Tinks

You don’t necessarily need to take it away, there are other avenues of punishment. Detention, Saturday school, no extra-curricular participation, suspension, etc. I was in high school right as dumb cell phones started to become a thing and those were our punishments if we were caught with phones out. We were allowed to have them, but they had to be either off or on silent, and in our bags (same as CD/MP3 players.) We were allowed to have them out to check them only during lunch and before and after school, or if we had to make a call, in the main office. I completely agree that kids shouldn’t be using phones AT ALL during class time, but there’s ways to allow them to exist and punish inappropriate usage that doesn’t require teachers taking them. Teachers shouldn’t be taking phones, that’s a liability risk and not worth the effort.

Bartlet.

My husband wanted a special German stew this week and I went to price out chuck roast for it and it was $10/lb! It would cost us $20 in meat to make a pot of simple freakin stew. Round wasn’t even cheaper either! I quickly decided we weren’t having that stew right now. The price of beef is insane. Beef roast and stew was the poor meal when I was growing up - the thing my parents made to stretch the budget because you just buy a super cheap cut and cook it all day to make it edible, along with cheap veggies. Now those meals are damn near a delicacy considering the cost of the meat. Chicken isn’t much better either at the moment. Grocery shopping has become exhausting.

I’m so glad my company a) has a “nobody wants teams” stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn’t give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it’s getting done they’re happy.

Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don’t do the job and be done with it.

We still have researchers…with funding even? Huh…

My husband is German and has always found the crazy flag waving patriotism of the US odd. I never really understood his position until the last few years. Having been raised in the US, all of that seemed completely normal to me, but now I view it very differently.

Last week I was told that my dog’s trainer said I was the best client she’s ever worked with. The man that works at the front desk said he randomly asked her one day who the best client she’s worked with was and apparently with zero hesitation she said my name. I’m quite proud of that, because I worked really hard when I had my dog in training to make sure I was doing everything I could to make it, and us, successful. This trainer has worked with thousands of dogs and owners over the years so to have the distinction of being her best client is quite a pleasant surprise. I was determined to turn my crazy excitable COVID puppy into a well behaved dog I could take anywhere, and we succeeded. It was a lot of work, but worth it, and I’m proud of both the results, and the fact that apparently our trainer was impressed too. ☺️

My dog got attacked by a colony of yellowjackets for having the audacity to go near their nest that was just on the other side of our fence line. He ended up in the ER for anaphylaxis. The neighbor’s dogs got stung too, though they weren’t allergic. Those little cunts can all die in a fire.

Paper wasps I hate less, I just wish they’d stop trying to make nests on the eaves of my house. They’re chill, but I just want them to find somewhere else to call home.

The wild thing is that because of Delaware’s tax laws, a LOT of businesses are registered in that state. This is honestly bonkers to me.

This depends entirely on the vape. I quit smoking by switching to vaping, but this was before the current craze of nic salts. I switched using PG/VG flavored blends with much less dosage of nicotine than even the lightest cigarettes. It absolutely changed my life, and I will advocate for it being legal because of it. The Juul and other crazy high nicotine devices are very addictive though, and I’m of the opinion those need to be controlled better. Lumping all vaping together is very misleading though. I was able to quit vaping by reducing the nicotine blend amount in the juice I was buying, and that’s not really an option for a lot of these mass-market devices. This is part of the problem though - people legislating with a broad brush on a topic they know little about.

I go hiking a lot and I always carry pepper spray and a knife, specifically for dogs. My dog is usually with me and I have no qualms with pepper spraying an aggressive dog, or even hitting mine in the mix, to save his or my life. I hadn’t even considered strays, I’m mainly worried about the assholes who let their dogs off leash. That number of strays is a whole other nightmare scenario.

I am of the opinion that space exploration and settlement is the single most important thing humanity should be doing. Currently humanity exists only on this planet, which through the course of its existence has had numerous mass extinction events. It is hubris to believe that we will never be affected by one. Right now all of humanity’s eggs are in this single basket, and if that basket gets kicked over, humanity could cease to exist.

Now I will grant you that there are lots of things down here on earth that we should be spending money on to better the lives of humans generally, but these things are not mutually exclusive. Right now we’re spending orders of magnitude more money and resources waging war on one another than space exploration. In the US in 2025, the US military budget was around $920b, whereas NASA’s was $25b. The military budget was 36 times higher than the space budget. It’s not even close. Space is not where dollars are being wasted.

Studies have also shown that NASA’s impact is a net positive on the economy, consistently generating more economic impact than is put into it. It creates well paying jobs that employees find fulfilling and satisfying, generates public interest in the sciences, and benefits society as a whole as new technologies are developed that we all get to enjoy.

I would argue that what we NEED to do is stop needlessly murdering each other over religious and social disagreements, and spend our resources on feeding, clothing and taking care of one another such that we all have the time, security and ability to watch humans go out into space with wonder in our hearts.

Because people can buy stuff off your wishlist and have it shipped to you. In its current form, it doesn’t expose your address to the buyer, but apparently the change may do that.

Seriously! Anyone who thinks about this for half a second realizes the repercussions of only allowing US citizens bank accounts. Are we just eliminating immigration entirely now? Immigrants have to prove that they are financially self-sufficient and doing that without a bank account is… effectively impossible. Every legal permanent resident would be immediately unable to function in society. Most jobs require direct deposit into a bank account these days and won’t issue paper checks. How do you even pay rent or a mortgage without a bank account.

It would be absolute chaos.

And they’re still going to make you work in the office

Based on the article it appears they’re targeting naturalized citizens, but as someone who was born in Germany because my dad was in the Army, this is still concerning. Here I was just thinking I only had to fear for my permanent resident husband… I really hate this timeline.

I work in procurement and the last week and a half at work has been hell. Buying anything that contains RAM, Hard drives or GPUs right now is a circus. Pricing changing after orders placed, 6+ month lead times, insanely expensive pricing and any other problem you can imagine. It’s not just a problem for consumers, but businesses that need hardware refreshes, startups that are trying to launch, and replacements for defective units are all just really hard to get right now. I know this will pass eventually, but it’s a tough time to be in procurement for IT hardware.

What a cutie!

Public holidays are not mandatory time off let alone paid in the US. Many employers that give paid time off do include at least some holidays, but which ones and how many is variable between employers. Some will give every federal holiday and others will be only the really big ones like Christmas, thanksgiving, independence day, etc.

One of the most exciting things about the job I currently have is that I get around 15 holiday days a year off, in addition to my normal vacation time. It’s a rarity. My last two jobs only had 7 holiday days - that stretch from New years day to Memorial day (end of May) was always brutal.

I really don’t understand the hate for the magic mouse cursor lol. I freakin love it!