Roboticide @ roboticide @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I just bought a big ass TV, and I've just started buying discs for movies I truly want to own for a few reasons.

1. You own it, period.
2. Even if you trust Amazon, do you trust your ISP to stream 4K reliably on demand? I don't. Fuck Comcast.
3. A physical collection just kind of looks nice, especially if you fork out for Steelbooks and only buy your favorites. Steelbooks on eBay are like ~$30.

Few reasons:

1. The system is far from perfect. It's not as good as say, the NHS or Canada's health system. And while it's "free" healthcare that is better than the non-existent free healthcare that doesn't exist for other Americans, it's underfunded and understaffed, especially following 20 years of war which obviously saw a huge strain put on the VA system.
2. It's only healthcare. Veterans with untreated psychiatric problems also often struggle with homelessness and stable employment. If they're transient, it can be difficult to insure they, say, make a key appointment to get a diagnosis or prescription.
3. Many people who are largely on their own with psychological issues, including but not limited to veterans, simply do not stick with a treatment regimen. There aren't a lot of mechanisms in place to force someone to take a prescribed drug, even if it helps, and don't like how it makes them feel. This obviously can feed back into #2.
4. Selection bias. It seems like "so many" because our military is huge. 1.9 million US troops were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Of those let's say 5% saw actual combat (hard to say how many, but all estimates I have seen say certainly not more than 10%), which is 95,000. If most of those end up with PTSD, that's more soldiers than most of the coalition forces sent over, combined. If around half do (and around 35,000 US troops were injured, so this tracks), that's more than France's entire contribution to the invasion and occupation. The vast majority of the remaining 1.8 million who went over and weren't in combat are typically fine. Sure, some will also have psychological issues, but these are people who might have anyway even if they weren't in the military.

Not to shill for the US military, but, uh... source on NJ paying anything comparable?

I don't know if you've looked for a job in the US lately, but the prospects for a 19 year old with just a diploma, and not pursuing a college degree or a skilled trade, are pretty dismal.

You're looking at something ~$30k for a Starbucks barista or a McDonald's burger flipper, or maybe ~$36k if there's an automotive plant nearby. Both are hourly, so gotta hope they actually give you decent hours if you go the fast food route. If you go the autoworker route, hope you enjoy 8+ hours of repetitive, non-stop, physical labor. You're then spending at least a third of your ~$20k - $25k take home on rent and another third on food.

Compare that to $36k, with no significant costs for room and board. You're paying federal taxes but the deductions for active military are huge and most states waive income tax for soldiers. Your take home is better, your expenses are less, your fit, healthy, and your healthcare is covered for life, and if you leave after your contract is up you get to enjoy the government paying for college.

Like 99% percent of military personnel never see combat, and especially now that we're done with Afghanistan and Iraq it's even safer.

The military's problem is that anyone smart enough to do that math and weigh those choices is probably smart enough to do something else, but for millions of people it's a better choice than slaving away at McDick's as cost of living and college tuition continues to rise.

Many, if not most "regular military" jobs in Western armed forces don't involve front line combat and getting shot at or shooting at people. Less than 10%.

Now obviously, you look at Ukraine and think "Well that's a lot bigger than 10%," and it probably is. But any country with a large air force, navy, and sizeable ground forces are gonna have thousands of people trained to load weapons onto planes, manage ship engines, cook, drive supply trucks, load cargo planes, cook, manage payroll, manage procurement of equipment, fly drones, cook, run propaganda and recruitment, operate medical facilities... the list goes on.

I had an ex whose brother was going to med school to be a surgeon for the Navy. Her father, who was an Army pilot, thought it was great because he knew his son was just gonna be (relatively) safe on a carrier or hospital ship somewhere, not getting shot at, and just saving lives.

I feel like there could be a few rational explanations to that, but I want someone smarter than me to tell me what exactly they could be...

This is what happens when you don't teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school...

That's the joke. The Wachowskis both ended up being trans sometime after they made The Matrix.

Why are you saying this as if the AI would have control over the reactor.

It's unlikely they'd even be in the same building, or even the same campus. We have these crazy things called "wires" that let us transmit a lot of power over distances, so your small nuclear reactor can be remote, safe and secure and your AI lab can just be on your main campus.

That's a funny name for a toilet.

Consumer Protection says the boards would fail to maintain balance and crash, if "limits" were exceeded. I'm guessing speed limits.

So the new models get a firmware update to prevent that/provide warning if you're approaching such a limit. The old models, which are more easily modded and perhaps unable to send haptic feedback, get tossed.

We did ban that, and it didn't really do much. It just created a black market, much like weed today.

And don't feel the need to have kids in your 30s either.

At least a subset do. The study concedes it's self-reported and not necessarily a representative sample of all incels.

At the very least, it sounds more to me like there's now just cross-pollination between the old PUA community/philosophy and the incel community. Both are highly misogynistic, but incel culture is literally defined by men unable to find partners and PuAs are defined by men who only find many multiple partners.

A mysoginist claiming to have multiple partners just sounds like a Red Piller to me, not an incel, and I'm a bit suspicious of this whole "study". I'm curious whether this study even bothered to consider that distinction. I read the article top to bottom and found no indication on how they actually identified their sample of incels as incels, and couldn't find a link to the study itself. It appears like they simply found some online mysoginists and assumed they were all incels.

If you want the best Android experience you're not going to do better than a Pixel. It's a Google OS, on Google hardware. I myself am looking forward to the Pixel 8 Pro.

Hardware wise, Samsung may meet or maybe even exceed Google's line, but not significantly enough to make a difference in my opinion. Especially with the newer Pixels, it's a pretty mature product at this point.

Since the Pixel 1 I've been buying a new phone every four years. Honestly I prefer it that way. Saves money and the upgrades feel more meaningful. As long as the battery is good, you still get security updates, and the hardware is intact, what is the reason to upgrade beyond being told to consume?

Looking forward to the Pixel 8 next month, since my 4 is actually starting to show it's age.

Sure, but even rich people don't buy more than two phones, if they have one for personal and one for business.

Lots of states have casinos, this country loves to gamble. My understanding though is the brothels are highly limited in Nevada. Like, they are severely limited to where they can operate. There's not actually any in Las Vegas, for instance.

It's hardly the model we should be copying.

To both sides. They need to work with whatever party is in power. On top of that the real Big 3 American companies - Ford, GM, and Tesla - have committed so hard to EVs they literally can't back out now, but EVs are popular with liberals, not conservatives. They've made it clear their business interests align with the liberal agenda, and at this point any regulation on emissions is doing them a huge favor, something they won't see from the GOP.

Our state GOP was totally hijacked by MAGA radicals and now answers to Karamo, who's an utter nut job and die-hard Trump loyalist.

But they've gone so far a lot of moderate Republicans feel alienated and with our new balanced voting districts Democrats will probably secure victory for the foreseeable future. It still will be a tight race, but I would not be surprised if Biden's margin in 2024 is bigger in Michigan than it was in 2020.

In most countries it still is and basically always was illegal. I wouldn't hold your breath for the US any time soon, since half the states still can't get their shit together to legalize a harmless plant, and the puritanical pushback from the federal level if a state attempted to legalize prostitution, especially with a conservative administration, would probably be swift and immediate.