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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • My personal favorite was my insurance at my last job had my prescription coverage managed by CVS caremark. I have a few prescriptions I probably need to take the rest of my life, and after the initial fill at my local pharmacy, they would refuse to cover it unless I had my doctor resend the script to their mail-order service, and had the gall to claim it was for my convenience. Some of said medication is controlled such that I can only refill it within a few days of my current fill running out, bud will conveniently also cause some rather unpleasant withdrawals if I miss a couple of doses. So, “for my convenience,” rather than calling in a refill and walking the two blocks to my local pharmacy, which has my refill ready in 30 minutes for me literally every time, I had to send it off to CVS. Then hope they filled it quick enough and there weren’t any Sundays or holidays to mess with it.



  • Sure, I was just trying to say that while some people will dislike the flavor of the currently vaunted light roasts, even when properly brewed, I think there is a pretty sizeable number of people who would like them well enough, but just find it too much hassle. Especially outside of the specialty coffee scene, where you see more and darker roasts, in my experience

    When Costco or someone puts out a dark roast on the shelves, they generally aren’t competing for customers that drink single lot beans from your favorite café, they’re looking to get the people who find McDonald’s coffee or Dunkin Donut’s good enough, but want to save a bit of money by brewing at home.


  • The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan

    Almost all, except for the oddball that is Strange Journey, taking place in post-apocalyptic Antarctica, instead. It has a lot of elements that differ from other Mainline entries, but Atlus treated it as such and acknowledged it with the recent Mainline 25th anniversary celebrations. I really enjoyed it and think it’s worth a playthrough, but it may not be the best starting point. I also don’t know how the remake holds up, I’ve read complaints about changes online, but SMT fans can be a bit touchy about their favorite games.

    SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.

    I’ll disagree on this one and just add that not everyone who enjoyed 4 found Apocalypse to be that good. From what I saw, people that really just love the battle system and doing things like building out the perfect team for tackling boss rushes and insanely challenging super bosses really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting more of SMT IV’s world and story, you may well be disappointed by it. I found the characters to be unlikeable, personally, and it seemed like an unnecessary rehashing of the story. I also recall some unavoidable boss rushes in the main story that made certain areas really grindy and killed my enjoyment for a good while.

    Otherwise, I would say a pretty decent write up here.


  • Plus often they’re not especially skillfully made and I’m pretty sure some people are reacting to very thin acidic, sometimes woody and vegetal, cups and assuming that if they don’t like this,

    Another possibility is just that light roasts can just be too fiddly for most people to want to bother with. Between the money for equipment and time spent brewing it, it’s probably just too great an investment for most people to take something from at least acceptable to them to being great, after a while when you get things dialed in and the stars align.


  • For native speakers, there is also the level of education and the contexts they use it in that can influence their vocabulary. I know a lot of Spanish speakers, both heritage speakers and those who grew up in Spanish a speaking countries. Heritage speakers often are educated in English and mostly use Spanish at home and in social situations, but are more comfortable in English for other topics. Lots of my coworkers who grew up in Spanish speaking countries have pretty limited formal education. In either case, they often don’t know the Spanish terms for technical, scientific or political contexts, and will just use the English word, even in Spanish.

    This doesn’t mean that English has a richer political or technical vocabulary than Spanish, but it does create a chicken and egg situation in certain contexts. Why bother to learn and use the Spanish term if the English term is already more widely known, especially if it isn’t a topic that would lend itself to popular publications and discussions outside of industrial or academic contexts? Even in Spanish speaking countries, the increasing dominance of English internationally can result in highly educated people in these countries being pressured to publish in English, further reducing the number of occasions one might have to use these terms in Spanish.


  • GM, who just announced a $6 billion stock buy back once they knew tariffs would keep them safe from having to compete with Chinese EVs, that GM?

    This sort of stuff is realistically why I have no sympathy for the major US automotive manufacturers. The only reason I don’t just say “Screw them, let Chinese EVs drive them out of business,” is because it would put so many people out of work in their plants who have no role in these decisions. Barring some fantasy where the Chinese companies establish US plants and offer equivalent or better union contracts for current employees at GM, Ford and Chrysler, these companies should simply be bound hand and foot in terms and conditions whenever something is done by the government to help them. Like, make those protectionist tariffs conditional on them hitting investment targets in relevant technologies, raising worker pay and benefits, reducing cost to the customer and a ban on stock buybacks for the duration of the tariffs being valid.


  • In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

    I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.


  • My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

    My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.







  • If you read the article, it’s defined purely in terms of income:

    The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.

    In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it’s just $30,120/year. I don’t know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you’re in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it’s the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.

    That being said, financial struggle doesn’t necessarily mean they’re one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.


  • Not just work life balance, but also the cost of living. I can barely afford to take care of myself, so I’m completely disinclined to go and create a whole new person that will be absolutely dependent on me to provide for it for years. If people can afford to live reasonably comfortably and conditions give them confidence that conditions will remain stable for the next 10-20 years, I bet you’ll see them start having kids. When they’re worried they could be homeless next year if things worsen and their retirement plan is advocating for the right to end one’s life on their own terms, it shouldn’t be a shocker that people don’t want to add kids into the mix.

    Also, perhaps decades of social stigma that said having a bunch of kids is something only poor, ignorant people do that represents a moral failing amongst the upstanding daughters of decent society is a bad thing to maintain when you want folks to keep cranking out more kids to feed into the meat grinder of the workforce.



  • Biden vowed to appoint progressives to the SCOTUS.

    While his appointees would be better than more Trump nutcases, people seem to be making way too much of Biden’s words on this. His words from the piece I saw the other day were this: “The next president, they’re going to be able to appoint a couple justices, and I’ll be damned — if in fact we’re able to change some of the justices when they retire and put in really progressive judges like we’ve always had, tell me that won’t change your life.”

    Unless there’s another quote I missed, that’s not a vow, it’s just normal campaign stump speech talk.


  • I wouldn’t entirely discount them. January 6th showed that Trump could rile up enough support to literally get a crowd of a few thousand to enter into open treason on his behalf. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised that the convictions stemming from it thus far have further radicalized some of those who held back into believing they’re legitimately at risk of persecution, leaving them more likely to take such extreme actions in the future. While I don’t think Trump himself could pull it off, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if more competent individuals on the far right took note of this and will do their best to channel the passion and loyalty Trump inspires in his supporters towards much more effective and dangerous action if he gets another shot.