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Thank you for posting, I never really pursued this but just downloaded Airalo for an upcoming trip and I’m really excited to not pay $10/day with my carrier!!!
Thank you for posting, I never really pursued this but just downloaded Airalo for an upcoming trip and I’m really excited to not pay $10/day with my carrier!!!
No, I’m not referencing my original comment. I meant I drafted a detailed response to the water/arable land/invasives complaint about the entire cut flower industry, and all the orgs/lobbying efforts re: farmland and ag policy we are working on to change it, but deleted it.
I wrote out a long comment, but there are loads of people trying to change this industry for the better. 78% of all flowers in the US are imported and it’s a huge problem. I hope you’re able to always buy locally grown flowers from small farms like we do. (Many of whom also grow vegetables.) In our area, housing developers buying up arable farmland are the biggest challenge to small scale farms.
It’s fine to not read a whole comment, but there is still plenty of demand from people with money. Can you tell me more about why you believe the wedding industry is predatory?
Your resident lemmy wedding florist checking in!
Cheers to all of you who are excited about the deaths of small businesses just because you…don’t like the way other people get married, lol? Do you think artists should be paid, or not?
I, too, got married when I was a broke grad student and couldn’t afford the wedding I wanted. We didn’t go in debt for it! In big cities, there are a lot more wealthy people than y’all realize who are happy to pay people like me to make art. Business is down but still fine for us.
Anyway, what most people don’t realize is that certain wedding vendors have super low overhead costs, so they are mostly paying for labor. Your DJs, wedding planners, and photographers can afford to charge $3k/wedding and still pay themselves. Meanwhile, florists are spending $1-4k at wholesale for a typical wedding, before we even touch your flowers or get any pay for our time. I think we probably have the highest COGs outside of venues. Catering, cakes, and to some extent rental companies are all in the same boat - we have to pay a lot to provide you with the physical goods we show up with, and we don’t make much.
I know everyone on Reddit and probably Lemmy thinks every wedding vendor is fleecing couples at all times. Or that the price goes up because “wedding.” It doesn’t. The price is what it is because it takes a LOT of labor and materials to create an entire event from scratch. And because it’s seasonal/weird hour/weekend work, we have to pay our freelance teams really well to keep them coming back. (You think I can afford a salaried team year round?? Lol no.) I can’t think of a single colleague who inflates pricing between weddings vs. other kinds of events.
I only do $10k+ weddings, and you probably think I’m raking it in. But 75-80% of the cost of every wedding I do goes to someone else - paying my team $35/hr, paying local flower farmers fair wages for their products, buying vases or supplies, my web hosting and professional fees, insurance, etc. I still only take home A QUARTER of what my spouse does in a good year. We live in an expensive city, and I could make a lot more money doing something else, but I love what I do.
I hope this helps y’all understand at least the wedding floral business a bit better. We aren’t getting rich off weddings, there is no wedding tax, and wholesale flowers are expensive AF before we do anything with them. I can’t speak for all vendors, maybe there are unscrupulous ones out there, but most are just small businesses trying to do something we love for a living. And I don’t really understand the online hate when people are in my inbox every day asking me about their wedding date.
People seemed to appreciate the conversation in this thread about balancing privacy with the realities of wedding business marketing: https://lemmy.ml/post/7435311
Oh yeah that whole thing was so absurd. Like…it’s so radio friendly, I don’t get it?!? And God they are so good too!! Saw them live last year, one of the most energetic shows I’ve ever seen, period! Germany has so much great music.
This headline is bogus; the comparison to Brexit makes no sense here. Brexit was voted on in a democratic process (for better or worse), but all of these countries currently have junta governments that were not elected, and were suspended by ECOWAS because of it. Now they are unilaterally “choosing” to leave ECOWAS, but truthfully, ECOWAS considers them illegitimate and has considered military action (though done very little). It will be interesting to see if the threat of leaving finally prompts some collective action or not.
Glad to hear y’all are having fun with it! Truly, last year’s results surprised me and made me think Germany might actually be cursed…
They have actually changed the rules! Audiences choose who moves on to the final now - there are no jury votes in semis anymore. Only for the final.
This is such a great way of putting it! Gave me a chuckle.
LOTL was truly robbed last year, they were one of my faves.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
But seriously, it’s the gay musical Olympics, what’s not to love? (Unless you’re from Germany/UK in which it’s a point of national pride to dismiss Eurovision, lol?)
Haha, “Happy HONK” does mean something to some of us! Totally plausible that she’s already in a HONK band…
Cardboard boxes, paper bags, and sheets of paper are all better than anything I could buy my cat, haha. But all cats are different! He also loves to hunt birds (part of why he’s indoor only) so bird toys with birdsong were his favorites for years. I’d recommend not spending a lot until you “learn” your cat! And also, if you’re getting a kitten or a youngish kitty, they will be way more playful and like anything you throw at them!
A vet once called them “princess paws” and we’ve used that term ever since!
I’m so sorry for you both! What a sweetie. She is lucky to have such a great human by her side ❤️
Sometimes keeping a symptom journal or diary can help your medical providers piece things together. They are only seeing you once for 10-30 minutes, but you’re living in your body and experiencing symptoms way more frequently. Don’t log obsessively, but maybe once a day review your pain (rated 1-5) and write down any noteworthy symptoms or episodes. And as someone else mentioned, get good at condensing your medical “story” to date, including your current symptoms.
Doctors will always go for the simplest explanation, even if it’s wrong. This is how they are trained (in the west, anyway). So don’t give up! Continue insisting on a proper diagnosis. Get another opinion. See a different specialist. If you find it difficult to advocate for yourself, imagine if this was your friend. How many mountains would move to get the same answers for a dear friend? And apply that logic and compassion to yourself. Have a bestie come with you to appointments if they are willing to.
A big part of the “suck” in this process is the not knowing. Will you be in pain forever? Will you get better? Will you get worse? Is it really a mystery illness? Will you ever get a diagnosis? With chronic pain you’ll find yourself exhausted often with the effort required to ignore the pain. So feel the pain sometimes. Lean into it. You may find it’s a relief to feel it instead of trying to block it out.
It’s maybe also worth accepting that these issues may never totally resolve. If they do, great. But what if they don’t? How can you live a happy and fulfilling life (which millions of people do with chronic pain/disability) even if it stays the same?
Lastly, I want to say that you have a separate problem, which is the lack of social support you are getting from your family. They are gaslighting you about your illness - of course you know your body best and are experiencing what you say you are. You are young and may depend on them financially, so that’s a needle you have to thread. But I’d encourage you to spend more time with friends who love and believe you.
If you have access, it’s worth working with a therapist on all of this. From what you’ve described, you have been left all alone to grapple with a disability that no one can even explain. That is an awful lot for someone to hold by themselves. Whatever happens with your illness, I hope you are able to get the love and support you deserve - which may never be offered by your family.
I totally agree. I remember when being in the phone book was enough for people to run a B2C business! The current marketing landscape for small biz owners is a nightmare, both in terms of privacy and the number of places online we are expected to “be active.” A lot of people get really burnt out on it because they also don’t realize that marketing and sales is like 80% of the work, and the fun thing you love to do is like 20%.
Ugh yes, nailed it!