The state does not care if you participate.

There is no amount of turnout so low that the people with power will go “welp our power isn’t legitimate anymore”

Perhaps we can don some African attire and kneel in the rotunda. Did that help?

Uh oh, after a democrat is disappointed they might gasp consider a sternly worded letter.

How can fascism survive such robust resistance?!

Democratic Party: yes we know, but is there somehow we can continue doing the bidding of the billionaires and get the working class to support us?

My wife of 14 years has bipolar disorder.

My experience with it as someone caring for someone with it is that, when properly managed with appropriate medications, it’s nothing we can’t handle.

Once we found meds that worked effectively, as long as she’s taking them things are fine. She understands the importance of being properly medicated, I make sure she always has the medication she needs and she takes it.

In our normal day to day I don’t think either of us think too much about it. I do know though that there are things that can trigger a manic or depressive episode. Sleep changes are a massive trigger for her, so we stick to a pretty solid routine. She can tell when it feels like she might be on the edge of a manic episode. We check in frequently when that happens, I provide support, and we get her doctors on the phone if we need to.

But in all our time together we’ve not had to go back to in patient treatment once we got our arms around it.

Good luck to you and your son. Just keep in mind that manic episodes are big and loud and people can feel a lot of shame about things they did while manic after the fact. Care, love, support and understanding are the best context to help your loved one find a path that will work for them.

A happy, full, and healthy life for your son is still more than possible.

You all see how republicans are free market advocates? Yea, me either

Not sure what would remove that image from your mind, but maybe you can recontextualize your experience.

We tend to grow up and think of our parents as somehow not also people, but as some other kind of creature. In some ways this is true, our relationship with them makes them very different from any other people in your life. But our parents are people, and there is a beauty in truly and deeply understanding that.

I was fortunate to grow up with loving and caring parents, my father passed when I was young. My mother cared for us, earned the money, ran the house, is one of the strongest people I know. Raising 4 boys by yourself isn’t easy. Now as an adult, realizing my mom is just a person, just like me, makes me appreciate her all the more. She wasn’t a super hero with magic powers, she was just a person working hard to care for us.

Now back to your situation. Sex is a natural and beautiful part of the human experience. Far too much pain and misery has been visited upon humanity by people scolding that this essential part of our nature is something shameful or wrong.

So let the shock pass, realize that your father is a person like any other and you happened to walk in on a natural, normal expression of love between two consenting adults.

One day you will be in your late 50s, and if you have a caring partner you may also express your love for one another in that way. You won’t find it at all upsetting or shameful, just a way to show love and share intimacy.

Tl;dr - sex is a natural part of our very limited time on earth, this is only as big a deal as you make it.

Companies will always try to scare you after you quit if they can, as a way to enforce their “intellectual property”

A former company that I worked at sent me a legal threat after I left, I had told some other engineers which company I was going to and a few decided to check it out and apply too. The company I was leaving accused me of illegally poaching their employees.

Thing is the company has the burden of proof if they want to show that I damaged them somehow. And IANAL but I think the same would apply here. They have to show that this has damaged them somehow to go after you.

If you got laid off with a severance package of some sort they might try to go after that. They may have made you sign some sort of exit paperwork. Even that though would be pretty epically petty.

But I’m not a lawyer, you might want to sit down and consult with a lawyer before you meet with them. I wouldn’t sign anything they give you in that meeting, “I need to have my lawyer review this first” is something I say to people when they want to pressure me to sign things. It’s pretty hard to argue against that, it’s a very reasonable thing and demanding you sign something you’ve just been given without having a lawyer look it over is unreasonable.

Also if you don’t work for them you don’t have to meet with them, you definitely don’t have to meet them on their terms. You can tell them you are happy to discuss with at your lawyers office. Good luck, lawyers aren’t super cheap, but they are worth every penny in protecting your rights.

This is just trump for “I’m too stupid to realize that Putin has been using me, getting massive value for empty promises and cheap flattery.”

It wouldn’t matter one bit.

You would have every right wing media outlet either calling it fake or saying that it has always been everyone’s peak sexual fantasy to do piss play and the wokies are just jealous that Donnie two scopes is getting some.

We are well past the point where there’s some big scandal that’s going to drop and save us. These fucking people sit in the Oval Office and say “we just aren’t following the Supreme Court anymore, fuck it, we have concentration camps now and we can send anyone we want to them”

The scandals are out in the open, they are shouted proudly by the worst people you can imagine and the cult eats it up.

Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.

Sad news for his family.

I do wonder though about these people that hang on to power all the way up until death. Is that fulfilling?

What was the point of all that amassing of influence and power, just to spend the last few months of your precious finite time on earth sitting in a little office arguing with people.

I wonder if there is an afterlife how many of those that held onto power with an iron grip up until death look back and go “I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I had used some of that wealth and power to enjoy the fruits of life. I can’t believe the last heathy months of my life were wasted doing these things that in retrospect seem so unimportant.”

There is this group of old billionaires and politicians that are bound and determined to run up the high score as high as possible and for what? Billions of dollars and still heading into the office day in and day out stressing about the next product launch? Why live your life like that?

Isn’t the point that you can get out of the rat race at some point, not just become the fastest rat?

I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
2. See if this is an XY problem.

I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

I’m sure after a crisis of that magnitude we put robust safeguards in place that have only been strengthened over time.

Right? panic right?!?!

We gave out risky and predatory loans to people with bad credit and now they aren’t repaying them

Shocked pikachu

Live by the DoorDash bnpl die by the DoorDash bnpl

Pretty hard form trump to physically kneel and kiss Xi’s ass over the phone.

Fart of the deal

Gru meme

1. Gain power by being a reality tv star who denigrates immigrants
2. make immigrants reality tv stars
3. Make immigrants popular and relatable
4. make immigrants popular and relatable

The best defense against hate is familiarity. Please go forward with your stupid plan, show hardworking dedicated immigrants, tell their inspiring backstories, put them on week after week for people to root for and cheer on, then deny all but one citizenship and see how people react.

It is easy to hate an abstract caricature of an immigrant. It’s a hell of a lot harder to hate Jose, who you’ve watched struggle and succeed for the last 8 weeks only to be shipped off to CECOT because he lost the immunity challenge.

I think the Simpsons summarized this best

Marge holding up a new baby on board sticker

Look what I got. Now people will stop intentionally ramming our car.

This second puddle is MUCH DEEPER!!

Look at cameraman who appears to be standing in roughly the same depth of water.

It’s a real shame we have no way to measure the depth of water beside la how much of a beast and tank something is.

I think there is something of a concerted effort to lionize these boring jobs that used to support a family.

It is amazing how many country / blue grass songs are about coal mining.

The thing the wealthy don’t seem to understand is that what made these jobs worth identifying with was that they could support a family. People were proud to provide a good life for their loved ones.

They are hoping they can get people to identify with the jobs, be proud of them, without having to hold up their end of the bargain.

The entire world right now seems to be the wealthiest people going “can’t I have a little bit more though?”