Someone once posted that rather than calling it Christian Nationalism, we should call it Nationalist Christianity, because it has a convenient and easy to remember abbreviation: Nat.C.

Or, they’re claiming it affected them so they can rip off their customers and blame it on the “communists”.

I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the aftermath. A small car was crushed between two large trucks in the left lane of the highway. When I drove by, the crushed car was completely unrecognizable as a car. Just a pile of compacted metal and plastic. You couldn’t even tell what was the front or the back.

When I got to work, I checked the news to see what happened to the driver of the car.

No significant injuries, just some scratches. She laid down across the front seat and slid down under the dashboard and managed to find the one space that wasn’t completely compacted.

Raising my children, I got painfully aware of how “lasts” work.

The last time your baby asks you to pick them up. The last time they ask you to take them trick-or-treating. The last time you read a bedtime story.

The one thing that is common to all the lasts is you never know it was the last time until it’s too late. It’s always already a memory. At the time it seemed like every other time so you didn’t even savor it.

What I’m trying to say is, if they manage to usurp the election this time, then 2024 won’t be the last democratic election. The last democratic election would be the previous one.

Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.

If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.

They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.

Whenever anyone talks about how high interest rates are now, I remember when my wife and I bought our house in 1997. We were pre-approved for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 7.5%, and we were told to take it.

What we were actually told was, "you’ll never see a rate this low again.

When people ask me why I like Linux, my go-to reason is my main personal machine. I use it for everything I do outside of work, including running my Emby server.

I built it from $500 worth of parts 13 years ago. I’ve kept updating the os and applications. It’s starting to slow down a bit after the last os upgrade, but it’s still plenty usable.

I am getting concerned about the spinning platters. As far as I am aware, Linux won’t prevent an ancient hard disk drive from reaching the natural end of is life.

It’s probably time to move on to a new machine. Well, new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and disks at least.

So sitting on my ass eating candy isn’t the way to lose weight?

Pong.

that doesn’t mean the political articles will be!

The idea is that it means there’s no reason to trust anything the paper says. However, that doesn’t go far enough.

If you read an article in a paper about something you have direct knowledge of, and you can confirm the article is factually correct, that still doesn’t mean anything else in the paper can be trusted.

You can’t really trust anything. For all you know, I’m a guinea pig who managed to steal a cell phone to post on the Internet. I’m not, of course. That would be impossible. However, how would you know?

I live in The U.S., so of course I’m not actually familiar with a functional health care system. However almost 50 years ago when I was in elementary school, there were health lessons that taught us kids how to brush and floss.

Regular flossing doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing you should need an X-ray to learn about.

No certainly not, but I didn’t see it on the list yet.

It’s it too soon to say, “letting Crowdstrike push updates to all your windows workstations and servers”

My mom often used two:

“Useless as tits on a bull” (often referencing her husband, my dad)

And also, “shit fire and save matches”, which I never understood to actually have a meaning, it was more like just an exclamation of surprise.

Perhaps people on Lemmy just aren’t learning anything.

That which doesn’t kill you probably isn’t a parasitic wasp sting.

I just had the odd experience of using a manufacturer’s discount card to pick up a medication for my wife. The medication is relatively expensive and seldom covered by insurance.

According to the information on the card, if you have private insurance which covers the medication, the discount card covers the co-pay, so you pay nothing. However, if your insurance doesn’t cover the medication, the discount card covers the cost, and you still pay nothing.

Our insurance didn’t cover the cost, and we didn’t pay anything for the medication.

I don’t understand how that works.

I think it’s important to remember that the USA isn’t a single culture. Things vary dramatically even within a single state to say nothing of differences between states.

In some areas prom is very important. In others, not so much.

Only one of my three kids went to prom (Eastern PA).

Prom in my high school was a relatively big deal. You rented a tux or bought a dress. Some people would rent a limo. The prom was held in some kind of banquet hall with a fairly fancy meal. There’d be a DJ and dancing.

My wife was one year behind me in high school, and we attended FOUR proms (my junior prom, then the next year her junior prom and my senior prom, then the next year I came back for her senior prom).

I think for most people it’s just an opportunity to get dressed up, have a good meal, and dance. If you’re already dating someone, it obviously has more significance, but I had plenty of friends who just took another friend as a date for the prom and others who didn’t go with anyone. However, there was a lot of pressure to be a “couple”, even if you weren’t actually romantically involved with your “date”.

Typically the parents take pictures of the kids in their dresses and tuxedos. From the parents’ point of view, it’s a moment to sort of take note of how your kids are maturing and think about what the future holds for them. Lots of thinking about how old you are ;-)

Often there’s an after party that goes on late into the morning, and for many kids the after party is more important than the prom.

I think social media has had an effect on what prom is, but it also has the effect of distorting what it is to people who only experience it remotely. When you’re seeing the crazy YouTube videos and Instagram posts, you’re not seeing what prom is. You’re seeing a snapshot of what those particular proms are.

the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present.

Perhaps this was a regional thing.

I was born in 1970, but from what my parents have described, dates were not chaperoned in the 50s unless you happened to have particularly strict parents. Like maybe if you were Amish or something.

Here’s the only thing I was able to find online about dating in the 50’s

https://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sombat.html

Came here looking for this.