• 1 Post
  • 127 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • I bought a Lenovo about 2 years ago that I’ve been really happy with. I wanted something with a metal shell because I carry my laptop around sometimes and use it balanced on one hand, and my previous Dell (plastic) started flexing and having weird issues with the TouchPad as a result. The Lenovo has been solid. I’m running Kubuntu on it, but my plan is to go Debian at some point.





  • It’s not just fast food. They’re getting the attention because they’re supposed to be cheap, but the price of eating out in general has jumped over the last 4 years or so.

    For example: We often eat at a local barbecue place, usually getting the same order each time. (During the pandemic, we would get take out.) I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but when I looked it up a while back, I think we were paying ~$15 more now for the essentially the same order. Adding $15 on to a ~$30 order is a huge increase, as a percentage.

    In general, our dining out expenses have gone way up since the start of the pandemic, but we aren’t eating out more often or ordering more extravagant foods. The prices have just gone up. (When we go out for meals, we go to a mix of fast food and casual dining places, some with counter service.)


  • My wife got into that lularoe shit. We set a limit, which she promptly blew past. You just had all these people, including the owners, telling you to buy buy buy.

    They prey on people’s insecurities. They take advantage of them.

    Call my wife stupid, I’m sure someone will because this is Lemmy where everyone is self righteous, but I think you don’t really understand the power of manipulation these companies wield until you see it firsthand. It’s actually really sad and dangerous what they do to people. And my wife has a successful career and makes 6 figures, we don’t need the money, but they still had her convinced she had to do this. I thought it would be a side hobby for her, but they were not kind to her. (Well, they were, but only to get money.)

    I remember trying to warn her that the company makes money when she buys, not when she sells. I don’t think it sunk in, and let’s face it, that’s how retail works in general. But with regular retail, you control what you get - Lularoe just sent whatever quantity of leggings, blouses, dresses, etc you ordered. You had no control over the patterns. I’m not sure if you even got to pick what sizes you received.

    Early on I helped, but I got tired of spending time and energy so she could sell one pair of leggings. She went to a few group sales things and would spend hours sitting there, plus all the prep and tear down time, plus gas, all to sell like three things. She only went to two of those.

    A host of other companies jumped in to help, for a price. Website. Square. Stamps.com.

    We still have some in the basement. I want to burn it, but we donate some to charities now and then, and occasionally neighbors and friends will come raid it (we give it to them free). We started watching the documentary on Amazon about it, but never finished. My wife was just too angry.

    One meeting we went to before she got into it had the head of Lularoe on video conference. She talked about having “600 new arts each week”, ie 600 patterns. That comment runs through my head every time I see a particularly ugly lularoe pattern.

    Ehhh at least I got a new camera out of it, for taking pictures of the stock.

    I joined the antimlm sub on reddit for a while hoping for advice and info, but it was just a very negative sub, mocking people and no helpful advice. I unsubbed after a few weeks. Fortunately my wife eventually figured it out.

    You’re not going to stop people from doing this by showing them numbers. You have to realize it’s an emotional thing. They are preying on emotions. You have to find a way to fight that.







  • Slackware in the late 90s. 3.x version. “If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user” used to be the mantra back in the day.

    I’ve been using Kubuntu on my desktop machines for at least a decade now. So, I’ve completely lost track of some of the things going on, like docker, flatpak, and so on. Which is actually a good thing: Linux has gotten so good, I no longer need to know how to administer my Linux system. I can just use it.

    I currently run Debian on my server and intend to switch my desktop to Debian as well. Haven’t gotten around to it…been busy. I also have to figure out how best to set up the nvme drive I have for it - GPT partition tables? Do I need a FAT32 partition? Etc.



  • The original thinking was the electoral college could stop any truly disastrous votes. But we’ve seen how that goes! Now we’re stuck with it because it helps one party and would require a constitutional amendment to abolish, and too few people in power are interested in doing what’s right for the country - they’re interested in doing what’s right for their party.

    (For another example of the “party first” mentality that has taken over: Washington, DC residents have no vote in Congress. This seems like an obvious thing to fix, give them a two members of the House and two Senators…but whoa, we can’t do that, it would change the balance of power in Congress! Seriously. That’s why DC residents have no real voice in Congress. For clarity, their votes do count for the Presidential election.)




  • It was extremely useful in sports for quick in-game updates, especially from third-party groups (like the news beat reporters, versus getting info from the team).

    It’s really entrenched, though: Even with all of the chaos and controversy, it’s hard to find articles that reference something that happened in a game that don’t embed some tweets (or whatever they hell they’re called now) for the video. It’s extremely frustrating. I think, in part, that’s why the hockey community here on lemmy isn’t taking off - no one wants to link to Twitter, and there are basically no other sources.