Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?

In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.

Interesting article. I appreciate that it included the example of a couple in Jersey City, NJ being forced to move because of increasingly exorbitant rent. That article could have been about me personally. I lived in a shitty overpriced 1br apartment that overlooked the Holland Tunnel. Rent was around $2200/year, but they wanted $2700/year for us upon renewal, and after we said no, they upped it to $2900/year when offered to the general public. This was June 2022, and a quick look on their website suggests similar units sell for $3300/month now. I make a decent living, but that increase was way too much for me. That was the final straw to get me to move out of NJ entirely and down to the relatively more affordable DC area. It was similar for many of my neighbors. The NYC area will always have a special place in my heart, but there’s only so much you can take before you begin looking to alternatives.

I’m mixed on this. I really don’t want the market even more fractured with yet another streaming service in the mix for MLB games. Ten years ago, it was simple albeit flawed. Subscribe to cable TV if you live in the market, and the RSN has all the games. Today, if you want to watch all the games, you have to bounce around between the RSN, but then a dozen different streaming sites too with games on Apple TV, YouTube, MLB Network, Peacock, ESPN, potentially Netflix, etc… I just want to load up the MLB app, pay a reasonable annual fee, and stream all games without blackout restrictions, but such a service doesn’t exist (legally). Aa a result, I find myself caring about the product less and less with each passing year.

From June 14 to June 30, the RIF Android app will mostly work as normal providing access to most of the same subreddits I’ve been visiting for the past decade+. A few will shut down permanently, but other than that, it’ll mostly be the same as before, so I’ll probably use Reddit during that period.

However, effective July 1, that option disappears completely. If I want to continue using Reddit, I’ll have to download an entirely different app and get used to an entirely different user interface providing an experience much worse than RIF. If I have to learn something brand new anyway, I may as well try an entirely different platform like Lemmy. No idea if I’ll stick here long term or not, but the power of Reddit was the community. If the community migrates over here, I’m all for staying here. I suspect one of the Redsit alternatives will attract a critical mass of people at some point.

As every internet platform has shown, the enshittification is inevitable. Eventually, Lemmy too will become an unusable mess of ads and feature creep if/when enough money starts flowing in. However, I’m perfectly fine using the site for the next few years until that happens.