Bob

True. But if there’s anything to take away from all of this is that those prices aren’t natural, god-given or unavoidable. It’s probably a good idea for op to shop around - wound care, anesthesia and antibiotics shouldn’t be $2000 even in the US.

I’m not the person you are replying to, but I do wonder what “third world countries” you are thinking of when you hear “Western Europe”?

As someone who has lived in both the US and Germany (one of those “third world countries” with significantly lower health care cost, for both humans and animals) and who has seen the benefits and drawbacks of both countries - it’s completely delusional if you actually believe that someone who is supposedly living paycheck to paycheck is getting better health care in the US. The German system certainly has its flaws, but it beats the US in just about every sensible metric (accessibility, cost, life expectancy, infant mortality etc.), usually quite significantly so. The US does a solid number of things better than other countries, entrepreneurship and innovation for example, but health care absolutely isn’t among those things.

What’s new to me (I had no exposure to the veterinary health care system during my time in the US) is that the inflated fantasy prices aren’t limited to humans only, but extend to pets as well. Anesthesia and extensive wound care, antibiotics, aftercare etc. are pretty standard therapies and they should cost little over a tenth of what you were quoted for your typical house cat.

You honestly might want to shop around, because even within the US, those rates are almost certainly inflated.

I don’t think the downvotes are warranted. That is an exorbitant amount for the planned vet procedure OP describes.

Vet rates in Germany, for example, are regulated and wound care under anesthesia is pretty standard treatment. Even with multiple, complicated wounds, a round of antibiotics, extensive after care, this would be a three digit bill - while likely more than 200€, it would still be far closer to that number than OP’s tenfold quote…

Heck, even surgery for a complicated fracture wouldn’t come close to the 2000€ mark and can often stay below 1000€.

We are all aware that the US healthcare system works with ridiculously inflated fantasy prices, but that this extends to veterinary care is news to me.

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is democracy.

Amateur! I usually make things worse by sitting around doing nothing. That’s called efficiency.

No, it doesn’t. Not even the old ones, because Brother is rolling out malicious firmware updates even to older models:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

If you have one of the remaining good Brother printers, make sure firmware updates are disabled.

I’m able to see any news that would be relevant as quickly as any other social media,

That’s not what I use Reddit for and that’s sadly the only Reddit (and other social media) thing today, that Lemmy mimics successfully.

I’m using Reddit mostly for the niche and special interest communities. For specific tech advice and troubleshooting. For all the stuff that once used to be home on newsgroups and bulletin boards and can now only be found in subreddits and, even worse, Discord communities.

And a lot of these smaller tech communities were super motivated to move to Lemmy, but Lemmy’s complete inability to surface anything but the most popular posts in the most popular communities (there’s still no equivalent for multireddits and there was no weighted popularity until 0.19) rapidly killed and suffocated virtually all of them.

That’s the reason why you can type “obscure technical problem Reddit” into Google and almost always get a relevant answer, while that will likely never be the case for Lemmy.

I can discuss things in communities that feel welcoming to me as a queer socialist that I could hardly find on Reddit.

I’m not saying Lemmy doesn’t have good communities, it certainly does, but once you go beyond news, politics and memes there’s neither enough content nor enough users to keep anything else alive.

deleted by creator

They did give a reason though:

“Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.”

That goal is fundamentally incompatible with an open medium where they don’t have full control over every participant. That’s why they have already defederated from any large instance that allowed open registrations months ago and have only continued to cut ties rather than to mend them.

BeeHaw’s definition of “nice” isn’t your or my definition of “nice”. It allows no dissent or opposing views on most subjects and more so, it doesn’t even allow for its members to be exposed to different ideas, however briefly.

They are trying to build the perfect echo chamber, free from anyone not “nice”. You simply cannot build such a chamber if you don’t have full control over every aspect of it.

BeeHaw’s entire concept would have been far more suitable for an old bulletin board style forum, the kind that is all but extinct today, but not for an open (in every sense if the word) platform.

I’m writing this as someone whose views actually align pretty well with those of BeeHaw’s - with the exception of their heavy handed approach to anything and anyone not fully aligned with them.

Their stated goal simply isn’t achievable outside of a sealed environment, so, no, Lemmy probably isn’t for them. They should look into phpBB and co.

Lemmy is very much a viable alternative

Oh, how I wish that were true. Alas, stats keep showing that Lemmy is not continuing to grow, on the contrary. There is close to zero activity in anything but the most main stream communities and Lemmy is only now making very, very slow and tentative steps to actually surface more niche communities after effectively burying and suffocating them in every release up to and including the current stable.

“Oh no, they’ll contaminate a lot of goods that were prepared for recycling and endanger the health of the people involved in that process chain.”

When corrected, most people don’t double down on their own, accidental, misinformation. The fact that you chose to be defensive and sarcastic instead, speaks a lot about the kind of person who dumps mercury in the recycling bin with the expectation that others will clean it up.

They contain mercury and are hazardous waste, not recycling. If, or rather when, they break they will contaminate everything around them and are a healthy hazard. So, no, definitely not curbside recycling.

There should be drop off points in many big box stores for this kind of stuff.

╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Here, you dropped this: \

┬──┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)

Yeah, until the printer engineers took over from the sewing machine engineers in around 2020. Even Brother is evil now, rolling out firmware updates that render third party toner useless or do even more evil shenanigans via firmware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I don’t think there’s a good brand left these days, Brother was the last bastion of “not shitty” and now they, too, were enshittified.

Sadly, they are also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.

Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.

Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit?

You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates outright blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

Now, that even Brother has turned to the dark side, I really don’t know what printer to recommend other than older/used Brothers with firmware updates disabled.