shikitohno

Damn, I was coming here to say this. All I can add is that maybe sleep on your stomach with one of these, otherwise it could wake her up vibrating the mattress, since she sounds like a light sleeper.

I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.

It moves the discussion further to the right and legitimizes Republican talking points for the majority of people who will only hear a brief soundbite about this, rather than diving deep into the matter.

Besides, the GOP isn’t about to run out of bogeymen to trot out just because they could get what they want on the border. They can take it as a compromise and try to push things further down the line. Or they can decide this is good enough for now, and start railing against something else. Union membership rising being a Chinese plot to infiltrate the US and install a Communist dictatorship, so we better write some new laws to enable even more union busting. Free school lunches for kids from poor families turning them gay AND communist by getting them hooked on the government teat early. Woke public libraries turning kids trans by letting them check out books that don’t universally demonize it, so better put some sort of draconian funding limits on them. They’ll find something else, don’t worry.

The way you’re framing it and Congressional Democrats approach these things only work if the Republicans aren’t completely shameless, above doing things that should completely destroy any remaining vestiges for their voters, but this has been disproven time and time again by the actions of the GOP. If they think they’ll have half a chance, they’ll wring out even more concessions on this front from the Democrats by pretending to offer something they immediately renege on, just to leave the Democrats going “Aw, shucks, fooled me again. I thought you said you weren’t going to do this again.”

Why on earth would I want to shop somewhere that I can guarantee will ship with FedEx? I’ll actively avoid places that only offer FedEx shipping as it is.

My sense of taste kind of came back, but severely muted for some things. Coffee never quite got back to the same level of flavor, for example. I’ve also noticed my ability to taste salt is pretty shot. I can, but I have to add stupid amounts of the stuff. For an example, I had to do a clear liquid diet about a week ago prior to a medical procedure, and drinking some broth with 748mg of sodium per serving just tasted like drinking greasy water to me.

In terms of long term effects, it’s a bit harder to say. I got covid for the first time in August 2020 (yay for being an essential peasant!), and I was out of work until May 2021. I had to do months of PT because of what my primary doctor called a post-viral fatigue syndrome. At its worst, if I tried to walk more than a block away from my apartment and back, I would wake up the next day feeling sore from my neck down to my toes. I remember a day where I slept for 12 hours, woke up and made and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and just doing that left me so tired I went back to sleep for another 6 hours or so.

Other stuff is less clear. It certainly started manifesting and presenting symptoms after I had COVID, but correlation and causation being what it is, it’s hard to definitively say what might have just been low-level and not bothering me that much before and what could have been kicked off by COVID. I developed photophobia, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and some nerve damage after being ill for the first time, which are all fun.

I guess the photophobia is the easiest to manage, I just need to wear heavily tinted glasses at all times, as I get these awful migraines if I don’t. Uncovered light bulbs, TVs, monitors, whatever can set them off. The thyroid condition I get to take a synthetic hormone basically for the rest of my life and get blood work done 4 times a year to see how it’s working. The nerve damage I get to take another medication pretty much for forever as well, thanks to US insurance. Instead of a daily pill, my neurologist could give me an occipital nerve block every 3-4 months, but insurance doesn’t want to pay for them unless it’s done at a pain management clinic. For reasons I can’t work out, every pain management clinic I looked at with my referral seemed to be out of network for everyone, so it’d run me like $700 for the initial visit and $400 every 3-4 months after that. I guess they know they’ve got you if the pain is bad enough? Anyway, my prescription has been working so far and it’s the only thing I don’t even need to pay for before hitting my deductible, so I have that going for me.

Maybe users wouldn’t have felt the need for adblockers if ad agencies hadn’t made them increasingly obnoxious, intrusive and pernicious. They just couldn’t leave a fraction of a penny on the table and made sites more and more unusable without adblockers, so screw 'em. They can reap what they’ve sown.

I’m rather curious how you relativise a lot of the US’ recent history. Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t pillars of stability, but I think the balance comes down pretty hard against the US with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations as well. Our continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia isn’t looking so hot either.

Then we’ve got military intervention in the Dominican Republic and support of Trujillo until he stopped being useful, installing the Pinochet regime after helping topple the government of Salvador Allende, support for the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as backing dictatorships in Argentina.

Our colonization of the Philippines was pretty awful, as is our continued treatment of Puerto Rico as essentially a vacation spot and Caribbean ghetto.

You get the idea. Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of an instance in the last century where the US has intervened on the international stage and actually has a credible claim to having done good with the exception of World War II.

The government has created and fought for stability for a small subset of monied interests and has largely left the rest of us to jump for whatever table scraps they deign to let fall to us plebs. As @Nokinori mentions, even domestically, things are increasingly coming undone at the seams and looking ready to get worse.

He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now.

Stabilizing the world is just flat out wrong. At best, the US has stabilized itself and a select few allies. Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, along with a whole bunch of countries in Central and South America over the last 100 years would probably feel quite strongly that the US has been a disruptive force for them.

Do they not have phones or emails? Why do they specifically need to contact you via Facebook? The whole setup sounds rather intrusive and unnecessary, just tell them to call or email you.

Ah, yes, the prospect of another war with US troops going to a country most Americans couldn’t find without google maps is sure to go over well with people.

They are the biggest group, but it’s a pretty diverse group with a wide range of beliefs. It covers the whole gamut from Evangelicals who declare anything that has ever made someone smile to be of the devil and the King James Bible to be the literal word of god to the hippy dippy churches that are cool with gay marriage and will say the whole bible is just metaphorical, so come play guitar with them at coffee hour before the church goes on a nature hike to do yoga and meditate on top of a local mountain. If you consider the denominations individually, Roman Catholicism is a larger denomination than the biggest Protestant denomination, at least according to Wikipedia.

Also worth considering how many people in all camps don’t really practice their professed faith and just keep saying they identify as follower of whatever creed anyway.

Spanish gave us the word machismo, and it also conveniently has its opposite, hembrismo. So, yeah, I’d go with that, myself.