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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2026

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  • Another Lemming (I just made that up, what’s the correct term?) mentioned how they blocked all the news communities and how it improved their experience. Until then I’d just been blocking individual accounts. I took their advice and blocked news, but also politics, communities about certain countries, and anything else where the default seemed to be activism/rage/hopelessness related. I actually agreed with the sentiments or causes of a lot of the communities I blocked, but I found that those actually hit me the hardest as I would get invested in them. All this blocking has helped a lot. Lemmy is a lot less heavy now. There’s more humor and animals and less horrors. It’s not that I don’t care abotu bad things happening in the world, it’s that I start to care too much while being powerless to do anything about it, and then I was no good to anyone, not even myself.









  • USian perspective:

    Things are currently going in the opposite direction where safety nets are being removed.

    In 2027, a huge chunk of low income people will lose Medicaid. It will be hard to see who can stay on it, because in most states with a higher minimum wage, working 80 hours would put them very close to or over the income limit. And people not working also lose it. There are problems people have that aren’t considered “real” disabilities, yet prevent having jobs. Obamacare does provide a low income discount, but there are still multi-thousand dollar deductibles. My prediction is that this is going to put a massive strain on hospitals because people simply won’t be able to pay. We’ll probably start to see some smaller ones go under (already are, actually, but it’s going to get worse, IMO).

    I think the Medicaid purge is relevant because working people got jealous that unemployed and poor people had better insurance than they did in some ways, and stripping that made them feel better about their own situation. That goes completely against the spirit of UBI, which is paid to both rich and poor and people in any situation.

    UBI would likely result in price hikes where the UBI money wouldn’t provide a real leg up as everything just became more expensive. We just saw that happen with the COVID stimulus checks. Or for another example, McDonald’s using the app provides a “discount”, but not even close compared to the prices they used to have pre-COVID.









  • With ls you can list the contents of directories recursively. Or you can list the contents in reverse order. One of them requires a lowercase “r”, one requires uppercase, but which is which? It’s not such a big deal that different commands have inconsistent syntax, but even having run Linux as my primary OS since 2004, and before that Unix since 1993, I still have to look these up sometimes.