It definitely has shades of the anti-vax idiots that said they'd rather have their child dead of a preventable disease than to have autism. As a parent of a child who has autism, the parent of a neurotypical child, and a person who is autistic, I'm happy that all three of us are alive and well and disease free thanks to vaccines. Even if vaccines caused autism (which they absolutely don't), I'd rather my child be autistic and alive than not autistic and dead.

I don’t mind algorithm feeds as long as it’s not the default view and as long as it’s not mingled with the normal feed. Reddit is an example of the latter case. They mix “promoted” content as well as “you visited a subreddit once so we think you’ll like this post” content along with posts from subreddits you subscribe to. I find that annoying.

So I wouldn’t mind if Lemmy had an algorithm to recommend posts as long as it was in a “recommended posts” section. Then people who want it could click over to it and people who don’t like that could just ignore it.

“Wait. So your episode idea is that the lawyer for the President of the United States will mistake a landscaping firm for a high class hotel? A landscaping firm situated between a dildo shop and a crematorium?!!!”

“Yes. And wait until you read the leaking hair dye episode!”

It’s no Reddit… And thank goodness!

I think normal died around this time in 2019 for me.

To give some context, in Judaism Rosh Hashanah (which coincidentally just ended) is the new year. There’s a superstition that whatever you do on Rosh Hashanah will be a reflection of the upcoming year. For example, if you nap you’ll have a lazy year.

Anyway, that year, my younger son and I were at Temple for services. We noticed someone sitting behind us who seemed odd, but didn’t think much of it. At some point, he left so we focused on the service.

Midway through the service, my rabbi suddenly shouted NO with the same force as Gandalf addressing the Balrog. Then I saw why. The “odd guy” was running down aisle shouting happy new year to everyone. He was wearing a t-shirt. And ONLY a t-shirt.

He reached the front and tried to get up the stairs to where the rabbi, cantor, and torahs were. Only, my rabbi clotheslined him back down the stairs. The ushers rushed in and dragged him off. My son was smart and looked away. I wasn’t as smart and got “visual confirmation” that he wasn’t wearing anything below the waist. It was only for a moment but it burned into my brain.

So remember how I said “how Rosh Hashanah goes, your year goes?” I joked with my wife later that hopefully this wouldn’t mean we were going to have a crazy year.

Then 2020 hit.

Only I think this got stuck somehow and now EVERY year is crazy.

Forget Switch sized. I’m still impressed with Phone Sized. My first computer was a bulky 286 with a full megabyte of RAM and 40MB hard drive space. (Yes, megabytes for both of them, not gigabytes.) I thought that there was no way I’d ever fill up that hard drive.

Now, the phone I’m typing this on is orders of magnitude more powerful and it’s a few years old (and wasn’t even bleeding edge when it was released).

And the worst part of those days is when you feel like it’s wrong of you to complain. After all, you just had a series of minor bad incidents happen to you. None of them are THAT bad.

Meanwhile, one of your friends has multiple cancers, your wife’s mother has serious medical issues, your son’s allergies are so out of control that he can hardly breathe… And you’re going to complain that you had a few minor things happen?

Um… Hypothetically speaking…

I love that movie. I showed it to my boys. When Paul Reuben died, they didn’t remember him from Pee Wee Herman (which we somehow never got to showing them). They remembered him as “that farting guy on Mystery Men.”

(He passed gas near a gypsy and tried to blame it on her. To take her revenge, she cursed him. Since he smelt it, he would forever be the one that dealt it!)

Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.

At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).

It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.

I’d argue the opposite. Kids aren’t born hating anyone different from them. They are taught “anyone with that skin color/gender/sexuality/religion/etc is inferior to you and you should hate them.”

The big problem is that hatred can be passed down. My father’s racist. Not in a “hang all black people” way, but more in a “I can’t be racist because I have a black friend but black people should act more like white people” way. Growing up, I started taking on his beliefs (as young kids often do).

At one point, I made a very insensitive joke in class about a religion and the kid sitting behind me said that he was in that religion. Now, I don’t know if he was or wasn’t, but it was eye opening to me. I realized what I was doing and didn’t like it. I took the time and effort to root out my prejudices.

It wasn’t easy. Even now, over 30 years later, I’ll occasionally realize that some action I’m taking is driven by prejudice. Still, I’ve rooted out many prejudices that otherwise would have made me into just as big of a bigot as my father. And my kids go even further than my at being accepting of others. One of many reasons I’m proud of them.

Hatred doesn’t come naturally. It is taught. Luckily, it can be “unlearned” if the person is willing to do the work and acceptance can be taught/reinforced also.

I’d be interested in finding out why some of the ads I see (mostly in Android games I play where I voluntarily watch the ads for in game rewards) are so badly matched to me. I’ll get ads in Spanish when I only speak English. I’ll get ads for dating sites when I’ve been married for over 20 years.

Very few of the ads seem to be anything I’d even remotely consider. Not that I mind too much. I ignore the ads (sometimes even muting them) and do other things until they stop playing and I can get my rewards. Still, those very mismatched ads seem to be badly placed. Is it just that nobody else is bidding for this ad spot so “let’s play this Spanish ad for toilet paper” wins the rights to advertise to me?

Not my manger (thankfully), but I worked near people whose manger did this. I’d be working when suddenly I’d hear the guy yelling and screaming at some employee who did something wrong. Even if the guy did something incorrect, the proper managerial response is never screaming at them in a public location.

The manger is still working for my company, but I’m not near his employees anymore. I’m not sure if age mellowed him out or if he still screams at his employees.

I’m in IT also and agree. On the other hand, you don’t want a manager who manages too much. I had a manager who would try to micromanage every aspect of a project. He would constantly stop by with suggestions about how to improve the projects I was working on. It would have been fine if he had good insights, but his ideas never worked out.

He would also come to me and declare that my top priority is now some weird project that he thought up which had no buy in from anyone else. (These would quickly die after launch or fizzle out when he got another great idea.)

One of my best managers did just that. He would tell me what my priorities were and then get out of my way, shielding me from any upper level politics as much as he could.

Sometimes the politics would seep through despite his best efforts, but he’d minimize it as much as humanely possible.

Farscape is always my answer to these questions. I enjoyed Peacekeeper Wars, but it definitely felt rushed. Had it been a full season, it would have been frelling amazing.

Having just had an X-ray on my spine to figure out some problems I’m having, I’d welcome this patch.

It would certainly be cheaper than months of physical therapy.

That’s what I was thinking. $10,000 for me is about 2-3 months of expenses. Of course, if I lost my job and knew things were going to be tight, I’d cut back on spending. I could probably get that $10,000 to stretch to 4-5 months, but it still wouldn’t make me relax my job search much.

Now, if I had $100,000 in the bank, I’d be quite a bit more relaxed in my job search. Give me $1,000,000 in the bank and I’d question if I even needed to find a job. $10,000,000 in the bank and I’d retire and live off of the interest.

Some people definitely aren’t in a position to fight back. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and barely getting by, your employer might know that you can’t afford to be out of a job for any length of time. Then, they might abuse you because what are you going to do? Fight back, get fired, and then become homeless? Nope. You’ll take whatever your employer dishes out on you.

Other people are in a position to fight back. I’m lucky enough to be one of those people. I watched my father waste his life doing extra work that he didn’t get paid for. He’d go in early, bring stuff home to work on late into the night, and bring extra work home for the weekends. It’s not like he was paid extra. He was salaried and was paid the same if he worked 40 hours or 80 hours.

In the end, he was fired when he was close to 60 - too early to retire, but too old to find a new job because he would likely retire soon. So he retired before he was ready and now lives on a very limited income.

When I got my current job, I was asked to check a generic “info@” email inbox. No problem. I routed the emails to people who could address them. My boss called me in one day to tell me that he expected me to check this inbox at night and over the weekends too.

Now, I’m Jewish and observe the Sabbath. My boss said “I can’t tell you to violate your religious beliefs, but I REALLY need you to check this every few hours every day!” I told him that I wasn’t going to check it on nights or weekends. He insisted I needed to because someone might email with a medical emergency. (Without getting into my employer, it was plausible that someone would email us about medical stuff in general.) I told him that if someone was having a medical emergency and, instead of dialing 911, they emailed our “info@” mailbox, they deserved to have their emergency wait until Monday morning. In all the time i monitored the inbox, I only got one email that was even slightly an emergency (and even then, it was more of a safety concern than an actual emergency).

I have no clue either. I don’t have any friends. I have one friend from high school/college, but I moved about 200 miles away when I married my wife. We text each other occasionally, but it’s not like we’re going to hang out together.

I’ve thought of trying to make friends, but the thought of going out, meeting people, and trying to make a connection with them fills me with anxiety at levels I haven’t felt since my dating days. In fact, it’s very much the same anxiety. No, the end result of these meetings isn’t quite the same. (I’m looking for a friend, not a girlfriend.) Still, there’s that feeling of needing to socialize and make yourself vulnerable in the hopes that you match up properly with someone.

Until recently, I’ve contented myself with my wife and boys. But my boys are getting older. My oldest is already in university and my youngest is going there in the next few years. So I’ll eventually be left with just me and my wife. And I work from home now, so I don’t even have co-workers to socialize with.

The desire to find a friend is rising, but so far hasn’t beaten the anxiety of meeting new people.

Same here in America. People are going about their days and don’t want random people sticking their noses into other people’s business.

Maybe if you’re sitting next to someone for awhile you might strike up a conversation. Maybe. (“Boy, they’re taking a long time today. Must be short staffed!”) But I don’t recall this ever happening with me and I’ve been to my fair share of doctor’s offices over the years.