Yes, but it’s under inflation every year so real wages are still going down. Yet somehow the C-suite can afford to give themselves raises above inflation, even while grumbling about funding and cutting positions left and right. Weird how that works.

Oh good, I’m sure this will be covered in my annual “merit increase” that’s not called a Cost of Living Adjustment because it doesn’t actually adjust for cost of living.

So tired of this.

“Hey we’re the Washington Territory want to be a state. Can we be called Columbia like the Columbia River?”

“No, we’re the District of Columbia and that would be too confusing.”

“Uh, okay. How about just Washington then?”

“Sure. Also we’re gonna be calling ourselves Washington, DC now and we’re just gonna kinda drop the DC part.”

“Uh…”

I completely understand that reaction. When I say immature I mean a man who was abused by family so he ran away at 14 and kind of arrested his development at that point. So even things like this that sound completely insane don’t feel that insane to my family members.

I’ve had conversations with other family members to try to get them to imagine hearing this story without knowing who he was to really see how beyond the pale it was.

You downplayed his actions with the drugs as “irresponsible” (earlier and again now) and only talked about him making drugs available to her rather than forcefully injecting them when she couldn’t consent.

He predated on a very young patient. Whether or not the mother’s claims about his comments are true, he is clearly a manipulative monster.

The article talks both about the evidence and the mother’s statements. You look really bad here.

My grandfather, who is generally a good-natured but immature man, really ate up everything Fox News spewed at him about Trump. He and my grandmother always play the pity card that I don’t visit them, but they’ve been supremely unpleasant to be around for the last 8 years because they can’t leave politics out of it.

He wore a MAGA hat to my nephew’s 3rd birthday party and explicitly stated that he did it to make others uncomfortable. So no gramps, I don’t really want to visit you these days.

Here, I’ll take this up. The article also quotes text messages between them wherein he admits he injected her with ketamine himself while she was asleep.

You are monstrous for defending this monster.

Good suggestions, and yeah if someone has an accent I’m trying to identify I’ll usually ask about the accent and region I think it’s from.

I still feel a slight ick from “originally.” And usually I’m talking with people from my general region and I’m really just asking what local town they grew up in, so it’s sometimes more “did you grow up in [current location, or area they’re talking about]?”

IMO 59/60 should be about the max for a first term president. That would put them at retirement age if they serve two terms. I think Walz is a great choice to make the whole thing more palatable to progressives like me (who feel that now for a third time in a row we’ve been deprived of a fair primary). I do wish the VP were a little younger than the president to set them up for a run of their own afterwards. Not sure if Walz has any intention of running afterwards, but we’d be right back to a retirement age candidate if Kamala serves two terms.

Personally, I’d like to see more presidents in their 40s or early 50s. That’s plenty of time to get “experience” while still in principle being able to understand the needs of the majority of people. Plus it helps that they’ll still live for a while in the world they shape after their term.

I really hate that racists have ruined a perfectly good question. I often want to actually ask people where in the US they’re from, but I can’t ask the straightforward “where are you from?” if the person isn’t white because I know it can easily be interpreted as the racist version.

Instead I now ask “are you from [city we’re in]?” to try to make it clear I’m assuming they’re from the US.

The same kind who have a separate variable for ignore-wordlist-regex that’s just another list of users almost identical to the first one.

That’s weird since I just got an email for a “payment due” on 8/15. It is so fucking exhausting to try to keep up with all the bajillion different “payment plans” and if you don’t choose the right one based on all the misinformation out there then fuck you, you don’t get the tasty breadcrumbs we’re leaving in hidden corners.

I am so tired of my student loan payments changing or being threatened to change all the time. Just tell me how much I owe you each month and leave me the fuck alone. I need to focus on budgeting groceries.

IMO, an agreement to get married should be a mutual discussion, not a surprise. My wife and I also decided to get married by having a discussion and then went ring shopping together. We went with a blue topaz. Super pretty and didn’t break the bank.

The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.

You need to grapple with this and figure out how to acknowledge the damage the DNC did to the party in 2016. You are only continuing to hurt party unity by pretending it didn’t happen.

I’m not saying Bernie would definitely have won or anything. Chances are Hillary would have won in a fair election anyway. I’m saying the people were robbed of a fair election so we can’t know what would have happened. If you’re truly interested in justifying democracy you should be outraged by that rather than denying it.

But sure, a pithy “lmao” definitely does the trick too.

…In an unfair election with the organizing body tipping the scale all throughout the process. So no, you can’t point to the votes to wave away the corruption that influenced those votes.

Oh, come on. You can’t justify a corrupt process by pointing to the final results of the corrupt process.

I itemized for the first time this year so I couldn’t use it, but I did fill it out completely as a comparison point to make sure itemizing was worth it. It was pretty painless, not very different from free filing through various other companies.

My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.

It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.

Getting screenshots or videos off the Switch is laughably arcane. Nintendo is so weird about modern tech conveniences.