I have some bad news

Curtains are stupid expensive, I have a big window with curtains that are in dire need of replacing but I’m looking at several thousand dollars for just that one window.

Longshoreman overtime is ass-backwards though. They clock crazy high OT and do shit like sleep on the clock and they get any shifts outside normal business hours counted as OT. The average pay is well over $100k iirc

They’re also super insular and basically the only way to get a job with them is to be a family member of someone who’s retiring.

I like unions but the ILA is basically a front for the mob. Their leader literally got involved in a ton of RICO charges that didn’t stick because a key witness mysteriously turned up dead in a trunk.

Also part of the reason they’re so insistent on paper records and refusing automation is so they can traffick humans, illegal goods, and steal stuff.

I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.

There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.

With just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open my work machine sits at 95% usage of 16gb. Half the time my compiles can’t even finish without getting axed by the oom killer. SSMS is a hog too, I often have to close half my stuff to get to work right.

Supposed to be getting an upgrade but my company is taking their sweet time.

I’ve been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we’ve ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.

I know it’s tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we’ll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we’ll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.

They let us use them for all my college math classes.

They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.

I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.

Keepass and syncthing are great combined. Functions fully locally even when I have no access to my home network, and changes get synced between my desktop, laptop, and phone whenever I have WAN access.

Also it’s specifically named as a reference to the gimp from pulp fiction as it originally came out around the same.

It’s fine for a hobby project but GIMP is well past that now and it’s a really bad look in a professional environment.

I prefer it over unconfigured vim on remote/new systems. If I can bring my vimrc though, vim wins.

Leftists have a big problem with purity testing. It’s why they never seem to be able to accomplish anything. Instead of joining forces with other leftist groups that share 95% of the same views, they shit all over them for not being 100% aligned.

If they’d suck it up and work together they could actually be a political force and get some of what they want, instead of infighting constantly and accomplishing nothing.

It’s the biggest thing turning me off of leftist ideology. I agree with a decent amount of what they want, but as soon as I say something like “Maybe market economies solve real problems and are suitable for some situations like consumer products” I’m basically turbo hitler to them.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

I’d recommend the following set of tools:

• Cordless drill (any major brand is fine, I like Milwaukee)
• Hand pull saw (whatever is fine)
• Set of decent chisels (Narex is great value)
• Corded circular saw (Makita 5007F is a great choice)
• Random orbital sander (DeWalt has some fairly good budget models)
• Clamps, clamps, more clamps

Most of all though, get good wood. I actually strongly recommend starting with plywood primarily if you don’t have access to quality lumber since you won’t have to do any surfacing.

I saw someone drown in a pool when I was 11. I noticed there was someone sitting at the bottom of the deep end, told the lifeguard who hadn’t yet noticed, but it was just barely too late. Later learned they had experienced a seizure and sank.

I mostly just remember how pale they were, and being annoyed that pool time got axed for the remainder of summer camp. I never felt much about it. Shit happens, people die, just the way it goes.

Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.