Eli5: your PC has different access levels a program can run at. This prevents a malicious or badly coded program from completely fucking your computer. Kernel level anti cheat runs at the lowest level access that exists under windows. It can do basically whatever it wants to your PC, and if a backdoor is coded in (happens way more than you’d think), it gives malware basically total access to your PC.

Reddit has an absolutely massive wealth of community knowledge. If you want to find a community for $thing or gain obscure knowledge on $thing, that’s where you go (assuming there isn’t an old forum post from before Reddit killed forums).

Twitter is where a lot of people still are. If you’re the kind of person to care what a particular person says, that’s where you probably want to be.

Instagram is used by young people who have friends on Instagram.

It isn’t a great system, but it is the system that we have today. This is why legislation compelling Meta/Twitter/whothefuckever to act in an ethical manner is important. Social media is to some extent a natural oligopoly, and unless we get extremely, extremely lucky, the fediverse will always be a niche community.

You don’t. You don’t pick your genetics, your family, the accidents that happen in your life, or even (to a certain extent) your environment.

If you want to save money on health insurance, stop letting insurance and healthcare companies fuck all of us for their own profit.

Literally the entire point of insurance is that everyone pays into a pool which is used to subsidize the people with bad luck who will have to claim more than their peers.

It may not be the case everywhere, but here condos are kind of a shit deal. They cost as much as a small house, they’re very difficult to sell, and the board can force you to renovate your unit out of your own pocket.

The last one doesn’t sound bad, but a big reason to buy a home is to fix your living expenses for retirement, and being told to tear out your flooring because Shelly upstairs likes muave and all units must now have muave floors can be a real problem.

A couple of ideas:

• Home Ownership. I know condos exist, but it seems to me that we need a solution for home ownership that is accessible and ecologically viable. Traditional houses (and even duplex’s/townhomes) are massively inefficient from a climate perspective, not to mention the space requirements and cost.

• Child rearing. In college, I learned that children were typically raised by multiple neighbors, in order to lessen the strain on parents. I think it is unrealistic and unhealthy to expect people to nearly kill themselves attempting to raise a child for the first couple of years.

• Recreation space. I realize this is mostly an American thing, but lawns are a colossal waste of space. To be of any use at all, they have to be at least half an acre, and realistically, there’s no reason every single family needs their own outdoor recreation space. Plus, a tiny minority of people even use them these days.

Kroger and Safeway have been the absolute face of enshittification since the pandemic. They’ve also been accused of price fixing, and are trying to merge into a monopoly. They also regularly abuse disabled employees (at multiple stores in my area).

I have absolutely no doubt that they will do this the moment they think they can get away with it. In a fair economy, they would have been driven out of business years ago.

Dark chocolate. Sweet enough to satisfy sugar cravings, but a low enough sugar content I can chomp on one to get my blood sugar up before going to the corner store for breakfast.

I’ve always saved very aggressively, even when I didn’t have any money. When I first moved out, I ate nothing but rice, lentils, eggs, and lard for several months to save a slush fund. Even today, I make ~15-20k USD below median income for my city, and I’ve managed to save just shy of 10k in the past year and a half.

Obviously the ongoing coat of living crisis is a big deal that needs to be addressed, but we also need to acknowledge that saving your money is unpleasant, and a significant number of people aren’t willing to do what’s necessary in order to build financial security.

My friends (I don’t get out much, I only have a couple) all have significantly better income/expense ratios than I do, and have exactly nothing saved. Honestly I don’t think that would change if you gave them all an extra $20k/year, because they will find a way to rationalize something into being a necessity.

Depends on which kind you’re talking about. Cinnamon raisin breads and similar are sweet because they’re basically deserts (desserts?).

Standard sandwich loaf is sweet because your weak foreign palate cannot handle the background level of high fructose corn syrup in all American food. It gives us the strength and vitality to enforce pax Americana, build our secret space colonies, and invent all new world technology.

Also, you can take PrEP to avoid catching it in the first place.

Which for the record, you absolutely should do if you’re queer, your partner is queer, or if you engage in high risk behaviors. Asymptomatic HIV is a scary thing.

The first one is a very different movie. It feels grounded in a way that the sequels move further away from with each entry.

That being said, they’re all fantastic.

I live in DFW, a large amalgamation of two cities and a bunch if suburban sprawl in Texas.
I live in a neighborhood that is considered extremely walkable, as I am directly across the street from a university and less than a mile from city hall.

Here are my walking distances:

• To the nearest convenience store: 1.8km
• To the nearest chain supermarket: 4.3 km (They have a monopoly though, so unless you can afford whole foods, the closest good one is like 22.5 km)
• To the bus stop: Lol, we don’t have busses. A neighboring city does, so I guess 29 km?
• To the nearest park: Nearest park is 2.8km. Nearest public space is only 1.5km because I live right next to city hall.
• To the nearest big supermarket: 8.9 km to Walmart.
• To the nearest library: 1.5km, again, I live right next to city hall.
• To the nearest train station: 16km, unless you mean one for intercity travel. We don’t have one of those because Amtrak is slowly being killed.

Straight-line distance to Big Ben: we don’t have a Big Ben, but we killed JFK and that’s 34km away.

Bonus fun fact, I commute 42km each day. This is considered far by most people here, 32km would be much more reasonable.

“I don’t really get why people get so up in arms about discussing it, but Sex is fun. Be careful though, those swimmers are persistent little fuckers.”

“Drugs feel good and you think everything is fine until one day you look up and realize it all went wrong years ago. I can’t stop you, but I really hope you’ll choose not to try them.”

I think both worked out well. I’m sex positive and I generally avoid drugs because it just isn’t worth the risk of finding that one substance that totally ruins my life.

I think it varies a lot by the user. I think (hope) most people are just joking, but I’m sure we have a number of people who aren’t joking.

But also keep in mind we absolutely have propaganda bots and trolls here. They’re quite good at directing the hivemind, even without the assistance of complete loons.

It depends. I think it’s definitely less common here because it just isn’t needed most of the time. Even a working class retiree should have a pension or 401k, social security, and some kind of savings from their life as a working adult.

To require the support of your children, you’d have to be unable to work, not entitled to substantial amounts of social security, not have paid into a retirement plan, and not have saved any money from when you did work.

I know a couple of people who support their parents, and they either spend their ENTIRE lives in poverty making sub-minimum wage (which is pretty uncommon), or they just straight up blew all their money because they assumed their kid would take care of them. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the second category.

Most CFA locations are franchises, meaning employee treatment varies wildly. I was paid $8/hr and worked 73 hour weeks. By contrast, the location down the street from me advertises $18/hr.

Prions are misfolded proteins that misfold other proteins they contact. They’re much harder to kill with heat or sanitizer and pretty much always fatal.

Yes, but if they refuse coverage you can appeal, ans if they refuse to honer the details of your policy you can sue or report them to regulators. Not that it isnt a problem regardless.

And the in network facility/out of network doctor loophole was patched recently under the Biden admin :)

It is true that nobody pays the cartoonishly high bills that you see posted online. It is also true that we spend way more on healthcare than basically anyone else.

My company offers very good insurance. Anything “in network” is free after the first $3000 every year, and the monthly premium is around ~$330. Note that this is a company that intentionally offers very good health insurance so they can be less competitive when it comes to salary and time off. I’d say in a given year, I spend around $7,000.

But really, one of the biggest practical issues with our healthcare system is its opacity. Most people are unable to figure out what most things will cost them before they consent to care.