I didn’t the first time, but I did after reading your comment.

Many years ago, I worked in a call center. I was sitting with someone who was new helping them take calls and both of our headsets were plugged into the phone. The trainee was helping a store employee and she was just being awful to him. While she went to get something from the customer, I muted the line and said, “God, what a bitch!” except my finger was hovering over the button and I hit it just in time for her to hear me say bitch. I fully panicked and hung up on her. Nobody ever said anything to either of us and this was back when landlines would occasionally cross, so hopefully she thought that’s what happened since she hadn’t heard my voice up until then.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s the origin of why I still don’t trust mute or hold to this day. I’m not talking shit until I know that call is disconnected.

Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.

People in FL complaining about not being able to get insurance, this is why. The whole state’s gonna be underwater.

My comment history was like 50% shitposting about the beauty industry and 50% hating on Christian fundamentalists. There’s honestly no way it won’t make AI at least a little bit worse, and I’m not mad about it.

Oh I 100% agree - when I finally managed to finish my degree a few years ago, I did my capstone research on suburban/rural homelessness, and I’m now an even bigger proponent of housing-first policies. Supportive housing works better than piecemeal programs, and outcomes are better for sobriety and mental health treatment than they are for programs that require those things as a condition of getting housing.

Unfortunately, people fucking love to hate the homeless. Everyone wants to put conditions on every scrap you give them because “I worked for what I have, they should have to, too!” There’s not a lot of political support to be found for policies that are based on meeting people where they are. Saying we should use housing that’s already vacant to help people get off the streets would get you booed right out of the room a lot of the time.

No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.

I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.

Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.

It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.

My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.

We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.

I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.

That’s pretty clearly not what’s happening here though - if it’s not mental health related, then she’s a liar because people have found out that some of her claims were untrue (because, again, she posted her real name). I don’t get liar vibes, it really seems like delusions. I’m not trying to beat anyone down, I’m just saying that anyone trying to get a clear answer isn’t going to get one.

Even if you’re not personally experiencing the things pop music is currently about, there’s still plenty of really great stuff coming out all the time that you’ll miss out on if you stop listening to new things. For example, NPR popped up recently with a Tiny Desk Concert (which feels like a very Old way to find new music in itself) from Chappell Roan, and I would’ve been missing out big time if I’d skipped it just because she’s 15ish years younger than me and in a different phase of her life. A lot of it feels more nostalgic (fucking Casual, man, so many of us have been there) than current to my life, but it’s good music. And as a queer woman, gosh it’s great to see these queer artists who are able to write their feelings and experiences without having to keep plausible deniability in the lyrics.

She’s either an incredibly dedicated troll or suffering from mental illness. She’s convinced her extended family is stalking her, that Lemmy users are doxxing her (even though she’s posted her real name, photos, and a ton of other personal information - apparently clicking her profile is “stalking”), and so on. That’s all from the last week of her post history. You’re not going to get an answer that makes any sense, unfortunately.

In my case, little of column a, little of column b.

I’m starting to question my life a lot. I’ve played over 4k hours of BoI since the first version. I remember when people warned about WoW before I really gamed and how people were sinking their whole lives into it and I was like, “wow, can’t imagine, that’s crazy,” and now I’m those people. I should go outside.

I tried to swipe some word earlier and it decided what really wanted to say was ConocoPhillips. Why the fuck is that even in the dictionary in my phone? When would I ever want to say that?

I’m from CO and dating here is terrible. It wasn’t so bad in my 20s, but doing it in my 30s has been almost entirely shit to the point that I’ve given up, and so have a lot of other people. I love the state, don’t get me wrong, but it’s expensive and the single men seem to have formed some kind of mediocrity pact. The last woman I dated went from witchy pagan to hijab-wearing Muslim convert for a man she’d met in person once, so I haven’t had better luck on the queer scene either.

That said, joining queer spaces wherever you end up is a good way to dip your toes in the water without feeling the pressure that an explicitly dating-oriented site/activity might cause. Join clubs, go to bars, whatever. If you meet someone that way, it’ll likely feel a lot more natural.

Eh, pretty much all of my info has been part of one breach or another and nothing has happened. I keep locks with all the credit bureaus and monitor my report regularly, which I think everyone should do, but there’s not much else you even can do about it unfortunately.

Look, if Noctua is going to charge me 10 whole dollars extra for the exact same fan in black, I’m getting the poop brown.

*sí