Yeah, people with all the money in the world are gonna give up their Malibu mansions with private beaches and sick views to move to North Dakota to avoid taxes 🙄

I guess super rich people in Boston might move to New Hampshire but it’s still a huge step down in amenities, proximity to workers (for the job creators), and social events (for the benefactors). And then your adult children are borrowing the helicopter to go everywhere.

The Washington Post got the What’s App transcripts and multiple participants confirming the content of the chat. They then asked the mayor’s office about it and the spokesperson said that the question was anti Semitic.

Correction, they asked about the Zoom meeting (which they had the transcript and on the record participants):

Asked about the Zoom meeting with chat group members, the mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that New York police entered Columbia’s campus twice in response to “specific written requests” from university leadership. “Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false,” Levy said. He added, “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”

Eric Clapton is wildly overrated

He was a developer on whatever company he had that got folded into PayPal. It would be accurate to say that he never was a good developer.

Loose tea isn’t very common on supermarket shelves. If you live near a store that has a bulk section, then they might have loose tea in bulk. I end up ordering online from Stash or Harney & Sons

China does have a lot of agricultural and manufacturing workers who aren’t on computers all day. And they have some pretty poor rural areas. But I’m calling bullshit on Japan’s numbers. Tokyo looks like Blade Runner at night but and the office culture is famous for long hours but no one is looking at screens? Get the fuck outta here.

Same. And knowing that I have been an efficient cashier in the past makes the awkwardness of the self checkout super frustrating. If you have the items coming down the belt and are in a groove and so it regularly, you can get through a cart of items so fast. Between the poor UI and theft deterrence the self checkout is way slower.

Ans what happens to the people whose jobs are eliminated by the self checkout? Yeah, it’s a crap job, I know, I’ve done it. But if the only alternative in our current system is more homelessness and absolutely desperate poverty then I’ll skip the self checkout. I’d love to live in the glorious future where machines do all the grunt work and people are free to spend their time in better ways. But it seems humanity can’t have nice things.

I dunno but WTF were they expecting? Was she supposed to fish the bloody blob out of toilet and bring it in so they cab run a tox screen on it or something? Check it for coat hanger marks? It’s not like they’re gonna have something that looks like a well formed small baby. This shit is so dumb it would be comical if it wasn’t traumatizing and endangering women

I wonder if the hospital violated HIPPA by giving the police her private medical information?

Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.

Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.

I used to stick to that rule and get a sensible mid sized Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord that’s a few years old as needed. But in 2013 (the last time I needed to get a new car) the cost savings were really low compared to new. I think the used market was particularly hot so you’d save less that 10% of the cost, so I ended up getting my 1st and only (so far) brand new car ever.

It’s cool that you were able to improve your situation with a lot of luck, hard work and sacrifice but a basic middle class existence shouldn’t require a lot of luck.

Owning your data is seeming less and less possible. Even paying in cash isn’t an option in some places now

Some municipalities had passed laws saying that retail businesses had to accept cash since going 100% electronic is discriminatory towards the poor. But covid fucked that up

Sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sucks that you’re going through this; I hope the situation improves and you don’t get furloughed.

I’m guessing that if you could get to all your jobs without the car, you would have already done so? Saving on gas and insurance can help, but depending on where you live that might not be realistic.

You could try contacting local food banks and see if they ever make accommodations for people who are working during operating hours. They might not but there’s no harm in asking.

Right now you’re in a serious hole from missing work for a family emergency. I don’t have much advice for getting back onto steady ground aside from being super crazy frugal and working extra hours in the short term (which is fucking exhausting mentally and emotionally and physically). Do you have any long term plans for having more breathing room years from now? If your steady state is “one car repair or illness away from defaulting on payments” then that’s a hard path. Do you or your wife have prospects for better paying jobs in the future? Are there training or educational opportunities that could help? Are there cheaper places you could live (smaller, worse neighborhood?) to save money while working towards better job prospects? Living on not enough money in crappy circumstances sucks but it is definitely more bearable if you know it’s temporary and you’re making progress towards something better.

Good luck.

And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?

📠

Anyone who says their smart overestimates themselves. Anyone who says their dumb underestimates themselves. How does anyone even answer this question?

I think it’s possible for someone to know that they are generally pretty smart or not very smart without over or under estimating. A lot of people will over or under estimate but if you’re just looking for a rough placement in a third of the bell curve, there’s a lot of feedback in everyday life to help.

Pedants who choose to make big deals over minor issues are always out to prove something and are objectively not smart.

Some people sincerely have trouble adapting to different precisions of language in different situations. I know some very smart and successful people with autism who struggle with this. It can be super annoying when they are way too pedantic for the context but I don’t think being deficient in this one area makes them dumb.

Up gets me every time.

If no one is allowed to wear any flair then that’s fair. But everyone is allowed (and possibly encouraged?) to wear pride stuff in June as part of the anyway corporate rainbow-washing. So I have to ask why it’s OK to wear “LGBTQ+ folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff but it’s not OK to wear “Black folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff? Why is stating that Black lives have value so offensive that it’s worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ban it?

I’m mad at both. Amazon is trash. The current court is trash. And all the ghouls that got us this shit ass court are trash, from Mcconnell to Trump to every dummy that votes for Trump to the stupid stupid Democrats who didn’t fight tooth and nail when Obama’s pick didn’t get a hearing and didn’t pack the courts at the 1st opportunity. Oh and fuck RGB who should have fucking retired at the start of Obama’s 1st term. Octogenarians who survived multiple bouts of cancer don’t have the luxury of hanging out so the 1st female president gets to appoint their successor. Democrats are so fucking inept it’s hard to believe that they aren’t sandbagging us on purpose