smeej

Most people are internally stuck in movie logic. They can't possibly be honest with other people because they can't bring themselves to be honest with themselves.

Who wants to admit their problem with someone is that they see something in that person that they don't like in themselves and it's making them uncomfortable? Heck, if they could clear that up internally, there wouldn't be an external problem to resolve.

I am extremely forthright and literal. I am the one you can count on to come out and just mention the elephant in the room and ask why people are acting weird around it. And I can assure you this does not work. There is an entire game of communication through social nicety that completely falls apart if you ask the question out loud. You either figure out how to play it and read between (all) the lines, or you end up the awkward weirdo because you won't just let people keep their useful fictions about their discomfort with themselves.

And for all of you bristling at this, telling me it can't possibly be like that, that I'm judgmental for calling it exactly as I see it, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

We all do this. We lie to ourselves because living with our self-contradictions is unpleasant. It's much easier to ostracize the person who brings that out into the open than it is to live with our internal inconsistencies.

Of the six old Android phones I have around, two of them I don't dare turn on due to swollen batteries. I guess it depends how old the devices are whether this was a real risk, but I won't leave devices plugged in anymore for this reason.

I think it's more just an example of the flawed methodology. Like, it assumes a 4-person household, right? Two adults, two kids. If the kids need full-time childcare, it's because the parents must both be working full-time, right? Otherwise presumably one or the other of them could take care of the children at least some of the time. But where can you pay two adults for full-time work and only hit $31,200? Is there anywhere that actually pays a $7.50 minimum wage? Even in states where that's technically the minimum by law, you can't hire somebody for that. I live in one such state. KFC advertises $17 an hour on the sign outside.

And the kids must be young enough that they're not in school, if the childcare figures are to be plausible. $32,773 for two kids? I'm not remotely in a low cost of living area, but you're not paying that kind of rate even for twin newborns. It's less than half that for after school care.

The problem is that it's taking average figures as though people who are financially struggling are paying average costs for things. That's never been the case. People who don't have money have always had to be careful about how they spend it.

It's a decent point that "3x food costs" is likely too low a benchmark. But it doesn't come close to justifying 16x.

Cheap phones like a year old Moto G are under $100. There's no reason that shouldn't last two years. They do everything necessary. If you're near poverty, you don't get to use "normal" amounts of data, streaming shows and Spotify and YouTube. You need enough data to get by, and 5GB will easily load every website you must access in a month, never mind that the plan includes all the talk/text you need.

I really do pay $15 a month for my phone plan. I've never hit my 5GB data cap.

I do have $30 home internet. So even if we assume two adults and home broadband, we're talking $70 including hardware, not $200, but there's nothing I do on my home WiFi that I absolutely need and couldn't do from my phone while staying under the data cap. But I'm not financially struggling, and it's an expense I'm happy to pay. It's not something I need.

You can get a year old Moto G for under $100. There's no reason it shouldn't last two years (or 25 months for easy math, $4 a month). And you can get an MVNO plan for $15 a month that covers all talk and text and 5GB data. $19.

Those are the actual costs of my phone plan. I've never once come close to the cap because I don't stream music/video on my phone. It's not a need. I can load all the websites I must access and look up maps everywhere I need to go. And it's a pre-paid plan. No credit check required.

People who are really struggling simply do not NEED to spend more than $20 for phone service.

I don't think I am. Twelve? You don't need your own phone, never mind a smartphone with accompanying data plan, before you're 12.

I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:

> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.

We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.

You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.

There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.

It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?

It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.

I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.

The "will learn to avoid you" part is what I was getting at in my warning at the end. This only gets you through a few interactions.

The point of small talk is to get to medium talk. It's not directionless. Medium talk just means you've found a topic that both of you are interested in enough to talk about it for five to ten minutes without getting bored. That you both know the host is one of the few things it's culturally safe to assume anymore. Both of you met the host doing something you like well enough to associate with a person you met doing that thing when you're not doing that thing, so if either of those things happen to be an appropriate subject for medium talk, great. Now you're out of small talk and just "talking to this person I just met at this party about a thing we both like." If you're lucky, it's something you both actually like a lot, and then you have a basis for large talk, and large talk opens the door to casual friendship.

If you don't happen to draw a medium or large talk topic out of the gate, that's when you poke around the edges of the small talk, looking for things that could be fodder for medium talk. If you try looking for three or four and aren't getting anywhere, you've still filled the appropriate 5-10 minutes not to seem like a jerk, and now you need a snack, or a drink, and a new conversation partner.

It helps a lot if you're genuinely interested in a wide variety of things, enough that you can ask intelligent questions about them, because it increases the likelihood that you can find a shared interest with this person you've just met. That's not just "attentive listening." It's "finding out why someone cares about something interesting to them because you sincerely want to know."

If the other person isn't engaging with you at all, isn't trying to find one of these topics with you, they actually just don't want to talk to you. That's how people communicate this. It's not usually personal. They haven't known you long enough for it to be really personal. They may not even consciously realize they don't want to talk to you, but it's still true, and you're doing them a favor when you recognize that and excuse yourself.

The best small talkers say very little. We just ask interested questions about what you've already said. An easy cold opener at parties is, "So how do you know the host?" Then inquire about whether they're still doing that thing, or how long ago it was, or where they did it, whether they learned any cool things--the point is to keep asking questions.

Most people love talking about themselves and things they like to do. If you can keep them doing that, they'll remember fondly the "great conversation" you had.

Fair warning: It won't get you past the third or fourth interaction, at which point you probably actually need to have something in common, but it's an easy way to get through parties.

You (and everyone else ostensibly affected) have had like 7 years to sue over this if you could prove it.

Plus, even though YOU obviously know better than to post a screenshot of your Coinbase balances on social media, (tens of?) thousands of their customers do not.

With the analysis you provided of the email, your report definitely deserved to be taken seriously, but Coinbase could easily get dozens of emails reporting "compromise" of the personal details you provided that were obtained by good ol' fashioned OSINT and poor personal privacy practices.

If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10. That's not "some clever ways." That's so basic it's absurd. They don't know how many things you're going to buy. They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy. There's no way to game the entire system for every combination of things people might buy.

Never mind this: When was the last time you bought something in person, in cash, and bought only one thing? Just think it through for a second.

Wouldn't they have to crack the private key by the time the block is mined? Otherwise that transaction would already be sent to another address? I don't have a good idea how long it would take supercomputers to crack a single private key, so I don't know if 13,000x faster would be fast enough, but I don't think it would.

The private key is a 256-bit number. I don't think even 13,000x faster than supercomputers is going to get your cracking time under the time for a 10-minute block. 2^256 is a really, really, really big number.

Sometimes there is no valid hash found for any nonces in the 2^32 space and the timestamp and/or the extra nonce in the coinbase transaction in the block header have to be updated and tried again, so at least it's not quite that simple (simple, as distinct from easy).

I had to have contrast to diagnose a simple cyst, which is entirely asymptomatic and was discovered by accident in the background of a cardiac MRI (family history of SCD, but my own heart is fine).

You're making me feel lucky about what was otherwise a very unpleasant experience!

The annoying thing is that nobody I've asked can pinpoint what it is.

Same happened to me. It was a "How dare you try to speak my language?" type of response.

They were almost as offended as the people in Barcelona when I ignorantly tried to speak to them in Spanish.

I wasn't aware of any diet that excluded these things for reactivity reasons, and once boiled half to death, they were so soft as to be practically "pre-digested." I was trying to make it as easy on my gut as I could manage.

Even so, a 1.2g dose, which was what I was taking, isn't enough to obliterate my existing gut bacteria.

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice in a pan until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Salt to taste, but it's never gonna be delicious. It's tolerable. It's even fairly enjoyable once or twice. It's not a bad meal. But boy is it a tedious one after awhile.

Yes, that was one of the inflammatory markers they checked. At diagnosis, I was in the mid-400s. After medication, I was in the low-200s. After 20 months of this elimination diet, I was in the 20s.

Multiple doctors told me it would not be possible to decrease the score without medication, one of them even while holding the results in his hands proving that I had done it.

My favorite is the "bless your heart" head tilt that strongly implies you're just too damn stupid to follow what they're saying, when it's obvious on its face that they're contradicting themselves.

"I was correctly diagnosed with it before." "Correct." "I do not have it now." "Correct." "It is not 'in remission.' I just do not have the disease." "Correect." "But it isn't curable." "Correct." "So if it wasn't 'cured,' what did happen to it?" {head tilt} "You tell me. Follow it through. You used to have it. You do not have it anymore. It's not in remission. But it also hasn't been cured. What does that leave?" "#$%^! I don't know! That's why I'm here, asking you! As far as I know, all it leaves is contradiction and impossibility!" "Now, now. There's no need to be difficult."

(This is almost word for word the last conversation I had with my GI. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not paraphrasing. I went through it exactly like this, and she responded to me exactly like this.)

Gosh, I'm sorry. It does suck. For me, it was like that until it suddenly wasn't anymore. Nothing obviously changed. I kept "testing" reintroducing very small amounts of other food to try to end the elimination diet, like a bite every two months or something, and after 20 months, suddenly it went fine.

I say that just in hopes of encouraging you that healing might be right around the corner and you just might not know it yet. I certainly didn't know it was about to be over when it ended.

I'm not a scientist on any level, so my theory only went as far as "stop irritating the thing and let it heal itself."

When they started talking about putting me on immune-suppressant drugs during a pandemic, I thought that didn't sound like a very good idea, but maybe my body could sort itself out if I gave it the opportunity.

Not a terribly sophisticated take, but it works for things like not popping blisters or picking at scabs, so it seemed worth a shot.

CRP and fecal calprotectin. The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Picked things that were very soft/easy to digest, with at least some nutritional value, because it didn't bother me. I just wanted to buy time for things to calm down.

It was meant to be an elimination diet with reintroduction, but every reintroduction attempt failed miserably for 20 months. Then, suddenly, it was fine.

I still mostly eat food I would recognize in its ingredient form instead of highly processed stuff, but if everybody's going out for pizza, I can have a couple slices and be fine. I just can't do that all the time.

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.

I wanted it to be soft/easy to digest, but also nutritious. This was at least a wide enough variety of nutrients that I didn't feel miserable (just bored).

Actually when I medicated it, it was with mesalamine, not an antibiotic. I didn't do anything to attack the bacteria.

The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.

It's also the case that there is a bewildering variety of things that get sort of lumped together as "IBD." Crohn's and ulcerative colitis are two of them, but there's no particular reason to assume inflammatory bowel diseases all have the same set of causes. Pretty much all of them are made worse by an e. coli infection, though, so a drug that can target just those bacteria is helpful!

During my own IBD journey, I've managed to stump the heck out of two different teams of GIs. I had been diagnosed with UC by biopsy during colonoscopy, and then at my last colonoscopy, despite not having been on medication for more than two years, they determined not only that I don't have it now, but that I never did. They told me "remission" would look different from "this bowel has never had IBD." But they also insisted I had not been misdiagnosed.

And yet they told me with a straight face that it is incurable. I had it in the past, confirmed by pathology. I don't have it now. And it's incurable. I give up.

In the end, I don't care enough to fight them about the contradiction, because the part I most care about is the "I don't have it now" part, and we're all in agreement on that.

(Note for any who are interested: I stopped medication after successfully reducing my inflammation markers within normal limits by eating the exact same thing for every single meal for 20 months with no cheating of any kind. They told me that shouldn't have been possible either, but it worked. And yes, it was as miserable as it sounds, but less miserable than living with UC.)

Have you no interior life at all? Nothing that matters to you even if nobody else knows or cares that it does?

This is one of the bleakest, most discouraging comments I think I've ever read, and it's hard for me (in a sad way) to believe anyone might actually mean it.

> sometimes outgoing autistic children develop social anxiety after their peers reject them repeatedly.

As a middle-aged woman who can't figure out what the benefits would be that would outweigh the costs of pursuing formal diagnosis at this stage, I related a lot harder to that line than I wanted to.

I've always been extraverted. I always do fine in new interactions, because I'm chronically interested in anything I don't already know well, especially if someone else is passionate about it. Most of my first meetings with people quickly become conversations where I'm listening attentively and asking interested questions about some niche thing they love and their friends and family members are sick of hearing about. I get stellar reviews on initial conversations at unstructured social events.

And yet I spend the vast majority of my time at home by myself because after about the fourth interaction, something about me registers as "off" to other people and they start to distance themselves from me. I have never understood why.

I'm not socially anxious, at least not in the typical "can't get out and meet new people" way. I just can't take the never-ending hope-rejection loop anymore.