Sarah Katz, 21, had a heart condition and was not aware of the drink’s caffeine content, which exceeded that of cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks combined, according to a legal filing
During the first quarter of 2023, PG&E earned $623 million, an 18.2% jump in profits from the $527 million the company tallied during the same quarter in 2022, PG&E said Thursday in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission....
You have read these charts wrong. The 17B figure is 12-month trailing gross profit. You are referencing quarterly net income (and you've also made a typo, saying 406 thousand instead of 406 million). If you want to compare the "per resident" calculation (which I don't even see the point of), make your units match. Trailing 12-month net income is 1.944B, so more like $50 per person.
Now to make the "per resident" metric actually have any meaning:
First, if we're talking yearly profit skimming off of a utility, our goal is to estimate overcharges per billing address. Census data reports about 38.9 million residents and an average family size of 2.92 - but that's not enough, because PG&E doesn't serve the entire state. They serve about two thirds of the state - taking this into account, a very rough estimate (because population isn't evenly spread across a state) is that they service 8.7 million households. Thankfully for us, they directly report how many households they serve, and the actual number is about 5.2 million.
$374. The average yearly bill for a PG&E customer is $374 pure profit for the company. Now that's a more useful metric.
Oh, and that's assuming none of their operating expenses are inflated - which they likely are. So that's a lower bound for how much they're ripping off each household.
How is that different than now?
We claim we won't force you into the military, but if there's not enough people who want to go to war, we'll draft you.
If you're a woman or minority, we won't kill you outright, but you'll have reduced quality of life without a conformative man to vouch for you. Bad job selection, lowered wages, political/legal/policing discrimination, doctors assuming malingering and not giving healthcare, etc.
People are still slapped with mental illness diagnoses and denied personal agency too. We shut down asylums, but we created mass homelessness. If you're a social rebel or outcast, you get a mental illness label that stops you from gainful employment, allows all authority figures to disregard you entirely, and if you make too much noise we'll send you to a psychiatric ward, give you court-mandated anti-psychotic injections under threat of jail, and even remove your power of attorney or make you a ward of the state.
Oh, and involuntary shock therapy still exists, by the way.
I noticed a quite lovely funnel web yesterday morning! The maker was hiding of course, so I figured I’d lightly tap the web’s edge with a piece of straw. That absolutely did the trick, and I was impressed with this little spider’s speed with checking out the tiny disturbance! They explored the web for a couple minutes, and...
Grass Spider. It's not a funnel-web, because those are very darkly colored (almost exclusively solid black), are a type of tarantula, and are exclusive to places where a tree like this would never grow.
Fun fact about grass spiders: they are quite nearly pacifistic when it comes to threats. They will make an attempt to 'attack' the threat, which means lunging forward and slapping it with their front two feet, hoping to scare it off in fear of a bite. They will never bite though, and if the false attack doesn't scare away the threat, they immediately run and hide. Besides, grass spiders are harmless to humans - whereas funnel-webs have venom that is of medical significance and can even be deadly.
Fun fact 2: a grass spider will gladly move into an abandoned web of another grass spider. Two webs in our house stayed up for years, alternating between being vacant or having different occupants. They even repaired the web regularly. We took to calling the webs 'apartments', because they really were.
Religion is a social construct wherein humans organize and participate in communal activities for the purposes of creating human connection/bonding and quelling anxieties through relinquishing perspective of control in life.
Trying to make an AI preacher is an exercise in trying to emulate the latter without the former. The latter is spiritualism: the beliefs a person creates/adopts to create a sense of 'belonging' in the world. The former is the aspect that takes spiritualism and turns it into religion, as religion is essentially the social commodification of spiritualism. Of course no one seeking religion is going to be satisfied with an AI preacher, because anyone seeking religion is seeking human connection. You could use an AI to discuss spiritual beliefs with people instead, but at that point you're not creating a preacher, but rather a chat-bot theologian.
Nah. I played before DPS/speed-clear meta and all the powercreep. When you actually fought the enemies, took damage, and didn't die to one-shots. I enjoyed that, and the game has always been downhill. After 1,400 hours of playtime, I realized I was only playing hoping for it to feel like it used to, but it never came.
Insecure people would download this app, and prematurely 'cancel' all their plans so that they get notifications the moment anyone uses it. This app idea only works with the pretense of privacy until both parties agree, but it is open to manipulation. And once you know that manipulative people are misusing the app, you will police your usage of it, and then we're back to square one, where people are unwilling to communicate.
I haven't bought Starfield, and I don't plan to, but I watched some gameplay and... Well, the game is a pile of issues. And the few bits that are acceptable are bits I've already seen from NMS - and their implementation is usually better than Starfield. So as I'm watching Starfield footage, all I can feel is a desire to reinstall NMS and play that instead... And I'm not even a big NMS fan. It's not a good sign if your 'revolutionary' game already feels beat out by competition that had existed before your game was even halfway in development. Bethesda had all the time and manpower in the world to compete with NMS, and still fell short.
Fair enough, but there's a difference between reading headlines/articles to make a judgement, and watching actual real-time gameplay for several hours to make a judgement. The only difference was that I wasn't the one holding the controller. If several hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay isn't enough to make a surface-level observation, I'm not sure what is.
Plus, I was just saying how what I saw made me feel, and I said I'd rather play one game over another. If we want to talk about unnecessarily strong opinions, let's start with you attempting to shut down my honest two cents to reinforce your negative worldview. Let's all be kind to each other, okay? :)
Well, sure. And Starfield follows in the wake of Fallout 4's lackluster RPG experience, offering shallow conversations and the illusion of choice. After Fallout 4, I'm not sure I can get myself to play another game modeled after the same system of "Would you like a quest? [Yes/Yes but sarcastic/One question first then yes/Maybe later]". If the story is railroaded, Starfield and NMS aren't too different then - there's a main quest line, with things to learn and people to meet, and you check off the boxes until it's done.
But as to whether they should be compared, I think it's unavoidable. There's too much overlap, and no other games like it. Games in which you can customize a space ship, explore thousands of planets, make a home base on any planet you want, and are incentivized to explore and find new places and meet new people? NMS, Starfield, Elite Dangerous, maybe Star Citizen. With some similar gameplay elements and a small pool of games, comparison is natural and expected. Nothing wrong with that.
Most of what I see as 'issues' are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I'm sure there's a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that's nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it'll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.
That was a >100gb download that took the moderators time to download and test. And the admins weren't involved. All the claims of admins backing the torrent or deleting comments has had zero proof, as it was all hysteria drummed up by the psychotic cracker called Empress, who has had a long standing imaginary feud with 1337x.
1337x can have malware in anything, as anyone can upload. The volunteer moderators downloaded and tested it as soon as they could. I'm sorry some people downloaded it faster, but there's no conspiracy here.
Do you think a "soulslike" is defined by being dark and gritty? I find it odd that you think the inclusion of anything cute or hopeful/friendly would be only a negative. Maybe your preferences are for dark and gritty only, but I assure you that many people enjoy other styles. There's a charm to there being hope in a dying world, isn't there?
Besides, I'd say most people define "soulslike" by their gameplay, not aesthetics. Maybe the "git gud" fragile-masculinity crowd needs their unforgiving combat system paired with a dark, 'masculine' atmosphere to fulfill their power fantasy, but again, I assure you that many other types of people enjoy those games - especially Elden Ring, which has much broader appeal than the previous souls games.
I'll wager you're a toxic "git gud" type that hinges their identity on these types of games, and that's why the idea of your sacred icon being blemished by comparison to Soulframe upsets you so much. I really can't see why else anyone would be this angry over a game not being to their preferences. If people enjoy something different than you, let them. :)
Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue. Dialogue: off screen character saying...
Nuance is needed here... The terms high- and low-functioning are definitely problematic, because they're too reductionist, and lead people to assume things. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that autism having "levels" is bad - the DSM-5 (as horribly flawed as it is) contains two sets of three levels each for determining level of support needed by an autistic person, with the two sets being related to socialization and life-skill functioning. Given that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people aren't disabled by it at all, being able to categorize people by their needs is useful - we just have to make sure that it's qualitative, rather than arbitrary labels being picked by how the doctor is feeling that day. And it's something to be kept in medical records, not used for self-identification.
I'm not sure that the labels themselves are the issue in either of these cases. It's worth remembering that we're talking about historical periods of mistreatment as well. From my experience, Psychiatry as a whole has historically had its favorite diagnosis for the 'bad and unwanted' people in society. Hysteria is the obvious reference, but that shifted towards labeling the 'undesirables' as schizophrenics (and later as borderlines). It wasn't (and in the case of BPD, still isn't) uncommon for people to receive these labels purely to communicate to other doctors "I don't like this patient"/"They're faking"/"They deserve mistreatment".
Let's not forget that the label of schizophrenia started as a combination of the idea of early-onset dementia and stigmatization of behaviors that do not fit into society. The latter half is covered up by history, but the initial 'symptoms' of a schizophrenia diagnosis included things like not making small talk and having strong beliefs about politics. The list of symptoms read half of what you'd expect in terms of psychosis, and half like it was copy-pasted from the 'symptoms' of Hysteria. That's why these additional labels were harmful - some of them were associated more with not fitting into society than actual pathology.
It's no coincidence that when this general issue of mistreatment and over-diagnosis was being fought against, Psychiatry was busy switching over to using Borderline as the new maligned diagnosis. The schizophrenia labels were removed during the wider push for humanizing treatment of schizophrenics, but I don't think the labels themselves were a significant part of the issue - the bigger issue was the inherent power imbalances and patient abuse present within Psychiatry. After all, BPD was previously unnoteworthy, but now has become the new stigmatizing label, and all the mistreatments of schizophrenics are being shifted to borderlines. After all, there's now a "quiet borderline" label - for people who clearly aren't borderline, but psychiatrists want to give the 'bad diagnosis' to anyway.
Autism is adjacent to Psychiatry, but the story is the same. Autism is currently maligned by society, and the fact that people are so hostile towards autistic people is the real problem, not the labels they've made up to 'justify' their hostility. Getting rid of the labels doesn't remove the hostility, because the hostility is just looking for an outlet. That's why my only focus is making sure that labels are medically useful - because managing societal and medicalized hate of disabled people is another issue altogether.
As someone who highly values spending time just thinking, it does take a level of privilege to do so. If your needs aren't met, or your life isn't safe/secure, letting the mind wander is giving it the ability to latch onto these distressing topics and create loops of anxiety and stress.
As much as I value spending my time thinking, I also value ways of shutting my brain off so that I don't have another panic attack about how I can't afford groceries yet or not knowing if my housing situation is secure. I can't feel like my life is collapsing if I distract myself.
And more people than not are struggling to make ends meet, so I imagine more people than not have stresses they need to put out of mind, just to retain their sanity.
This has been known for at least a decade now, and no changes have been made. I've even seen estimates on how little it would cost to modify the feed, and it's negligible, but any extra cost is too much cost I suppose.
You can't get a lobotomy anymore, but doctors still prescribe ECT all the time. You just need to modernize your standards for physician-inflicted brain damage.
It causes temporary and often permanent memory loss and brain fog. The goal of ECT is to, quite literally, make people detached from their illness or trauma by either forgetting it entirely or by damaging the pathways of learned stress responses, both of which are achieved through random damaging of soft tissue by routine 'treatments' until the right spots are hit, with every other damaged area being deemed acceptable losses.
It's proven effective, sure. It's more effective at causing improved mood than doing nothing. So is a heroin addiction. At least once you stop abusing heroin, you recover physically. ECT does permanent damage in most people who undergo it. Plus, ECT isn't a single course of treatments - any benefit it gives eventually wears off, and additional treatment cycles are planned in perpetuity. This is because of neuroplasticity, where the brain will recreate some of those connections that were damaged by ECT, thus bringing back trauma memories/associations and symptoms of illness.
Is it really worth it to suffer bits of permanent damage every time you undergo what is essentially medicalized repression of memory? There are people who lose memory of their partner of several years, have zero emotion towards them, leave them and continue on in their life never remembering the love they had. Is that worth it, for something that just returns anyway?
"Proven effective" and "outperforms placebo" are statements that focus on a single variable and don't mention how much damage something may cause elsewhere. Don't take it at face-value.
I used to think that. Then I realized I was dissociating all my memories away, and that my panic attacks were reality catching up to me. My life's fairly empty, but things definitely happen, I just don't remember them. It wasn't until I started living with someone else that I had someone to remind me of all the things I forget.
But I figure, my brain's doing it for a reason, right? Guess this is just how I deal with the stresses of life. It has its disadvantages, and I'm no stranger to hating myself for not remembering things, but any other way of getting through life would have its own downsides. Or so I tell myself.
/r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it's no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
You'd wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.
Well, being a very queer system, I think I can give a weird answer to that question... I'm a pansexual transfem jolteon that enjoys being on either end of extreme sub or dom, but in here there's also a (not really furry) genderqueer lesbian, a gay male bearded vulture, and an asexual femboy kitty, but I don't know more than that about their orientations.
If you're going to ask how all that works, I'll keep it simple: it doesn't. xD
Takaya Imamura, the art director of Majora’s Mask, reveals that, before he retired, he was interested in making Zelda “a bit more unique, with a little twi...
Is it just me, or does the language in this article feel very AI-generated? And this website is only 10 days old, has only one writer, over 10 articles posted every day by that one person, and is being posted here by an account with the same name as the site. This feels strange.
To me, this sounds like legal ass-covering to be used as a defense should Microsoft ever be investigated for attempting a sort of gaming monopoly. "No, we're not buying out all the big developers so that we control the AAA playing field, we just don't like exclusivity!"
I mean, if they don't like exclusives, why go on to complain about how much they're losing by putting their games on the competing console? Sure sounds like they'd rather not pay those fees at all, maybe... by making their new games exclusives? Hmmm...
Family files lawsuit against Panera Bread after college student who drank ‘charged lemonade’ dies (www.nbcnews.com)
Sarah Katz, 21, had a heart condition and was not aware of the drink’s caffeine content, which exceeded that of cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks combined, according to a legal filing
PG&E asks California regulators to approve a 22% rate hike (www.nbcbayarea.com)
During the first quarter of 2023, PG&E earned $623 million, an 18.2% jump in profits from the $527 million the company tallied during the same quarter in 2022, PG&E said Thursday in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission....
its the end of the rule as we know it (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
A funnel web and its resident (pawb.social)
I noticed a quite lovely funnel web yesterday morning! The maker was hiding of course, so I figured I’d lightly tap the web’s edge with a piece of straw. That absolutely did the trick, and I was impressed with this little spider’s speed with checking out the tiny disturbance! They explored the web for a couple minutes, and...
Researchers tried out AI preachers -- and it didn't go so well (www.zmescience.com)
Anon is afraid of change (sh.itjust.works)
Would this work or just make people upset? (startrek.website)
Brinner Rule (lemmy.sdf.org)
Starfield hasn’t hurt No Man’s Sky’s popularity – it may have even helped it (www.vg247.com)
No Man's Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day....
Pirate Pro (lemmy.ml)
Soulframe is Elden Ring meets Ghost of Tsushima, but with 'Disney princesses' - PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com)
Gir Rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue. Dialogue: off screen character saying...
People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts (www.science.org)
Cow poop emits climate-warming methane. Adding red algae may help (www.sciencenews.org)
Adding a type of methane-inhibiting red algae directly to cow feces cut down methane emission from the poop by about 44 percent, researchers report.
Nineteen Eighty-Rule (beehaw.org)
Suiruledal thoughts (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
U/SPEZ not popular on place (lemmy.world)
A current state of Place on Reddit shows seems to seems to be signalling something to u/spez :)
18+ Furries are typically more likely to be LGBTQ+, if it's okay to ask, what's your orientation / gender preference?
I’m curious… and slightly horny, I admit it....
Zelda: Majora's Mask art director wanted to work on another 'weird Zelda' (gamerkick.com)
Takaya Imamura, the art director of Majora’s Mask, reveals that, before he retired, he was interested in making Zelda “a bit more unique, with a little twi...
“Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation” Strong allegations being thrown here. (www.theverge.com)
Microsoft says Sony paid third parties to keep games off Xbox