I’ve been careless with a delicate man

My wife has a chronic pain condition, and there were a bunch of years where it was just impossible for her to stand in the kitchen, so I did all the cooking for the family. I have this vivid memory of going to the grocery store after a demanding day at work, pushing my empty cart down aisle after aisle, and being so completely out of ideas that I started to cry. Even at the time I thought it was the most pathetic thing ever.

I’m not understanding. I’m saying there are people who think things are better now, and I think that’s crazy - the only ones who legitimately had it better before are insurance companies, who could just cancel you if you were costing them money.

It’s so crazy that anyone aside from the people who own insurance companies thinks things were better before the ACA. I had a friend who got bone cancer and had a leg amputated at 17. For that type of cancer, it’s nine years before they consider you in full remission, so he was essentially uninsurable for nine years because of the pre-existing condition.

There were people who had insurance that covered almost nothing because that’s all they could afford - the ACA got rid of plans that didn’t actually provide a benefit.

Our healthcare system is really, really terrible, but it’s so much better than before the ACA.

Exactly. He lies so much to inflate his “greatness” that it’s just a habit at this point. It’s never mattered to his base whether the things he said are true or not, never any consequences to him lying, so he just does it at every opportunity. If he was telling you that he took a dump, he’d add something like “…and all the people in the bathroom were very impressed - they’d never seen such a great dump before. They were cheering.”

I always hear about people lamenting that they lost their boomer parents to Fox News or Facebook or whatever, but I’m a boomer parent who lost a son to Rogan. He’s always quoting absolute nonsense he heard on that show about Kamala or liberals. It’s so sad - he’s a pretty smart guy.

Killing or incapacitating a giant number of the people against you doesn’t have a strategic benefit?

The thumbnail hadn’t loaded and I thought this was going to be a Reddit drama post.

Same with me. Well, that in combination with the way they treated the app developers. I honestly didn’t have an issue with Reddit trying to make money, or trying to prevent all the LLMs from skimming their content for free, but there was no reason to cut the app developers off at the knees.

I had already changed my relationship/view of Reddit years prior when the internet connection to Russia was severed for a day or so and so many subs (especially political ones) became fundamentally different. Hard to ignore that. But i just couldn’t continue to give free content to such an awful company.

I didn’t know it happened either, but I check the news a couple times a day to see if anything happened.

It seems like you’re being disingenuous. You said you need Twitter to find out about things like the assassination attempt, so obviously you check Twitter, but the concept of checking the news is apparently strange to you.

Yeah, over fifteen months since I created my account here for that reason

You could simply open a news site a couple times a day. They all had the assassination attempt up pretty quickly.

You could say the same thing about Reddit, yet a lot of us left there a year ago on principle. Sometimes taking a stand means doing without.

I’m not at all bothered by “swear words,” and I’ll use them occasionally (mostly when I think it’s funny), but it’s somewhat rare. I just don’t find it very necessary most of the time. I can usually make my point just find without, but sometimes the emphasis seems right out, again, it seems funnier.

I had heard there were shots, but this is the first I heard that it was an assassination attempt.

I wonder if it will make him stop playing golf.

I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.

I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.

Insane

I don’t have a xitter account, is this real?

Loathsome, misogynistic convicted felon? Yeah, about right, though at 72 he’s a bit young.