I’m an American living in Germany. I’ve lived here for four years as of this week (June 2021).
Two and a half years ago, I had a medical emergency in the form of gallstones and an infected gallbladder. I tried to tough it out, like a True American Who Can’t Afford Treatment, and ended up in the hospital getting the gallbladder removed. I was brought in on Thursday, had the gallbladder and five gallstones the size of macadamia nuts removed on Saturday, and was home by Tuesday. Total cost, 200 euro.
Back in March, 2021, I saw a visual distortion in my right eye, like an afterimage of looking at something bright for too long. Got seen by the eye doctor that day, got sent to the hospital that day to get a diagnosis–ocular vein occlusion–and spent the following three days getting followup diagnostics, including a full blood panel. I got diagnosed with having elevated levels of homocysteine in my blood, and that turned out to be caused by a genetic disorder that runs in my family (MTHFR-5 mutation) where I can’t metabolize B vitamins correctly. And now I’m on modified B vitamins and the difference in my daily life is amazing.
Total cost for the hospital stay and all of the blood tests and eye examinations and other tests?
250 euro.
In my old city in the US–which has a nationally renown hospital–the gallbladder removal costs a year’s salary for a minimum wage worker.
US healthcare if you are not wealthy is a bad joke.
one thing i remember about using landline phones when i was younger was that the calls sounded better than they do on cellphones now - even background noise was clearer and more crisp.
thought this was just nostalgic memory, or because landline receivers had bigger speakers or something, but i just learned that cell call quality is actually measurably worse than old landline call quality.
not only does the digitized audio stream get compressed (to save bandwidth, which is not really an issue with landlines, which gave you a full & dedicated channel) but they can also alter the audio frequencies for clearer speech on the smaller speakers, which is why people sound a little robotic sometimes
so, analog wins again. good look getting a non-voip landline these days, though
25-35 is such a weird fucking age because you’re 100% a bread-and-butter Standard Edition Millennial but the cool teens are like “ok boomer” because you have a Real Job but the actual Boomers at your job are like “I’m not going to listen to a literal fucking child” as they download 16 self-replicating viruses and meanwhile the Gen Xers are telling you to refinance a mortgage for a house you don’t have and you’re sitting there at the Adults Table with the pretty tasty casserole you cooked because you’ve finally figured out how to do that now but everyone is eating the Boomer’s store-bought macaroni instead and admittedly they do sort of taste similar so it probably wasn’t worth all the trouble of cooking from scratch and you’re trying to comfort the freshly-graduated sobbing 22-year-old next to you because she just woke up here and doesn’t know where she is but you have like maybe 5k dollars in a savings account labelled RETIREMENT that grows approx. twelve cents a year and you keep eating dry macaroni while smiling incomprehensibly and periodically blacking out like ??????????
seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so it’s not totally dominating the market yet but it’s worrying that we’re basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.
Does Firefox not count for anything?
about 10% and falling, but perhaps that can change, I just don’t see how.
Chrome edging towards 70% on desktop, Microsoft has thrown in the towel, Safari obviously rules iOS, Firefox exists only as insurance for Chrome.
Please, please I’m begging you, use firefox.
PLEASE install firefox as a mobile browser and then run adblock on your mobile browser it’s so good I promise.
Look.
Look.
I know I’m a total grind about open source stuff but browsers are the PERFECT place to learn to love open source software and for so long FireFox was a major part of the browser market and sometimes if you want to see what kind of fuckery google is up to it helps to see the kinds of things they block in firefox and just
There’s an organization that makes free, excellent, safe software that doesn’t collect and market your data but for some reason two thirds of the world uses a google product and most of the leftover population uses apple and just
I promise, firefox is so good - the extensions are incredible look - I can use lightbeam to see what sites I use and how they connect to other sites (bottom right should give you an idea how much time I spend on tumblr)
or I can look at ublock origin and see that it’s blocked over 2 million requests since I installed it or I can run the facebook container extension and stop facebook from tracking me and you know what I bet you can do a lot of that on chrome too but you’re doing that while chrome itself is tracking you and gobbling up your activity for google and
firefox is so fuckin great and it’s such a great ambassador for other open source projects please be a big old fuckin nerd with me and use firefox and run a bunch of funky extensions and customize the fuck out of your web experience.
