I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

Agreed. A lot of people in this thread are confusing what they believe should be illegal discrimination with what is actually illegal discrimination. Or they believe discrimination laws are more broadly encompassing than they are. There are a lot of kinds of discrimination that most of us agree is bad and shouldn’t be allowed… but unfortunately is not illegal.

I think this is helpful context from the actual report (linked at the top of the WaPo article):

In 2022, half as many (47%) of adolescent girls and young women acquired HIV as in 2010. Even with this decline, we are not on track to meet our 2030 target to end new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women.

The global sex-distribution of new HIV infections among adolescents is driven largely by sub-Saharan Africa, which carries the overwhelming global burden of HIV. In 2022, 33% of older adolescents aged 15-19 years newly infected with HIV lived outside of the region. In the Middle East and North Africa region, the number of young people living with HIV has increased by 13% since 2010. In East Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, two thirds of new adolescent infections, age 10-19 years, occur in boys. Stigma, discrimination, societal inequalities and violence sabotage the efforts of adolescents and young people to protect themselves against HIV and other health threats. Young key populations are especially vulnerable.

I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is. A lot of areas have tiny grocery stores to support a small population spread over a wide area.

Dude. Your behavior here is really weird. People are responding to your unhinged flailing and trying to explain why the one source we currently have appears to be reputable. They are giving you reasons to believe that this source is very likely to be telling the truth while you wait for confirmation from other sources. You appear to have gone from a possibility you’ve identified (the possibility that this article is all made up) and inflated the probability of that being true to crazytown levels.

You seem to see conspiracy in the lack of a second source. There is a much more mundane explanation for the lack of that source you desperately need: this story just broke today (Friday). It takes a reputable source more than an hour or two to do their own research and verification and write their own article. Give it time. Yes, verifying news through multiple sources is a good thing. Yes, when there is more published about this, we will be better equipped to judge the accuracy of this article. But you seem to think journalism happens automatically and instantly.

While sometimes positions have a requirement to retire at a certain age and/or tenure, most don’t — I’m not sure if this particular role has such requirements. My reading of this is that while he was eligible to retire, he probably was not required to. Many people work past retirement eligibility.

Undoubtably, the airline doesn’t allow them to help because of “lawsuit”

And while I agree, they should have had the wheelchair there in the first place, I don’t see that as the core problem. While this incident wouldn’t have happened if the wheelchair were there, there will always be problems that need to be addressed in real time while running their business.

This incident shows how they respond to problems and it is terrifying. Sure, the company could make sure there are wheelchairs on every plane so that this particular incident never happens again. But the broader issue is that they appear to have actively disempowered their employees from solving problems or doing anything outside their specific list of duties. Problems will always happen and you can’t have a precise plan for every possible problem. That’s whey employees need the power to solve those problems. Otherwise you get evil shit happening like this.

Edit: and the solution was simple. If you don’t have the wheelchair you are required to have, you wait for a wheelchair (or give the passenger get the option to be physically assisted off). Yes, that is painful to the business. It means delays. But that is the obvious solution.

She said that eight cleaning crew members, two flight attendants, and the captain and co-captain watched as she tried to help her husband exit the plane.

At first I was going to say, “how as a human being do you stand there and watch this?” But i have to think that many of those people wanted to help but felt that they could not. Instead, I’ll ask: What kind of terrible, shithole, money grubbing, leach on society company must this be to have made all of those employees too scared to step forward?

Except the captain. That is your plane, you subhuman piece of shit. The company you work for may be the devil, but you let this happen while it was your responsibility to fix it. You watched it and did nothing.

But at least you’re rich!

It’s a vacation home, which, by definition would be a part time home. And vacation homes are pretty much the purview of the rich.

Looking a bit further (on squatting in general), it looks like squatting is generally only a misdemeanor offense. Although, burglary or similar may also apply here. Squatting is often a civil court matter.

Yep. It says he was convicted on firearms charges. It’s unclear whether he was even charged/tried for squatting. The article says

Devin Michael Cuellar was sentenced to five years and three months on Monday after he was convicted of felonious possession of a sawed-off shotgun and ammunition while squatting on private property, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California said.

Maybe the “while squatting on private property” part could mean some charges were related to squatting… but it’s unclear.

Lol. They don’t have a picture of the actual home, so instead the article includes a picture of the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite… because reasons. And now for a random Yosemite fact:

Though the home’s exact location or property size was not disclosed, homes in the area range from $279,000 upwards to $7.9 million. The Wawona Hotel is one of California’s original mountain resort hotels, and located 27 miles from Yosemite Valley on Wawona Road

The title is the only mention of the redwoods in the entire article. OP, please don’t post clickbait.

I hate this about lemmy. It looks like youve been banned/deleted/something from the thread. So now all your comments and all replies have disappeared from the conversation.

I think I said this before, but in case I didn’t: I agree that the mental health side of this equation is also critical. That doesn’t change the fact that the gun control side of the equation is a major factor. Also, if you’re going to cherry pick Switzerland stats, then don’t forget to also look at their gun control laws, which are much stronger than the US (and it appears Canada, although I’m less sure there). You seem to want to cherry pick data to show that it’s all mental health and guns aren’t a significant part of the problem. Good luck with that.

how is gun control going to help the fact that some people out there want to kill as many lives as possible?

By reducing access to a very powerful tool for murder. Here is a comparison of USA and Canadian homicide rates

Are you pointing to a single incident from 5 years ago as evidence that non-gun mass murders are common in Canada? Do you think that when gun control is enacted, all the people that would have committed murder via gun would instead commit as much murder using improvised weapons? If so, can you show any data that bears this out?

Even though other methods of murder can be devised, restricting access to the easiest, fastest method is effective in reducing murder.