Two or three years, I think. So far the price has stayed exactly the same, they still have no ads, and they haven’t made any changes to the app to try to advertise features or anything like that. It was (and still is) a nice change from Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube to be honest.

I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.

No actually! Napster bought Rhapsody and now runs a music streaming platform.

I get the reaction though lol. That was my reaction too when a friend of mine recommended it. But I tried it and it is actually really nice, and the price hasn’t gone up in the years I have had it.

I pay about that already (~$14 a month), but for Napster, which afaik gives the biggest cut of any streaming service to artists. They also have really good custom playlist management, I never get intrusive popups or emails, and premium means no ads, even with hours of listening. I switched after the Joe Rogan thing happened with Spotify and never looked back honestly.

Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.

Avocados and peppers to make guacamole 😋

Everything I see talks about how that was directly tied to emergency spending that needed to be signed off on by Congress, and how Biden expanded it while it was in effect and is actively trying to get it renewed, with sources much more recent and detailed that that one.

For example:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/bidens-budget-pushes-to-renew-bigger-child-tax-credit-for-families.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/01/revive-expanded-child-tax-credit-spending-figh/70480784007/

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-state-of-the-union-2023/h_f3a389356f524ac0a87dc9d64fa1b97d

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/07/01/stimulus-update-child-tax-credit-baby-bonus/70363864007/

But sure, it was Biden who single handedly stole that money from families, even when Congress makes the budget.

That is true, but I am also proof that their stance was at least partially valid. I voted Bernie in the primary and voted third party against Clinton, and I was definitely not alone.

Again, whether actions are justified or understandable, to me, is not reason to excuse the real impacts that the election results had. It wasn’t helped by the results for Congress, but no one can deny that the US would be in a much better spot now if Clinton had been president, regardless of who was in charge in Congress. I will continue to support leftists in primaries, and especially in my local and state elections, and I continue to do activist and monetary support as much as I am able. But I hate being told that I am abandoning my values simply because I am voting for the highest chance for fewer people to be harmed.

Nice cherry picking of two examples without sources, while completely ignoring all of the other things Biden did repeal. It also ignores the fact that those things were replaced with better projects that were less susceptible to repeals by future presidents.

Again, I am not saying to vote for all Dems across the board, just not in the Presidential election. I vote third party in my home state for state and local elections because my state (solid blue) is set up in a way that allows for a candidate presented by the third party to run as a Dem as well, allowing people to vote effectively for a party line that makes it clear what actions we want taken while not risking a regressive candidate being elected by a split vote. There are also several blue states that are enacting ranked choice voting, which is also being supported by even most moderate Dems.

If the number of people who died due to benefit cuts, throwing out the pandemic action plan, and direct actions from right wing terrorists who were emboldened by a president who values the speeches and actions of Hitler aren’t enough to convince you of how much worse Trump was versus lib Dems, then you are missing the point of the values you claim to have. I support the values I do because they uphold human rights and save lives. What good are those values if my actions lead to the death and dehumanization of thousands, when another choice would have likely saved them?

Really? Because that issue was a combo of actual universal healthcare and climate goals. I voted for the only candidate who had a commitment to those goals. This was before it was revealed that this particular candidate had accepted a whole bunch of money from the RNC to remain in the race.

The result was enough people voted for that candidate that Trump won. The result of his win was that we saw even the half-measures that had been taken on these issues were stripped, setting us back potential decades because of new rules and packed courts who are now going against all precedent and decorum to prevent new leaders from enacting new policies. I voted for a few steps forward instead of half-steps, and got several steps back as a result.

Keep in mind that one of those several steps back was a gutting of voting rights, which is being continued by Trump appointed judges to this day. If you need to be a one-issue voter, vote to keep your right to vote by voting in a way that is most likely to prevent a Trump win. They literally already have a plan on how to remove and bar even more people from voting.

As someone who voted third party in the 2016 election, take it from me that you will feel more guilty if you know your vote could have helped prevent the fascist party from gaining power. The presidency is not the office to try to vote on morals, save that for state and local elections that decide things like state benefits programs, distributions of funds, and public works. The federal government is where you will want to vote for the people who are protecting your right to vote in the first place, and that is done by ensuring that the fascist party can’t get a majority or otherwise control a branch of the government.

If the Supreme Court were made up different, maybe, but ending up with an R president just gives them room to pack more courts and see a whole bunch more rights get removed.

Either pumpkin pie or apple pie are my favorites!

Thanksgiving is for pies in my family, any other desserts wait until Christmas.

When recipes call for you to cook an item in a pan without first adding oil, they say to toast it to indicate that you are applying dry heat to it. For example, most Indian recipes call for toasting whole spices in a dry pan before grinding. That is also why you can toast marshmallows over an open flame.

It just irritates my mouth. May be oral allergy or just a reaction to the enzymes in the pineapple. It isn’t as bad as my reaction to wine and vinegar though, so I have to see more specialists to figure that out lol.

Not really? I actually get confused if people use mixed up idioms or other weird turns of phrase. It is really only this food item in particular.

I also like my ice cream to be soup lol! Pineapple on pizza is okay, but I can only have small amounts of pineapple. The rest are odd, but at least you know what you like!

No, we grew up in the same region of the same state and haven’t moved from there. Most of our friends are native to the region as well. I have no idea why I call it something different, it is the term I have used all my life. Even my sister calls it a ‘grilled cheese’!