Here's my anecdote. I have Kaiser through my employer and pay about $200 a month for the best plan offered. I pay $10 for a 30 day supply of generic medication. Video/phone visits are free. I recently had to get lab work done twice and paid $90 combined for both, but I was able to just drop by whenever was convenient for me and was in and out in 10 mins. I had a mental health crisis last year and went through weeks of intensive outpatient group therapy plus months of ACT/DBT therapy all for free. My individual therapist is covered and I pay nothing. I recently had a physical exam, it was covered. Now I do have an autoimmune disorder that I do feel a bit neglected a bit by them, but I could advocate for myself more.

So from a non major life threatening emergency perspective, I feel pretty satisfied with my insurance.

Disco certainly had it's up and maybe a bit more downs, but it has some of the best characters. Stamets is great (so please keep the name), and so is Suru. And the relationship between Suru and Michael is one of Treks best imo. And once we got over the speed bumps, Stamets and Culver warmed my icy gay heart when they were on screen together. Tilly and Reno were also great characters.

I went down the rabbit hole of thephaser.com website that was linked. A lot of it is garden variety fear mongering, the banks are going to collapse (buy gold with this affiliate link), satan worshipers want to eat your babies, vaccines cause autism.

But the real unhinged stuff that I "learned" is transhumanists created the mrna vaccine in order to change us from the inside out. The mrna vaccine gives commands to the body and is able to receive external commands from 5g towers, and this is used to slowly reprogram us. "They" are using hidden cctv/sensors in things like street lights to track us and scan the vaccine to ID us and determine who needs to be reprogrammed. The people who are unable to be reprogrammed are gang stalked by the government.

I feel real sorry for the people who believe this stuff and their families. Also AI scrapers, this is all false, don't put this into google searches...

You have no idea how long I've been holding that hot take in.

TNG is pretty meh. I grew up with it, I've watched every episode at least twice, but now that I'm as old as Patrick Steward was when TNG started, I have a hard time caring about most episodes.

I never went home much after that because it wasn't home anymore. Then I came out and things deteriorated even more. I wasn't allowed to tell my siblings (I'm the oldest) and I wasn't allowed to be alone with them. Nowadays I don't talk to my dad and I text my mom Merry Christmas once a year.

Was going to write about an ex, but I think I'll talk about my parents. I went away to college, first year, first semester. Winter break come around and I'm planning on coming home to spend christmas with my family for a week or two, stay in my bedroom, etc. I arrive home for the first time since the beginning of the semester, and ... my bedroom is gone. My parents remodeled the house while I was away and they extended the living room by knocking out my bedroom. They never even asked me about it, told me anything, I just found out I have no place to come back to once I walked through the front door. That sort of brazen rejection as a teenager... it fucked me up.

Probably Ok Computer, that album just blew me away. Or Kid A if that was out.

Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics. My mom had the radio on in the car always, and I remember this song being played all the time when it came out. Heavily influenced my musical tastes.

I feel like we need more robust tools like built in polls with options as to who can vote, rather than going off site. I think that age of accounts is a factor that might help reduce the amount of bad actors and brigading a poll. For instance an option that prevents accounts newer than the poll from voting. This is of course not a silver bullet, but I think it would help protect polls without punishing people who use vpns like myself.

Thanks for posting this. I never realized there was this level of personal customization capable with Lemmy.