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.

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

The alternatives for tortillas would be purchase from a bakery (made fresh so no preservatives), purchase frozen (so no need for added preservatives), or make at home (surprisingly easy to do).

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.

Make a post about it and let’s find out!

I don’t see why not

Yeah but people don’t make a big deal about “save the deer!” and then start a cattle ranch

This is one reason why I love my native lupine plants. They occasionally get honeybee visitors, but I’ve noticed honeybees struggle with getting the flowers open to access the nectar. Bumblebee lands and his big fat body causes the flower to open right up. Gee it’s almost like they co-evolved!

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.

I think it’s because a lot of things are bad (and many are getting worse) yet the only power most people have to do anything about them is to raise awareness of the issues, which means engaging with negative news. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s real news and what’s rage bait; sometimes non-news can seem like news when it’s part of an ongoing pattern (such as “Elon’s dumb take of the day”). I think there’s also some degree of trying to maintain one’s sense of reality. To the previous example, despite being a massive fuckwit, Elon is still among the wealthiest people in the world, is incredibly influential, and has maintained some degree of fanboy army; posting/reading/discussing/upvoting an article about what dumb thing he said today is grounding for some folks because it reinforces reality by demonstrating that yes, he is still a fuckwit, even though somehow everything still hasn’t come crashing down around him like it karmically should.

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.

Skimming through the photos, they completely neglected to connect any of the sidewalks in the new dystopian refugee village. Whole community went from 100% car free to 100% car-reliant.