OpenStars

This is where John Oliver would jump in to say: except that's not who this is bc one of them is fake.

And then continue with: except that's a lie bc actually, two are fake!

I wouldn't be even a tenth surprised to find out that the name of the later-made TV show was designed as a partial homage to that exact episode that preceded it.

Though maybe not, as the concept seems to describe something deep in our psyches, and appears in so many shows & songs (e.g. R.E.M.'s shiny happy people), and I would bet that the Twilight Zone episode itself was either based on or at least was was preceded by some ancient story written or told hundreds of years before it:-).

Oh dayum, you are right. Ok, I quit already.

Nobody likes a quitter... unless it means creating a Shitter account, b/c that's just too cruel (and too kind to Musk's profits).

Yeah note how the version number is 0.19.3 - that's not 19.3, or 1.93, it's still far from 1.0 yet.

When Reddit imploded Lemmy got hit with this deluge of new subscribers, but it wasn't quite ready for it. On the other hand, third party apps were made almost instantly, so definitely the pace accelerated:-).

And they've been hit with multiple spam attacks, from 4chan and Discord, so those I am sure were considered the priority.

Well, this is certainly the Good Place at least:-).

Apparently, ice cream.

There are also several financial institutions named emaqs:-P

And an Employee Management and Compensation System in California:-D.

As Wolf of Wall Street explains, at some level it isn't even "money" anymore, it's rather numbers like in a game - the goal being to "win", e.g. Huffman competing against Musk.

No matter how many salaries of irl people are being affected by their childish tantrums:-(.

That does not work in a webpage browser, so seems like a Liftoff ~~bug~~ (/feature?:-P) on top of the underlying issue in Lemmy itself.

Little by little, progress is being made - in the meantime the software isn't quite "finished" yet, but somehow still the UX ends up being significantly better than Reddit:-).

Surely many who have them received them from elsewhere before immigration to America, and likewise the proportion of immigrants who have them I would expect to be oversized. Americans tend to be more greedy than anything else and don't put in the effort required for such small (financial) rewards.

Also, those with PhDs tend to congregate into certain areas that support those jobs, i.e. cities but not even a goodly number of those so much; plus smaller college towns too ofc. As such, many in the general populace might rarely if ever run into one for the largest majority of their lives, unless traveling specifically to those areas for some reason?

And ofc rural areas are far larger, geographically speaking, than places where a person with a PhD would (likely) go. So you could randomly pick a spot on a map 100 times and never manage to find someone with a PhD anywhere within tens of miles, I would expect - although that line of thinking reveals my own biases: do most educated farmers stop at like an MS and just follow up with their own (possibly even extensive) self studies, or go all the way to PhDs while working their actual farms? (I doubt it bc it does not sound practical, and that is a hallmark of farmers afaik, but I could be wrong...) Anyway, I expect the unequal distribution is a contributing / exasperating factor to the general rarity.

I'm glad I could "help":-P.