His brain worm has measles.

It’s not quite like that. My workplace is surprisingly good on the hours, they just aren’t great on responsibilities or scope.

It’s… a lot of work in very broad specialties, with little backup.

There’s a checklist, with a box after the jury box.

I’m not in a position to type out a long comment, but this link should give you the answers you need.

Not the person you responded to, but my actual answer is that’s because all of the national political parties in the U.S. are corporations whose business is politics.
They’re basically glorified staffing agencies that invest a lot of money into marketing. Instead of stocks, the wealthy buy ownership with donations or other arrangements coordinated via PACs.

This has been the approximate state of affairs for decades and became the de facto standard with Citizens United.

Re: The reception of your comments - I think people hate to see that reality. Facing it feels inescapably hopeless. Polite fictions are far easier to maintain. But in a brief skim of your comments, your positions align with me — even if now I’m angry and sad for the reminders of how dog shit this is.

Honestly, Tesla’s quality is far less than most vehicles.
Apple has a lot of fair criticisms leveled against it, but their products are at least built as well as their competition. Unless I’m woefully out of the loop. That’s also possible.

Thank you. Things are definitely better. I can’t say I’m normal. I mean, I trauma dump on strangers on the internet in the name of interesting anecdotes, but I think I threaded a needle that few manage to thread. I’m more or less financially stable, with a solid career, comfortable prospects, and a good home life with someone who grew up under equitable circumstances, and also managed to escape the cycle, so we have a good understanding/acceptance of each others foibles.

Oooh, boy.

Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom both fell more heavily into drug use and moved us (me, and two of my sisters) halfway across the country to the magnificent town of Throckmorton, Texas.
My mom found a dealer, who became her boyfriend, and they wound up spending a lot of time together. So much so that sometimes they’d take us to abandoned houses and leave us there for hours before they came back. My mom was going through a phase - she wound up dyeing her hair so much it somehow looked orange in the sun and green in the shade. But she also was sort of falling off being around the house. Sometimes it was just a day, then a day or two. We learned she lost her job, which was a problem - the house we lived in was provided by her employer. One Friday she left.
When Monday rolled around, we didn’t go to school. The school called that afternoon, and we were honest with them. Our mom was gone and we didn’t know what to do. By Wednesday, they had managed to contact our grandma, who had extended family nearby, and they swooped in before CPS.
We were eventually mustered back “home” to where more immediate family lived, and we floated for a long time. Not quite a year, but long enough that we moved up a grade and we celebrated NYE at my grandma’s.

My mom emerged from wherever she’d been. She convinced my family to bring us back to her, to come live in a battered women’s shelter in Abilene - not far from where she’d disappeared. She was in AA, and NA, and even briefly went back to college.

She never told us believable or consistent stories about what happened. It was always a tale of woe and coercion. Once she told us her drug dealer was an FBI agent that was using her to conduct sting operations and threatened to put her in jail if she stopped helping. In another, it was kidnapping. It was never that she got strung out and tried to run away.

And that may not have been it either. Because after my mom died a few years ago, my sisters, who stayed close to the places we mostly grew up (I fled half a country away), found a weird creative writing exercise: A mother’s letter to a son she gave up for adoption. Odd, but my mom was odd and increasingly tried to get into more creative pursuits as she aged. But then they found a police report that said she got arrested for attacking her boyfriend. The report indicated that she was pregnant. Then they found paperwork from a hospital - standard pregnancy stuff, dating to the time period she was in the wind. The last thing they found was another police report, this time from him assaulting her, indicating she was about 6 months pregnant.
And that’s all we know. We don’t know if this pregnancy came to term - my mom had 6 miscarriages that we knew about. We don’t know if an adoption took place or is she left the kid with her drug dealer - who is now apparently a church alderman (one of my sisters looked him up from the info on the police report).

My mom was both very prideful, and quite racist. Our working theory on why she took this secret to her grave is that it reminded her of her failings and, you know, that she boinked someone she was racist against.

Preamble: My parents divorced when I was young, my dad died a few years later, and I never really got to know him. Plus I have childhood trauma and ADHD, so I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. My parents weren’t great people, and life was pretty rough and tumble growing up.

When I was in my early teens, I found a newspaper clipping from before I was born in some scrapbook or memory box. It was a short little crime blotter story that indicated my dad had accidentally shot himself in the face, because he had mistaken a snub-nose pistol for a lighter while drunk.
I do remember that he had a big scar on his face, but I sort of assumed it was because he liked to get in fistfights for fun.

My mom, a serial liar, confirmed the story, and it’s what I and another one of my sisters have believed for decades.

I mentioned the event in passing to my oldest sister a few months ago and she balked, and immediately began laughing. After she composed herself, she explained that she was home when it happened. The real story is that my dad had ripped someone off in a drug deal, and they did a poor job of trying to kill him. The whole drunk/lighter thing was to avoid additional questions by the police.

So, you know. Gun in a thrown shoe. Sure.

I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.

It’s sort of funny - Seeing the rise of the Buy Canadian or Buy from EU groups/movements/knowledge sharing as a U.S. citizen and thinking “Shit, can I buy from them, too?”

Equal parts recognizing that buying American made usually means you’re just buying something assembled from components produced elsewhere and that standards here are not as good. (And getting worse all the time, now that the pro-corporate writing is on the wall.)

From my recent garage sale:

A warrior uses every tool at their disposal to vanquish their foes!
Self care is an honorable and righteous pursuit. It makes you a more effective foe in battle.

I took my antidepressants FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

At a particularly awkward time in my life, I used to keep a secret online journal. Journaling helps me to out process my emotions as well as serve as a way to mark occasions and well, establish facts. Useful when you’re in a relationship with someone who gaslights you and you have all the ADHD forgetting. The ADHD also means I have to have a reward component, so that’s why it was online, because I can type like a demon, and I am strongly externally motivated. Imagining I’m monologuing for an audience provided motivation. Anyway, life got busy. I went back to school. Depression hit hard enough that I got medicated. Life narrowed to slow, loping rhythm while I took upwards of 18 credit hours and sometimes worked multiple jobs. After months of this grind, I had all but shrank into nothingness. Entries to my blog were short, terse. Not florid or deep with my own lore. Just sleep, work, school, study. Sleep, work, school, study. I was more or less at the bedrock of my personality there.

I got a message one day through my secret journal. Someone told me they had accidentally found it a few years before and had been following it at a distance since. It wasn’t on a platform they could subscribe to it, so they bookmarked it and checked it roughly weekly. She acknowledged it was an odd situation, but that she didn’t intend to be creepy. She had noticed I decreased my posting frequency and that my overall tone had shifted. She wanted to let me know she found meaning and comfort in what I wrote, and related to the struggles I’d expressed. She had kind of felt kinship, and wanted to make sure I was okay. I responded and thanked her, letting her know that I was okay, and would be okay. I probably said something more than that. I know she responded, and her response included her email address and I think a genuine offer of friendship. But, well, I thought at that point she may have been my then-girlfriend trying to pull some bullshit, so I never responded. About 6 months later my girlfriend actually did find the journal, and I wiped the whole thing.

I’m reasonably confident my ex was not in the know prior to her discovery, so I suspect this person was a real person. In the moment, wiping the journal was a panic response, but after I sort of felt sad that this voice in the dark - my voice - suddenly and inexplicably went silent for the one person who was listening.

But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”

Right? It’s a darn fine marketing effort.

🇱🇷 Freedom Freckles 🇱🇷

(Yes, that’s the Liberian flag. You think the people who would call measles that pay attention to minor details like which country they’re supporting?)

I just had a heartless thought that I sort of have mixed emotions about.

If the warranty on my car can be cancelled because I never do preventative maintenance, why does my insurance premium keep going up to defray the cost of people who won’t engage in preventative medicine?

Hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this seems more like the work of Lyle Lanley than Hamas.

Edit: For those downvoting me - fair.
I was wrong. It wasn’t the monorail salesman from from the Simpson’s. It was Israeli citizens.