Due to economic, environmental, and cultural state and trends, my wife and I are choosing to not have children. Our dog is lovely. I will not spend my time and energy to give capitalists another generation of cheap labor just in time for this class to flee from rising sea levels, suffer malnutrition, and choke on contaminated air and water. I believe that it is inhumane to bring life into this world with the knowledge that they will endure the hardship and suffering that is so obviously coming.

We will sooner see throuples become socially acceptable in order to make rent than offer any real help to the working class. There is a pedophile running America and the American people are still policing bathrooms to protect against imaginary pedophiles. The priorities are beyond fucked.

As an upper limit? As a lower limit? What do you mean?

Forcing people who don’t want kids to have two is insane. Who will make it happen? Is there a conception agency where agents just go a rape women in this imagined scenario?

Forcing a third pregnancy to terminate is also pretty insane. Suppose the mother doesn’t even know she’s pregnant until pretty far along. Suppose a mother hides her pregnancy and gives birth in secret; is that baby getting killed?

In either case, what is the punishment for violation? Suppose a woman is incapable of having kids when you mandated 2; is she to be executed for being unable to fulfill this societal requirement? Suppose a woman intentionally had more than her government-permitted 2 children; what is her sentence for providing extra mouths to feed?

It’s unethical, it’s not reasonably enforceable, and frankly, I’m not sure I understand what such a policy would even be attempting to accomplish.

As a former chef who had an astonishingly abusive boss (he literally violated basic labor laws and I didn’t know any better and felt pressured to impress to advance), Whiplash is maybe the most triggering movie I’ve ever seen.

Anybody who watches that movie and isn’t utterly horrified at the ending didn’t understand the fucking movie.

Just replacing one eco horror with another.

Exactly. CEO is maybe the easiest job for an AI to take over, so an AGI is possibly the most perfect candidate for that role.

Put up or shut up, tech bro CEOs. Replace yourself if it’s so fucking amazing.

I rage at my Aldi too, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait in line to check out. My issue is that every time I’m there, they’re out of a bunch of shit despite ALWAYS moving pallets around and stocking while I’m there. It’s also always packed to the gills with clueless people, usually senior citizens, taking up an entire aisle to figure out which cheese they want. And holy shit, everybody walks in the door, stops just inside, and then reaches in their pocket for their grocery list to figure out where to go, holding up everybody just trying to get in and get their shit. Like wtf, you drove here and don’t have a clue what you need? Just walk 20 feet in and pull to the side if you’re this fucking inept.

In relation to your hill: While you’re entirely correct, that’s absurdly small potatoes compared to industrial water use. Yes, we should be conscious of our water use and limit unnecessary overuse, but a higher priority ought to be regulating industrial use. Data centers are the obvious example of using way too much for bullshit that ain’t worth the water or power. Speaking of power, we could reduce water use by power plants. Nearly all generate power by boiling water. I’m a power plant operator at a plant that happens to use reclaim water as our source water, and we purify on-site for the main process, and we have a brine concentrator and crystallizer on-site to recycle the cooling tower blowdown and remove the solids to a dumpster that goes to a landfill. Unfortunately we burn methane, so I can’t say that we’re green, but we at least discharge zero water into local waterways (except storm drains when it rains).

My hill: Vote with your wallet. If you really believe in something, stop giving money to companies fighting against it. I won’t buy chikfila because the owners actively spend money on gay conversion camps and lobby to reverse the legality of same sex marriage. It’s impossible to research every little thing before every purchase, and sometimes there’s no reasonable alternative, but something like chikfila is easy to avoid. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Little changes can add up, and doing anything even a little bit better is an improvement over not trying.

Bonus hill: Put your fucking grocery cart into the cart corral. It takes ten seconds and prevents cars from getting hit. It’s kind of the simplest measure for societal decency. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but what value are you contributing to society if you’re too selfish to return your fucking cart?

Modern day Indiana Jones, but like, not Shia or whatever the last one was.

This is human nature. The “antiwork” crowd isn’t actually against work, but against the exploitative system of how work is executed under capitalism. We all like solving problems and knowing what tomorrow holds for us. If you woke up tomorrow and had absurd “fuck you” money, you’d retire from your job, but you’d still work on things.

Over the years, I’ve learned the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from fixing a thing, replacing a broken/old/inferior thing, installing a thing, etc. I was never particularly handy. I don’t much enjoy the process itself, but the visible and quantifiable and tangible product of my labor and time are so much more fulfilling to me than the fraction of a fraction of an impact to a billionaire’s bottom line, given in exchange for being allowed to have shelter and food.

And really, some jobs are fairly enjoyable too. My wife truly enjoys her job most days, and a lot of that enjoyment comes from her job being less serious. She clocks in, performs tasks in a way that meets expectations while joking with co-workers for a few hours, and clocks out. It’s not all soul crushing, but it’s easier to stomach when it’s <30 hours per week.

I can’t believe we haven’t started seeing work station docks for phones. Imagine carrying your laptop with you everywhere in your pocket, but then having a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and a few USB ports to do all of your laptop things without needing to buy a laptop. Maybe the phone mounts on top of the monitor to make use of its camera too. I’m sure these things are powerful enough for how most people would use that. Just not games and blender, and probably not video editing.

I could even see something like internet cafes come back. Rent a docked work station, plug your phone in, get shit done and take it with you when you leave. It seems redundant only because we still have libraries, but when the fascists recognize libraries as socialism and ban them, then you’ll see the value of my stupid fucking idea.

Yeah, MLK Jr was pretty clear about his position when he said that communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. He was a socialist, which is a different thing. But let’s pretend that he said socialist instead of communist… Wouldn’t that make you kinda curious to know the details of what socialism is then? Because everybody says that King was a great man and helped achieve racial equality, so his ideology must not be as evil as everybody says, right?

So if you’re young and maybe not super aware of politics and civics and everything, and you see this tweet in response to a general “Happy MLK Jr Day” tweet from Elmo, you’re gonna have questions and your Google results are gonna lead you to answers that reveal what a fucking clown show the John Birch society is.

It’s petty, it’s factually inaccurate, and if chases young people to your opposition’s ideology. Plus picking on a literal Muppet is the kind of thing a lazy writer would write to show how villainous a character is. What a disaster of a tweet, and I’m thrilled to see it.

My regular job schedule is rotating 12 hour shifts. We work 3 or 4 days/nights in a row, either 0400 to 1600 or 1600 to 0400, and then get a few days off to flip sleep schedule to do it again on the opposite shift. The benefit to this schedule is that every 4th week, we’re scheduled 7 days off in a row. But because of vacations and callouts, it’s pretty common to have to come in on days off to cover.

We also have two times per year for about 3-8 weeks where everybody would 6 or 7 day weeks. That’s 72 or 84 hours in a week. And because we’re hourly, that’s very good money, but because the cost of living is so high in the area most of us are commuting about an hour each way. So every 12 hour day is roughly 14 hours away from home. So those times of year are really 84 or 98 hours per week away from home, and a week only has 168 hours.

The work itself is also fairly demanding. We don’t just sit at a desk. We are climbing ladders, carrying heavy shit around, shoveling, turning valves, running to respond to alarms, etc. A light day is still a day at the gym.

Despite this, there is an absurd amount of pressure to come in a significant amount more for training or you’ll never get a promotion. And a lot of my coworkers seem to be happy to do that.

Idk what they’re doing with their time outside of work, but it seems like they can’t possibly have time for anything meaningful. I don’t understand the point of chasing money that hard if you don’t give yourself any time to spend it. I keep talking myself out of spending on things I want because I know I won’t actually spend any time enjoying those things, so I’m just sitting on a useless pile of money and working at a place that’s trying to push me into trading even more of my time for even more useless money. And nobody seems to see the problem. I’m glad that my bills are paid and everything, but how the fuck is this different from being a slave that’s housed and fed?

All I do is work and sleep, and I’m expected to work even more, and I’m surrounded by people who think I’m crazy for not pulling 60+ hours every week. That sort of schedule is what somebody who hates their family does, and I happen to like my wife.

And that’s a big part of why I don’t miss reddit. Most chuds didn’t migrate because they couldn’t figure out how to do it, so a lot of the toxicity got passively filtered out.

I’m skeptical. They couldn’t find the shooter. Then they found a bag that looked like his, filled with monopoly money (no weapon). Then somebody at a McDonald’s calls because Luigi kinda looks like the guy. Luigi decides to hang out and eat his shitty fast food at a leisurely pace. Cops show up and supposedly find the weapon on him.

I think it’s more likely that they found the weapon with the bag, but opted to keep that quiet so they could plant it on whoever they grabbed. If Luigi is the shooter, and he still had the gun when he left NY, then why the fuck wouldn’t he have tossed it into a random river along the way? Wasn’t it a “ghost gun” that he could easily dispose of and not have traced back to him? Wasn’t that the point of it? Isn’t that why it would’ve made sense to leave it with the bag?

The job of the jury is to either find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or let him go free. I have reasonable doubt. I’m not sure what evidence they’re gonna reveal that will convince me, but I’m also not gonna be selected for that jury. I just don’t believe in ruining the entire life of somebody whose only provable crime was that he enjoyed McDonald’s in Altoona.

UwU this poor wittle tigey-wigey is surrounded by big bad wolfies. I wonder if it’s enough to bring me the little death that I swell and ache for…

I recognize that this probably qualifies as “picking holes” as he said, but his questioning of Hamas seems to be more of a rhetorical device than a sincere request for information. It’s not like things had been good in Palestine before the October 7 attack, so questioning why they did it sort of implies that it was out of the blue and not in response to decades of failed attempts to peacefully end settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians. And while acknowledging the horrors that Israel is raining down on them, is it not obvious why Hamas would still have hostages? The hostages are their only bargaining chip, and without the hostages, Palestine would’ve already been wiped off the map.

I’ve been a Radiohead fan for a long time, and I’ll continue to be, but this was an unexpectedly neoliberal take to criticize both sides and yearn for going back to how things used to be, completely ignoring that how things used to be is how we got here. That’s how time works.

I think of this quote from JFK pretty often, and it just refuses to stop being relevant, and apparently more people need to hear it. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” That’s the reason for the attack. The reason for having hostages is “to cling onto hope for survival against an otherwise guaranteed complete genocide.” They’re holding on and hoping that the world that is watching actually does something to help them, and we just aren’t.

I wasn’t really thinking of covid. Biden made sure we got free test kits mailed to us when they were impossible to find, but yeah otherwise he just kept on course. Covid vaccines were maybe the one thing that I agreed with trump on. And he could’ve sailed to reelection if he had just let the experts talk to the people instead of sowing doubt about masks and lockdowns. If he had just sold red masks that said “trump 2020” on them, he would’ve won reelection while lining his pockets.

Biden’s first half achievements that I was referring to were things like the infrastructure bill and the chips act. Inflation cooled, shit got fixed, manufacturing started coming back, and we started investing in a greener path forward. He should’ve communicated those accomplishments much better because most people don’t really get a glimpse beyond what catches their attention in everyday life. Like egg prices. But there’s a very good reason that egg prices rose, and it has very little to do with Biden and everything to do with bird flu, culling, and supply & demand; reduce your egg use for 6-12 months and the prices will come back down.

The same strategy will not be so effective in the incoming crisis due to tariffs, mostly because trump is such a stubborn dipshit that I’m not sure he’ll ever fully walk it back. He always chickens out of the high rate shit (probably mostly as a pump and dump scheme) but he’ll never admit that he was wrong about what tariffs are and what they do when deployed the way he insisted on doing them. His whole thing is pretending to be brilliant at business, but he doesn’t know basic shit that most people know before even enrolling in econ 101, so that’s pretty damning for the knowledge of the tens of millions of people he managed to trick into believing that he’s even remotely passable at business. His multiple bankruptcies are evidence of either incompetence or maliciously fraudulent looting, and the latter is only really necessary if you’re so bad at business that you have to cheat to get ahead despite the monumental inheritance left to you.

Sorry for the wall of text lol.

I would say that Biden did better than I had expected in the first half of his term and then more or less coasted off of that momentum through the second half. The probable dementia can’t be ignored, but even without that he should’ve been doing more. He mostly stabilized shit, which is what a status-quo neolib is supposed to do, and he even expanded equitability and built framework for a better tomorrow, but he was I guess too humble to brag about it? He should’ve been holding up graphs every week and told the people “this is an improvement, and you may not be fully feeling it yet, but you will over time. I’ve expedited relief to get to you faster, but that means it’s on the scale of years instead of decades. The downside of bureaucracy and democracy and proper checks and balances is that solutions can take time, but that’s also a benefit in that any would-be malevolent authoritarian couldn’t break everything overnight. Just hold on. We’ve stopped the bleeding, and now the healing takes a little time.”

Instead, we got bounced from our hospital bed and immediately started picking at the scabs with a rusty knife. We’re fucked. Tariffs? What a fucking moron. We’ll be referring to turned-out pockets as trump flags by the end of the decade.

First time playing BG3, but I’ve played a good bit of 5e and a little 3.5e. I’m trying a monk for the first time. Way of the Open Hand. I named him Rick O’Shea. He goes up front and bounces between enemies, fucking 'em up. I can’t remember every choice I made, but I know for sure he took the Athlete feat, but that makes less sense outside of BG3. I can’t remember his level, but I’ll probably pick Mobile for another feat.

My favorite 5e character I ever played was a high wisdom, low intelligence human cleric. He would occasionally do a stupid thing that came back to bite him, but he would learn from that mistake and not do it again. He would also relay metaphorical farm wisdom to the party, always formatted as “Pappy always said…”
E.g. “Pappy always said never milk a cow if you ain’t brought your bucket.” Meaning don’t start shit before you’ve figured out subsequent steps. Don’t try to pick a tough fight and then realize you’re out of spell slots lol.
He was a cleric of Helm but somewhere along the way he was convinced to serve another god instead who had pretty much identical goals in mind (idr the details) and I think his name was Pyxis or Pryxis or something. Idk, the cleric could never get it right so he would call him Pixar and he was like sure, fine, close enough. Anyway, so for flavor, Spirit Guardians was always Toy Story characters flying around.

Not to be overly morbid, but what’s the point in saving up for retirement if the job is killing you? Financial security is important, but so is your mental health. And based on your general field, I don’t think I need to explain that stress has real, quantifiable consequences. I wouldn’t be surprised if reducing your stress level actually raises your ability to do some stuff for yourself that you’re currently finding pretty impossible. Less stress at work might give you more energy to exercise, cook healthy meals, better maintain your home, etc.

You might need to adjust some of your “extra” spending to make it work, but if that’s the only real sacrifice in the switch, I’d say make the switch. You’re obviously unhappy with what you’ve got or you wouldn’t be looking at other options and asking the internet.

FWIW, I’m in my mid 30s and changed careers ten years ago. I was a chef and loved what I did, but I had a boss that completely killed my passion to grow or even sustain. I literally got a raise when I quit for a job scrubbing toilets. I found my footing in power plants and now I’m an operator in-house. It’s never too late to make a change. You’re never in too deep. And in many cases, it’s gonna take a step down before you have a chance to rise up higher. Never stop learning and growing. Cheers and good luck :)