That sucks man. Religion ruins childhoods.

I’m sorry, but let’s be realistic… if she came out in support of trump she would get a lot of negative responses also. We’re a pretty divided country.

I think Elon musk’s case, the drugs came first… After that came social media and mental illnesses.

That’s another way to say metric. Fuck the English system. Especially when cooking.

Wow… Maybe for you, but it was everything and more for me. Fuck childhood. Give me freedom, independence, and not having to follow the rules of my parents.

No curfew, no bedtime… You can figure out what you want and do it. Living with a girlfriend. Making and spending money. Driving your own car. I get that maybe adulthood may not be for everyone, but I’ll take it any day over childhood!

Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.

The US tends to suck for many things worker related, I wasn’t arguing about all the different policies. However, I double checked, all our Scottish employees have a “use it or lose it” rule on vacation days. They must use all their vacation days per calendar year. They get their vacation days on Jan 1st and if they don’t use them by Dec 31st, they lose them. This is also the model the other employees have in the US, with the exception of the two of use who live in California where that type of policy is illegal.

Since you must know, I get 20 days of vacation a year plus all federal holidays (11 days). I don’t get sick days, they come out of my vacation days. However I’m a high value employee and you’re comparing me against the blue collar workers in Scotland. I believe they get either 15 or 20 vacation days per year and I don’t really know about their sick day program. I hate the calendar “use it or lose it” vacation day plan and I think the California rules are much better.

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

I would make SI mandatory in the US.

I would make one night a week a “have dinner with the neighbors” day.

Edit: I would make bidet toilets mandatory. Dry toilets would be phased out like cars without back-up cameras or asbestos insulation.

It’s absolutely a company policy, but in California it’s not legal to have a policy like that. The whole idea that you must use all your holidays every calendar year is stupid. Having a policy where if you haven’t used all your vacation days by December 31st, you lose it, is stupid.

The main difference from a vacation standpoint is that the vacation days are allocated per calendar year, and must all be used in that calendar year. You’re given x amount on January 1st and they must all be used by December 31st.

In California, vacation days are treated as an accruing asset. They can’t reset my vacation days at the turnover of a calendar year . The vacation hours build up over time. This means there’s not an end of the year rush to use vacation days, there is no use it or lose it, and if I’m ever laid off the company has to pay me for all the vacation days I’ve accrued. The California system is a much better system than the one the employees have in Scotland.

With the US is it the vacation rules are mostly not required. Many states have different rules, and the more conservative the state, the more anti worker the rules are.

And all the jobs I’ve worked, I’ve never seen any pushback for taking vacation. But that’s because I work in a white collar industry that is competitive and I can find another job if I wanted to. The less skilled you are, and the lower the opportunities are in the industries around you, the more opportunity exists for shitty employers.

The interesting thing is, that I currently work for a Scottish company, and their vacation rules are worse than mine because I am guided by California labor laws, and they’re under shitty UK labor laws.

It’s like living in Minnesota, except the months of the year where you don’t go outside are swapped. Winter is very nice, in summer you don’t go outside. In the colder places, it’s the opposite.

Life has only gotten better as I got older. I’m 50 now and I know things will get worse in many ways as my health gets worse in 10-20 years, but so far life has been great. Don’t believe the internet cynics, life is what you make of it.

This is the first comment in the thread that I 100% agree with. (I can’t believe how many of the other ones I don’t.)

My conclusion given the world as presented to me and the information I have is that there is no God.

There also is no Thor, no Santa Claus, no miracles, no ghosts, no easter bunny, and no afterlife. These are my conclusions from my time alive. If information is presented to me that changes these beliefs I’ll change my conclusion. But for now, that is my conclusion. That’s all. I’m not stating that “no matter what, no matter what information is presented, there can not be or has there ever been a god!”, rather I’m saying that I don’t believe there are any gods. It’s just the conclusion from the evidence.

Bush Sr. Then Nixon before that.

Fox news. Daily beast. Daily Mail. etc. The usual suspects. But no matter what she said or did, they were going to bash her. If she were the 2nd coming they would say she was a “trans ultra-left authoritarian”.

This just in: “CEOs work for money… JUST LIKE THE REST OF US!”

About 15 years ago I was giving a presentation at a technical conference. This was me giving a presentation in front of a room full of about 50 other engineers. At this point in my career this was still pretty new to me, so I was nervous. It was getting time for my presentation and I needed to do a last minute nervous pee before I did my presentation.

I went to the bathroom, peed in a urinal, and then went to wash my hands. I pushed down the bathroom faucet and it exploded sending up a geyser of water about air a foot or two into the air. Now had I really been on a TV show, my pants would have been soaked in the crotch area, but luckily in real life I stepped back and didn’t get wet. However, this was the perfect setup for a young nervous engineer giving a technical presentation to be thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily I’m either not on a TV show, or I’m not the main character.

The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.

The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.

But they do handcuff them to a script… at least 1st and 2nd level tech support. That’s the point. It’s so fucking awful. It’s a barrier to keep you from the more highly paid tech support people who may actually be able to answer your questions. First you have to wait on hold to make sure you think it’s worth wasting their time on your annoying problem, THEN it’s a maze you have to navigate, and then whoops you just got hung up on… so sorry, start all over! LLMs are (can be) so much better at this!