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

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.

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”!)

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.

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

The H-Mart in Federal Way (south of Seattle) is about 2/3 Asian food aisles, 1/3 Hispanic food aisles. Of the handful of H-Marts I’ve been to it’s the only one like that.

Agreed. I tried to adjust to Celsius when I moved abroad from the US, and my biggest issue with it was actually in temperature control. I lived in a tiny studio apartment with an in-wall A/C unit, so I had really accurate, nearly instantaneous control of the room temperature except that often it would be too hot at one temperature setting but too cold if I reduced it by a single degree (Celsius). Had the system been in fahrenheit I would have had around three times as much sensitivity to control, which would have been perfect.

Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.

Basically all the media.

There is (or at least was) a special kind of joy in discovering a new piece of media (movie, TV, book, video game, comic, etc), getting to the end, and hopping over to the relevant subreddit to sort by “top of all time.” Bonus points if you loved the series and would get to essentially relive it all over again through the sub, but even media that you hated or were neutral about could be fun subs to peruse; maybe you would get to revel in seeing something you hated turned into a meme highlighting how stupid it was, or get to feel justified in your negative assessment upon reading an epic rant from another user; maybe instead you’d find hidden details or explanations pointed out by other users that made you reassess the work (“huh, I though that was a stupid plothole but it actually was perfectly explained by that one scene that apparently went over my head”). The ATLA subs especially were treasure troves of tiny details and “holy shit I just noticed on my fifth rewatch” posts that really elevated my opinion (and thereby enjoyment) of a series I was initially kind of “meh” on.

When I think about what it would take to feel like Lemmy had sufficiently replaced Reddit for me, the number one practical answer is for comprehensive news (political, world, cultural, meme, etc… Reddit really did at one point feel like “the front page of the Internet” if there ever was one), and the second is to have the critical mass to be able to ask a question and get a good recommendation for any specific product or service, via regional subs, hobby subs, etc (although thanks to LLMs and corporate astroturfing that may simply be a bygone part of the Internet). But the “fun” answer is to have the critical mass for a wide range of specific fandoms.

I’ve never seen (or even heard of) it, but that movie poster is not doing it any favors. IMO it reads like a fake/parody. Maybe it hit harder in the 80s?

I’ve heard two good explanations as to why she’d publicize such a story:

1. She botched a common Republican technique by choosing the wrong victim to villainize (full explanation here)

2. There are witnesses to the puppy murder (construction crew) so this is her way of getting ahead of the story before someone else tells it (AFAIK so far we’ve only heard her version; maybe reality is even worse)

Or we could regulate vehicle size and reduce speed limits, two things actually proven to reduce pedestrian fatalities and that could be implemented today without waiting on future technological advancements

¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I signed up during the Rexodus, which happened to be a lovely summer day so I was hanging out outside at the time of sign-up. I glanced around my yard looking for inspiration, saw my fireweed patch, and figured that was as good a name as any.

Fireweed is a hardy plant native to much of North America, with beautiful pink flowers that native bees love, and it requires little maintenance once established. It is also edible and has medicinal properties! Please consider planting it (or seed-bombing it in an empty lot) if you live in its native range! More info here

Twenty years ago the going rate at private liberal arts colleges in the US was $40k/yr (including room and board). What is an example of a school that was charging 2.5x that?

It’s a “freedom to” vs “freedom from” issue. The US is much more on the “freedom to” side. For example, freedom to own firearms overrules freedom from gun violence. In this case, it’s freedom to say nasty shit overrules freedom from hearing nasty shit. This is also why libertarianism is so popular here (they’re all about having the “freedom to,” even when it’s at others’ expense). This isn’t always the case of course (our strict zoning laws and development codes are a great example of “freedom from” overruling “freedom to”).

Actually the housing crisis has gotten so bad that I’ve seen quite a number of “handmade houses” sell in my region (US Pacific Northwest). And they’re selling for way more than just land value…