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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • As a rarity on Lemmy, I’m neutral on bitcoin as an investment. Yes, it’s very voltaile, but it does continue to have a record of going up over any 3 year period. So does the traditional stock market. The argument against bitcoin is that it could collapse at any moment and is only propped up by those who keep buying into the pyramid scheme. OK, and? Same can be said about traditional stock markets. The prices are entirely fictional there, too. We have supposed outlier cases like Tesla being massively overvalued, leading to crashes. The same could be said about any other company because the metrics are subjective, feigned as objective because someone made some predictive mathematical formulas. Neither one is actually run by the small-time inveators/buyers like you and me, it’s all operated by massive investment companies. They have an interest in winning and we hope we can hold onto our shares through economic downturns in order to ride the total bullshit profit trains they fuel after each crash.

    Back to the question at hand, like any investment, once you sell, don’t look back at what you could have had. You sell the item in exchange for money, then that money buys you something of comparable value at the time of the transaction. It’s hard to do, but that’s the only clean way too look at it.

    So from an isolated viewpoint, there’s nothing wrong with selling now at its latest high and turning it into something tangible. But as others have said, make sure the current $1500 value would not be that important to you otherwise. You could ask yourself what you would decide if you simply had $1500 extra in the bank. Would it still be justified? Would you still be comfortable? Would you still be able to handle a reasonable financial setback? I don’t know your life, location, or situation (and don’t want to know) so that’s your decision.






  • If it’s a US city you’ve heard of, racism probably won’t stop you from living there. You might find pockets, but larger cities should be ok overall. Often they’ll have pockets of people that might hate you for a myriad of reasons. Maybe their ethnicity already hates yours back home. Maybe you’re part of an immigration wave that happened at the same time as there’s, making the two hate each other to step on the other to lift their own (NY Italian and Irish in the early 1900s). Maybe they believe immigrants are consuming all the resources and you’re the reason they’re poor (general hate from whites across the country, but localized majorities do it too).

    But, overall, cities will generally have less meaningful racism because, as it turns out, if you spend your life next to other races/ethnicities, you realize we’re all human living the same struggle. Urban/suburban metro areas surrounding them will be similar. Sometimes there’s simple cultural misunderstandings, but once you see the first generation children raised in the local area, you see it has nothing to do with race after all.

    But this is not a guarantee it’ll be all dandy and magically happy. I don’t know your ethnicity and I don’t know where you want to go. Even if I did, I don’t know everything.


  • In my usage, ethnicity refers to somewhat socially-defined regional identities. Basically, what country/group is your ancestral origin. You might call this a nationality, but, to me, that implies I’m assuming you’re not a US national/citizen. This also gives a leeway to include ethnic groups not restricted to a particular country such as certain groups of Jews, nomadic groups like Romani, or sub-groups of countries like Sicilian.

    But I really don’t ask often because it’s not really important and can easily be taken as an insult.




  • Life, uh, finds a way Life… Finds a way Life [checks notes] finds a way
    Life, finds a way Life [deep breath] finds a way Life [lean away from the microphone to breathe in] finds a way Life [scratches head] finds a way?
    Life [gestures vaguely to day care center] finds a way

    They are performative modifiers to add visual context to text. Imagine you’re reading a script for a play. The author adds notes like some of the examples above, in a similar format, in order to better convey what they want the actors to do, by text alone, to better convey the author’s intent to the audience.








  • At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.

    Also

    spelt

    That is a grain spelled “spelt”


  • I think you’re overestimating the average quality of English as a second/third language education. The internet continuously becomes more accessible across the globe, which has overlap with lower quality and lower frequency of English lessons. There’s more exposure from speakers that don’t use the same native alphabet as well, so use is not so universal. When speaking is the primary use of language, reading is secondary, and writing is tertiary, mistakes get interesting. It’s not too hard to hear the word “extreme” but visualize the spelling from words like dream, team, cream, or beam, all words I could see being more commonly used than extreme. It’s easier to learn “very” as a modifier to a common adjective.

    Source: I work in the US with mixed central/south American-born employees and travel to Mexico often. I see casual US-sourced mistakes, of course, as well as those distinctly from Spanish-speaking writers. My Spanish is just as incorrect. If you can say it out loud and still make sense, I’ll vote for non-native English speakers every time as the cause



  • Over 15 years driving, here. I use blinkers all the time. I feel weird if I change lanes without a blinker, even if I know for an absolute fact there’s no one around me… Or even any that can see me. And I mean, I’ll even use it when I do a little road rage for people camping in the passing lane and I pass them on the wrong side, cutting a little close when returning. That being said, a driveway is something I’d make a joke about among friends. It wouldn’t make me judge you as a driver. I’d use the rest of your driving as my judgment material.

    My 2 cents on a topic you didn’t ask for: Do not hold down the passing lane. It makes me a little irrational, but only with a totally clear line of sight. There’s plenty of dumber morons that suck at it, so camping sprinkles a little chaos into the hierarchy of the lanes. It does not matter how your speed compares to the limit.