mynachmadarch

Actually the one you play with a skull. Most call it Griffball though.

And hand that list to the lockpicking lawyer right?

And I’m saying you’re wrong and completely ignoring the actions he took to address it. It was mentioned. States were to expand Medicaid in conjunction with his expanding ACA explicitly to handle situations like you brought up.

His proposed budget involves $150 billion earmarked for Medicaid explicitly to expand it to cover people in your situation where the 10 states did not expand coverage as they were supposed to after his American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. This was not 14 years ago. That was 3 and 2 respectively. And the budget is being debated currently.

He’s mentioned it. He’s been trying to tackle it.

I’m sorry you’re in that situation, but this is wrong.

He successfully created subsidies that brought Affordable Care Plan enrollment up and brought the number of uninsured Americans down from 14.5% to 11% through the American Rescue Plan Act, which removed a cap on eligibility for subsidies above 400 percent of the poverty level and limited premiums to 8.5% income among other things.

Every action he’s tried to take in the healthcare front has been blocked by others, lawsuits from drug companies, Congress, you name it. States were supposed to take increased funding and expand Medicaid access for people outside the income range for ACA at the same time as the increased subsidies. Many did. Several did not (take a guess which).

He’s certainly a flawed president and I wish Democrats ran someone stronger, but this critique is provably false. He has mentioned it and tried to take actions to improve healthcare access.

Of course he could do more, but saying “no mention” is either willfully ignorant or trollish or angered exaggeration. This is on top of the health care improvements he managed to get into the Inflation Reduction Act and proposed healthcare funding in the budget he released in March (which is again supposed to expand Medicaid and Medicare).

It’s complicated, but some would argue the modern Internet started in 1986 (with the adoption of DNS and TCP/IP for the NFSNET), a full year after Handmaid’s Tale was published even.

But yeah, Atwood stated she took inspiration from religious movements in the 1980s to oppress women, the Islamic revolution in Iran in the 1970s and it’s effect on women, and the pushback in late 1940s against women working after the war ended.

All of this prexisted the Internet by a long shot.

Ol’ Georgie boy wasn’t wrong. (Well, about cars. If I remember correctly he was wrong about his mom’s love).

No, but you can be average and Tinker Bell.

I’d argue TV is a side effect of the same thing that killed strong communities in the US, not the cause. Look at Europe, they all have TV’s and screens, plenty laying video games, but they still have active third spaces.

I think your comment on cars is more right. Americans “embraced” (thanks car companies for buying and killing our public transit) suburban sprawl through our embrace of cars. This meant we moved away from denser downtown areas where people could intermingle by chance and moved instead to splintered specialized places (thanks for having the way to our modern hell Edward Bassett). This got mixed with the American dream picket fence and lawn pushed by Monsanto post WWII and sprinkled with some casual racism and other issues to become a death spiral away from mixed use zoning and into large separate houses and plots of land. So life became “simple”. Home, grocery store, work.

You can’t just walk five minutes down the street anymore to a coffee shop or jazz club and find yourself rubbing elbows with people, and everyone driving cars to a dense social area just doesn’t work, if everyone tried to go to their city’s downtown the parking would just not support it. So we replaced this socializing with TV. A symptom sprouted from the root cause, not the cause itself.

There’s been a push to change zoning laws back to allowing mixed zoning which would directly improve this, but NIMBYs are out in force against it because it will lower the value of their home, which is a whole other related issue.

Honestly not even brownouts. I was so hyped for the potential of IOT to let distributed power management be a bigger thing. Throw your laundry in the wash when you have enough and just let the electric company trigger it when they’ve got excess or low consumption periods to help balance things.

Instead we get unsecure cameras or DDOS botfarms piggybacking “smart” thermostats or fridges that let you tweet.

One thing, does your dog actually crack the treats or can it swallow them whole? We thought the same thing with our large (not overweight, but still 16 lb) cats. Gave them daily dental treats, vet kept saying teeth are bad.

We switched to a new vet during a move who explicitly pointed that out to us, if they aren’t actually chewing on and cracking them it does nothing. Got the same treat just made larger, way less dental issues.

New plan everyone. Sue your company for their crime against humanity and the environment for their lack of bidets.

No, Stupid, Questions!

Doesn’t mean we need to cut down a forest to build the factory.

But apparently it can’t cover the cost of monopoly go!? That, that amuses me. I need to look into that one more.

Wow. Way to show you have no understanding of neither the proposed solutions nor NIMBYs. The idiots voting them down don’t care about what is actually being proposed, they care exclusively that it will lower housing costs. If there’s enough housing for everyone their house suddenly isn’t as precious a commodity and their retirement plan just withered away.

There’s plenty of people who would happily move into new apartments.

The original was titled “October Rain” (a reference to an October Hamas attack),
had lyrics like:
Hours and hours
and flowers
Life is no game for the cowards (most I’ve heard felt it in context to be saying screw Palestine, they started it and hide in their holes killing, let’s bomb them all)

And the Israeli delegate to Eurovision (the board member guy, not the artist) said they were sending a song all Israelis could connect to.

So yeah, my albeit western interpretation is it was very anti-palastine, pro-israel

If only denser housing structures and public transportation and work from home didn’t all keep getting voted down and shouted down by NIMBYs so we had a better way. I get out and vote and write letters to elected officials. Not much more many of us can do.

I haven’t heard it at all so I can’t comment, but I do know they were forced to re-write it pretty late in the game to turn down the more obvious anti-palastine political messages in it after several countries threatened to boycott this year. It might have already sucked, haven’t heard either version, but a late re-write changing it can’t have helped.

My gaming groups (both tabletop and video) are leaning into experimental phase of trying new stuff. Count me in if I ever come across your release in the wild.

On the music and visual side. If at all possible I highly recommend finding or hiring someone to at least review what you have and advise, if not doing all the work. There’s so much to both that it takes ages to get right but they can have such a huge impact as you seem to know.

I’ve looked into this before for arguments with my mother trying to get her to stop saying there’s a gay agenda. Her argument was because I enjoy the videogames and sci-fi I wasn’t smart enough to understand the truth. The science has actually been done (though I’m sure more still needs to be done).

Research by a scientist named Schwartz in 2016 showed that those predisposed to anti-social behaviour are also naturally pre-disposed to watch more TV. When accounting for genetic traits, previous research into negative affects of TV didn’t hold up amongst children and young adults (mentally, physically yes, but we already knew sedentary lifestyle has negative impacts).

A (I Believe Johns Hopkins but I’m going from memory) 20 year data evaluation released in 2021 showed that excessive TV can contribute to cognitive decline over time (they measured a 0.5% reduction amongst the adults they tested). The main scientist I remember saying they didn’t account for type of media and did think educational content like documentaries would have a smaller impact though he couldn’t guess by how much. His worry wasn’t about the average adult making decisions but rather preserving as much mental capacity long term so as to help reduce impacts of dementia.

A 2023 UK study backed up the 2021 and 2016 study. Excess causes increased health risks and a long term small measurable cognitive decline.

Everything I’ve seen points to, for the most part, the amount being the problem as with everything. Moderation is key and living a diverse life that stimulates you mentally overall is important. Manga or Marvel movies when you want to relax is not going to rot your brain. Only consuming them will, same as with any type of media or genre.