I learned my lesson about “lifetime” thanks to SiriusXM.

When Howard Stern got lured to SiriusXM they offered a deal where you buy the receiver and pay $500 for a lifetime subscription with unlimited transfers to different receivers. Fat forward to 2017ish when I bought my last car that had the receiver built into the radio and tried to transfer to the new one. I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.

Lifetime is a hoax.

Oh hey! I narrowly avoided this one. No SNAP here (yet)! Only SSDI, Medicaid/Medicare, and HUD housing 🤨

Wait…. Did I miss something? What’s going on in South Africa that we take on refugees? Shouldn’t we be, I dunno, accepting refugees from Gaza and Ukraine instead?

“There are 18 very important trading relationships, and we are currently negotiating with 17 of those trading partners,” Bessent told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on Tuesday. “Approximately 97 or 98% of our trade deficit is with 15 countries, 18% of the countries are our major trading partners. And I would be surprised if we don’t have more than 80 or 90% of those wrapped up by the end of the year, and that may be much sooner.”

Uhhh…I’m not sure you understand the gravity of the self-made situation when you have major retailers saying shelves could be empty in weeks because of this stupidity.

“Obviously, we’re working as expeditiously as possible, but we’re not trying to make deals that are Band-Aids for the sake of making deals,” the official added.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a problem with AI, more of a problem with humans in general.

Hearing ONLY validation and encouragement without pushback regardless of how stupid a person’s thinking might be is most likely what creates these issues in my very uneducated mind. It forms a toxically positive echo-chamber.

The same way hearing ONLY criticism and expecting perfection 100% of the time regardless of a person’s capabilities or interests created depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation and attempts specifically for me. But I’m learning I’m not the only one with these experiences and the one thing in common is zero validation from caregivers.

I’d be ok with AI if it could be balanced and actually pushback on batshit crazy thinking instead of encouraging it while also able to validate common sense and critical thinking. Right now it’s just completely toxic for lonely humans to interact with based on my personal experience. If I wasn’t in recovery, I would have believed that AI was all I needed to make my life better because I was (and still am) in a very messed up state of mind from my caregivers, trauma, and addiction.

I’m in my 40s, so I can’t imagine younger generations being able to pull away from using it constantly if they’re constantly being validated while at the same time enduring generational trauma at the very least from their caregivers.

Yeah I saw the public broadcasting defunding one. To be honest, I lost track of all the things going on because I’ve been so focused on Social Security, Medicaid, and HUD because anything that happens to them affects me in some way more than anything else being on disability and in HUD housing.

I imagine once things come up in the Supreme Court we’ll see a flurry of activity regardless of their decisions

No, only states do. Although territories have members in congress, they can’t vote on any legislation. They have a government set up by Congress and pretty much oversee themselves with no ability to influence elections or laws in the states. The last territory to become a state was Hawaii. Territories are land grabs, statehood comes after that.

Canada would unfortunately be a land grab for the resources and nothing else for Trump. It would be ravaged and the people of Canada would suffer greatly for it without an ounce of ability to do anything about it.

I don’t think Trump is actually running the white house anymore. Watching the project 2025 checklist, it’s far too complete for Trump to be able to dictate any of it.

What bothers me more is that it’s been stuck at 42% complete for what seems like a month. Things have taken a nose dive compared to the first couple of months. Makes me wonder if we’re going to go from 42% to 80% with martial law all at once soon.

The military preys on the poor and desperate. It brain washes those that don’t know fully what they are getting involved with.

Exactly this. In 96/97 I was supposed to have gone to college and fucked that whole thing up and had to look for a job. I was having a really hard time trying to find a job and thought about the military.

Out of the blue I got a phone call from one of the military recruitment centers (you’re lucky I remember this at all, let alone what branch) telling me about military service since I had turned 18. I told them I was hearing impaired and wear hearing aids as well as legally blind in one eye. I was told I was not a good candidate and would be denied despite my willingness to take the offer since I couldn’t find a job fresh out of high school.

This comment connected this memory of that call and the Iraq War in a way I hadn’t thought of before – I no doubt know now that if I had been accepted into the military I would have gone to Iraq in 2003. At this moment, I am grateful that I have an unusually heavy burden of medical issues when I normally don’t find much to be positive about in life.

Thank you for this unintentional reminder.

I put Amazon in the same category these days

Laws don’t mean shit anymore and stopped doing so when a convicted felon got elected as President. Well it doesn’t mean shit for rich people.

This is a complete upheaval of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution per Wikipedia’s entry on Separation of church and state:

Jefferson and the Bill of Rights

In English, the exact term is an offshoot of the phrase, “wall of separation between church and state”, as written in Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. In that letter, referencing the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Jefferson writes:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.[6]

Jefferson was describing to the Baptists that the United States Bill of Rights prevents the establishment of a national church, and in so doing they did not have to fear government interference in their right to expressions of religious conscience. The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791 as ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, was one of the earliest political expressions against the political establishment of religion. Others were the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, also authored by Jefferson and adopted by Virginia in 1786; and the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789.

The metaphor “a wall of separation between Church and State” used by Jefferson in the above quoted letter became a part of the First Amendment jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was first used by Chief Justice Morrison Waite in Reynolds v. United States (1878). American historian George Bancroft was consulted by Waite in the Reynolds case regarding the views on establishment by the framers of the U.S. constitution. Bancroft advised Waite to consult Jefferson. Waite then discovered the above quoted letter in a library after skimming through the index to Jefferson’s collected works according to historian Don Drakeman.[30]

As an atheist that agrees more with Buddhism and Paganism than any organized religion this infuriating. I went to Catholic Church and school for 18 years of my life, I know what it’s like to be “forced” to believe in something you don’t.

Are they going to keep records of who goes to what churches and arrest people if they don’t go to the correct church at the correct time and day?

I don’t give a shit what anyone believes as long as they are not an asshole, that’s their own business. I’ve had people try to shove their religion on me and it’s not fun. If I had the financial means to leave this country I absolutely would now even if I was a Christian and went to church every Sunday.

This is REALLY freaking dangerous and scary on top of all the REALLY freaking dangerous and scary other bullshit Orange Man and his Disciples of Dumbasses have been doing since January 20th.

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There was a traffic stop a month or so ago where the city police were called by BP for assistance and they actually assisted them in kidnapping people. The mayor is pissed and says that can’t happen due to our sanctuary city status (since 1986) and now the federal government is suing us. We have a HUGE population of immigrants from all over the world here as refugees and to attend our two universities and this is going to get ugly.

The head of C&BP is coming to my city this week because of all this. Something tells me ICE is going to be crawling all over this city the whole week and longer. BP already crawls all over the city because we’re on the northern border.

I live in a HUD building. I see ICE searches without warning in my near future because of how many immigrants are here. My cane might be useful for more than just balancing me while walking.

This is beyond evil. Like I think even evil people are nice to kids with cancer

Don’t these two countries have nukes? 2025 is a shitshow

I’m on the northern east coast. I have friends in California that try to get me to move there but I have no interest in experiencing an earthquake first hand – blizzards and ice storms are traumatic enough.

If this is done on the east coast and we start experiencing California-level earthquakes…

U.S. Gen Xer here about to give up on doctors again. In my 20’s it was pill pushers, 20 years later I had physical and mental health issues that are complicated and that I had ignored because I didn’t want to just have another pill shoved on me and decided to put trust in doctors.

At first, it was pretty good because I was seeing a NP who took time to listen to me and it felt like I was in on the decision of MY health. A couple of years later the hospital system decided in their interest of not making enough money to stop using NP’s in that location.

I tried…I really did. I’ve given it a couple of years and we’re not to the point of pill pushing (although with all the docs I have I’m on 8 different meds now 🤦🏻) but I’ve lost the ability to advocate for myself because either he’s too quick and I don’t think that fast or I do think that fast and he dismisses me. Testing that might be helpful in figuring out what none of the other doctors or him can figure out is denied by him, most likely because he doesn’t have the time to fight with insurance (in my case Medicaid/Medicare) rather than doesn’t see any value in a test. But instead of being honest with me he just says it’s not helpful, at least that’s what my cynical ass sees.

I’m getting my physical soon, they made a mistake with the bloodwork dates and I had to send them a message to get that corrected. I decided to advocate for a test that I thought could be useful that was just drawing more blood and he flat out denied it as helpful. Once I get my physical I’m going to try changing doctors, with the expectation that either none of them are taking new patients or have a year or longer waiting list. Oh and the message back was also just short of blaming me for their mistake.

Doctors (at least in the U.S.) are overworked, understaffed, and if you don’t fit neatly in a box they can check they throw their hands up and say who knows rather than working with you to figure out what’s going on. Better yet, they blame symptoms on mental health to deflect – only to have therapists (unless they are trained in addiction and trauma-informed) disagree and refer you back to the doctor. And the cycle repeats over and over again until you are worn down enough to stop caring.

Anything demeaning another human in an effort to make them less than everyone else is pure hatred and is hate speech.

In 2023, United States exported a total of $1.86T, making it the number 2 exporter in the world.

🤯