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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: April 8th, 2024

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  • We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.



  • I do the same, metro commuting and a short trip to visit family (~50 miles each way) every couple weeks or so. I don’t even have to plug in every time I get home, I only need to make sure I am charged up at least to 75% for the family visit. Level 1 charging is more than sufficient, I’ve only ever used a charging station just to see what it’s like and try to use up some credit I got for them through my dealership.

    For those without EVs: level 1 charging is just plugging into a standard 120V outlet. I have no special equipment at home, though I did need to confirm my breaker could handle it. For my 2023 Bolt EUV I charge about 1% per hour on the reduced charge setting (8 amps). If I do need to charge a little faster I can swap it to 12 amps, but I typically don’t need to do that.


  • I have an uncommon but not unique name and I have [email protected]. As far as I know, others with my name usually include a middle initial in their email address but they sometimes forget it. I’ve gotten family event plans, car maintenance reminders, digital receipts, contractor quotes, and even once added to a daycare group (that one I did reach out to the coordinator to let them know and then removed myself from the group).






  • I sincerely doubt anyone at that zoo didn’t suffer a severe emotional loss that day. That was an awful situation, and while I do think the zoo has the blame it is not because of their decision that day. For the employees, the death of an animal at a zoo can easily cause grief akin to the death of a family member or pet, depending on how closely they worked with the animal.

    Once that child was in the enclosure they really didn’t have time to try out different options that may have aggravated Harambe. Any option, including the lethal one, presented a risk to the child. They chose the option they thought gave the best chance to save the child.

    Where the zoo has blame is the design of the habitat such that a child could just crawl in. I know they’ve learned from their terrible mistake and changed the design, but they really should have known better in 2016.


  • Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to get back on Lemmy until now. Bit of a now-or-never situation. The housing market is absolutely bonkers where I live (maybe where you live too, from your username). We had both made big leaps in salary recently that put the monthly payment in the barely-doable range, and her parents had some fixed funds available to help with the down payment.

    Both the gift money and our salaries were going to be outpaced by the housing market if we waited, and interest rates were already on the post-COVID rise. I don’t think it was a terrible financial decision in the long run, because at least now we’re building equity and the house value will rise with the market. But until we sell (which we won’t be able to afford to for a long time), those assets aren’t liquid, so our month-to-month finances are a lot tighter than when we were renting. Which makes the repair work from the dipshit former owners hurt a lot more since it’s gonna take a long time to recover from big financial hits.


  • My wife and I were able to buy a ridiculously priced starter home only because we had the privilege of her parents being able to help with the down payment. We had to move farther away from work than where we were renting just to be able to even consider homes.

    Our mortgage is twice what our rent was, and we only gained about ~100 sq ft of interior space. Plus a whole host of problems because the previous owners were jackasses who DIYed everything and did it all wrong.