Interesting question…

As an overall answer: humans are incredibly adaptable, so as a person living in the US, it almost never subjectively feels bad. For goodness’ sake, I knew people who lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park (one of the most dangerous neighborhoods) and happily biked to work. I personally lived in what people would describe as a “hood” and a “third-world country” for a good year and a half, and honestly felt really safe over there. Because of this, I honestly don’t think anyone can give an objective answer solely from their living experiences.

Objectively, the US is a developed country and is not terrible, but regarding your specific points:

1. Yes, the government passed shitty laws, and chose to not pass a lot of not-shitty laws.
2. Yes, there are more mass shootings than the country should have. I’m not going to say why.
3. Insured healthcare isn’t expensive (correction: some stuff are still too expensive even after insurance). However, uninsured healthcare is incredibly expensive, and unfortunately people without employment/self-employed have to purchase their own insurance… which is also stupidly expensive. Also, a lot of things that should be insured aren’t.
4. The different states are certainly different. US politics is very polarized, so heavy-blue and heavy-red states are quite different in their approaches to… many things in life. Whether they are good or bad is up to you.

I mean, people living in Switzerland complain about their countries all the time, even though almost everyone else in the world envy the way they live… so it is possible that some might be a bit overblown.

Hey OP, I am similar to you in most aspects but I’m a lot younger, so please take it with a grain of salt…

I also live in Texas, and honestly I thought a lot of less privileged folks or ppl with family ties would love to be in your situation and just leave? It’s not just about politics. Even if tomorrow Texas becomes a liberal stronghold, it will still take possibly at least a decade to fix ERCOT, the climate issue, and flooding issues (if you live in Houston)… This clusterfrick alone was enough to prompt me to never live in Texas again once I’m done with grad school

Besides, my understanding is that there are a few left-leaning metro areas which have suburbs (or live in the city!) that don’t cost that much more to live in compared to mid-/upper-mid-class TX suburbs, so there’s probably no financial disincentive to move either

Oh boy it’s my time to shine!

I’m working in aging right now. Heard of Dr. David Sinclair since he was the corresponding author on a paper I was curious about… So this is what his lab is doing.

Two important disclaimers:

• Success in cellular research rarely translates to something viable in the clinic. A lot of chemicals don’t behave the same way in cells as in actual animals or humans. Heck, a good number of phase 2 drugs even fail, and these haven’t even made it into phase 1… so I wouldn’t be too optimistic about them.
• The journal Aging is not the most prestigious journal especially for someone working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to be honest. I’d be more excited if this was published in Nature Aging or Nature Communications or something. If this ever gets published in New England Journal of Medicine (a very prestigious journal only for clinical studies) then we have some news.

The link between cell senescence and aging is something actively being studied tho.

And, if anyone is curious about this topic: I’m also very actively following Dr. Vadim Gladyshev who is also from HMS and is working in aging, I believe he is doing some wet lab-biology on a similar area as well. Feels like his research is sometimes a bit ahead of his time but I think his work has great potential.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone does. I mean banks also just shuffle money around and guess who has a bunch of cash lying on hand so… Goes back to the gold rush era, but there are folks who mine the gold and folks who mine the miners

Also some tech companies can be at a loss for years but run on VC money

So… I don’t know, but again I wouldn’t be surprised if they are making something to keep this nonsense going

Ah… so you’re specifically mentioning about the news article in question?

If you repay the loan, [your NFT token] comes back home. If not, [the token] gets a new owner. Simple as that!

I guess this explains everything… Probably just ppl hustling each other lol. And I assume given what types of shady characters are into NFTs, there are probably a lot of them who want to hustle another person out of some cash

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah… I do use mailbox.org and I’ve self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don’t open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I’m happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it’s not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

(insert astronaut meme) never has been

Jokes aside… This is my personal philosophy & probably won’t align with everyone’s. As someone who started science quite young, I realized quite early that beyond societal issues, literally nothing is “meaningful”… If Earth itself will be gone in a few billion years, might as well practice some optimistic nihilism and do some stuff with whatever life I have. There’s still stuff to do even if society doesn’t prioritize ppl like me

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it’s not really accessible for beginners…

If I need a VM I’d probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you’re familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers… pretty much Debian always since that’s what everyone supports

Stability-wise… I guess it depends on what type of “stability” I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it’s not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don’t have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there’s been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won’t want to support that endeavor

Yes and yes! Couldn’t contribute that much but I try to

I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I’m talking about you Google) is pretty nice…

Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps… in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)

I stand my opinion on this… Some people are defederating Meta because they are anti-capitalist; these are the same admins who defederated mastodon.cloud as well as instances from Medium/Mozilla/etc on moment’s notice, so I think they will certainly defederate from Tumblr. Most people would probably want to at least wait & see since Tumblr isn’t as nefarious as Meta is

Definitely. I just found the whole thing odd tbh… First of all, Nature is extremely rigorous with their review (because they only publish highly novel/interesting findings and is very thus susceptible to fraudulent stuff). Yet this paper passed for a Nature-branded journal (albeit a newer one, I think Nature Aging is only like 1yr old or sth) with doing only one experiment (a monkey trial), and they don’t even know what this “klotho” thing is… My suspicion is that the aging field is just too small so Nature Aging is lowering their standards? They’ve accepted less than stellar works before too.

The results seem fine to me & I really hope this is something real since I’m also studying aging, but as someone with some medicinal chemistry training… Nothing is confirmed until you get a positive phase 2 clinical trial result, otherwise we’d have cured all cancer and Alzheimer’s a long time ago lol… I’m not putting my eggs in this basket just yet

Interesting, I did drive for Uber Eats during the pandemic a bit…

I guess the main “backlash” is because these few companies have to pay minimum wage now? Drivers are gig workers so have been treated as independent contractors so far: a.k.a. no employee benefits, absolutely no minimum wage… The flexibility might sound alright to some on first glance, but the more you think about it the worst it gets. And yeah these companies basically made money by giving the false pretense that you can have a flexible work schedule but then squeeze profits out from both ends

So to get back to this… I guess these companies are arguing about this law not just because they are greedy for a few extra bucks, but because mandating them to pay minimum wage might straight-up bankrupt their businesses? I don’t mind tho… Uber got to where it is today by being a loss leader & drove out the cab companies. Might as well let 'em taste a bit of their own medicine for all the shitty gig economy they brought to us

Surprised no one else mentioned this… the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances…

To answer the second question… I don’t know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I’m aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.

I had a good bit of thought about this too… This kind of mindset should never be allowed in customer-facing fields in the first place (cough cough all the social media privacy hellhole we are in today…), let alone ones that risk human lives tbh.

Not sure how much of it is “predatory” behavior and how much of it is just a combination of being a masterful salesman + being really, really dumb, “drinking his own Kool-aid”… The dude was piloting the sub on every expedition after all

Excellent read. Have just re-posted this on 'key, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that Meta is doing something very dangerous to the fediverse… hope they could be stopped in their tracks.

Ah so there are some people on the fediverse who believe that any restriction is bad… Like the ppl who think domain blocks are too strict and stuff like that.

Pretty much everyone I’ve seen on Mastodon knows that Meta is bad. However, I’ve seen quite a few people echoing the sentiment that “hey I know Meta is bad but blocking is wrong & they haven’t done anything wrong on the fediverse”. The thought comes across as a bit naive to me but… to each their own.

From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for all

Honestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.

So it certainly doesn’t help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn’t realize it was such a big deal… I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.

Also, for large general instances, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some “fun” discussions.

Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously