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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • We were late to the SMS game in the US as well, most European countries saw mass SMS adoption back in the late 90s and early 2000s, whereas it didn’t catch on in the same way till about 2005 or 2006 here. I still remember the days of being limited to 400 texts a month, and having certain friends growing up who I couldn’t text because their parents would not get a plan that had any buckets of them.


  • It’s an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don’t have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)

    Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don’t work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven’t felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.



  • Another for the get a laser printer train, I got a Xerox color laser printer 8 years ago for a ridiculously good deal (like $130). I finally had to replace the original toner last year, and it took my off brand cartridges just fine at a cost of like $50 for the full set of four. Came with Linux drivers even! Having color is nice too, means I don’t have to think about using another printer. We keep my boyfriend’s inkjet printer around solely for scanning things at this point.




  • It’s not as bad now, but these used to be on things like IDs/driver’s licenses and birth certificates. My parents (both born in the late 60s, one white, one biracial) have the races of both parents listed (and in the case of my maternal grandfather, still listed as ‘Negro’) on their birth certificates, while mine from the 90s does not, IIRC.

    One area of official documentation that absolutely does still are tickets from cops, whether traffic or otherwise, as every traffic ticket I’ve gotten in my life has listed my race. (Amusing for me as a biracial person because I’ve gotten three different ones listed over the years, but I digress.) There’s still things in the legal system that very explicitly call out race still.