Except he didn’t just have a raspy voice. He was mixing up words, rambling, even struggling to put full sentences together at points. And when he wasn’t talking he looked to be spacing out at times, just trying to hold it together at others. His performance was as if he was fighting a very high fever, a migraine, and/or was trying not to puke the entire debate. I totally believe reports that he had a minor illness and was having an off day as a result, but unless he had something like the flu (in which case he wouldn’t have been allowed on stage, certainly not that close to Trump) it would be completely reasonable to expect him to perform much better even while sick.

I think that matters to voters, because as president you don’t get to take a sick day; shit goes down and you need to be there for it. Maybe he’s not too old to be president on days when he’s feeling well, but I think a lot of viewers last night thought he looked completely incapable of handling any kind of sudden crisis in his condition last night.

Obligatory: assuming he’s still the nominee I’m voting for Biden in November anyway because all the alternatives suck more.

So initially I thought AOC was too young to be president, but she turns 35 in October, so I think that means she’d qualify?

Historically most presidents were in their 50s or 60s when inaugurated; I struggle to see anyone who barely made the cutoff even being considered for nomination.

I’ve heard several of these “I accidentally found out I have ADHD when I tried meds recreationally” stories. How accurate of a diagnostic strategy is this, actually? For many reasons this would never be implemented in a medical setting of course, but theoretically if you gave a room of random people ADHD meds and recorded who got high and who calmed down, would there be a lot of false positives/negatives in determining who has ADHD?

Yeah I kinda suspect these anti-mask laws are going to be a disability lawsuit bonanza

The alternatives for tortillas would be purchase from a bakery (made fresh so no preservatives), purchase frozen (so no need for added preservatives), or make at home (surprisingly easy to do).

I remember really enjoying How I Met Your Mother when it was airing. I tried for a rewatch recently and only made it a few episodes in because I was so disinterested. It felt empty, and the humor wasn’t hitting. I think it’s a combination of I’ve changed (I’ve aged out of the “20-something singles fool around in a fantasy version of NYC” demographic) and TV has evolved (good comedy shows are no longer just goofy hijink situations and setups for one-liners).

So instead I rewatched Archer season one (same era as HIMYM) and fortunately that one still slaps.

Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.

You might want to consider a priest for the damned lakes (which were presumably corrupted by the damned rain?)

Well, it’s extremely unfortunate then that the last half-century of zoning and building policies have put us two million homes in the hole. Where y’all plan on putting millions of surplus people, broken down RVs in the Walmart parking lot? (Except now it’s also illegal to be homeless in many places… It’s hard to pay into social security when you’ve been fired for your job after getting arrested for “loitering”!)

Archive link: https://archive.ph/7Z0VX

(The article is worth reading, IMO)

You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

All I want to know is: will this push companies to rethink infinite scroll? Like, even to make it a toggleable option.

I really appreciate that Lemmy still has distinct pages. “I’ll stop at the end of this page” is the easiest way to quit a social media session, which is why most companies have eliminated it.

I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.

Make a post about it and let’s find out!

I don’t see why not

That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?

Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)

Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong “why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” vibes. Articles? Don’t exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you’ll change the meaning of the sentence.

“Went” is a complete sentence in Japanese.