For all you youngins out there: DO NOT PUT HYDROFLUORIC ACID IN YOUR BUSSY

Based on the fact that they’d give someone like me a PhD, this comes as no surprise. But it’s not saying as much about GPT-5 as a lot of people might think.

Yeah, happens all the time with all kinds of different instances. Just do yourself a favor and set-up an account on at least three but preferably around eight different instances and then maybe if you’re super lucky you’ll always be able to find at least one that’s up and running when you want to get on.

Also, one of my big gripes is that so many Lemmy instances have various uptime monitoring services in place, but then when you check those while the site appears to be down, they almost always indicate that the site is fully operational and just fine. Those things are close to being useless, anecdotally speaking.

No, no they don’t. Not by a long shot.

However, my mom did have a small number of framed Glamor Shots (or whatever that business was called) photos of herself back in the day. I don’t recall the details at the moment, but she was gifted a free photo session and I guess a certain number of prints.

For those of you who never got to see a stegosaurus in person, let alone ride one to school, Glamor Shots was a popular business in that era. If memory serves correct, they provided all kinds of costume jewelry and wardrobe, a drag queen level cosmetics make over, and a photo session. Then you could buy blurry photos of yourself airbrushed to the edge of sanity and back that would literally make an 80 year old woman as well as a 14 year old girl look like a 22 year old through the eyes of someone with severe cataracts. It was glorious. It was glamorous. It was worth a shot. Glamor Shots.

It’s not just mega churches.

My dad was going to a small little church for years. At some point in a conversation about their church, I asked him what the church does in terms of community service or giving to the less fortunate. His response was “nothing”.

To me, that should be a pretty high priority for organized religion, otherwise it’s just Sunday social hour and free entertainment … at best.

Where I live, the definition of a bug is super liberal to the point of absurdity.

But even that’s been topped a few times over the years. When I used to be active on Reddit, I would participate in the “bug” identification sub. It wasn’t frequent, but it also wasn’t all the uncommon for folks to show up asking for ID on reptiles and amphibians, even remember that a shrew (or maybe it was some other small mammal) was posted once.

It wasn’t that big of a surprise for me. I used to work retail decades ago and I remember a customer who returned a bag of salad greens because there was a bug in it. The “bug” was a very small baby frog (just out of tadpole stage) – likely some kind of tree frog.

The dad was 28 years old at the time this photo was taken.

I noticed you mentioned that insurance has always “cost me more than it saved me”. I feel like this is a fundamental issue in how Americans think about health insurance.

I’m sure many Americans do look at health insurance in that one singular way, no different than how some people are single issue voters. However, taking that phrase out of the context I presented it misses out on the statement I was making.

For people in my situation, we’re fully aware that insurance of all types generally costs more than you get out. And I think most Americans understand that fundamentally, at least to some degree, but that’s not super relevant one way or the other.

Either way, the point I was making is that not everyone is being forced out of coverage, many of us are opting out or at least considering it.

We do have to look at it from the lens of cost versus value. It’s not that I can’t afford to go to the doctor and buy my healthcare supplies without insurance, it’s that I might not be able to afford to those things if I’m also paying for insurance. Basically, it has to save me more than it costs in my situation. But the other aspect of this decision that gets lost if you only focus on the “cost me more than it saved me” is that the plan would need to offer meaningful financial protection against disaster (i.e. the traditional role of insurance), but with maximum out of pocket amounts being so high, there’s little to no value there. Which means the affordability part (i.e. costs more than it saves) becomes a much more important aspect to consider.

Figured this much.

Honestly though, we have until Monday December 15th to make a decision on which plan or whether to even have a plan. Regardless of the outcome, even if it’s a no, this is something that should have been written in stone MONTHS ago, not several days before the deadline for Americans to choose a plan.

It’s literally a clown show, and regardless of political party, these people should be ashamed of themselves.

I’m co-opting your comment, so apologies if you don’t approve.

It’s a bit of both, opting and forced. At this point, I’ve commented in dozens of threads about my personal situation, so apologies to those folks who are seeing yet another comment with the same sentiment from me.

In a nutshell, I was laid off this year due to the Trump administration, due to a variety of factors I have not returned to work, and I’m using the ACA for health insurance. While I still have several days to make a final decision, I can see an argument for classifying my situation as “opting for no coverage” versus being forced.

Here’s the thing, in my entire adult life, health insurance has always cost me more than it saved me. Literally, 2025 is the very first year where I might have broken even, and that was only because I had an unexpected health emergency.

On top of that, when you’re unemployed and in a financially strained situation, being 1 million dollars in debt is pretty much the same as being 10 thousand dollars in debt. Can’t repay either. So, having health insurance with a maximum out of pocket is still no guarantee that I won’t end up in financial ruin.

More importantly, the degree to which health care costs are going up this year is unprecedented for a lot of people. The raw, unsubsidized cost of ACA plans is increasing close to 50%. Bronze plans (lowest) cost as much as silver plans did for 2025, silver plans cost as much as gold plans. In addition, all the out of pocket expenditures are increasing like copays, coinsurance, deductibles, and maximum out of pocket. But that’s not all, the cost of prescriptions and medical costs in general are increasing due to inflation, so even if the insurance is 100% comparable to last year, we’re still paying much more. The final and often the most significant blow is that these tax credits / incentives are going away. These were significant, they made the lower tier plans free for those most in need and provided significant relief for people earning up to around $60,000. All combined, the cost increases associated with these plans is honestly absurd. Truly a WHAT THE FUCK situation.

Even if we all agreed that this is how it needs to be, no sensible and reasonable policy would let this all happen at once. At a minimum, these increases and changes should have been phased in slowly enough to allow people to adapt and there should have been much more communication that this was on the horizon. I say that, because after I was laid off this year, I was directed towards an ACA plan (versus COBRA coverage, if you don’t know what that is, just know that it’s expensive and limited) with no mention of this time bomb about to explode. That’s a major failure on all fronts.

So, apologies continue, this ended up being yet another novel on the subject. But it’s important that people know how terrible and complicated this situation is.

In summary (i.e. the TLDR) is that I could probably afford the very cheapest and shittiest plans offered through the ACA for 2026, but at the end of the day I have to look at the risk versus the cost, and realistically, the case could be made that if I choose not to get a plan, I’d be opting for no coverage versus being forced. Not that my situation is the norm, but I’m also sure I’m not the only person in the USA in this kind of predicament.

Be a queen. Don’t be a drag.

Founding fathers wore wigs.

I had to sleep in my car from time to time when I was in college.

I’d park in a well-lit spot in an active parking lot (back in the before times, many major retailers were open 24/7) in a safer part of town. The backseats of my car were pull-downs that opened directly into the trunk. So, I’d sneakily climb through and into the trunk, then curl up back there to sleep.

It was a dark space and since nobody could see me back there, there was less chance of someone targeting me for robbery (sleeping person = easy target) or calling the cops on me (sleeping person = drugs or medical emergency). But those were still factors that added lots of stress to an already shitty situation.

I know times are harder for more people these days, but I figured I’d share since a lot of people don’t actively recognize that things were also difficult for many people back in the day as well. While there’s obviously a problem that needs to be solved here, and it sucks that we’re at a point where this is considered a solution, I would just say, don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.

Of course we should strive for a situation where everybody has a home, familial / social supports, good stable income, etc. But, also, even a little added comfort from having a safe® place to park & sleep as well as access to things like showers and bathrooms is a tiny little step in the right direction.

For you, I’ll make an exception.

Just in case anybody didn’t read the article and doesn’t already know: Wild animals infected with rabies aren’t just the stereotypical raging aggressive terror beasts you see in the media, they can also be super friendly and usually docile.

Obviously the best advice is just to leave wild animals alone and keep your distance. However, if you see a feral or wild animal behaving in an uncharacteristic way, added caution is needed. This includes things like seeing traditionally nocturnal animals like skunks and raccoons out and about during the daytime or having them be unusually friendly / fearless / docile to the point where they don’t retreat and may even come up to investigate you. It doesn’t mean that they are infected with rabies, but that’s definitely a potential symptom of rabies (but can also be a sign of other infectious diseases that should activate your spidey senses).

You are not a Disney princess and Cinderella Snow White is not a realistic presentation of how healthy wild animals act.

The ones I went to school in were nowhere near as nice looking on the outside as the ones in this photo.

Ours had HVAC, unlike some of the other comments, but where I live in the USA we have laws regarding the minimum and maximum allowable temperatures so I guess that’s why. Still sucked because these things would get uncomfortably hot and muggy during hot weather, but at least we were out of school most of the summer sparing us from the worst of it.

On the other hand, our “mobile classrooms” didn’t have bathrooms and only one tiny window that doubled as a fire escape.

The communal bathrooms were on the other side of the school, so the teachers would be very choosy about who they’d let go and what reasons qualified during instructional time. Scheduled bathroom breaks meant the whole class walked over to the restroom area and everybody had to go all at once.

There was a water dispenser machine with 1 oz paper cups (super tiny, basically a shot glass size) and there was a ridiculously low and strict limit on how many “cups” of water each student was allowed each day (I don’t recall, but maybe 2 or 3).

Anyway, I have some family still living in the area where I attended school back in the ancient times whose kids who go to that same school. 30 years later and it is still basically a trailer park of mobile classrooms. So, it seems several generations beyond just 80’s and 90’s kids get to experience the joy of these things!

Humans are already imposing upon our pets and depriving them of their autonomy, simply by keeping them in captivity. Any argument against merciful euthanasia grounded in concerns about how it is imposing are moot.

As for pulling human euthanasia into this context, do yourself a favor and don’t. You might be surprised at how common euthanasia is in humans. At least in my part of the world, it’s largely a wink-wink nudge-nudge situation, but it does happen with some regularity. Also for people who are actually suffering in decline, there are all kinds of supportive care options being provided that simply aren’t feasible or economical for pets. There’s also not really the potential for the same kinds of perverse intentions with pets as there might be for people. Like, the list goes on.

So, basically from either of those two perspectives, let alone the fact that both apply, the argument against euthanizing pets that you’ve presented fall apart.

Having said that, this is often not a simple and straightforward decision. But since we’ve already established that we’re imposing upon them one way or the other, it really comes down to what kind of imposition do you want? The animal is going to die soon one way or the other. You can impose upon it and force it to experience the pain and fear and discomfort of its body naturally shutting down over the course of days, weeks, or months. You could impose upon it and decide to euthanize. What can you live with?

On a more personal note, I’ve had to have 2 pets euthanized.

One was a cat who managed to escape outside, it got hit by a car and then a neighbor’s dog mauled it. Literally pieces of broken rib and punctured lung exposed as well as untold other injuries. No hope of recovery. The idea of letting it suffer another moment was not something I could live with and it was going to die anyway.

The other was a dog with congestive heart failure. There comes a point where there are no more medications and no higher doses that are effective. The animal literally is experiencing the sensation of drowning. They’re terrified and in pain, exhausted, and suffering. The vet might be able to alleviate it a few hours or even a couple of days with a procedure to manually remove the fluid, but then you’re just going to put the animal through this again and soon. I could not live with myself forcing the dog to endure that knowing there was another option.

Plus, I have seen the pet owner that refused euthanasia and wanted their pet to die a natural death. The dog had cancer. I’m honestly broken up enough just thinking about what I witnessed that I can’t even bring myself to type it out. So I’ll stop there other than to say I’ve seen people dying of cancer in their final hours – there is a world of difference in those things, at least in modern times. The pet was clearly distressed, in pain, and suffering. The people are being made comfortable with drugs and medical care.

Okay, but you can’t post a story like that and not pay the ass tax. It’s literally tax evasion, a serious internet crime.

I dunno what’s the dumbest thing. I guess it was using the same username and/or email address on enough sites that I was eventually tracked down and doxxed by someone on a site called Fark of all places.

The same people that hung on to every syllable that came out of Biden’s mouth, pounced on the most minor grammatical mistakes, and seemed to have memorized every word the man uttered in his latest speech now suddenly they claim they don’t keep up with the news they haven’t heard what Trump is saying and they’ll look it up later.

Updawg

I’m not sure if the recent fledglings actually are larger or if it’s more of an illusion.

Logically, it doesn’t make sense that their bodies (sans plumage) would actually be substantially larger than the mature adult parents, other than maybe if the juveniles have a lot of “baby fat” or just different body shapes early on. I assume there are other aspects in play, like maybe they have more down feathers that push up on their outer plumage causing it to be more fluffed up and giving the appearance of them being larger than their parents.

Maybe a birdologology expert can weigh in (yes I know the actual term is ornithologist).