Except he didn’t just have a raspy voice. He was mixing up words, rambling, even struggling to put full sentences together at points. And when he wasn’t talking he looked to be spacing out at times, just trying to hold it together at others. His performance was as if he was fighting a very high fever, a migraine, and/or was trying not to puke the entire debate. I totally believe reports that he had a minor illness and was having an off day as a result, but unless he had something like the flu (in which case he wouldn’t have been allowed on stage, certainly not that close to Trump) it would be completely reasonable to expect him to perform much better even while sick.

I think that matters to voters, because as president you don’t get to take a sick day; shit goes down and you need to be there for it. Maybe he’s not too old to be president on days when he’s feeling well, but I think a lot of viewers last night thought he looked completely incapable of handling any kind of sudden crisis in his condition last night.

Obligatory: assuming he’s still the nominee I’m voting for Biden in November anyway because all the alternatives suck more.

So initially I thought AOC was too young to be president, but she turns 35 in October, so I think that means she’d qualify?

Historically most presidents were in their 50s or 60s when inaugurated; I struggle to see anyone who barely made the cutoff even being considered for nomination.

I’ve heard several of these “I accidentally found out I have ADHD when I tried meds recreationally” stories. How accurate of a diagnostic strategy is this, actually? For many reasons this would never be implemented in a medical setting of course, but theoretically if you gave a room of random people ADHD meds and recorded who got high and who calmed down, would there be a lot of false positives/negatives in determining who has ADHD?

Yeah I kinda suspect these anti-mask laws are going to be a disability lawsuit bonanza

Every climate scientist crunching the numbers right now is freaking out behind semi-closed doors because they’re worried that if the media starts running with the story that “thanks to a series of feedback loops the climate may already be fucked beyond hope of ever returning to normal, and at this point the best we can do is try to minimize the damage but even that will require completely upending the status quo,” everyone will give up on climate/environmental action entirely, so the public instead is fed an alternating diet of toned-down warnings and positive news about microscopic improvements to maintain a general sense of hope.

If that’s “moving in the right direction,” we deserve our demise.

Are we still rapidly backsliding on climate issues? Then don’t wonder why “no one knows about how much Biden is helping the issue.” I, like I’d imagine most people, have little interest in hearing about his “wins,” be they climate, economic, etc, if all they amount to is “I helped make a worsening problem worsen slower!” That’s not news, that’s just a reminder of how pathetic the better of two evils is. If he actually does something substantial enough to improve even one of the many giant problems the country/world currently faces, everyone will know about it because it will visibly change the communities that we live in, and directly affect our day-to-day lives. The time for incremental change was the 20th century; we’ve kicked the can down the road for so long it landed in “go big or go home” territory.

To be clear, I’m going to vote Biden in November because the alternatives are all so much worse, but damn, that’s not something to celebrate.

Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.

You might want to consider a priest for the damned lakes (which were presumably corrupted by the damned rain?)

Well, it’s extremely unfortunate then that the last half-century of zoning and building policies have put us two million homes in the hole. Where y’all plan on putting millions of surplus people, broken down RVs in the Walmart parking lot? (Except now it’s also illegal to be homeless in many places… It’s hard to pay into social security when you’ve been fired for your job after getting arrested for “loitering”!)

Archive link: https://archive.ph/7Z0VX

(The article is worth reading, IMO)

You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

All I want to know is: will this push companies to rethink infinite scroll? Like, even to make it a toggleable option.

I really appreciate that Lemmy still has distinct pages. “I’ll stop at the end of this page” is the easiest way to quit a social media session, which is why most companies have eliminated it.

I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.

It really depends on how much you want to encourage engagement on a post. Ever since forever people have complained that folks in the comments clearly didn’t read the article, so when comments complain about a paywall you can A) do what OP did and describe the multiple steps each individual reader can take to access the article or B) link to archive when you make the post in the first place. Commenters complaining of a “paywall” are usually remarking on easy/immediate accessibility, not on whether it’s free or not.

In that case, you can start posting links to the archive version for people to access instead.

The H-Mart in Federal Way (south of Seattle) is about 2/3 Asian food aisles, 1/3 Hispanic food aisles. Of the handful of H-Marts I’ve been to it’s the only one like that.

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations […] What’s gone wrong?

Answer: Shit’s bad and getting worse (especially for younger generations) while the old & rich people in charge twiddle their thumbs because “I got mine, fuck you.” Any other questions?

I definitely wouldn’t conclude that anything the mental health industry did or didn’t do has anything to do with the mental health of youth today; given current circumstances the kids who are alright are the abnormal ones.

Agreed. I tried to adjust to Celsius when I moved abroad from the US, and my biggest issue with it was actually in temperature control. I lived in a tiny studio apartment with an in-wall A/C unit, so I had really accurate, nearly instantaneous control of the room temperature except that often it would be too hot at one temperature setting but too cold if I reduced it by a single degree (Celsius). Had the system been in fahrenheit I would have had around three times as much sensitivity to control, which would have been perfect.

Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.