There’s another part to this, and the renowned surgeon makes it a bad metaphor.

It’s more like: “You have a choice for your surgery. On one hand, we have a trained surgeon, on the other hand is a circus clown.”

“What are the surgeon’s credentials and record?”

“Well… they have a reasonably good record in other kinds of surgery, but and they’ve shadowed a surgeon who has done your surgery before. I won’t lie to you and say their record is perfect, though, and some of the practices and techniques they use draw serious criticism from various world health organizations.”

“And the clown?”

“They have more experience with these surgeries, but the vast majority of the people who underwent these surgeries have died. In fact, he shows flagrant disregard for even the most basic and accepted sanitary standards in the medical community.”

“But some people did live, right? So he can’t be all bad.”

“Occasionally he was part of a surgical team, and in those cases the rest of the team managed to keep the patient alive. And again, your other option is a trained surgeon.”

“But a shitty surgeon with no experience.”

“A questionable surgeon with limited experience. Or a clown who kills those he commits surgery on more often than not.”

“I can’t believe these are my only two options. When you said I had a choice, I thought it was a real choice, but it sounds like you’re just trying to force your surgeon on me. I think I’ll wait until another round of surgeons is available.”

“You will probably die before the next round of surgeons is available.”

“Honestly, I don’t trust your judgement over what’s best for me. I’m sitting this one out.”

Undecided doesn’t always mean who you vote for, sometimes it means whether you vote.

Still dumb not to vote, though.

Does anybody know what this said?! I’m having the same problem!

Edit: nevermind, I figured it out.

Yeah, high school is some of the worst times in my life. If my kid complained, I wouldn’t say “it only gets worse,” I’d say “this is a rough time, but remember, none of the stuff that is hard is real. It’s all just training. The school stuff is training you for deadlines and heavy workloads. The social stuff is training for personal and professional relationships. Try to think of this as the tutorial for life, where you must do X action to proceed, and maybe it’s hard because it’s new, and it’s frustrating because you don’t realize it’s a tutorial and think “this is the game.” It’s not. It becomes an open-world game after this. It’s harder, but it can be WAY better, and you have a lot more control.”

I once had a female coworker who was complaining about how she had walked in on a male coworker using the single-occupancy bathroom (peeing, his back was turned to the door), that him not locking the door was somehow inappropriate of him.

Somebody put a poll up on a white board with the scenario, with question “who behaved inappropriately” with the choices “the person entering the bathroom without knocking” “the person using the bathroom without locking it” “they are both wrong” and “we’re all adults here, get the fuck over it.”

The tallies were overwhelmingly in the “get the fuck over it” column. But I feel the poll was missing something important: the door had a tendency when locked to stick and leave the person locked inside. We were in a quick-response duty status (as in running to the aircraft), so the person already in should absolutely not have locked it (he was the runner).

You see a closed door to a room (of relative privacy) that might be occupied, you knock. Simple as.

My parents were wonderful, so I have no real complaints, but my father had a weird quirk. Tools, equipment, whatever that he had interest and purchased himself were “his.” I mean, obviously, but he would use the possessive when referring to those things.

“You have to prime my lawnmower first before you try to start it.” “Go and get my ladder.” Never the ladder, always my ladder. I never questioned it (because I didn’t care), but when I was a teenager I started noticing it and it was odd. Like he was establishing that the lawn mower or the ladder or whatever didn’t belong to the household, they were his. And nothing seemed to get him worked up more than a neighbor borrowing something and taking more than a day or so to return it.

you can take a day or some time off to support your local business

Now who’s being entitled?

We all mourn the passing of the Head of Reason.

Look, I completely agree with the general sentiment, but if you conflate the current illegal theft of agreed-upon and earned wages with what workers deserve to be paid, it doesn’t help the latter argument, it just confuses the former.

This type of thing is “defund the police” all over again, where the intention is to transfer funds from the police to social services specialized in situations the police shouldn’t be handling in the first place, and then got conflated with the idea of abolishing police. And while the former would have, it seemed, broad support (even among a lot of police who felt ill-equipped and trained to deal with every kind of emergency), the latter immediately turned off a significant portion of people, and conflating the two hurt the entire movement.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a serious focus on wages increasing with profitability, I’m saying don’t use the terminology of a separate problem that needs to be fixed and could have broad support right now.

I suppose. I’m far more likely to die in a helicopter crash. Never been shot at, nor have just about anybody I’ve worked with. The only people who have gone to a war zone in the past couple decades were people who specifically requested it.

Though I have worked with a few who survived helicopter crashes (five, between two crashes), so definitely not without its dangers. That’s the specific job I chose, though. Plenty of jobs in the Coast Guard with paper cuts or oven-related burns as the most danger they’ll experience.

So… I’m not shilling for the military, but…

Coast guard gets 30 days of leave, 3 months of paternity leave, and unlimited sick days.

Just saying.

Edit: to be clear, US Coast Guard.

I imagine it’s something along the lines of calling people at companies who her family knows. I just assume when rich people say nonsense like that, it’s just networking or nepotism that normal people don’t have access to.

Seriously, try being the candidate talking shit about an astronaut and decorated servicemember. “I like people who stay on Earth.” Well I don’t!

I’m a man, and that’s how I feel about boxers and being nude. I don’t like that dangle feel of uncontrolled swaying on a sensitive part.

Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist. The main example is J.K. Rowling, who thinks shitting on trans women is in service to feminism, instead of harming some women in order to pretend to protect others.

Basically feminist but only for cis women.

What indicates what on that map? There are two white and one black marker

The Detroit Lions are the only American football franchise operational for the entirety of the Super Bowl era to not appear in the Super Bowl.

So two men from Detroit die and wind up in hell. One day the Devil comes around and sees the two in thick coats, hats, and mittens, with a fire barrel between them, seemingly enjoying themselves. The Devil walks up to them and asks how they find Hell.

“Oh, it’s great! It gets awfully cold up in Michigan, dontcha know, so it’s nice to get some warmth!”

The Devil walks off in a huff, and heads over to Hell’s Thermostat. He turns the heat up, saying “let’s see how they like this.”

The next day he goes back to the two, and finds them with coats but no hats or mittens, still seemingly enjoying themselves. He walks up and asks how they are doing.

“Well, it’s nice to get a little more heat here! Up in the U.P. we don’t get summers like this, doncha know.”

The Devil walks off in a huff again, and heads back to The Thermostat. He cranks it up to the maximum and is immediately assaulted with the anguished cries of the damned.

The next day he goes back to the two, and finds them in swim shorts and seemingly enjoying themselves. He walks up and asks how they like the heat now.

“Oh, it’s so nice here! We can finally enjoy some heat after being cold so long!”

The Devil stomps off again, and heads back to The Thermostat. After staring at it a moment, he says “well, if they like the heat, we’ll just give them back the cold!” And he cranks the Thermostat down as far as it can go. The cries of the torment soften to the sound of a multitude of chattering teeth. Icicles beging forming on the stalagtites and lava pools cool and solidify.

The Devil returns to the two men to find them back in coats and mitten, loudly cheering and celebrating. The Devil loses his composure and yells.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND! I turn the heat up, and you enjoy it, but I blast you with cold and now I find you cheering! This is Hell! What do you have to celebrate?!”

The two hug each other and yell out happily “The Lions must have won the Superbowl!”

Especially hot sauce. I missed that the cap wasn’t closed on some… I think Sriracha, and ended up pepper spraying myself. The waitress was very concerned.

BTW, actually getting pepper sprayed is MUCH worse. Getting bear sprayed is worse and also disgusting, because on top of the pain and misery, it also has a really gross musk stank. It took A LOT of washes with vinegar to get the smell out of the clothes I was wearing.

Do not recommend getting spicy stuff of any kind in the eyes.

And the US military. I was studying the supply manual (not for fun, a large portion of our promotions are based on a test we take once a year), and saw there was a hierarchy for ordering. Most of our stuff is from Skilcraft (“Made with pride by people who are blind”) and thought that was our preferred source. Nope! Our first source we have to try to order from is Unicor. So I looked up Unicor, and it’s prison labor.

So our first focus is buying cheap products from slave labor lining the pockets of truly awful business people. The secondary choice is one that helps blind people. Way to show priorities, right?

I had thought the recent understanding was they were likely small wings, like emus or ostriches, to help with balance. Angled back instead of forward.