You get told it’s just pneumonia, but it keeps coming back for years.

Eventually someone figures it out and says you have mesothelioma. You travel the country for a few years, looking for treatment wherever you can. It costs everything you have.

Somewhere along the way, you have to put down $120,000 in cash for a surgery that gives you a few more years. But your last years are still mostly pain and exhaustion.

I wish my uncle hadn’t died the way he did.

They have been for a while now. It started before the API thing with subreddits that were basically mirrors of English ones. But (badly) auto translated into German.

A few weeks ago, the Google results got flooded with auto translations. You can still find stuff that was written in German, but you have to limit the search to German subs (site:reddit.com/r/de, for example).

Or check the sub name in the search results. If it’s in German, you should be good. If it’s in English, or if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s usually a machine translation.

Other made up offenses include having a knife and having nothing but walking toward them

Or having a seizure on your kitchen floor.

Or having dementia and ending up at the wrong house because you think you live there.

Were you standing inside something when you took this, or is the black frame something that was added later?

And then there’s the different ways to connect verbs in English.

• I want to go to the movies. (“I want going” is wrong.)
• I like going to the movies. / I like to go to the movies. (Both ways work.)
• I despise going to the movies. (“I despise to go” is wrong.)

There aren’t rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.

Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.

Here’s an example from German:

• Der Hund (subject) hat den Mann (object) gebissen. / The dog bit the man.
• Den Mann (object) hat der Hund (subject) gebissen. / The dog bit the man. (Implied: That guy, and not someone else.)

In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.

• The dog bit the man.
• The man bit the dog.

Languages do fine with genders and without. They’re just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say “the,” we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.

You can add salt, sugar, or lemon juice to the yolks to keep them from getting so gelatinous. Link 1 has a good overview and here’s link 2 for good measure.

Nepal? That would be my guess because of the colorful flags. The river must make quite a sound when it’s like that.

I haven’t been on since June, but I noticed it for the last 1-2 years or so. Especially on the smaller subs where any given comment would only get a handful of upvotes. Someone would write a long helpful explanation, I upvote, and nothing happens. The score would stay at 1 or whatever.

It’s not like I was spamming votes either. I would make a point of only voting on one comment per post so my vote would count. But it was still usually 50/50. Vote fuzzing was there for years, but this was different. The comments that were less popular seemed to be affected the most.

It’s actually kind of complicated. I did some digging and it looks like the problem is that he wanted a new judge in his case challenging the election results in Georgia. But he made a legal move that prevented that from happening.

This is the case he’s talking about (warning: legal language). Trump originally asked for emergency relief, which means the case could be decided in days or weeks instead of months or years. Then he withdrew that request for some reason. So the original judge said no emergency relief for you. You don’t get it unless you ask for it and the judge decides it’s appropriate.

Well, Trump didn’t like that, so he did two things. He filed an appeal (of an order that you’re not allowed to appeal). That basically puts a stop to your case until the appeal is over. That’s just how it works and even brand new lawyers know this.

At the same time, he asked for his case to be assigned to a new judge. The court couldn’t say yes or no to that request because of the appeal. Thus the complaint that they wouldn’t assign a judge.

He dismissed the appeal a few weeks later and got a new judge.

I checked just now and it’s normal for me. I don’t know if the instance matters, but I’m on mastodon.social.

Yeah. In case anyone was wondering, the down payment on a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor near your heart is $100,000. Cash, or no surgery for you. The tumor is growing fast, so you only have a few days to come up with the money.

That’s all because the insurance company said the surgery wasn’t necessary. Or maybe it was too experimental. I forget. Some family members with high paying jobs managed to come up with the money, and my uncle got to live a few more years. I’m sure not everyone is that lucky. And why on God’s green earth should it have to come down to luck?

Insurance changed their mind after a long appeal. I think it took 1-2 years.

Now, more than a decade after Sylvia’s death, their efforts have landed the Wildensteins before France’s highest court. The evidence she and Dumont Beghi brought forth has persuaded prosecutors that the Wildensteins are a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating, as a prosecutor for the state once put it, “the longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history.

A trial this September will determine if the family and their associates owe a gargantuan tax bill. The last time prosecutors went after the Wildensteins, several years ago, they sought €866 million — €616 million in back taxes and a €250 million fine, as well as jail time for Guy. The consequences could do more than topple the family’s art empire. The case has provided an unusual view of how the ultrawealthy use the art market to evade taxes, and sometimes worse. Agents raiding Wildenstein vaults have turned up artworks long reported as missing, which fueled speculation that the family may have owned Nazi-looted or otherwise stolen art, and spurred a number of other lawsuits against the family in recent years. Financial distortions have saved the family hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors allege, but their treatment of Sylvia could cost them far more — and perhaps lead to the unraveling of their dynasty.

What a story. It’s a long read, but fascinating.

I think part of it is because of pricing software like RealPage.

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

I lived in a building that used this software. In 6-7 years, rent went from around $1200 to about $2,000. More and more apartments stayed empty. They kept raising prices during the pandemic. Surprise surprise, a tent city popped up down the street. A couple people died there.

Did you use a phone camera, or do you take a separate camera with you? Great picture!

High desert mountains are, or were, a great place to see the Milky Way. You had the mountains and the openness. It’s been a few years or 20 for me, though. No idea if those places are still dark enough.

Oh yeah, that would be good. This is making me hungry.

That’s going straight on my list of things to try. I love the idea of crunchy potatoes with the soft meat.

Looks like you used whole cloves of garlic, too. And maybe roasted some of it? I’ll be stealing that idea too.

How big were the mushrooms? I’m looking at the two blades of grass there at the bottom, and I can’t figure out if they’re a decent size or its just the perspective. Nice picture btw.