there are 2 men that seem to be completely stoic (I don’t know what word would describe them better): they ignore drama and jabs, even if directed at them

It may be that they are just oblivious.

Years ago my wife and I noticed a difference between the men who worked for her and the women who worked for her.

She had to take a woman aside and tell her that her shoes weren’t appropriate for the office. The woman heard, “she thinks I’m a slut.”

The men would hear, “she thinks my shoes aren’t appropriate for the office.”

Science indicates that women generally have more brain space devoted to communication than men. That is typically accepted to indicate that women communicate better than men, but it really just means more of their brain is involved.

Like a person with macular degeneration seeing hallucinations because their brain is trying to fill in the missing information, some women will hallucinate information that isn’t in the communication.

They will also think they are communicating in ways that aren’t conveyed with words. Many men will miss subtle, “read-between-the-lines” subtext because they just don’t have the neural real-estate to deal with it.

Women are also more likely to care about what other people think, simply because they are more likely to be at risk if they piss off the wrong person. Men can usually be a bit more chill because less of the population can threaten them. So it’s entirely possible that those two men don’t care because they know no one is going to kick their ass, so there’s nothing to get upset about.

Men will care a lot about actual aggressiveness. When you’ve had to be stitched back together after being jumped, passive-aggressiveness doesn’t seem like that much of a big deal.

I think how “burning bridges” is generally used refers to not leaving yourself a way out. However in this case we’re talking about not leaving others a way in.

He bragged about some of them.

It’s not about being sure about what’s involved, but being sure that it is what you want regardless of what’s involved.

The reality is no one knows what you’re getting into when you have a child, even when it’s not your first child.

However, you can be sure you want to commit your life to something without knowing the future.

He likes his roadkill rare and his brain worms starving.

Forest rats.

If they are the right kind of Styrofoam, they can be recycled. See if there’s someplace near you that takes them.

It’s not pointless. The point is to get people to forget that the president is a pedophile.

Probably not cheap, but it can be a fun time, and if you do it right, you can save money on chum.

My family tends to be less concerned with our remains. My grandfather used to say that when he died we should just “jam a ham bone up my ass and let the dogs drag me away.”

Never quite understood what the purpose of the ham bone up the ass was, but I don’t judge. No kink-shaming.

Edit: I should add, we did not shove anything up his ass and let the dogs drag him away. He was cremated. His instructions were to proceed with the cremation immediately with no time for family to say goodbye. However, my grandmother and my father (only child) decided to ignore that. We met at the funeral home before the cremation and just sat in the room with him.

To this day, he’s still the best looking dead person I’ve ever seen. He was dead, and he looked it, but he looked like himself. Just dead. He looked normal, not some plastic, uncanny-valley version of himself that someone thought he should look like.

If you really want to stick it to the funeral industry, and you’re including crematoriums and all other aspects in that, I think the only option is burial at sea.

Put it in your will that you want your friends and family to go on a deep-sea fishing cruise. Specify they must bring you along, and once they reach the approved and legal dumping location and have you naked and weighted so you sink, they can raise their glasses, make a toast, and pitch you over the side.

Meant to include this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_at_sea

In my experience, it doesn’t have anything to do with kids living at home longer.

It’s more related to the issues of the parents. Control issues, lack of purpose, lack of independence on the part of the parents.

Some parents just fail to prepare their kids for life. All of my kids had roommates in college who didn’t know how to do laundry, or cook food, or clean up after themselves.

Other parents go out of their way to keep their children dependent on them. I think that is usually because the parents don’t know what to do with their lives if their kids move on.

Yeah.

Generally my wife and I keep the, “oh crap is this going to be a shitshow” conversations between ourselves.

The only way the kids get a reaction beyond a raised eyebrow and an amused smile is if the fuck up in question is going to push the limits of my ability to fix.

If it goes beyond $1000, they might get a “what the fuck?!?” out of me, but it’s more in the nature of a momentary loss of control and is really just what my body does while my brain is trying to figure out how to cover it. However, if they fucked up, they already know it. If they fucked up by ignoring my advice, they know that too. There’s no need to rehash it.

Generally, the biggest problem I have is they want to be independent, so they tend to try to keep their problems to themselves until they grow too big to deal with.

If you ask my mom, she’d say I do the same thing.

I’ve definitely met people who were not raised to be independent of their parents. It sadly seems to often be the rule rather than the exception.

As a parent, our job is to prepare you to be an adult, and our involvement should gradually decrease over time.

As babies, you have no capacity for self-determination. You literally can’t decide where you are or what you do. You’re luggage that can scream.

As you get older you become capable of more, and as parents, we should be giving you more responsibility over the choices you make.

Here in the U.S., from a legal point of view, your parents are responsible for you up to the age 18. Regardless of how much freedom you’re allowed before 18, your parents are on the hook for any damages.

At 18, that changes. Now you’re legally an adult, and you are responsible for all your choices. However, your brain development is incomplete, and you haven’t developed the ability to fully comprehend the future consequences of your actions.

From 18 to about 27, you should be making your own decisions, but your parents should be available for advice or rescue when you make a mistake. The idea is for you to make mistakes, but have the support to be able to learn from them.

From there, parents should continue to step back. Advice can always be given, but it is up to the child whether to take it, and as parents we have no say in what advice children follow.

Personally, I’ll always be available to help any of my kids in any way I can. However, at this point my job is not to actually intervene until asked. I can, however, initiate the conversation when necessary.

I wonder where he keeps his collection of Epstein souvenirs.

I asked my retired, optometrist wife.

She didn’t have time to respond fully because she’s dealing with a plumbing hardware supplier to get a defective toilet tank replaced*, but she sent this:

Those are for adults with presbyopia and near vision. The PD is standard for average adults. If we assume people will get the right distance prescription via over-the-counter means, then who is responsible if they buy the wrong thing and get into a car accident because they couldn’t see at a distance?

I had to look it up, but “presbyopia and near vision” means you used to be able to see up close, but now you’re old and you can’t focus up close anymore. As opposed to: you’re young, but your eyes are the wrong shape.

PD would be pupillary distance, ie the gap between your two pupils. One of the things they measure when they’re ordering lenses for your glasses. As has been explained to me previously, if the PD is wrong, it’s adding prism to the lenses, and headaches to your experience.

* She didn’t retire to become a plumber. We’re getting a powder room renovated, and the tank for the new toilet arrived damaged.

It’s nonsense.

Alcohol interferes with neurological function. It doesn’t reveal the truth about who you are any more than a head injury would.

You can still sue if you find a lawyer who is willing to do it.

Pennsylvania is an “At Will” state, so in theory my wife could have fired any employee just because she felt like it. However, the steps laid out by our lawyer for firing someone were quite extensive.

We needed to have extensive documentation of failures and performance issues on file before we could consider it.

That’s also why my employer has such an extensive coaching and documentation process for poorly performing employees. The policy documents describe it as a way to ensure all employees have the opportunity and support they need to improve, but the real reason is definitely to protect against lawsuits.

Of course, if anyone in the US is thinking of moving to another state, this might be useful:

https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/workers-rights/best-states-to-work/

I was going to suggest that you’d want to cross-reference other details as well, such as if the state allows doctors to refuse to treat you because they think their magic sky-daddy doesn’t want them to.

At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.

My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It’s hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.

For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.

I have heard that when productivity didn’t drop, the CEO asked, “Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?” It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.

At this point, there’s no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They’ve reduced office space to the point where we all couldn’t work on-site even if we wanted to.