogy I don’t like but I’m going to use anyway) crabs in a bucket. Too many people are in it for themselves, grabbing everything they can for themselves, pulling the ladder up, and it’s more than enough to overwhelm the people who can and do work together to make things better.

Technology isn’t even being used to solve easily solvable and relatively tractable problems, in fact, it’s often being used to make things worse. I suppose I could go on my old man yells at clouds rant about technology at the grocery store. Instead of using it to make sure the shelves stay stocked and things aren’t out of stock for weeks, we use it to adjust prices on a daily basis via e-ink displays and then forcing people to use terribly implemented self-checkouts. Now imagine that kind of problem solving being used on actual meaningful problems. Some of the technological “fixes” sound great on paper, but in the end they solve nothing at best and on average seem to make things worse.

So from that perspective, yeah, you might say I’m a bit worried at a minimum.

Another power issue in some areas is that these and many other enormous energy hogging facilities get cheaper power rates than residential customers.

They should be paying at least as much per kwh as I am, and in fact, I feel like they should be getting charged way more to encourage them to reduce their power consumption and/or convert to renewables. And in the meantime, use that “way more” to lower my bill or offer real financial subsidies for residential solar installations.

Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.

But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.

Here’s the thing: Even if she could do a video call, that doesn’t really prove anything.

Having said that, she’s 40 and she’s a CEO. If her “webcam is not working” she has the means to rectify that quickly. Not to mention, there’s basically no chance a 40 year old CEO of an international organization doesn’t have a phone that can do video calls, let alone no laptop/device capable of it. It’s pretty much going to be essential for that type of job. She’d buy a new laptop, new phone, get the existing stuff fixed.

Yes it’s a scam. There are many variations of how these work and there’s not always a one size fits all script. They’ll say whatever it takes and it could be anything.

Some will ask for money directly. Some will lure the target into crypto scams. This general type of romance scam typically involves building trust over time, and then suddenly concocting an urgent situation requiring money. The idea is that they need help ASAP, and if the target doesn’t act quickly, the scam artist is going to be in a lot of danger/trouble. For instance, she might claim that she traveled abroad and something happened (ex: lost passport, stolen purse) that requires lots of money now. Or maybe because she’s stuck in another country without ID, she needs someone in the USA (your dad) to cover some bogus financial transaction for the company or they will face big fines/bankruptcy/lose the biggest client/etc.

Also, people who are being scammed often lie about whether or not they’ve sent money. Deep down they know they may suspect they’ve been taken advantage of and feel embarrassed/ashamed about it. Even people that you feel 100% would never lie to you about that, will lie about that up to a point.

When these threads come up, it’s always interesting to see how many of the “I was banned for no reason at all, I only said puppies are cute” users have a post history here on Lemmy that makes me think “I don’t agree with full-on bans, but in this case, I can kind of see why they might’ve done it.”

Also, I always wonder with these how many people are saying “I was banned from Reddit” when actually they were only banned from a specific sub. It’s super easy to get banned from the average sub on Reddit (at least it used to be). Much higher bar, generally speaking with caveats, to get banned from the site itself.

Having said all that, I did get a temporary site-wide suspension from Reddit, the REAL DEAL, for using the word “retard” in the accurate non-abusive way when discussing methods to slow the growth of mold. So, there’s that.

As for what made me join this place? I was already ready to be done with Reddit. I was aware of Mastodon, checked it out, definitely not for me, but by looking into that I found out that there was a news aggregator style alternative of similar principle called Lemmy.

Are you gonna be buying a Steam machine?

Highly unlikely, so I’ll say no.

The big appeal (for me) would be simplified gaming for the 1 television in my home, but I almost never get that tv to myself. The other big appeal to me would be to buy the mega max pro pro plus pro maxxx xxxl super mega 2TB with controller version and then sell at a higher price (i.e. scalp), but that’s a little risky and not really a thing I’d ever really do.

I was only interested in the new controller to begin with, which that release has been botched to hell, so I’m not really likely to get one now. I simply do not want to pay that much AND wait that long to replace the crappy, god-awful, unreliable piece of shit PS4 pro controller of mine. There are a myriad of easier to find and/or cheaper options.

Going back to the Steam Machine itself: I assume it’s highly unlikely that Valve is selling this kind of hardware at a loss. Given the current pricing, I’m even more confident in that assumption.

Thousands of people have “done the numbers”, and while I’m not an expert on the parts and prices, the general consensus is that you can build something from off the shelf parts much cheaper. On the one hand, the Steam Machine is using some amount of custom parts and obviously using more expensive stuff for the smaller footprint, but on the other hand, they’d also likely be getting some amount of discount on a good portion of the parts/materials that wouldn’t necessarily be available to hobbyists putting together a home PC. So, I’m going to say that’s a wash.

You’d have to be very clear and very specific about what you mean “sells well” to comment there. I suspect that Valve knows that regardless of whether the price is competitive on a singular “by the specs” or “per performance” metric, there will be a solid number of people who will buy it. As long as they were relatively conservative with their estimates on the size of that crowd and produced fewer units than that, it will sell out. Selling out is certainly one way to define “sells well”. This hardware was never going to sell at a magnitude similar to established console brands, so anybody using that as a metric for selling well is, I’ll be nice, not being realistic.

So here’s the thing. Right off the bat it’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even seem to understand how the pre-order works for the Steam Machine – and that’s even with me agreeing with at least some of your overall sentiment. What compelling reason would they have to shut down the pre-order page earlier than advertised?

Honestly, none of us really know for sure 100% factually whether the Steam Machine will sell out or not, but it’s hard to take your questioning of it seriously when your understanding is so limited, and that’s the nice way of putting it.

Personally, I won’t be surprised either way. I suspect it will sell out, but like you, me, and millions (billions?) of other people, I also know that the price is laughable when appraised only by specs and anticipated performance metrics, so it also would not surprise me if they struggle with sales.

Steam Machine is (or will be) a PC, so I’m not sure how they would/could make HL3 and not have it be compatible with PC. Or am I missing something?

Humans are already imposing upon our pets and depriving them of their autonomy, simply by keeping them in captivity. Any argument against merciful euthanasia grounded in concerns about how it is imposing are moot.

As for pulling human euthanasia into this context, do yourself a favor and don’t. You might be surprised at how common euthanasia is in humans. At least in my part of the world, it’s largely a wink-wink nudge-nudge situation, but it does happen with some regularity. Also for people who are actually suffering in decline, there are all kinds of supportive care options being provided that simply aren’t feasible or economical for pets. There’s also not really the potential for the same kinds of perverse intentions with pets as there might be for people. Like, the list goes on.

So, basically from either of those two perspectives, let alone the fact that both apply, the argument against euthanizing pets that you’ve presented fall apart.

Having said that, this is often not a simple and straightforward decision. But since we’ve already established that we’re imposing upon them one way or the other, it really comes down to what kind of imposition do you want? The animal is going to die soon one way or the other. You can impose upon it and force it to experience the pain and fear and discomfort of its body naturally shutting down over the course of days, weeks, or months. You could impose upon it and decide to euthanize. What can you live with?

On a more personal note, I’ve had to have 2 pets euthanized.

One was a cat who managed to escape outside, it got hit by a car and then a neighbor’s dog mauled it. Literally pieces of broken rib and punctured lung exposed as well as untold other injuries. No hope of recovery. The idea of letting it suffer another moment was not something I could live with and it was going to die anyway.

The other was a dog with congestive heart failure. There comes a point where there are no more medications and no higher doses that are effective. The animal literally is experiencing the sensation of drowning. They’re terrified and in pain, exhausted, and suffering. The vet might be able to alleviate it a few hours or even a couple of days with a procedure to manually remove the fluid, but then you’re just going to put the animal through this again and soon. I could not live with myself forcing the dog to endure that knowing there was another option.

Plus, I have seen the pet owner that refused euthanasia and wanted their pet to die a natural death. The dog had cancer. I’m honestly broken up enough just thinking about what I witnessed that I can’t even bring myself to type it out. So I’ll stop there other than to say I’ve seen people dying of cancer in their final hours – there is a world of difference in those things, at least in modern times. The pet was clearly distressed, in pain, and suffering. The people are being made comfortable with drugs and medical care.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be hedging this guy’s hog, too.