You? Where else?

What a coincidence, I just watched the Scrubs episode with the Dr Toilet running gag.

Also just makes the zipper easier to operate in general.

This decade it’s AI, last decade it was outsourcing to the third world. The assault on skilled workers never stops.

Managers who try to replace engineers with AI are probably shitty bosses to work for anyway, because they don’t have a single fucking clue about what the job actually entails.

The only thing those employees lost was their income. I’d move on and never look back.

Unlike every other metal known since antiquity, gold doesn’t tarnish or oxidize or decay. It’s the very embodiment of purity and immortality. It invokes the divine. If you make something out of gold and you keep it safe, it’ll look pristine indefinitely. This also makes it great as an offering to (the) God(s).

Silver tarnishes, but very slowly and can easily be polished to a mirror finish. This makes it well suited to make “nice” things where gold isn’t necessarily appropriate or cost-effective, and it can be added to gold to bulk it up and improve its material properties without ruining its luster.

Copper tarnishes quickly and forms a green patina in salty sea air, and the vast majority of ancient settlements happened to be on the coast. It’s still a useful metal, but it has to be kept up, a constant reminder of one’s mortality. It’s more suited for tools and cookware than as an offering to God.

Rarity helps a lot with this too, of course. It doesn’t matter how immutable gold is if you can just find it anywhere. This also means it’s great for turning into coinage with your face on it, to remind everyone exactly who’s in charge.

Once upon a time, pure iron used to be even more valuable than gold. Before we learned how to smelt it, pure iron was extremely rare, and the only pure iron that could be found on or in the Earth’s surface came from the heavens (meteoric iron). Finding a pure chunk of iron was tantamount to winning the lottery.

The same goes for aluminum. Despite being one of the most abundant elements in Earth’s crust, pure aluminum almost never occurs naturally. In the 19th century, people had cutlery made out of aluminum because it was fancier than silverware. It only dropped in value once we started to refine it on an industrial scale, which involves electrolyzing molten alumina, requiring an immense amount of power.

Long story short, value is relative. Iron and aluminum got cheap because we figured out how to make more and more of it. Gold and silver remain precious metals because they only got rarer and rarer as more people went looking for them, and their value only went up as we started finding practical uses for them.

Bruh, just look at the address bar. That is not a USPS domain. Obviously it’s a scam.

Sounds like an issue with handling Exif orientation tags.

Here it is, folks, case in fucking point.

Did I ask, at any point, for opinions on how I should be feeling about any of this? I don’t think so.

In all fairness, she was pretty patient with me for a bit, but as I alluded to, I attempted to apply small course corrections when I should have tried a different course entirely. In reality, this was the cumulative effect of multiple different occasions.

See, my dumb ass didn’t think it was an issue with what I was saying, but how I was saying it. So I figured it was just a matter of trying to be more tactful with my suggestions. Obviously, that wasn’t it.

Sure, she could have been more mature and introspective about it, but so could I. So it’s kind of a wash.

I can’t really blame her because of the shit she was going through. There’s a bit more context that I don’t really want to get into on a public forum, but in hindsight her reaction is understandable.

Kinda hard not to blame myself when it was ultimately my fuck up, however. I’m still dealing with that over 4 years later.

Well, kind of the exact opposite of that. I realize that’s meant to be satire, but that kind of attitude is what got me into trouble.

I left out the exact details for brevity and privacy, but it was a situation where there wasn’t a simple answer. I just didn’t have a good grasp of the concept of active listening.

I was trying to engage with what she was saying, because she had previously told me that it seemed like I didn’t care about her problems. But I just wasn’t saying the right things.

In reality, my previous approach had revolved around keeping my mouth shut because then there was no way I could say anything to fuck it up. But then, in large part thanks to my undiagnosed ADHD, I would tune out without realizing it.

So I engaged in the only way I knew how, by trying to rationalize her experiences when I should have been empathizing with them.

Here’s another thing that I was just reminded of in this very thread, lmfao:

Men are expected to accept unsolicited advice at face value when they want to vent, because we’re supposed to be the ones with all the answers, and if a man is complaining about a problem, then he’s obviously just missing the answer.

This actually blew up my last relationship, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when my girlfriend at the time was stressed from being laid off and we weren’t able to see each other due to the isolation orders.

She would try to vent to me about her problems, looking for support in a time of emotional vulnerability, and I, an inexperienced idiot just trying to be helpful, would suggest solutions that I thought she hadn’t considered. If you can’t guess exactly how that went, you’ve almost certainly never been in a serious relationship.

What made it worse is she would then say to stop mansplaining, which made me defensive because I thought she was tacitly accusing me of being intentionally misogynistic when I was honestly just trying to be helpful. At the time, I figured I just needed to adjust my approach a little bit, not completely change course. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work.

It was only in hindsight, some time after she had dumped my dumb ass, and I had blocked and deleted her number, that I was complaining to my friends and getting the exact same kind of thing back that I realized, “oh wow, I get it now, that is actually really fucking annoying and invalidating.”

It was also around this time, while discussing my experiences with friends who have been diagnosed, that I realized that I might have ADHD. So that definitely hadn’t helped.

In the extremely unlikely event you’re reading this, K, I’m sorry. I figured out what I did wrong, just a little too late.

Yes, thank you, I never would have figured that out without your brilliant insight.

Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned probationary period at the start of any conversation, it can take some time before it becomes clear that the other person just isn’t that interested.

Can I still be annoyed at my time and effort being wasted? Or is it just my fault for being a man on a dating app?

Oh yeah, I’ve seen the other side of things through female friends. They generally have the opposite problem as men.

I’d heard about guys doing stupid shit on dating apps like sending unsolicited dick pics or just going straight for sexual stuff and figured it was maybe a “yeah it happens once in a while” kinda thing, because I’d personally never do something like that. But in fact it seems like a large portion of the interactions are just that bad.

So I can understand not putting in a lot of effort initially. Starting with small talk and making sure it’s not a waste of your time. I do the exact same thing.

But even after it feels like I’ve started to establish a rapport with someone, the conversation still can feel incredibly one-sided. It’s like, okay, at this point you’re just kinda being disrespectful. And it happens over and over again.

As a guy who’s trying dating again, there’s something that keeps coming up that kinda bugs me: talking to women who just put in the bare minimum of effort, expect me to carry the conversation and make all the first moves.

I don’t give two shits about traditional gender roles and I’m all about subverting them. However, I think if you’re in the same boat but still wanna call yourself a “passenger princess” and expect the guy to do everything, you’re kind of a hypocrite.

I’m not saying you are. You missed my point entirely.

The biggest threat to your life from climate change is this kind of doomerism making you suicidal. I’ve been down that road myself.

Either get off your ass and do something about it or stop worrying about it. You’re not helping anyone by making yourself sad.

The problem isn’t people owning an extra house for a nest egg. It’s companies owning hundreds of them.

It’s not even summer yet and I’m already contemplating if I can afford to move to New Zealand for half the year.

I feel like a zombie wouldn’t be able to consent. If they can speak intelligently, they’re not a zombie, they’re something else.

As for marriage, I think the contract would be automatically void, “til death do us part” and all that.