I’ve no doubt the staff are friendly, and that the vets genuinely care.

I myself was with the same practice for ten years, and the price for the yearly checkup was reasonable.

Until my boy was diagnosed with kidney failure. The care was excellent, and the diagnosis correct, but the price for the bloodwork and kidney ultrasound raised eyebrows.

I went looking. Straight up scam. The place was owned by a group that owned several other vets in the area, all with a pattern of low prices for the basics, and then 5-10 times the “norm” for everything beyond that.

The next practice over charged 1/5 for the same bloodwork, and could have saved me over a 1000€ on the ultrasound.

So, just double check. If you’re getting the best price in your area without compromising on the care, good. But if you haven’t made sure, you should.

Until the guards spot you and put you in there with them.

If you can, try to find a practice that hasn’t been bought up by private equity.

Pumping prices on pet care is another straight up evil thing happening, because people will pay anything for love.

With the result that people who really can’t afford it, either go into debt or lose their pets early.

Sure.

Saying people would end up “cowering in fear” and telling KDE to reassign the person who came up with making their own distro to kcalc was entirely pragmatic on your part.

You walked in with a lot more anger, and pointed it at a VOLUNTEER PROJECT that produces FREE SOFTWARE. You attributed profit motivations to them like they’re some kind corporate landlords out to capture the “market”.

The other person commented with info that shows KDE does not have the goals you suspected.

My comment explained why you were insane to have suspicions in the first place.

KDE is not a company, and doesn’t have profit incentives. I’m sorry if I corrected you on that a little too vehemently, but that doesn’t invalidate the point.

Or even my heated tone in response to your heated post.

Volunteer projects, have volunteers. Not project managers you can punish by “assigning” them to do stuff they have no interest in.

Yeah… Except GoodYear is a commercial entity. While KDE is not.

The reason corporations pull that kind of shit, is because there’s money in it.

Why the fuck would a FOSS project start locking down functionality? They don’t sell anything. Even when FOSS projects charge, the second they’re unfair about it, people will just fork the project and take it for free.

KDE doesn’t have “sales”. They don’t care whether they have a thousand users or a million. The money they “make” is the same. Because KDE isn’t a product you buy. Their revenue doesn’t go up or down depending on how many people they can get to use their desktop environment and applications.

In fact, if anything, doing what you suspect would cause people to donate less to the project.

The thing about FOSS projects is that if they forced you to use them in a way that upsets you… You can just not pay. With GoodYear, making you unhappy is worth it, because you still have to buy the car.

It’s because he knows how screwed OpenAI, actually is.

He acts like he’s surfing the wave. He looks like he’s exactly as deep in the hole as he actually is.

ChatGPT is the next Theranos.

He hasn’t just scammed consumers. He’s scammed investors. And that’s the one crime that actually lands people like him in prison.

I usually go with Kubuntu.

Set up flatpak, share internet from my phone via usb to install broadcom wifi drivers, and modify the KDE desktop to work more like MacOS (add top bar with search widget and alt menu, turn bottom taskbar into a dock, move window buttons to top left).

Hand it back to the post-MacOS-user. No complaints so far. In fact one came back with another Mac and asked me to do it again.

I think probably the biggest thing my parents did with me and by siblings, was humble themselves in front of us. They never tried to maintain infallibility or some illusion of omnipotence. I’ve seen some parents try to fight tooth and nail to maintain that well into their kids adulthood, and far beyond the point the kid has come to know better.

If our parents lost their temper, or made a mistake that affected us in some way, they’d apologize. To us. And that goes as far back as I remember. No privately apologizing to themselves because we wouldn’t remember anyway. But to us.

One of my core memories, is an argument I had with my mother, about how I needed her to be kinder with her choice of words sometimes. She was saying that I can’t let every word people say to me affect me like that, to which I made the point that I don’t. That the only reason I was asking, is because she’s my mother. And that what she says goes straight into my heart, and even when I know she doesn’t mean it, I literally can’t stop it.

It took her about ten seconds of silence to process that point, after which she apologized and promised to try.

That’s not to say we were raised the “free range” style. Our parents were strict, but they didn’t try to make their authority out to be absolute on matters where it wasn’t. Instead, we obeyed because of the simple fact that they had wisdom and experience we didn’t. And they in turn openly acknowledged that that didn’t mean that we had zero. As we grew up, they’d go our of their way to let us defer to our own judgements more and more on more and more matters. Mistakes and all.

The voting for small parties problem could also be address with multiple ranked choice voting.

That way, candidates who don’t win, can have their voters submit second and third choices, that are count when or if their primary choices don’t win.

That way, people can vote for their actual favorite, while without taking their vote away from a second favorite with better chances at winning a seat.

This is especially important for positions like president, where only one candidate CAN win (some countries achieve the same with multiple rounds of voting, but you can theoretically achieve the same representation in one round).

I expect you to stop attributing malice where none existed. To take back the words that expressed that idea the way I have.

An maybe admit that “not how that works” isn’t the tactful way to point out a problem.

How are you reading my mind, and still so wrong about what I “deliberately” meant to say?

I started off agreeing with you, and I still do. Rudely, but still.

I mentioned ace because there is experiential overlap. But obviously OP isn’t ace. They’re into women FFS.

You can assume whatever you like. I’ve clarified my meaning.

I tend to do that when someone goes for the worst possible interpretation so they can assume ignorance.

Frankly you walked in sounding like the kind of people who were mean to OP on discord.

Removed by mod

Duh

Edit: I know I’m not being nice here, but “that’s not how thing works” is how you correct someone when the main goal is feel superior.

Even then I agree that the adverse interpretation was there, so I improved my wording.

I wouldn’t say it’s wrong… But it might be inaccurate to call yourself lesbian. In that you don’t fit what people expect that word to mean.

I can tell where the disconnect comes from: most non-bi people find the idea of sex with their non-preferred gender repulsive.

In that way your lived experience differs from that of most people. You have a clear preference, but it doesn’t come with the sexual aversion for the other sex that most people experience.

Your experience with men sounds closer to how some asexual people describe sex, than what bi people describe. So neither “bi” nor “lesbian” correctly describe you. If someone was rude in how they said that to you, that was uncool of them.

I wouldn’t worry too much. The important thing is that you understand yourself, which you seem to be well on your way on. If and when you need others to understand, you can add on some explanations.

I think if we include niches with users that post daily, but not necessarily to communities big enough to be seen by most, we can up that to 6.

Maybe even 7.

See, I don’t see a difference between what you are describing and most corporate leaders.

I didn’t say a good job.