For whatever it’s worth: in my 20s I went for the obvious/easy/high-paying career and have made enough money to retire early. But I deeply regret working for soulless corporations doing pointless bullshit tasks for 35+ years.

I’ve recently started reading an introductory philosophy book and I love it.

I’m surprised old has lasted this long.

Did RFK Jr find us already?

They are intentionally making websites frustrating so we’ll use their stupid proprietary apps instead.

In the USA: complicated tax returns that require tax software and/or professional help. It’s a rent-seeking scam.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that I am NOT celebrating CK’s death and to make sure you all understand this story is really about me and how I claimed the moral high ground before anyone else even thought of doing it.

I’m really surprised I haven’t been called for an interview. Surely the Nobel folks will be ringing my phone very, very soon.

He’s the kind of evil dipshit who would have legislated to pay people as close to zero-per-hour as possible, hired people at that hourly slavery rate, and then bitch that they weren’t dedicated workers.

Feel like it would hit harder if the first panel simply said “There is no trolley”.

It’s not that I disagree with the premise. Car sprawl sucks. But, brevity pairs well with humor.

Still funny.

Yup. They were already committing violence on the people. They’re just ramping up the rhetoric as usual.

Me: Jokes on you, I can afford a real breakfast.

Also me: dies of heart failure in my 50s

I can’t predict the future, and there will be some short-term fallout (potentially very bad fallout) from this. These young men will hold a grudge for sure, but I think it’s much harder to say how long of a lasting imprint this will make on them.

Many of them will grow up and realize “maybe I need to work on my mental health and general qualifications as a human being and stop thinking we can bully women into being barefoot pregnant tradwives”. The differences between what young men and what young women want out of life right now is truly astonishing. Check the polling data.

Part of this phenomenon stems from the unfortunate biological fact that young men don’t truly mature until about the age of 35. At that point, many of them (not all of them) have grown up and obtained some maturity and perspective. They finally realize that the world doesn’t revolve around me and my shortcomings and grievances. If they want to become better men, they work at providing some actual value and to at least occasionally serve others unselfishly in a non-transactional manner. Thinking you’re entitled to sex and children just because “that’s what real men get” is a road to rejection and solitude. Some will figure this out. Some never do.

As for CK’s legacy… lies and bullshit travel orders of magnitude faster than the truth, but the truth tends to win the marathons.

No, it’s more like telling an addict to stop using.

At some point it’s not about proving anything anymore it’s just self-defense. Violence should always be the last resort. But in case you haven’t been paying attention Trump and his gestapo are committing acts of violence on the American people every single day.

It’s very human to make dark jokes during dark times. I honestly think the self-righteous overly serious virtue signaling does far more harm than the tasteless jokes.

Yes, you’re right that the reaction to this could be very bad. We’ll see. I think it could go either way. The American public has a very short attention span and this sort of thing tends to burn brightly for a while then blow out as soon as the next big story breaks.

As for the rest of what you said…so…we should be more concerned about teachers and students hurting some kids’ feelings than the Republicans taking away actual things like jobs, healthcare, housing, vaccines, trade agreements, and alliances that took generations to build and less than a year to destroy.

These emotionally damaged young men need to snap the fuck out of it and realize who is really hurting them and who really killed the American dream. It’s not some dumbass underpaid woke college professor. Pieces of shit like Charlie Kirk come along and brainwash these same gullible kids into thinking the Republicans want to “help them” bootstrap their way out of the same crab bucket wage slavery that the Republicans created.

Not that crazy but I’d never seen anything like it before.

Over 15 years ago, I was standing in a very long line at St. Basil’s in Moscow. A small pack of tourists (half a dozen or so) started to “sneak” their way into cutting in line. About 30 French people in a tour group immediately started scolding them in loud unison. They shamed them into taking their place at the end of the line. It was such an automatic and united scolding. Highly entertaining.

A fellow traveler, far more experienced than I am, said that the French are known for doing that sort of thing.

It’s a little confusing because IMO both of these things are true at the same time: it’s good to make friends at work, but by default your coworkers are not your friends.

But that’s really just poor wording.

Having a friend or three at work is wonderful. It can make a shit job tolerable and a decent job fantastic.

Just choose wisely, take your time, and don’t be too trusting too soon. And don’t reveal too much personal information to coworkers that you don’t know well and trust yet. Some of them will use that info against you. Ambitious psychopaths can be very charming.

Having permission to access to the HIPAA-protected dataset is only the first hurdle. You also need a medically valid or claim processing reason to look at individual patient records within that dataset. People have gotten into trouble by not respecting this. Doctors and other providers are not going to just poke around in the data for fun. Too little to gain for too much risk.

HIPAA is far from perfect, but it does do a decent job of protecting data at rest and in transit. If a bad actor like a hacker manages to get a copy of it, the sensitive stuff will be encrypted.

We handle HIPAA data at my job, and we all take it very seriously. There’s annual training required, and a reporting process for violations. Nobody is looking at anything unless they really need to.

Large corporate health insurance providers are another problem. They of course do have access to it, and I am sure they abuse the privilege for data mining and scheming on claims denial strategies and so on. But that’s a political and enforcement issue not an issue with HIPAA itself. They are violating HIPAA and getting away with it because they are a powerful lobby.

There are thousands of possible reasons and many of them won’t have anything to do with you. There are fake job postings. There are many jobs where the hiring manager already has someone in mind for the job (but they have to check the required boxes and pretend to open the position to any candidate). Another candidate may have gone to the same school or been in a frat with the hiring manager. The list goes on and on.

I was a musician for a few years, and some players had what we jokingly called GAS. Which is “Gear Acquisition Syndrome”. They were always buying, selling, and trading things like amps, instruments, effects, etc.

I found all that constant GAS stuff to be very annoying. So I know where you’re coming from…I think.

I will give a mild counter-argument: an expensive tool probably won’t make you better at a task, but a cheap crappy tool very well could make you worse at a task. I think there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

But overall, I appreciate your anti-consumerism take. People buy too much crap.