quixotic120 @ quixotic120 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

uh, dunno if people have noticed but the Mediterranean is kind of goin through some shit right now. Also Italy has a pretty notable history of bombings and assassinations

But also what the other person said, dude is american. I’m so sick of my family members talking like sopranos characters because our grandparents were actual Italians. Plus they 100% definitely didn’t say gabbagool and proshoot before like 2003

It’s to fill dead air. I would bet the overwhelming majority of cable subscriptions are people who just watch sports. That’s why it’s such a nightmare to pay to watch sports online, it’s the last draw to actually purchase a cable package and for a lot of people it actually is worth the insane $120 a month or whatever bullshit they charge.

An ever shrinking minority are extremely tech illiterate people who actually watch that content and refuse to adapt from the system they learned in 1996 but those people are literally dying out.

But the channels realize the majority of cable subscribers don’t actually give a shit about watching cable. So they don’t bother with the expense of churning out content, instead going with endlessly regurgitating syndicated shit.

I haven’t had access to cable since like 2003 when I lived with my parents. I, like many others here, pirate a bunch of stuff (plus some physical media for independent media and stuff I want to support)

That said I recently got an iptv subscription bc my partner got into sports and the available options are either stupid, prohibitively expensive, or both. NBA streaming package is not crazy at $10/mo but it has a blackout for your local team, so you can’t watch games of your team, forcing you to a cable provider if you follow them. Anything for local sports is minimum like $60 a month and often double that. absurd. Iptv is super piracy but it’s like $70/yr for all the games of all the teams of all the sports plus all the channels of all the countries plus a huge library of content.

I watched tv for like a day with it and it was insane how terrible it was. Most networks just marathon random episodes of mid shows with obnoxious ad breaks. So it’s like comedy central- 6 hours of family guy, 3 hours of american dad, 4 hours of south park, 3 bad movies, 6 more hours of family guy, 4 hours of infomercials, repeat. Maybe there’s like one episode of new content every few days, and it’s something low effort like the daily show. Or another network like hln that literally just shows forensic files and informercials 24/7.

The news is toxic bullshit. Hyper focus on rage bait and propping up anything that gets ratings (which is basically trump and elon nonsense).

It’s insane. It’s just streaming networks where you can’t pick what you watch. They realized people like binge watching and leaned into that, hard. The advantage they had is creating new content but there’s none of that the overwhelming majority of the time. They’ve given up and are propped up solely by sports

I will say some of the other countries have decent programming at least. Tbs from Japan has some good shit (although you have to speak Japanese of course). They tend to have better news too

Often the high deductible options do financially make sense if you are in a place where spending the deductible each year isn’t a burden. They can even be advantageous if you are healthy; in that scenario they are essentially “hedging your bets”. You can save a substantial amount over a ppo if your utilization is low and typically if you just spend to the deductible the cost is about the same.

It’s the coinsurance afterward that can be a killer, especially if you have a chronic illness that requires a lot of expensive stuff. A PPO caps everything at a copay amount (which, tbf, can sometimes be quite high), but coinsurance can be 10-30% sometimes (maybe higher but that’s the highest I’ve seen). And if you have cancer, or some other nasty thing that requires expensive scans, medications, bloodwork, etc, paying 10-30% of the bill is still a shitload of cash. Thankfully there’s still an out of pocket max but that’s often quite high

And tbh I took your statement as judgey. I’m glad it wasn’t, thanks for clarifying. But that’s one of the issues with such a system. My colleagues who don’t do what I do are absolutely judged. But at the same time I do not judge them (usually, lol). This is not a sustainable setup. It is not sustainable to ask individual practitioners to take on the financial burden. It harms the relationship between practitioner and client, it’s destructive and can breed resentment. It results in quality of life issues for practitioners like wildly unpredictable pay. I could go on.

Ideally we would just be paid an actual salary, an actual living wage, with benefits, to work with a set number of clients, but with the current system this is functionally impossible. If we had a single payer system this would be easily feasible, all healthcare staff could be government employees basically. Good luck getting most doctors to support this though. They love padding billing under the current system

I have an ibm qualstar lto8 drive. I got it because I gambled, it was cheap because it was throwing an error (I forget what the number was) but it was one that indicates an issue in the tape path. I was able to get the price to $150 because I was buying some other stuff and because ultimately if the head was toast it was basically useless. But I got lucky and cleaning the head and tape path brought it back to life. Dunno how long it will last. I’ll live with it though because buying one that’s confirmed working can be thousands

You’re right that lto8 tapes are pricey but they’re quite a bit cheaper than building an equivalent array for backup that is significantly more reliable long term. A tape is about 12tb and $40-50, although sometimes they pop up cheaper. I generally don’t back up stuff continually with this method, I back up newer files that haven’t been synced to tape once every six weeks or so. It’s also something that you can buy a bit at a time to soften the financial blow of course. Maybe if you get a fancy carousel drive you’d want to fill it up but frankly that just seems like it would break much easier

More modern tapes have support for ltfs and I can basically use it like an external hard drive that way. So it’s pretty much I pop a tape in, once a week or so I sync new files to said tape, then as it gets full I swap it for a new tape. Towards the end I print a directory of what’s on it because admittedly doing it this way is messy. But my intention with this is to back up my “medium critical” files. Stuff that if I lost I would be frustrated over, but not heartbroken. Movies and TV shows that I did custom muxes of to have my ideal subtitles, audio tracks, etc. all my dockers so stuff like my Jellyfin watch status and komga library stay intact, stuff like that. That takes up the bulk of my nas and my primary concerns are either the array fully failing or significant bit rot, and if either of those occur I would rebuild from scratch and just copy all the tapes back over anyway so the messy filing isn’t really a huge issue.

I also do sometimes make it a point to copy harder to find files onto at least 2 tapes on the outside chance a tape goes bad. It’s unlikely given I only buy new tapes and store them properly (I even go to the effort to store them offsite just in case my house burns down) but you never know I suppose

The advertised values of tape capacity is crap for this use. You’ll see like lto 8 has a native capacity of 12tb but a compressed capacity of 30tb per disk! And the disks will frequently just say 30tb on them. That’s nonsense here. Maybe for a more typical server environment where they’re storing databases and text files and shit but compressed movies and music? Not so much. I get some advantage because I keep most of my stuff in archival quality (remux/flac/etc) but even then I still usually dont get anywhere near 30tb

It’s pretty slow. Not the end of the world but just something to keep in mind. Lto8 is supposed to be 360MBps for uncompressed and 750MBps for compressed data but I don’t seem to hit those speeds at all. I’m not really in a rush though and everything verifies fine and works after copying back over so I’m not too worried. But it can take like 10-14 hours to fill a tape. If I ever do have to rebuild the array it will take AGES

For my “absolutely priceless” data I have other more robust backup solutions that are basically the same as yours (literally down to using backblaze, ha).

This is true and mental health is a pain in the ass specifically because of it.

This is probably what’s called an EAP, employee assistance program. Basically your employer benefits provider provisions a few sessions paid in full. Great for you, kind of a pain in the ass for me. It’s more paperwork, the coding is weird, and the payments are lower (sometimes by a lot, like 40% lower). Not your fault at all obviously and entirely an insurance problem. Just another thing that makes working within this system an absolute nightmare.

However, sometimes this is called a “carve out”. This is different and less of a direct pain but causes so much confusion. This is where your works benefits provider decides that insurance company a charges too much for mental health coverage so they don’t purchase that portion and instead “carve it out” and replace it with insurance company b. This can result in you having specific copays for mental health even if you have high deductible (or even a separate deductible) because it’s essentially a secondary insurance (though technically it’s not considered as such and you would generally never even know the name of the company handling the carve out)

This is SUPER confusing for consumers because when you get your benefits package they hand you a card that says Aetna or Cigna or whatever. Then you see my psychologytoday profile and I advertise I’m in network with Aetna, Cigna, etc. great! we do a consultation, feels good, you send me your info, then I go “ooh, so sorry, turns out I don’t take your specific Aetna plan”. Because your Aetna plan takes mental health coverage and subcontracts it to another company who I have never paneled with.

Sometimes this is because I have never even heard of the company (paneling with an insurance co is weird, sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it takes 10 months), sometimes it’s because their reimbursement rates are a joke (one literally pays $24/hr which doesn’t even cover my overheads), etc. This isn’t entirely on the insurer though as it’s the employer that cuts coverage benefits to do this, although the insurer rising costs year after year is definitely a factor in why an employer would do that tbf

Does it matter?

A fat doctor smoking a cigarettes is still right when he tells you to lose weight and quit smoking

But for the record I make about 50-60k a year and have high deductible insurance. I could potentially make substantially more but I don’t because I have a large number of sliding scale slots to subsidize the care of people who have financial need, at my expense, because the system is bullshit

I have colleagues who do not do this and work the same amount of hours as me and easily clear 70-80k thanks to a combination of no sliding scale and much more draconian no show penalties assuring they always get paid even when someone doesn’t attend (some charge as much as $100 for missed appointments)

Some colleagues curate the insurance panels they’re on so they maximize payment amounts. Some eschew insurance altogether and only take out of pocket payments, usually far more than what any insurance would pay (over $150 an hour). These tend to make over six figures

But even if I was in the latter categories that wouldn’t change that it was correct (although it would make a hypocrite tbf ig). Insurance is a collectivist concept for the greater good and cannot work without someone subsidizing someone else, typically the young subsidizing the old. The only way you escape the need is being healthy forever (unlikely) or being obscenely wealthy (far more unlikely)

Those people generally have really good insurance

That’s one of the key issues of tying health insurance to employment: it creates a backwards system where the affluent pay basically nothing for care and those who make little pay a great deal

There’s a weird curve at the bottom because of government services like Medicaid, with these you also pay very little to nothing, but in most states you have to basically be destitute to qualify

It’s one of the most frustrating things about being someone who takes insurance as a career. The people I see who make $30-40k or less? They have 4-10,000 deductibles and pay 10-30% coinsurance after, on top of hundreds of dollars of premiums coming out of their check (that percentage wise take up a huge chunk of each pay). Their out of pocket max is also very high so their medical spending has to be pretty crazy to get to the point where they just don’t have to pay anymore

But the people who make 100k? 150? 200+? They almost always have nice PPOs. They pay $5-30 per visit. They have lower out of pocket max (though tbf still fairly high, it’s insurance) so their copays can go away (but this is uncommon, tbf). They pay more out of their check but not as much as you’d think because it’s usually more heavily subsidized by their employer (“nicer benefits for essential staff”) and given their substantially higher income it’s often much less percentage wise of their net earnings.

So someone says “go see a therapist”. If you’re making 40k a year with avg benefits that might mean you’re now on the hook for $120 a week for weeks or months (or more!) because of your high deductible plan, until you finally hit that deductible. If you’re young and healthy and don’t utilize much you may never hit it just going to therapy. Even if you do you’re still on the hook for 12-36 dollars a meeting after that. Meanwhile the 150k a year tech bro or banker goes and pays $10 a week.

It’s not always like this of course. Sometimes low earners get bad PPOs with high copays that feel criminal ($75 per meeting). Sometimes high earners do high deductible plans because they realize the accounting makes more sense for their medical spending. Or sometimes they work for a company that cheaps out on benefits even though it pays a few people very lucrative salaries. Etc

But it’s also one of the hard issues to solve as a result. In an ideal world the people who have more resources would pay more and the people who have less would pay less. The sliding scale payment system where the wealthy subsidize those who have less. But people are greedy and don’t want to give away their money. And guess who has more political power and also tends to vote more?

Never used goharddrive but can def endorse spd

Serverpartdeals has done me well, drives often come new enough that they still have a decent amount of manufacturers warranty remaining (exos is 5yr) and depending on the drive you buy from them spd will rma a drive for 5 years from purchase (but not always, depends on the listing, read the fine print).

I have gotten 2 bad drives from them out of 18 over 5 years or so. Both bad drives were found almost immediately with basic maintenance steps prior to adding to the array (zeroing out the drives, badblocks) and both were rma’d by seagate within 3-5 days because they were still within the mfr warranty.

If you’re running a gigantic raid array like me (288tb and counting!) it would be wise to recognize that rotational hard drives are doomed and you need a robust backup solution that can handle gigantic amounts of data long term. I have a tape drive for that because I got it cheap at an electronics recycler sold as not working (thankfully it was an easy fix) but this is typically a super expensive route. If you only have like 20tb then you can look into stuff like cloud services, bluray, redundant hard drive, etc. or do like I did in the beginning and just accept that your pirated anime collection might go poof one day lol

Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail

You can just get a cap that will fit on any bottle and attach to a traditional c02 tank. Added benefit that if you use this with any regularity it will cost you much less over time.

You can also get corny kegs like the other person posted but those can be pricey. You can get them cheap at restaurant auctions sometimes (I basically got mine for free but they were gross). These take up a decent amount of space but you can make a lot of stuff at once

yeah no shit, america is a melting pot and it’s food culture is an amalgamation of foods from other cultures

And frankly some aspects of most of those are spurious. The origin of the hamburger is debatable mainly because before america it was (probably) just a mince patty served with sauce, much closer to what japan serves as hambagu/ハンバーグ. It likely wasn’t until it came through shipping ports to america that it was served on bread, ground instead of minced (though this was likely a function of the era), and eventually over time evolved to the modern version of what we consider a “hamburger”

Mac and cheese actually goes back to medieval england and was closer to a lasagna. The extruded version is also probably england, or possibly france. Unless you’re simply attributing dried pasta, which is probably an italian invention, but may be arabic

Frankfurter is german but the modern hotdog is american and debatably the idea of serving it in a bun is an american invention, which again goes back to the hamburger and the insanity of prior to america people struggle to combine meat and bread

In closing I bet you’re fun at parties. Also while america sucks at so many things we definitely make the best burgers in the world, hands down

one week till vol 16 comes out, what do you think the extra chapter will be?

My bet is on Tsukuyomi doing a monologue that is ultimately meaningless

No it was a small hole in the wall place in (I think) kyoto that had a single employee and like 4 tables. The walls were literally covered in Americana shit but heavy on the advertising slant (which is pretty definitive of american culture tbh)

It did have drink bar though, though not nearly as much selection what you’d see at a family diner type place or karaoke

I went to a western restaurant in Japan that was “stereotypical USA” themed and there was mainly kitschy shit all over the place like advertising memorabilia (stuff m&m character statues) and of course american flag themed stuff (but iirc no actual flag)

It was a long time ago but I remember the menu was like burgers, hotdogs, mac and cheese, etc and the food was super mid. Main thing I do remember was the mac and cheese was 100% kraft dinner which was so disappointing. the burger was also weak which is inexcusable because japan has serious burger game

It was a mid ending. The concept overall was fine but the pacing was horrible, it felt terribly rushed after arcs that moved fairly slowly.

Like kaguyas ending was ridiculous, he wrote himself into a corner and needed a kind of deus ex machina with the helicopter moment, but in the overall context of that work it was mostly fine because it was a gag manga that for some reason needed to get super serious for 10+ volumes

This was different. The ending was overall structured okay. I think he was hammering home the whole “entertainment industry is deception built on destruction” theme but unlike kaguya, or onk previous arcs, that had time to flesh out, he apparently decided that he was ready to move on and pushed this ending through quickly. As a result there’s a bunch of unsatisfying bits where we don’t get much emotional processing in lieu of just quick montages of characters reacting (mengo pulling more weight in this final arc than ever tbh), we get tons of unresolved plot lines and plot holes (what was on rubys dvd/why did she need a separate dvd? What was the significance of the brackets around the titles which was actually something that aka said would make sense by the end? Etc). The entire nature of aqua dying ends up with plot holes; why couldn’t he have solved this any of a million other ways that are fairly obvious with even mild scrutiny

The theme itself, aqua dying, etc, aren’t bad though. Those parts can all work, but they would only work in a scenario where the ending was written with more care and not rushed out so aka could take a longer break before he starts his new manga next spring.

That all said it was also doomed to be received poorly because all the waifu nerds were only going to approve an ending that validated their pick and aka seemed pretty hellbent on the “aqua dies” route, which invalidates all of them. I do wonder if that was a factor as well. Just based on the nature of his work he clearly has struggled with online criticism and if you read the commentary about onk during its run the waifu wars were hardly complimentary to him. It’s not a good look but I wouldn’t be shocked if he was like “fuck this fanbase, I’m done with this shit” because onk twitter was pretty toxic at times, especially to mengo

Or maybe he just didn’t give a shit about any of that and was just really pissed off at health insurance companies, felt that all representation had failed us, and the only solution left was violence

But people will read an article that has barely any info and jump to wild conclusions based on pure speculation to categorize him on one of the “teams” rather than assume he is one of the vast amount of politically apathetic individuals that make up america.

so tons of the right wing will move to paint him as a leftist, because it’s simple with the lack of info available and the current rhetoric surrounding the event, because it is advantageous to them. the left wing will move to distance themselves because there is info available that casts doubt on his being a leftist and again it is advantageous for them to distance.

And while both spend time shitflinging away responsibility for this person, who never claimed either side, it will deflect from discussing the very real issue he exposed with his act: the health care system in this country is so fucked up that when it drives someone to murder an executive a huge amount of people cheer them on

Assuming the latter given he apparently didn’t ditch the gun, clothing, and had a manifesto. Especially so if it’s true the gun was 3d printed, that would’ve been much easier to dispose of than an actual gun. Dudes had days and is in an area where they have easy cover to burn all of those things

just get a clamp one?