Please note that this is the natural birth of an otherwise healthy child.
In Canada, provincial healthcare and private insurers have not kept pace with the needs and advancements in the areas of alternative methods of conception (IUI, IVF...). Yes, a naturally born baby wouldn't cost the parent(s) much medically. But, if you cannot have a child naturally, medication and procedures (lab testing, blood testing, artificial insemination...) are only partially covered and the amount corporate or union-backed insurers will pay varies widly by doctor and by patient. A couple struggling to conceive will easily pay 15-40K per child after the first procedure.
Funnily enough, friends who have jobs in the USA, but live in Canada often have better insurance that fully covers all of the costs after the deductible. It ends up costing much less to have IUI or IVF procedures with Canadian doctors using American insurers (of course they will take the money).
I’m not intelligent. I’m average. But, I’m considered successful and live comfortably for a North American. I have a few university degrees, with secure long term work in my field, an affordable home, a dependable car and all the trappings of middle class life.
Am I happy? I spent my young adult years hoping that happiness would arrive after finishing university, buying a new car, supporting myself financially, starting a career, getting married… it’s less of a “moving goal-post problem” and more a existential “what’s the larger point to life” and “what impact do I actually want to make”.
Having happiness as this ever elusive goal was more an errant wish than something measurably achievable.
This is why people get divorced. It’s not because their partners are terrible (they can be), but because they are on train tracks of a life that isn’t theirs.
Fight Club had the answer to this, by taking a no-name Joe Schmoe (reflected as us), and putting a gun to his head: The Question, Raymond, is what did you want to be?
It is not that exciting primarily because I have limited time to work on it!
I run a copy of my home automation software (don't get excited, it's written in Visual Basic .NET) on a NUC in my car. The user interface consists of a 16x2 LCD display attached on my dashboard which displays the GPS position and speed of the car (I log this) as well as the song and artist when the playing music track changes, and an Elgato Stream Deck which sits in the center console and allows me the ability to launch playlists, advance tracks, etc. If it has Internet (it doesn't usually, I'm cheap), it can hypothetically do some limited navigation, but I haven't tuned the behavior of that much because it's hard (illegal) to program while driving.
I also really want to work on CANBUS connectivity, but it's a big project and I have bills to pay and kids to feed.
I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in the car or on mobile, I use YouTube Music and it scrobbles to ListenBrainz as well.
I probably should use navidrome or a similar technology to serve the files. I already do this for audiobooks and podcasts and use Tailscale to access it when I'm not on my local network.
I have an Anker nano II that get's very hot while charging my laptop (~25-35W average). I should run a thermometer on it. If I held it for more than a second, I might get a burn.
I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
This is corporate fraud and I would love there to be an internal email discovered, "Hey, our game plan is to control the Oculus ecosystem purely so people have to buy it if they want their Facebook account unbanned (which we'll randomly do on occasion, to ensure this happening)"
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.
You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.
I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies
Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage
> At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.
I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
> The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task.
Humans have issues with such tasks, too, apparently. Hence their push to change IT terminology, e.g. master -> main git branch.
Indeed, I got my Hotmail suspended because of something not terribly different. Thank God in those days not every account insisted on 2fa through email
In Canada, provincial healthcare and private insurers have not kept pace with the needs and advancements in the areas of alternative methods of conception (IUI, IVF...). Yes, a naturally born baby wouldn't cost the parent(s) much medically. But, if you cannot have a child naturally, medication and procedures (lab testing, blood testing, artificial insemination...) are only partially covered and the amount corporate or union-backed insurers will pay varies widly by doctor and by patient. A couple struggling to conceive will easily pay 15-40K per child after the first procedure.
Funnily enough, friends who have jobs in the USA, but live in Canada often have better insurance that fully covers all of the costs after the deductible. It ends up costing much less to have IUI or IVF procedures with Canadian doctors using American insurers (of course they will take the money).