Makes sense. I don’t usually call customer service - I tend to use email or social media where possible, so that I have everything in writing with timestamps, just in case I need to refer back to it or use it as evidence.

Does that mean I can also record them?

that makes anything you say after implied to have given consent for the recording, bypassing any two-party comsent laws.

That… doesn’t sound like two party consent to me. Are you saying that I can tell someone “I’m recording this call” and they don’t have to actually consent, they just have to not mention it?

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.

How long until they replace driving lessons with a page that says “not driving a car is the only 100% effective method to prevent car crashes”?

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.

Get rid of pokies too, or at least restrict them to casinos only. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population but close to 20% of the slot machines in the world.

Any cameras that support RTSP and ONVIF should work well with whatever software you want to use. I’ve got some Dahua and Amcrest cameras, but Reolink is decent too. Reolink isn’t great in low lighting though, so prefer higher quality (albeit more expensive) Dahua cameras for outdoor cameras in areas that are dark at night.

I use Blue Iris. Frigate is good, but it’s not nearly as powerful as Blue Iris, and its bundled AI models aren’t as good as the ones in CodeProject AI (which Blue Iris uses).

And it’s more widespread in Australia compared to practically every other country.

through the magic of heat pumps!

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’m not saying that McDonald’s isn’t hard work - I definitely agree with you there. I was just referring to the fact that McDonald’s food is fairly straightforward to cook such that a teenager with minimal experience can do it, compared to a restaurant where they have many different menu items cooked from scratch and the chefs need more detailed knowledge of the items.

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.

They pay cooks less than $20/hour

So their cooks get paid less than ‘cooks’ at McDonald’s? Fast food minimum wage is $20/hour throughout California.

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).