Think it’s supposed to be a pun since John Wick and Wicker Man.

It’s not the government that tells the insurance what’s cosmetic or medically necessary unless she’s on Medicare or Medicaid.

Regardless, there needs to be laws that make it illegal for insurance companies to try and overrule doctors’ medical diagnoses and deny coverage. I’ve straight up had my insurance company argue with my doctors about prescriptions before, requiring them to fill out a bunch of pre-approval forms that they have to renew every year, which then causes me to have to wait an extra few days before I can even get my meds. Luckily, my meds aren’t life-or-death. Unfortunately, they pull the same shit for people needing life-or-death medications, too. It’s fucking evil and I cannot comprehend how over 220 million US voters aren’t rioting to get a better system.

Oh, I 100% agree that one of the biggest issues is due to corporate mass house purchasing and squatting. But my understanding was that is a problem in some large metros and the surrounding suburbs around those. For example, in San Francisco, much of the issue is due to NIMBY laws preventing high rise condos/apartments in many areas of the metro, which artificially suppresses the supply of new housing.

Really, there isn’t an all encompassing, singular reason that’s driving up the prices everywhere, but a multitude of them. It’s a difficult problem to tackle, but it’s incredibly frustrating that most governments (local, state, and federal) thus far have made barely any effort to address it.

Keep in mind that inflation has risen over 30% in just the last 4 years, which explains at least part of the rise in prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if inflation is even higher in certain areas of the country. I’d also not be surprised if Georgia is getting a lot of natural disaster refugees from places like Florida.

100% WFH jobs have rapidly dried up. They’re not super common like they were in 2021-2022. Most places either went back to the office or require a hybrid setup (x # of days in office every so often). I won’t deny WFH jobs have definitely contributed to a general rise in home prices in some areas, but I’d need to see data proving it is heavily contributing to a rise all over.

I think you overestimate how many women will simply prefer a woman leader by default. Several countries have had women as their PMs/leaders before and they don’t automatically win every woman’s vote each election cycle.

What’s going on here in the US is just pretty cut and dry: If you value women having bodily autonomy and equal rights, then the choice is pretty damn clear on who you should vote for. Unfortunately, it feels like so much attention is on the presidency, this obvious connection isn’t being evenly applied to other political offices as well (i.e. last I’d read, all projections have the GOP winning the Senate).

What is that from?

Haha, I literally just watched that a few days ago. For a brief second, I saw this post and jokingly thought, “so when did Lemmy start snooping on my search history?”

But seriously, it’s a really bad problem. It’s crazy how widely they’ve spread and become such a massive pain in the ass in so many areas.

I have rarely encountered places that don’t accept cash. The only places I’ve seen signs that state no cash are smaller businesses and/or street merchants/vendors.

Regardless, I agree with the spirit of your comment. I rarely use cash anymore simply because carrying it around is inconvenient. You have to know ahead of time exactly how much something is going to cost and then when you get coins back, that’s doubly more inconvenient/annoying.

Ultimately, OP’s post is a little melodramatic. Gift cards are meant to be more personal, although in the specific context they wrote, it does feel a bit half-hearted (“Thanks for helping, here’s a random gift card I found in my wallet that I never used!”).

Oh for sure, I get that. But the NWS website is still meant for the public to use, and the old design layout was simpler and faster to read. Some folks might read graphs faster/as fast, but not for many of us. Regardless, another user pointed out you can click on the graph and it converts it all into an easy to read table format. :)

Holy shit, you’re awesome! Seriously, thank you haha, that makes readability so much faster.

I only ever check my weather on NWS, but a year or two ago they went from having easily read hourly forecast data to those obnoxious graphs. I have zero clue why they did that.

You don’t even need to do all of that. Simply teaching kids to be curious, critical, and not afraid of failure prepares them in a much more universal/general sense.

A lot of these people were probably told they were special growing up and “really smart,” which unintentionally reinforces the idea that they naturally know things and their identity is tied to being smart/knowledgeable. So when anyone contradicts that identity–confronting them with facts that don’t align with what they thought to be true–it feels like an existential threat to their ego.

I like what this Ed Mitchell guy has to say.

Hell, I think northern Nebraska had widespread, massive flooding a few years ago due to extreme weather causing one of the dams to fail. Wiped out several communities.

Not super far from there (~6 hours), WNW Illinois.

Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines

We have our own shit show of extreme weather. For example, derechos (an oceanless, inland hurricane essentially) used to be rare. We’ve had 2 massive ones in the last 4 years. This summer alone there were hundreds of tornados hitting places that rarely ever see them. Hell, it’s god damn October and we’re still having ~90°F days, which hardly ever used to happen.

Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.

Sadly, I believe you’re correct on that… sigh…

$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.

But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…