Some people don’t want universal health care because they don’t want their taxes going towards other people’s health care. What they seem to fail to understand is that the exact same thing happens with private health insurance, and some of the money goes towards the insurance company’s profits. Universal health care would make things cheaper.

The US really needs universal health care.

The best approach at the moment at the moment is to work at a large company that’s self-insured. Obviously this isn’t an option for everyone, but at least in my experience at large tech companies, insurance plans with self-insured employers usually have reasonable fees and tend to be less likely to reject claims. My employer is self insured but uses Aetna’s network and billing systems.

Medicare levy is 2% of income, so you’d pay $1600/year on $80k taxable income.

Insurance in the USA is great if you have a good employer. I pay around $100/month to cover my wife and I, and that includes a $200 deductible (amount you need to pay before the insurance starts covering stuff), $15 doctor visits, $100 for ER, max $15 for generic medication, and a $4k out of pocket maximum per year (after which everything is fully covered). I use a CPAP machine for sleep apnea, and both the machine and supplies are fully covered.

The monthly price plus the deductible is less than what I was paying for the Medicare levy in Australia.

On the other hand, if your employer doesn’t have a good health plan, or you’re unemployed or self-employed, health insurance is way more expensive and the coverage isn’t as great.

The divide between well-off (not necessarily rich, just middle to upper middle class) and poor is significantly larger in the USA than it is in Australia. My parents relied a lot on Australian government assistance when I was young (below market rate government housing, rental assistance to help pay the rent, etc) so I’m very grateful about that.

Honestly I’d be happy to pay more in taxes if it went towards universal healthcare.

China has banned practically all US social media sites, not just Meta-owned properties. A bunch of other sites are blocked too.

China generally wants major internet services to have servers in China itself, similar to how the EU wants citizens’ data to remain in the EU. In order to operate servers located in China, you need to get a license from the Chinese government (ICP license). Large sites that don’t do this tend to get banned by the Great Firewall.

Vista brought a lot of good features and improvements, but it required very high specced systems and ran like garbage on the lower-end systems that were common at the time. It also tried to make too many changes too quickly.

It also had a bunch of driver issues, because it introduced new driver models that were more reliable/stable, some of which are still used today, like WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) for display drivers. This required manufacturers to make some big changes to their drivers, and not all manufacturers are great at writing drivers.

So yeah it was kinda terrible at the time, but it laid a mostly solid foundation to build on top of. By the time Windows 7 came out, PCs had better specs, and manufacturers had fixed all the issues with their new drivers (resulting in far, far fewer BSoDs compared to older versions of Windows). Windows 7 was good because of Vista, not in spite of it, and a lot of the improvements attributed to Windows 7 were actually introduced in Vista.

I think they became more shady after the investment from Francisco Partners, who are likely trying to squeeze more value from the company. I think Gamers Nexus mentioned this in the previous video.

I think this is a feature that any page/profile can enable.

Right now there’s like 20 news lemmys

Isn’t that a feature rather than a bug? Each one is on a different server with different admins and different moderation rules.

If you make it so only one can exist and they’re all merged together, you’re back to a centralized system, which is what Lemmy is aiming to avoid.

here on Lemmy

Is there really a “here on Lemmy” though? The main point of Lemmy is that it’s decentralized, so if you don’t like how a moderator on one server moderates, you can use a different one.

Unfortunately there’s too many very large instances, which isn’t ideal for a decentralized service since you end up with some of the downsides of a centralized one.

Sorry, thoughts are not in network with your health care plan.

RIP. HowStuffWorks was one of the first websites I used, in the early 2000s. I think I found it via Yahooligans (Yahoo directory for kids).

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Yeah I think Framework does it well and they’ve worked with AMD to have first class Linux support. AMD have submitted bug fixes to the Linux kernel specifically for the Framework laptops. For Linux, AMD is a much better choice than Nvidia. I’ve got a Framework 16 but don’t have the dGPU.

At work I have to use a Lenovo with Nvidia graphics though, with Fedora or Windows (or a MacBook Pro, but Apple is not for me). I’ve got a desktop (ThinkStation P620) and a laptop (X1 Extreme Gen5).

My personal desktop PC has a GTX1080. I don’t really game on it any more so I’ve considered buying a roughly equivalent AMD GPU second-hand to have a better experience on Linux. Honestly I’d be fine with onboard graphics but the CPU (an older Ryzen) doesn’t have onboard graphics.

Tap to pay is much safer though.

Mastercard started removing the magnetic strip from new cards this year in some European countries, and want to completely remove it worldwide by 2029.

In the US, I’ve actually got one card that doesn’t have a magnetic strip: a debit card for Target stores (gives 5% discount for every purchase which is why I have it).

It’s a thing (or used to be a thing) in Australia too: a voucher or prepaid debit card that can only be used to buy food, given to low-income residents.

Australia actually has a proper safety net for low-income residents though, with public health care and monthly payments from the government if you’re unemployed and looking for a job, or you’re a child / young adult and your parents are low income, or a few other cases.

I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can’t ban maths.

If I remember correctly, there’s also a law in Australia where they can force tech companies to introduce backdoors in their systems and encryption algorithms, and the company must not tell anyone about it. AFAIK they haven’t tried to actually use that power yet, but it made the (already relatively stagnant) tech market in Australia even worse. Working in tech is the main reason I left Australia for the USA - there’s just so many more opportunities and significantly higher paying jobs for software developers in Silicon Valley.

vaping won’t give you cancer

Has that been proven though? I don’t think there’s yet any sufficient long-term research to know the full risks of vaping.

I’d believe it… I remember they were around $10 per pack back when my parents smoked, over 20 years ago. My mum saved so much money by quitting. Unfortunately my dad didn’t quit until much later after having a heart attack and realizing he had to change his habits.

Most laptops with discrete Nvidia and AMD GPUs also have onboard/integrated graphics and only use the Nvidia/AMD GPU when something graphically-intensive is happening (playing a game, video editing or encoding/decoding, etc). They call this “hybrid graphics”.

However, the HDMI port on the laptop (as well as the USB-C graphics) is wired directly to the Nvidia GPU (I’ll call this the “dGPU” from now on). This means that when an external monitor is plugged in but nothing graphically intense is being done, the screen is rendered on the iGPU, then sent to the dGPU to send over the HDMI port.

The hand-off between the dGPU and iGPU (called “reverse PRIME”) is basically voodoo magic. People have tried to get it working in Linux, but there’s a bunch of issues with it.

To get dual monitors working properly on my work laptop (Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen5 with an RTX3050), I have to go into the BIOS and force it to only use the dGPU (disable the hybrid mode). If I don’t do that, the external monitor renders at maybe 5fps? A coworker got it working by instead forcing the Nvidia card to always use a high clock speed for the RAM instead of reducing it to save power, but I haven’t tired that.

This is a laptop-specific problem, only for laptops with hybrid graphics. I have no problems using three monitors on a desktop PC.