Weird Finance
Signtist @ Signtist @lemm.ee Posts 1Comments 485Joined 2 yr. ago

My sister used to be the head of the environmental department of one of the suburbs of Minneapolis. She's met Tim Walz a few times, and has had nothing but good things to say about both his personality and his attitude toward the environment. The US has pretty slim pickings for good politicians these days, but I really feel that Tim is on that list. I'm feeling hopeful about American politics for the first time since I learned about how American politics works!
Small price to pay, imo. When my job was forcing everyone back into the office in 2021 I just picked out one of the headhunters who contacted me on linkedin, got an offer for a remote position with better pay, and brought it to my employer to get a raise and the go-ahead to keep working remotely. I'll suffer the occasional spam email for the knowledge that I have options for another job lined up pretty much whenever.
People playing tag 💪
Most republicans I know believe that their party, like their country and their religion, needs to be followed blindly; if their party supports it, it's good, and if their party rejects it, it's bad. End of story. No more thought will, or should, be put into it.
The people who go on and on about how America is the best because "freedom" are now working out whatever mental gymnastics they need to perform to justify voting for the man who said if you vote for him you won't need to vote anymore. They already chose to support Trump and his party - nothing they say or do anymore will change that decision.
Can't have a blue wave without a blue vote.
That's the issue with American politics. It's so overtaken by corporate lobbying that "good candidate" and "electable candidate" are mutually exclusive.
I was never full-on incel, but I was definitely headed down that path. I was a late-20's fat guy with severe acne all over my upper body, and I'd obviously never had a girlfriend. I looked ahead in life and just saw it going further and further downhill. I tried dieting, working out, etc, but none of my attempts at making a change ever lasted.
One day I saw a facebook post that one of my old highschool classmates had gotten married. The guy looked a lot like me, and at first I was mad - I had that classic incel thought of "why is he successful and not me?" But after sitting in that dark place for awhile, I realized that the answer to that question is that I can be successful! I realized that I'd never tried to put myself out there because I always viewed myself as not being worthy - I needed to be fitter, more attractive, better at talking to people, etc - but did I really? I wanted to find out, so I made an online dating account, cleaned myself up, got a friend to take some nice pictures of me doing things I enjoyed, and put myself out there.
I made a goal for myself to never start a conversation with "Hey" or something similar - I went through every profile I found and picked something specific to talk about. It took a while, and I missed a lot of opportunities by being awkward, but eventually I got good enough at holding a conversation to secure a few dates, and in only a few months of that, I found the woman who is now my wife!
I'm still fat, but having someone to look good for was at least enough for me to shower more regularly, which cleared up a lot of my acne. I'm still pretty awkward, but so is my wife, and we both find it endearing. Life's not perfect - there are still issues - but I'm no longer looking ahead at my life and seeing only downhill trajectory; I have a sense of optimism I didn't have before, and it mostly came from me accepting myself. I'm not sure if other incels are the same as I was - not realizing that the one they actually hate is themselves - but I hope that if they are, they eventually come to the same realization that I did: that they are worthy.
As someone who works with door hardware, this would be a pretty easy interview.
Where is this? I need to make sure I go there if I'm ever in the area!
Well, there's your problem - you forgot the sugar, so all you've made is lemon juice.
Right? I love the sticker (minus the random capitalized words), but I've never been honked at in the 15+ years I've been driving. I feel like if people are honking at you, you're probably not paying enough attention.
I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn't concerned - I'd already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we're too afraid of stepping on people's toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.
If protests are something people can just ignore until they're over, then that's what they'll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn't always negative change - it's often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they'll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.
People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you're closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won't affect to your vote, and if you're actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you'll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody's still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn't going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.
There's no reason we can't acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it's not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he's a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we've sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there's no reason to think we won't do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.
These "both sides" discussions aren't about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they're about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the "lesser evil" every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we're solidified our candidate's victory, but then once we've done that we do nothing until we're in the same "lesser evil" situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we're voting for a president we'd actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn't a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.
I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who's paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they'll feel as though they can't even air out their grievances with the candidate they'd already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.
Yeah, that's part of the reason why I just dealt with the pain whenever I was prescribed stuff like Vicodin. I don't want to risk it at all.
I've seen plenty of people who think they could take hard, addictive drugs and not get addicted, or that the addiction would be a small price to pay for the highs of the drug. Plenty of people have far too much self confidence for their small understanding of the situation. It's why drugs like heroin are still around; if everyone intrinsically understood that they're not worth it, they'd have disappeared a long time ago.
My wife and I usually plan big vacations about a year in advance so that we can follow flight prices and whatnot to get a good deal. We also book a few days at a cabin for our anniversary every year, so we just book the next year's reservation while we're there, since reservations can fill up even several months in advance.
Only planning a week in advance seems stressful to me - we planned a last-minute (for us) road trip vacation earlier this month for the long 4th of July weekend, and it was tough to find cheap places to stay that weren't super grungy.
Yeah, it's specifically because they're trying to increase profits for so long that they need to get so incredibly meticulous and complicated with how their business works. Companies that just try to earnestly provide a desired service to people who need it in their area of operation don't need to worry about such details.
I didn't really see people mentioning that "would" can still be used past-tense outside of "would have," though it's not in the same way - you use it when talking about something that happened multiple times in the past. For example, "When I was a kid my friends and I would go to the pool every Saturday," which means that, as children, my friends and I did visit the pool every Saturday.
Why would they investigate it? Either he has no money, and is telling the truth, or he "has no money" and will be happy to share his "nothing" to keep an investigation from happening.