Y'all should employ my "Hawkeye Pierce Theory of Work". You bust your ass right off the bat, get really good and knowledgeable, get recognized as such. At worst, you get a lateral promotion doing something you would rather be doing, or gain the juice to do what you want to do and leave the lazy people to do the crappy parts of the job. In any case, they dare not get rid of you.
If that doesn't work you a) are not the top employee you think you are or b) need to get another job. I turned down a job that's considered pretty good around here by our biggest employer. They made it damned clear I wasn't going anywhere or doing anything else for at least a year. Nope.
I'm a man whore. Of all the sorts of sexuality, that's the one I can't wrap my head around. Bi is kinda hard. "You don't have much of a preference?!" But I can get it. Kinda.
Been a functioning alcoholic my whole adult life. Got my first bad test for liver enzymes. Looked the numbers up, holy shit that's fucking off the scale! Quit kratom powder for 2 weeks, keep drinking as normal, perfect retest.
Doc: "I'm so proud of you!" Uh....?
Another anecdote: Good friend crashed her liver with Tylenol. This was before it was widely known to fucking kill you. Hardcore alcoholic. 90-proof generic vodka, hiding bottles kinda alki. She got a transplant after being in a coma for 2-months, poster child for success! Doctors wanted her to speak at medical events as to how she no longer needed anti-rejection drugs after only 18-months. Imagine that!
Surgeon to family: "Believe it or not, her alcoholism had nothing to do with her liver failure."
All that to say, yeah, other factors we didn't evolve for can kill your liver. We been drinking for 10,000 years, the weak livers are largely weeded out.
Let's hear from Kurt Vonnegut!
"Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise." I feel personally attacked. :(
Anyway, Julie got run over by a random dude while crossing the corner with her husband, my best friend. So it goes.
I feel sorry for Europeans who aren't geared for this. Couple of years ago a monster heat dome sat on the Pacific Northwest. Many of my coworkers lived in and around Seattle and were suffering the lack of AC. My brain can't imagine living without.
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
American, white, liberal, redneck gun nut here. If you're talking about "defund the police", that's yet another idiot liberal slogan that misses the mark. The idea is to take police funds and pay for workers who can handle situations police should never have been sent to. Want to kill yourself? Call the cops!
The far right loves cops because cops are on their side, or are perceived to be. To put it bluntly, guns are for shooting marauding black people, not white people. See all the stories about white people being shocked when law enforcement doesn't go their way? Yeah.
Also, I suspect people who are anti-gun have never had violence inflicted upon them, or cops who are far away, or haven't had a bear wander in the dog door, or haven't had an enraged redneck struggling to be polite because they're visibly armed. In related news, my MAGA neighbor came stomping down here to kick my ass, turned right the fuck around when I went inside for my .45.
I could write all night on the subject, but let me leave it at this: Now is not the fucking time for Americans to disarm themselves. The only reason fascists haven't run us completely over is that they know there will be a real chance we'll fucking kill them. Look where the ICE raids are happening, in the places where guns are the most suppressed.
Yes, this all sucks, but it's where we're at in America.
I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.
On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump's admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. "And where do you think they get their data?"
OK, Trump beat Harris by 14% points. That makes all 31 million Texans hateful bigots. Imagine if I said the same of any other group. I'd be banned of the entire site if I said, Jews, blacks, LGBT, women, whatever are a bunch of X.
In the US our colleges and universities typically have what they call extension offices that can tell you all about the local environment. Anything like that where you're at?
From Gemini, but it's factual:
A local extension office, often called a Cooperative Extension office, is a branch of a land-grant university that provides research-based information and educational programs to the local community. These offices are staffed by experts who offer guidance on various topics, including agriculture, gardening, food safety, natural resources, and 4-H youth development. They act as a bridge between academic research and practical application, helping individuals and communities solve problems and improve their lives.
Lots of great advice here! I've learned the most just by getting out in the woods and swamps and looking. Still so much I'm ignorant of! A great project for you, that I've been slacking on, is putting events into a calendar or tracking app. "May 15th, dragonflies are back." "June 1st, banana spiders back." Stuff like that.
OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.
My dad took me in the shower when I was young and taught me to bathe properly.