Chobbes @ Chobbes @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This is a huge difference. Plus, even if you do end up paying a similar amount in Canada because you're very well off (boo-hoo), you also don't have to deal with the US insurance companies that cannot even accurately tell you which facilities are in network or whatever. It's just so much simpler and the mental burden of dealing with health care is much less in Canada. You don't have to worry about massive surprise bills or insurance not covering treatment you receive... It's just not an issue.

In my experience the wait times issue has been similar between Canada and the US to see specialists, though admittedly I haven't had to schedule a major surgery in either place. I will admit that there's some really nice facilities in the US and stuff too (and some REALLY not so nice facilities... Canadian facilities were consistently good across the board in my experience), but it's hard to really appreciate them in my experience because it's really shitty to be worrying about the cost of treatment / dealing with insurance and it also sucks to think about how weirdly exclusive it can be and how many people cannot afford it here. Frankly the insurance and cost issues are huge in my opinion and it makes it kind of weird to talk about because it means almost everybody has different experiences with the US health care system, especially when many Americans think it's fine that they spend a fortune on insurance because they've never really known anything different.

Ah! No worries! I’ve had similar issues with lemmy before.

That’s fair. Just when applications tout dubious security features it makes me a little sceptical of the expertise of the developers. At the very least I’m disappointed that they don’t have more details on this. If it is valuable, I’d be interested to hear more about it.

How expensive does editing and cover art get? I imagine it’s pretty pricey to hire people to do that. You mention this is moot going the traditional publishing route — I guess because publishers will front the costs for these things if they think your book will sell? If you’re buying cover art and stuff to self-publish, where do you publish your novels? Do you sell print copies, or is it all digital? Is selling physical copies even feasible without a traditional publisher?

Yeah, as a NixOS user I was like "what?"

The RAM shredding feature seems kind of silly to me, but I don't know the details. Ideally the operating system should clear pages before giving them to other applications... While I can see the appeal in also doing it in the application, it seems kinda wasteful, and I wouldn't trust the application to do a good job of that anyway. If the point is to prevent the app itself from leaking private keys on a buffer overflow or whatever... I guess I can see the value of that, but I'd rather see mitigations for the buffer overflows highlighted instead. I guess this just makes me a little suspicious of the actual value provided by the app.

Relying on a centralized service can still be problematic. If nothing else it's a central point of failure, even if you don't have any particular privacy concerns due to the usage of end-to-end encryption. Signal also relies on Intel SGX for some of their privacy features on the server, which is somewhat dubious. AFAIK this is currently mostly used for contact discovery, which would otherwise be an even worse situation, but it has seemed in the past like they were interested in expanding this, though maybe that's just all speculation. Regardless, my main concern with signal being centralized is that you have a lot less control over your chat. Signal can change on a moments notice and it's all just gone.

I think Twitter has just taken up all of the oxygen lately.

Just curious --- why do you consider writing to be an expensive hobby? I mean, it's totally expensive from an opportunity cost perspective, but wouldn't any hobby be? Is it the cost to get it published somewhere?

Yes, that's very fair :). You could do this very easily on a cheap VPS or a raspberry pi or similar, but if you haven't done any self hosting before there would be a bit of a learning curve / investment. Might not be worth it for you, but it seems like you'd get a much cleaner and more elegant solution out of it.

It consumes so much time and is so stressful. This healthcare system is an embarrassment and I cannot believe there are people who advocate for this.

Great reply :). I definitely agree, and do understand that libraries contribute to sales and can make or break books from certain authors. And I also agree that it feels different when buying something from a massive greedy corporation vs something from a smaller production where the creator probably isn’t making millions of dollars, and might be kind of struggling. I’m definitely not saying I condone these authors and creators starving or these works not being able to be created in the first place because piracy might make them unprofitable. I absolutely think that’s a bad thing! But at the same time I do think it’s a shame we can’t freely distribute these works with all of the amazing tools we have, and it’s a shame we’re losing the right to loan and resell things with digital media. It makes me wish we had some giant government digital library that paid for things with taxes (I mean… arguably this is just a library, but the restrictions and DRM on digital lending are depressing) or universal income or something so this was more feasible. Obviously neither of these would be perfect solutions, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a better way.

Just wanted to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying that we should pirate things and have authors starve or whatever. I guess I just don't think it's as simple as saying "piracy is immoral / moral", I think it depends on the context and on what the overall economic system is, and I like to believe that we could live in a world without artificially imposed digital scarcity and where sharing is a virtue and not a sin.

As a Canadian living in the USA… the efficiency of the US healthcare system in comparison to Canada’s is INCREDIBLY overstated. From my experience it has been no more efficient, but a HELL of a lot more expensive and insanely depressing.

You mean to tell me that they don’t use English pronouns in other languages? I’m gonna need a source on that one, buddy!

Although, more seriously, I am curious if other languages lacking common usage of gender neutral pronouns are doing similar things to they/them. I know mandarin also has a bit of a weird situation where the third person pronoun when spoken is gender neutral, but the characters are gendered (他/她/它 are all PRONOUNced “ta”). I don’t know too much about why this is, but it sounds like it was foreign influence that led to the distinction in the written form?

It's super interesting to me that piracy is generally considered immoral, but going to the library is considered pious. Obviously there's some differences with these things... But in general I find it incredibly frustrating and depressing that we have developed the tools to copy and share information pretty much instantaneously across the globe and that we have decided that this is a bad thing instead of a miracle. Obviously I still want people to be able to make things and make a living, but I wish we could find a better way to do this while providing access to more people. We can have kick-ass libraries with modern technology, but it's stunted for legal and capitalistic reasons... I'm not saying I have all of the answers, but I wish more people could at least recognize that as a shame.

I have an iPhone, but I will say for me the biggest deal breaker with it is absolutely not the lack of USB-C support (though that sucks and THANK GOD they're switching)... The lack of sideloading for apps is a much bigger problem IMO, because it's really hard for free and open source apps to even exist on iOS (which makes paid apps, subscriptions, and advertising much more common). Honestly, I'd care a lot less about the lack of sideloading if it wasn't for the other inconvenient facts, like the a $100/year developer license to publish anything on the App Store, or the fact that you pretty much need to have a Mac to develop for the iPhone... The $100/year developer license is just a death sentence for any open source apps and hobby / passion project apps. It's not thaaaat much money, but it's a lot to pay on top of putting in a bunch of free work to build an app in the first place.

I always found the VPN solution felt really heavy. I remember on Android you could at least also have hostfile and DNS blocking too... But maybe that was only because I was on a rooted device?

For those thinking of moving away from Gmail... I strongly recommend buying your own domain name so you actually own your address and can switch e-mail services whenever you want without needing a new e-mail address. Hell, I'd recommend this even if you're planning on staying with Gmail for a while.

Honestly, aside from having to point people at your new e-mail address... Gmail is not particularly hard to move away from, especially if you already use an external mail client. I don't really miss it, anyway. The only pain point I experience is that if somebody sends you a Google Doc / Sheet you need a Google account to edit it, but that's not a huge concern for me personally.

I'm self hosting my personal e-mail right now, and it's pretty great if you know how to do that stuff. Super cheap to host, and I can have as many aliases and send as many e-mails as I want. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's very doable if you already host your own stuff. Otherwise there's a bunch of e-mail services like Proton (kind of expensive, and a little annoying in that it's not just IMAP), Tutanota (dunno much about it), Fastmail, etc... But it's also worth mentioning that if you have a domain / VPS already your VPS provider and your registrar may both provide e-mail services that you can use... And if you just want to get out of Google and you have an iCloud+ account already (which is very possible if you have an iPhone and wanted more iCloud storage, but otherwise it's $0.99/mo) you can also use iCloud+ for e-mail with a custom domain.