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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I hate airbnb. I live in a place in the US that depends on tourism that also has a bad housing shortage for locals who cannot find affordable rentals. Tourists come and pay the excessive prices to stay at airbnb places that should instead be used for long term rentals to the actual residents who live here. Tourists should go to hotels which are meant for them instead of wrecking the housing market.

    I spent years being homeless because the little long term rentals that open up every so often have such high prices. I have stayed at places that were unpermitted since that’s what I could afford, I cannot stress how awful it was being off-grid away from town with no transportation. No bathroom either. Power, outlets, etc. completely exposed. And when I finally got section 8 (after years of waiting for an opening and then years waiting for the selection to happen), no landlord would lower the price or even rent to someone using section 8 so I had to “network” to find someone that would let me rent with them as long as I illegally gave them extra money every month since they felt their property has more value than what section 8 covers, oh also lease says utilities included but you need to pay for your own utilities. Yeah every landlord I’ve had with section 8 has done that so far because section 8 pays more if utilities are included. We need rent control and airbnb banned asap. We are not doing OK.


  • I never considered Zippys fast food, more like a diner that hands you a menu at your table. The food doesn’t taste good since it is all frozen food that I assume is microwaved but have no qualms charging you as if they were a proper restaurant. I think they are only popular because there was nowhere to eat back then so people go there for nostalgia. If I had no choice but to go to a fast food joint, I would much rather go to a different one on the list than Zippys, it’s cheaper and tastes better but still pretty unhealthy.


  • This has nothing to do with MFA. Reread the article.

    To understand these questions, you have to know how the scam works. Here’s what typically happens: One of my social media accounts goes down. Suddenly — in a way that feels too quick to be a coincidence, though it’s unclear exactly how they might get an account down taken down — a stranger contacts me via Twitter DMs or email. They promise they’ll get my account back if I pay a price. Sometimes, they claim they have an inside man at Meta.

    Performer Abigail Mac has received these messages after losing her account. “It’s people that work at Instagram,” Mac says she believes. “[They’re] extorting them and just stealing their money.”

    In her most recent ordeal, Mac says, Meta took down her account then she received a message from a scammer, offering to retrieve the account for $15,000. They swore the account would disappear forever if she didn’t pay them in 24 hours. She replied that she would get her account back herself.

    “Then they asked me what my budget was,” Mac says. “Every day [they] would knock some money off. It’s such a scam.”

    The scarier scenario occurs when someone messages you are saying, “Hey, save my stuff in case you lose your account.” Then, whoopsie doodle, lo and beyond, your account’s gone. Now, when I receive these messages, my stomach drops.

    The worst part is when I’ve paid these people, it’s often worked. They’ve retrieved my account. I’m thankful for that, but it raises questions about how these people operate and what they know, not just about sex workers’ Instagram accounts, but everyone’s. How do they get the accounts back? Where do they work when they’re not retrieving sex workers’ accounts? How do they communicate with Meta to fix the problem? And why does your account get deleted over and over again once you pay these people?

    “Once you pay, they know you will pay and keep doing it,” Mac says.

    Girls have paid up to $20,000 and have not gotten their accounts back. It’s plausible these scam artists message a girl, report her account, and then contact her via another avenue, such as Twitter or email. But there’s no way to know for sure. For all the talk about the dangers of social media, from teenage anorexia rates to smartphone addiction, the public pays little attention to the harms sex workers face on these sites. (Unless a porn star is fucking a president, you’re not going to see her on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.) We need Meta to investigate the problem and identify what has gone wrong before more people get scammed.


  • Clothing that is UPF 50 can provide protection but unless your wardrobe is filled with these specialized clothing you won’t get the same protection. For instance, a white T-shirt provides only moderate sun protection, with a UPF of about 7. When that T-shirt gets wet, it provides a UPF of only 3. A dark, long-sleeved denim shirt can provide a UPF of about 1,700; in essence, complete sun protection. (https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/sun-protection/sun-protective-clothing/)

    It’s recommended to use both sunscreen and sun protective clothing by just about every skin cancer authority (https://www.cancer.org.au/cancer-information/causes-and-prevention/sun-safety/preventing-skin-cancer). I have no idea what data you are referring to that sunscreen is not a good thing, I suspect exposure to fear mongering from the “natural” anti-science crowd. Let me guess, you think sunscreen is a hormonal disruptor even though you would need to use oxybenzone (the “worst” one) sunscreen continuously for 277 years to get the equivalent amount to cause a noticeable hormonal effect - so even oxybenzone is considered safe. Or you think “nano” sunscreen is bad even though the studies so far have found that the nanoparticles don’t get very far into the skin (only to the dead layers of the stratum corneum). It’s possible that nanoparticles will penetrate further if you apply them on broken skin, but they’re currently considered safe.

    Physical vs chemical sunscreens is a debate with a lot of misinformation and fear mongering because people will drink water while not registering water is a filthy cHeMiCaL (half joking). You should be much more concerned where you buy your sunscreen because the US has shitty standards for UVA protection while the other countries have much better UVA systems and standards. I can’t even begin to debunk this but here we go:

    https://labmuffin.com/chemical-vs-physical-sunscreens-the-science-with-video/

    Physical and Chemical work the same

    Physical sunscreen ingredients (more correctly known as inorganic sunscreen ingredients) are zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

    Chemical sunscreen ingredients (more correctly known as organic sunscreen ingredients) are everything else.

    The reason organic (carbon-based) and inorganic (not carbon-based) is a better classification than chemical/physical is that there’s overlap between how they work. Both types work by absorbing UV and turning it into heat. Inorganic sunscreens also scatter and reflect about 5-10% of the incoming UV, as do some particulate organic sunscreens like Tinosorb M, so really they should be classified as both chemical and physical.

    Natural things aren’t better than synthetic, man-made things

    The amount of heat produced from UV by sunscreen is really, imperceptibly tiny. There’s also only a 5% difference in the heat produced by the two types of sunscreens, since physical sunscreens also absorb about 95% of the UV they protect you from.

    Even if they were – physical sunscreens aren’t even natural. They’re processed to get rid of toxic contaminants, and often need to be coated in synthetic chemicals to stop them from being photocatalytic, and prevent them from clumping up and causing patchy protection.

    https://www.kindofstephen.com/physical-vs-chemical-sunscreens-myths/

    Even more detailed explanation

    Chemicals are physical – they have a mass and take up space. On the other end, the “physical” sunscreens titanium dioxide and zinc oxide are chemicals, you can find the elements titanium and zinc on the periodic table.

    In marketing, organic is a label that describes how something is produced – often with a safe-list of chemical treatments and approved practices.

    In chemistry, organic means the chemistry of compounds that contain carbon. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide don’t contain carbon. They’re made up of metal and oxygen and classified as inorganic.

    Marking the categories as organic and inorganic makes more sense because all of the sunscreen chemicals used contain carbon, except for titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

    It’s often said that inorganic sunscreens (titanium dioxide and zinc oxide) reflect UV off of the skin and organic sunscreens absorb UV and convert it into heat. In reality, for most of the UV spectrum they work very similarly.

    Organic sunscreens absorb UV because of the way the bonds between their carbon molecules are arranged… The energy from UV light promotes electrons in the conjugated carbon bonds of organic sunscreen molecules from a lower energy state to a higher energy excited state. The excited electrons in the bonds then relax or release the absorbed energy by stretching, vibrating, or bending – this turns that energy into heat.

    Inorganic sunscreens work very similarly – even though their structure is different from organic sunscreens… The principle behind the UV protection is exactly the same as organic sunscreens.

    There is a strong belief that these inorganic metal oxide sunscreens act by reflecting UV light instead of absorbing it, but this isn’t the complete story. UV light is divided into UVB and UVA. UVB is between 280 to 315 or 320 nm and UVA is between 315 or 320 to 400 nm. Inorganic sunscreens predominately absorb in the UVB spectrum and reflect in the long UVA (above 360 nm) and visible spectrum. Only about 5% of UVB light is reflected by inorganic sunscreens and the remainder gets absorbed and converted – just like organic sunscreens.

    Both organic and inorganic sunscreen particles can penetrate into the upper layers of the skin. If and how much they penetrate is dependent on properties like their particle or molecular size as well as the overall sunscreen formula. This isn’t a desired effect and formulators work to reduce the amount that penetrates. Modern organic sunscreens often have larger molecular sizes, chemical and physical properties, or even coatings which make it more difficult for them to penetrate past the surface of the skin.

    Keep in mind that skin penetration doesn’t mean that it’s causing harm to our bodies. There has to be a biological mechanism for it cause an effect. There is a lot current and ongoing research into this area, but we don’t have any strong answers yet.



  • Sorry for the long wait for my response, I was preoccupied at the time.

    I tried tapping on change instance but it seemed to not work immediately, I had to tap on it a few times while trying to vote which is why I initially thought I needed to change accounts and there was some sort of error since the dialog kept reappearing. I did get a vote in after tapping on change instance a few times but it didn’t show I upvoted (it did not make the upvoted button orange, it left it the same color as if I hadn’t interacted with it), just showed the vote count change.

    I think a good compromise is your suggestion to have a toggle for auto-open link set to off by default so I can have it on and replicate what I saw voyager doing.

    I think the buttons could also say something like “view in my instance” (Lemmy.dbzer0) and “view in original instance” (Lemmy.world). That might make it clearer to someone like me.





  • This is definitely a con of Lemmy for me. I like to be more privacy focused but Lemmy gives you 0 privacy on whatever you do on the website. Anyone who wants more privacy on Lemmy is told you have no right to privacy, don’t expect any privacy, everything you do is public on the internet, etc. A massive boner killer for me. I think basic things like deleting your own post or comments should actually get removed from all servers, PMs should not be viewable by anyone except the recipients, and what you vote on or subscribe to should be private. Lemmy doesn’t sell your data but that’s because anyone can take the data for free. I thought this stuff was because Lemmy is still new and will get to it eventually but the push back seems to say this was a choice or is not broken. I ended up exploring different social media alternatives but I like the style of Lemmy better since it is more reddit-like with an active user base plus has different android clients. I don’t like kbin because it shows who upvoted or downvoted something to everyone - it’s not accountability when it erodes your privacy.

    I used to comment on Lemmy more but then I ran into this problem when juggling multiple accounts, Liftoff sucks ass at letting you know which account you are logged into (I use Summit now and it is better at it) so I ended up getting my accounts’ wires crossed when I thought using the drop down on your accounts changed your account but no you have to go to manage instances to switch which was not intuitive. I ended up abandoning the accounts when I couldn’t figure out how to actually delete the post from the server.

    Edit: man I wish I saw this sooner, might be time for me to either stop posting again or look somewhere else.


  • I have to agree. I considered Standard Notes but I would have to pay for super notes in order to use images, even if I self-host. Same for code blocks, organizing notes into folders, spreadsheets, web clipper. Have to get the most expensive plan for offline access and being able to have local backups, although it is discounted if you self-host completely but why still pay a sub at that point? I would rather pay once and then be able to self-host using their super notes without paying more every month.

    I liked Obsidian but wanted encryption that works on my android so I went with Joplin.




  • I wish I could install lineage on my s10+ snapdragon. I just got this phone and now I just ordered a pixel to get grapheneos. I was willing to pay this guy on telegram to unlock my phone so I could try to get lineage to work or at least a custom rom, but my bootloader is one update off, I have v6 but he only supports up to v5. I hate ordering new devices when my current ones are still functional. I also am getting rid of my fitbit I also just got and replacing it with the amazon band 5 since it can connect to gadgetbridge. Degoogling is expensive, it shouldn’t be this bad just to get privacy. I’m not sure what to do with my devices I am replacing, but I hate that they had to be replaced in the first place. I also switched from google services to proton mail/drive/vpn.




  • Godamn that reminds me of college, I had a class at 7-8ish in the morning but the only bus that could get me there in time left around 5am so I was waking up at 4am to get ready. I would just find a bench to go to sleep until my class started at that point. I had classes throughout the day with hours in between each one so I would stay most of the day at college, spending a lot of time sleeping and trying to study / do homework. The bus is not free for students here. No trains here either. I am not able-bodied so I can’t just walk but it’s a 40 minute drive from where I lived to college with a long highway so I don’t think people are walking that anyway.

    I can definetly sympathize with you, it sounds very rough. Just gotta hang in there!


  • I had to take the bus and it left at *7:00am so I was waking up around 6ish everyday. I was constantly tired and had trouble staying awake in school. Taking the bus back put me at arriving at 4pm home. It was awful tbh. I see grade school years, especially high school, as the worst years of my life followed closely by early adulthood in college.


  • I’ve been downvoted for saying facts just like I did with my previous comment here so I wouldn’t read into it as this is what the community for sure wants. I checked the rules and it was not there so I commented that, it’s not an opinion but people get triggered all the same because they are used to reddit’s rules and assume lemmy is like reddit. But it is not, the different instances have their different rules and communities have rules on top of that. If you want to change the rules that’s up to you. Generally a vote might be nice, one that everyone can see and it isn’t hidden in this comment chain (the OP of this chain is already hidden by downvotes) and isn’t determined by only 20 people. Personally, it’s a waste of time because you can easily lookup the tweet and find the person. But if people want it to be this way because they think it “helps”, I guess that’s how it will be. But at least the community will have a voice even if it is something I feel is a waste. I feel more irritated by the constant censoring of “bad words” and don’t care so much about the usernames, after all it can be easily looked up if you want. I wouldn’t downvote a post over it like OP said but I can see where the frustration comes from, how corporations want to sanitize the internet. Anyway, thanks for listening to my rambling.