Seriously. I’m sick of this let’s-beg-for-an-itty-bitty-change nonsense. If rent near me is $2000/month, and that’s supposed to be 1/3 of my pay, then I should be making $6000 per month ($72k per year!)

Assuming I worked a full 40 hours every week, with 4 full weeks in a month, that means I’d need to make $1,500 per week, which breaks down to $37.50 per hour (before taxes, as well as before payments for employee benefits, garnishments, etc.)

I don’t live anywhere fancy. This place is an average apartment with too little parking and too many centipedes. Thankfully, I am not paying the entire rent by myself at this time, because I don’t make anywhere near $37.50/hour.

If $13.75 was the wage of somebody who worked a full 40 hours/week, for 4 weeks, they’d only make $2,200. Total. That’s it. For the entire month.

If your fight for a new minimum wage is starting with a number less than 30, you’ve already lost.

Oh uh hey, andros_rex, wanna go out? We can take a nice, romantic drive to a Habitat for Humanity’s interview.

Also add in: education, health care, and prisons.

It’s appalling the things people are able to make money off of and still sleep well at night.

“Tapping me along” made me imagine someone tapping a golf ball. Nudging it, but not making a big swing, it could be indicative of a subtle influence.

Trump may not know a lot about a lot, but he spends enough time golfing to potentially use a metaphor from it. On the other hand, I’ve never golfed (except the mini kind), so I could be way off.

I just keep watching this. It’s fascinating to see how the “eye” of the herd forms, strengthens, and moves. The individual actions of dozens, if not hundreds, of reindeer coalesce into the same pattern as a hurricane… Fucking beautiful. Thank you for sharing this.

Might as well. It’s still safer than driving right up to people who will arrest you, and worse.

Somewhere between January 20, 2025 and today.

I guess we’re at a point where the safest thing to do in this situation would be to just abandon your car and walk away. It’s better to sacrifice your car and inconvenience traffic than to risk your life interacting with ICE.

I mean, I know other drivers would be pissed, but so be it. In the (hopefully) unlikely event anyone here finds themselves in this situation, don’t buy into the sunk cost fallacy - just cut your losses and keep yourself safe.

As a Millennial whose teen years were filled with adults pushing me to gO To cOLleGe constantly, I’m pretty pissed. I could make and fill a Bingo card of bullshit reasons people repeated ad nauseum, yet in retrospect there is one critical reason that nobody mentioned - that if you want to emigrate, other countries only want you if you’re “educated.” (Or “skilled.”)

I can’t imagine most adults I knew were even aware of the requirements for becoming a citizen in another country. I had dreams of moving to Canada at that age, so if somebody had known, it would’ve been a very convincing argument on me. For those that don’t know - the system is set up to prevent most people from going anywhere, but having a specialized degree makes you desirable internationally. It’s one of the few ways that ordinary (read: non-wealthy) people have that allows them to move to a new country.

I’m glad it makes sense. I’m sorry people are downvoting you for having a different opinion and/or for daring to ask a question about something you don’t understand.

It hurts when it decides to show you photos of dead pets, or people that you’ve had a falling-out with. Sometimes, sweet memories can come from it. But other times, it’s a punch to the gut.

Damn. Well, if I’ll never get to see it, I suppose I can still imagine it as some far away, legendary place where horror dreams come true.

You’re absolutely right - race is a social construct. That’s more logic talk though, which doesn’t matter to racists.

Have you considered running tours on Halloween? Throw in a few fog machines and black lights, make up some backstory about evil taking over your home or something, and you’ll have the most creative “haunted house” around.

If you ever change your mind, you can just move into my place. Nobody invited the centipedes, yet every spring those creepy bastards find their way in.

Then double their shock - a significant amount of those white people in the US will think your race is “Mexican.” Never mind that you’re not Mexican, have never been to Mexico, and that “Mexican” isn’t even a race.

Logic doesn’t matter in their argument. You speak Spanish? You must be Mexican. End of story.

Shortly after entering adulthood, I lost a close friend. He was still in college at the time, a talented, friendly, bright light snuffed far too early. He was well loved and his funeral was so packed that it was standing room only. One attendee described it as “the most depressing class reunion ever.”

His loss has never left me.

Right before I got the phone call telling me the news, I had been feeling extremely down about myself. I was crossing my work parking lot (which I had to do regularly as part of my job) without looking up for moving cars, thinking that if I got hit, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But that same day, my phone rang. It was a mutual friend, and through obvious tears and a quavering voice, she told me, “John is dead!”

With that, everything changed.

I’ll never forget how much it hurt to lose somebody so important to me. The idea of purposely putting my friends through that has kept me going more times than I can count. I have to remind myself, even in my darkest, most self-hating moments, that I’m more important to others than I realize. I can’t imagine John would have known just how much of an impact he had made on others, but I saw the proof. I felt the pain. I love my friends and family too much to entertain the thought of making them attend my funeral. And so I push on, but with one change:

I now make a point to explicitly tell my friends how much they matter to me.

Sites still add them because it makes them money at the expense of your privacy.

You can also consider it a form of advertising for the platforms. The buttons not only suggest for the user that they should use an indicated platform, but give them an immediate way to engage with it as well. It’s manipulation, all the way down.

Way to absolutely miss the point.

I don’t need to be or decide it and it’s not my opinion: the language community is the ultimate authority of their language. Their collective choices establish observable conventions. Linguistics is dedicated to that approach.

A not-insignificant amount of women think using the term “female” is derogatory. Women who feel that way are part of the “language community.” You’re talking like we’re some outsider group, whose use of English is less valid than yours.

Language has conventional, established meanings.

Language is alive - it evolves, it changes. As well, English famously doesn’t have an established body to define meanings. Rather, English words are based on common usage. Women commonly experience the usage of “female” in a derogatory sense. We didn’t designate it this way - all we’re doing is pointing out that it’s used in this way. Just because you don’t feel a derogatory sense from a given word doesn’t mean those that experience it that way are wrong.

If you had gone out to research the usage of “female,” including how people perceive it in different contexts, you’d see just how many anglophones disagree with you. But those people would probably, by and large, be those who’ve experienced that word in a derogatory way - in other words, they’d be women. So how about we stop acting like this is a semantics issue and get to the point you’re really saying, which is that women’s experiences and opinions are somehow worth less than yours.

What makes you the ultimate authority on what terms a woman can consider “derogatory”? Where do you get the power to decide what words other people should use to describe their own feelings? What makes your opinion about it more valid than those of others?

Have you considered that the same word can make two different people feel two different ways? Unless you’ve got the power to know exactly what another person is feeling, there is nothing that makes your thoughts more valid than the thoughts of others in this matter. Doubling down that “derogatory” isn’t the right word to use gives the impression that you don’t believe “female” actually feels derogatory to a lot of women. Gotta wonder why that might be.