That’s fair. I’m in manufacturing so I associate it with physically difficult trade labor, low paid administrative labor, and low paid repetitive and boring labor. Some uneducated people develop plenty of skills, that said, my degree was a shortcut to skills and a direct path to a good career. The deal has gotten worse over the past few decades, but we still need people who have traditional educated knowledge. And I fear that we may face serious problems if education rates plummet.

The general education also had a drastic positive impact on my personal development as well, but I’m not rich enough to pay tens of thousands for that.

Give fresh a try. Canned green beans tend towards mushy where fresh have some crispness. A lot of people who like it swear by some trick, and I really think that upgrading the beans is the best strategy, upgrading the soup is risky with good payoff if you do it well, and upgrading the onions is something that I always see people suggest whenever fried onions appear and it’s a crazy increase in effort for at absolute best, very little improvement.

But what do I know I’m the cheese and potato casserole/mac and cheese relative.

Yeah I went to a cheap state school for an engineering degree. Sure I still haven’t paid it off yet, but it was definitely financially worth it. Even more worth it if you consider how much I don’t want to do uneducated labor for a living.

Ooh thanks, I’ll have to check it out!

I think it depends on size and relationship. Nobody brought anything to my grandparents (either side) until I started to. But it was always 10-11 people. Except when their same age siblings came, they’d bring something (much younger great aunt was never considerate of oma and opa). At my in laws’ we cook a dish. If we lived in town I’d probably bring a casserole, but even before we moved far away we still were hours away and you don’t want to leave a casserole for hours.

Friends though, always bring a dish except for the ones friend who has made it crystal clear that she doesn’t want people doing so because she’s insane and shows her love through elaborate meal planning. For her we just try to keep her liquor and wine cabinet overstocked and demand she let us help her with anything she wants.

Yeah they scale very explicitly in a nx line

Eh stovetop stuffing is popular enough that it’s reasonable to ask someone to bring it.

That said, general rule is requests can be like “dessert” or maybe a “cheesy casserole”. If someone has a dish they’re good at for potluck it’s reasonable to request that. But if you want specific dishes you should be doing a volunteer sign up

As the potato casserole aunt, you bet your ass it slaps. It had to unseat homemade painstaking mac and cheese to be my Thanksgiving dish

I feel a cheap metal also works, but it should be unassuming. I also feel like they should be wearing it under their shirts not openly. “Do not pray as the hypocrites” and whatnot.

Maga lacks the sheer catholic drip to try that.

Oh shit, congrats to them. Randall’s wife got cancer a few years before my mom did, and his comics on the topic were huge for me to be able to cope with something so heavy as a teenager.

I think it really depends on preparation. It’s one of those dishes that varies wildly in how good it is based on a few simple things. Canned green beans? The casserole can’t be saved, green beans are one of the worst foods to buy canned that a lot of people still do. Frozen green beans? You can make it good, but you’ve gotta do some doing. Fresh green beans? Even a mid recipe will be pretty dang good, but then you get it good and crispy and maybe you upgrade to a homemade cream of mushroom, and yeah it can steal the show. But people use canned green beans because nobody really likes it and it’s just there to be a traditional vegetable option and so they don’t know how little effort it needs to be drastically better.

Does distinguishing country actually matter here?

And not the women who actually date women, we’re with y’all on it

The problem is that the safeguards keep getting eroded. Companies really want to be allowed to make the gambles that tank the economy and so they push for them to be removed.

Yeah. Automotive, insurance, and banking were industries when they collapsed in 08. They kept making bad calls (and automotive has continued to do so immediately after the government stopped forcing them not to), but the industries were bailed out because the consequences of not having them would be disastrous to the US economy.

Unfortunately I do think a lot of the government feels not having AI dominance would be disastrous for the US economy so it could easily become a fight.

Romantasy has been thriving in recent years but you have to market yourself to stand out. It’s also been weird in that increasingly self publishing has been a better deal for authors of the genre.

Personally I’d love to get into reading it but I hear there isn’t much good f/f content in the genre.

Different people find different physical activities beneficial. Some people love team sports, personally I’m not a fan of competitive activities or of games where I feel my physical abilities could let others down. Some people love running, many find that while they don’t love it, they love the physical and mental effects of it; both of which are hard to deny, there’s a reason every competitive sports team makes its players run as part of practice.

Personally I’m a cyclist, because it’s like running, but without the parts that make me not want to run and with added benefits like equipment to mess with and upgrade and the ability to use it to run errands. I also enjoy hiking for exercise because it’s just a long exhausting walk in a beautiful place that I can spend chatting with my wife.

For some people it’s basketball or soccer/football. I have a friend who’s really into gridiron flag football (she actually used to be a runner when she was younger). Sports are great for people who don’t derive meditative effects from solo cardio, but don’t discount those effects.

Some bike rides are me just listening to a podcast or audiobook, but personally I struggle to process my emotions if I’m not taking a walk or a bike ride, and so regularly doing these things is invaluable for my mental health. Runners are often the same way, the act of running can make it difficult to hold on to a thought or to avoid it, which makes it a shortcut to meditation as you just kinda have to observe your thoughts and let them go.

As someone who quit running not long after getting to the point I get runners high, you have a point, but also different people can thrive on different forms of cardio. When I ran i found myself rapidly overheating and just generally miserable until I was stoned on feel good chemicals. Bicycling on the other hand was fun enough from the start that I wasn’t struggling to force myself to do it.

When I bought my bike I was struggling to get myself out running every other day. Things like stopping for water made me feel like I was failing. By switching to a different form of cardio, one that I enjoyed, I was able to get into shape without the constant urge to give up. It also came with my knees not hurting.

If I see a scary dude trying to exercise his feelings away I just feel sympathy. Like, I’ve known too many men afraid to cry, and seeing someone exercising and trying to hold back tears feels like he’s probably healthier than many of the guys who struggle with that.

Hell as a woman I bike the pain away too.