The chicken looks pretty cool too, like he’ll steal your wallet and your girl in between puffs before you even finish coughing.

I don’t think an uprising is going to break out tomorrow as an immediate reaction to his actions.

But at the very least he got a lot of people talking and thinking. People who a year or two ago would call someone “complaining” about the health conglomerates and the way we’re getting fucked crazy.

I was that person called crazy, and now my whole family, neighbors, friends, coworkers are fucking pissed and finally waking up. People who I never thought would.

It certainly doesn’t stop at health insurance, we’re getting killed from 100 different angles. But he got people talking.

That’s interesting to hear. I started out as a web dev and made quite a few transitions until I got the title software engineer, bounced around a few companies until I settled at my current job and since I got that first salary job have never been asked. I even did a short stint of security work a company that had a decent amount of government contracts when I was desperate.

I honestly didn’t think they were still a thing outside of maybe directly in government positions.

I’ve only ever had to pass a drug test for low paying hourly jobs. I’ve never been tested for a salaried position.

I don’t understand how not having social media is a red flag. I know people look at it funny, but I don’t get why.

Not your main point but for the past few years I’ve spent half of the months sick. I got a cold 3 weeks ago, everyone else in the house is better, my throat is still halfway swollen shut, my nose is a broken faucet, my heads still filled with helium. I’ll start feeling better just in time for the Christmas party where I’m almost certain to get sick again.

I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me and got a bunch of test done, got a nice ~$800 bill and haven’t been able to get in touch with the doctor since. I missed 2 calls from them about a week after my tests and since has been calling in a couple times a month to find out if there’s something up but I keep getting “the doctor will call you back later”.

I would like to assume the fact that no one is calling me back means I’m don’t have anything seriously wrong, but I still would like to know for certain.

Ahh how could I forget about the bored, racist, wannabe cops with nothing better to do. The perfect face to any modern company.

I highly doubt it, if the store is too busy they’ll likely either do nothing because why would they or if it’s really bad add some robots who can handle the workload so they can get rid of those pesky employees.

In the past few years almost all of the fast food places in the closest plaza to me have been working on a skeleton crew. Lines wrapped around the building, 2 miserable employees, upset customers, but the money is still coming in.

Most people can’t just leave their job, even a days wage can crush a lot of people.

That worker doesn’t want to be there, that’s likely one of 3 jobs they need to barely scrape by.

You holding them up from doing other tasks they need to do to keep a job that barely feeds them is doing nothing but making their day a little harder. It affects the company 0%. The company is faceless and doesn’t care how much you abuse the worker bees as long as they get your money.

I don’t know what the answer is aside from not patronizing the company at all, but I know that’s not it.

I did a thing once where everyone brought a gift and some game was played and if you won your round you got to pick the gift you got, or something like that.

The person who picked before me got 2 crisp $100 bills, the person after me got airpods. I got… A painted rock, I was so excited. It was the only gift that someone put actual effort into and wasn’t just a quick buy.

Not that I would’ve been upset with $200 but I still have that rock sitting in my garden

That’s always a possibility especially when every company under the sun is making smart things on a whim for as cheap as possible. I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw an oven.

I have a few random smart things, but before I connect them to the internet I make sure they have a decent api that I can use, block external access from the router and set up a little interface so that I can VPN into my home and control stuff if I need to. So in order for anything to be compromised my whole network would have to be owned. Which is still possible but I trust that a lot more than letting 20 different apps for each device have access to anything in my home.

I can totally see a point in some of the features.

The other day my wife and I got 20 minutes from home before I said “oh shit I don’t know if I turned the oven off”. Turns out I did, but we had to drive home to check. I would have loved to pull up an app that told me it was actually off, or even if I was on be able to turn it off from there.

With that said, it’s not worth all the extra bullshit in my opinion.

I would have to lightly disagree about Linux. I think for the average person, just using a browser and occasionally editing a document, some distros are absolutely plug and play.

Installing it can be overwhelming for people unfamiliar but once it’s installed there’s not much to do aside from use it.

My sisters been using Linux for years since most of her schooling has been online, she was on mint for a while and then I switched her to Fedora. The gnome interface was the biggest hurdle to get over and she figured it out in about 10 minutes. She uses firefox, libre office for documents and sheets, the software app to keep everything up to date and install stuff. That’s all there really is to it. The only time she’s ever called me for help is when she changed her password and forgot what it was.

I think if it came pre installed people would do fine.

What’s this “cable management” thing?

That’s not a bad idea. I’ll tell them I cooked it on the grill while smoking a cigar so no ones feelings get hurt.

I love cooking and baking. Whenever there’s a family get together I try to make something whether it’s a full dish or some sweet bread for desert.

None of the other guys have ever complimented me on any if it, they all compliment my wife on ‘her’ delicious food. She corrects them and they say nothing, it turns into a weird situation for some reason and it seems like they’re embarrassed to admit they like something made by a man? It’s weird

The toxic masculinity on my wife’s side is absolutely crazy and really sad.

At a previous job where I had basically become the manager of my manager and held my department together, I spent 3 months just trying to get a meeting with the guy who had the power to give me a raise.

In that time I found another job and put in my two weeks, my new job paid 90k but for shits and giggle I told them I was getting 130 and asked if they could do any better, they immediately came back with 110 which was almost worse since I was only initally asking for 80. I said no and went on to my new job which was 110% the right call.

Shortly after that they announced that they were selling the company, I heard from my old manager that the sale went through but in the mix that had to drop a good chunk of their clients from my old department (the most profitable one) since I was the only one there who knew how to handle a majority of the work and the only reason they could bring them on was me. I don’t know how it all worked out but the old owner got sued for fudging numbers and is now the current owner.

Last I heard they fumbled keeping my department alive and all of my coworkers got layed off along a lot of other people and the company’s not doing so hot.

I hate apples almost as much as corn on the cob.

The skins always get stuck in between my teeth and it makes me want to use a chainsaw to get it out.

I’m all for skinned apples and uncobbed (decobbed? cobbless?) corn though.

I look forward to missing you at next months meeting.

I hate fireworks and always have. I get people like them, but I wish they didn’t go all night from every direction. If each area had a central park/spot where they did a big firework show for everyone for a little bit I wouldn’t mind it as much, but now every street has they’re own fireworks that go off randomly through the night.

Also something I don’t think a lot of people think about. In my old neighborhood a lot of us had varying forms on PTSD and couldn’t deal with the loud bangs. Holidays where fireworks were heavy were treated as a ceasefire/peace day for the most part since basically everyone who had been involved in a shooting was a mess, which was almost everyone. Others took the chance to disrespect that and use the fireworks as cover, they weren’t treated well.

I’m sure most veterans feel the same or worse.

It’s not just dogs who lose it at fireworks.