I started working this job after Obama had already been in office one term, so I was mainly comparing the final 4 years. I’m really glad I was still in college for the first term when the economy was really rough.

Covid did have an undeniable effect on the economy at the start of Biden’s term, and I don’t consider that his fault or anything. It does feel like we generally haven’t really recovered from it though, gas prices finally came back down but everything else is crazy expensive still. For example, I do electrical work, and a 250’ roll of 12/2 wire went from $35 in 2019 to $140 today.

Probably unpopular answer, but it’s not some clear cut “this political party has better policies for everyone”. Republican policies usually are better for people living in rural areas, and Democratic policies are usually better for people in cities. I’m sure people will debate this, but this is the reason why people typically vote depending on where they live. At the very least, they believe that their party has better policies for them and their way of life.

My personal (anecdotal evidence) is that I work for a small business in a rural area, and our main customers are other small business owners (usually self employed or under 5 employees). Over the last 3 presidents, the Obama years were rough for our company, we had explosive growth during the Trump years, and then we’ve had stagnant growth over the past 4 years. Our largest competitor went out of business this past year, which sent us a lot of new customers, but we’ve also had a lot of our customers go out of business as well, so we’ve been pretty stagnant. Being stagnant isn’t terrible, we don’t have shareholders or anything, but the cost of living has increased and company profit/wages haven’t which is a problem. That said I know we’re doing pretty well compared to a lot of people here.

Another (once again anecdotal) example is that I have a friend who paints murals full time, for the past 30ish years. He told me that he does well with either Republicans or Democrats in office, but that his customers change. During republican presidents, his customer base is usually local businesses wanting to decorate their stores. During democratic presidents, his customer base is usually towns, state buildings, schools, etc.

But anyways, I’d be very interested to hear from some people living in cities if there’s a visible uptick in income/etc when we have a democratic president, or in general what your personal observations are on how which president affects your local businesses/income/prices/etc.

That’s horrendous.

Yeah, I’m fine with it.

I have an unused twitch account that I used to watch league of legends on in the mid 2010s. I logged in the other day for the first time in years, and the top stream was titled “NAKED JUMPING JACKS IN SHOWER” and had a nude girl taking a shower. A ton of the other recommendations were the same.

People don’t have to search these streams out, whatever recommendation algorithms they use are recommending them to people who have only used twitch to stream games.

Imo twitch is a website for game streaming, there are plenty of other sites for sexual content.

Judging from these comments, I’m the only one who actually likes it. I find it easier to control music playback/etc while using maps and driving.

The DoJ is looking into investigating apple over anticompetitive conduct with its handling of the beeper saga, so there may be government intervention to force iMessage open or require them to adopt RCS.

Slowly government requirements are turning iPhones into a friendlier product, with mandated usb-c charging, side loading apps, and now potentially open iMessage.

Yeah, I was just talking about the idea of providing incentives for healthy activities as a general concept.

It doesn’t have to be specifically running, you could theoretically have a list of healthy activities/diet/etc and people can earn up to x% bonus by doing them, let people mix and match activities as their health/body allows. If someone can’t do any of the activities due to health reasons exceptions could be made.

Honestly, giving bonuses for employees having healthy habits seems fine. It’s not like anyone is entitled to bonuses, they’re not “withholding” bonuses or anything, they’re just giving extra incentives to live well.

Thanks for the quality response.

You can just go to that instance’s webpage and view their frontpage. It’s worth noting that NSFW posts are often hidden without an account though, so if an instance was defederated for NSFW content it might not be obvious why.

You’re right, I hadn’t noticed that. They have the breakers labeled backwards from how they normally are.

I think it’s been taken down and relisted multiple times, possibly due to reports. I’ve seen these plugs on amazon for years now.

Here’s a short extension cord version of one

The explanation of why they’re a bad idea is valid though. Usually the kinds of people who know just enough to want this type of plug are also the type of people I wouldn’t trust with one.

Edit: I’ll go ahead and explain why people want plugs like this. These can be used to backfeed power from a generator into a house, letting you used different outlets/lights in the house. A knowledgeable person can actually use something like this safely, but most people who would use something like this don’t know enough to do it correctly. The dangers about doing this are:

• You can easily shock yourself off of the exposed pins of the cord. You can avoid getting shocked by waiting to plug into the generator until the other end is connected first.
• You can backfeed power onto the electrical grid. The power going backwards through the transformers will step up the voltage to thousands of volts, and could seriously injure or kill the linemen who are trying to fix the outage. This is avoided by making sure you’ve opened either the house’s main disconnect breaker or the breaker for the individual circuit you’re plugging into.

There are some safer ways to setup this type of generator use, there are special generator power cords/outlets that won’t have exposed energized prongs if plugged into a generator. There are also transfer switches or breaker interlock kits designed to prevent someone from being able to backfeed power by requiring them to disconnect commercial power before the generator can be fed into the house’s distribution panel.

To be fair, this can be offset by sticking to smaller communities. All the large communities on reddit were low quality, but reddit’s large userbase allowed a lot of niche communities to exist with an acceptable amount of users. Lemmy (with its smaller overall user numbers) has much better “large” communities, but many of the niche communities barely have enough active users to get by.

It’s always the plumbing that makes for the late night trips too. Missing a piece of wood or something electrical, and it’s fine. You can fix it tomorrow. But busted a pipe and have water cut off to the house until it’s fixed? That’s when you make a late night run to wherever is still open.

This price hike is for people who signed up for YouTube premium early (before it was combined into YouTube music). These people weren’t promised a low rate for life when they signed up, their price was always going to increase eventually even if the service didn’t merge.

I think the $8 Play Music All Access was advertised as a lifetime price, that it would be what we paid forever. I really hope that’s the case.

I was promised $8 a month for life when I signed up for Play Music all access, and thankfully they’re still honoring that.

That’s only feasible if you have a small family, once you have a couple kids and are buying $300 of groceries a week it’s not at all feasible to transport that home by walking or using public transportation. Even less so if you’re having to transport the kids at the same time. Just carrying in all the food from my driveway to my house takes 15+ minutes, and that’s literally like 20 feet.