zlatiah

zlatiah , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Interesting question...

As an overall answer: humans are incredibly adaptable, so as a person living in the US, it almost never subjectively feels bad. For goodness' sake, I knew people who lived in Chicago's Hyde Park (one of the most dangerous neighborhoods) and happily biked to work. I personally lived in what people would describe as a "hood" and a "third-world country" for a good year and a half, and honestly felt really safe over there. Because of this, I honestly don't think anyone can give an objective answer solely from their living experiences.

Objectively, the US is a developed country and is not terrible, but regarding your specific points:

1. Yes, the government passed shitty laws, and chose to not pass a lot of not-shitty laws.
2. Yes, there are more mass shootings than the country should have. I'm not going to say why.
3. Insured healthcare isn't expensive (correction: some stuff are still too expensive even after insurance). However, uninsured healthcare is incredibly expensive, and unfortunately people without employment/self-employed have to purchase their own insurance... which is also stupidly expensive. Also, a lot of things that should be insured aren't.
4. The different states are certainly different. US politics is very polarized, so heavy-blue and heavy-red states are quite different in their approaches to... many things in life. Whether they are good or bad is up to you.

I mean, people living in Switzerland complain about their countries all the time, even though almost everyone else in the world envy the way they live... so it is possible that some might be a bit overblown.

zlatiah , 10 months ago

ELI5 about the Chinese real estate market in general? This is how they got to where they are today:

• Investing in China sucks. The stock market is extremely volatile and there seem to be a lot of shady activities, banks get bank runs so you couldn't even put too much money in banks, etc
• In contrast, real estate is heavily subsidized by China's state capitalistic approach, so it became a really "stable" investment... because government subsidized it
• Because of this, everyone buys or want to buy real estate in China. In fact, people are willing to buy places that would almost never be lived in, because of possibility of appreciation... so we're approaching NFT-level bullshit here
• Additional point: because of the above point, Chinese investors would buy real estate even when abroad & the RE market is not nearly as favorable. Obviously this causes some frictions... like a good chunk of Canadian citizen blaming Chinese ppl on raising home prices
• Chinese economy is now facing hardship, so the real estate bubble is finally showing signs of leakage in the past few years

I am not an economist and cannot offer insight as to whether this would turn into an 2008 moment... Nevertheless, I am aware that Soho is an extremely well-known developer, and that the Chinese economy is to a large extent built on top of real estate. And despite how much I dislike China, it is one of the world's largest economies, and large economies don't just go belly-up without inflicting heavy damage on the whole world... So this is not good news by any means.

zlatiah , 10 months ago

Hey OP, I am similar to you in most aspects but I'm a lot younger, so please take it with a grain of salt...

I also live in Texas, and honestly I thought a lot of less privileged folks or ppl with family ties would love to be in your situation and just leave? It's not just about politics. Even if tomorrow Texas becomes a liberal stronghold, it will still take possibly at least a decade to fix ERCOT, the climate issue, and flooding issues (if you live in Houston)... This clusterfrick alone was enough to prompt me to never live in Texas again once I'm done with grad school

Besides, my understanding is that there are a few left-leaning metro areas which have suburbs (or live in the city!) that don't cost that much more to live in compared to mid-/upper-mid-class TX suburbs, so there's probably no financial disincentive to move either

zlatiah , 10 months ago

For god's sake temperatures above 40 Celsius are dangerous and claims like this will literally kill some people... But again, after everything happening in the last 3-4 years it's hard to imagine conservatives putting other folks' health and safety as a priority

zlatiah , 10 months ago

Oh boy it's my time to shine!

I'm working in aging right now. Heard of Dr. David Sinclair since he was the corresponding author on a paper I was curious about... So this is what his lab is doing.

Two important disclaimers:

• Success in cellular research rarely translates to something viable in the clinic. A lot of chemicals don't behave the same way in cells as in actual animals or humans. Heck, a good number of phase 2 drugs even fail, and these haven't even made it into phase 1... so I wouldn't be too optimistic about them.
• The journal Aging is not the most prestigious journal especially for someone working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to be honest. I'd be more excited if this was published in Nature Aging or Nature Communications or something. If this ever gets published in New England Journal of Medicine (a very prestigious journal only for clinical studies) then we have some news.

The link between cell senescence and aging is something actively being studied tho.

And, if anyone is curious about this topic: I'm also very actively following Dr. Vadim Gladyshev who is also from HMS and is working in aging, I believe he is doing some wet lab-biology on a similar area as well. Feels like his research is sometimes a bit ahead of his time but I think his work has great potential.

zlatiah , 11 months ago

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah... I do use mailbox.org and I've self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don't open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I'm happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it's not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

zlatiah , 11 months ago

Great article... Pharmaceuticals is interesting since the needs of corporations functioning under capitalism and their customers disconnect a lot

• Making effective drugs is mad expensive (billions of USD), so companies are strongly incentivized to squeeze as much profit as possible everywhere on top of the already bad enough corporate greed levels
• Thanks to patents, new drugs are almost always monopolies, so the pharma who makes the drug can charge (almost) as much as they want and make a lot
• Whereas making drugs without patents is not profitable as the article suggested... so these are done mostly by factories based in India and other not fully developed countries
• Funnily enough most ppl need cheaper generic drugs, not the ones most pharma companies are innovating and will make mad profits from
• And for the people mentioned above, pharmaceuticals are basically a need not a luxury, but somehow it's dependent on the ebbs and flows of free market capitalism

My unhinged opinion is... Most of the pharmaceuticals research are done by (mostly) publicly-funded research labs anyways... so might as well just let the government do something about this? I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in academia wouldn't mind moonlighting as CEO at a nonprofit drug manufacturer or sth

zlatiah , 11 months ago

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it's not really accessible for beginners...

If I need a VM I'd probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you're familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers... pretty much Debian always since that's what everyone supports

Stability-wise... I guess it depends on what type of "stability" I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it's not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don't have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there's been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won't want to support that endeavor

zlatiah , 11 months ago

Yes and yes! Couldn't contribute that much but I try to

I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I'm talking about you Google) is pretty nice...

Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps... in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)

zlatiah , 11 months ago

I stand my opinion on this... Some people are defederating Meta because they are anti-capitalist; these are the same admins who defederated mastodon.cloud as well as instances from Medium/Mozilla/etc on moment's notice, so I think they will certainly defederate from Tumblr. Most people would probably want to at least wait & see since Tumblr isn't as nefarious as Meta is

zlatiah , 11 months ago

Second this!

Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don't forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login... with credentials stored at FB/Meta... that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?...) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all

For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so... yeah.

zlatiah , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...

To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.