You can’t be a bohemian when a one-bedroom apartment in a big city requires making 70 grand. When I was 21, my half of my rent was $200 or so. I had an (awful) former motel room in Ohio for $250 a month in 2010. All that cheap Midwestern rent enabled a lot of reading and writing. https://t.co/abt5OgJowz

— Matt Bell (@mdbell79) April 29, 2023

A friend of mine rented a decent apartment in 1995 for $150 a month. In today’s money, that’s $300 a month. He worked at Blockbuster and had plenty of money for other crap he liked, such as game systems and concerts. Note that he lived alone; no roommates. If he’d chosen the roommate option, his monthly rent could’ve been around only $180 a month in today’s money.

You cannot do that anywhere anymore.

Because of Boomer propaganda and gaslighting and that people don’t recall even recent history, I don’t think most realize just how very cheap housing used to be comparatively in most places.

Neighbors asked a man to stop firing a rifle outside. He then opened fire on them, killing 5 people, a Texas sheriff says.

What a country!

I hate ambient music.

You need to have an IQ of about 100 just to live – to figure out insurance, tax, car rego, bank accounts, retirement funds, rent, bills etc. The low IQ live in a baffling hell of piled up reminder letters, confusing forms and forgotten passwords.
The IQ needed to live is rising https://t.co/dpbrG0bxsX

— Nikolai the Cosmonaut (@nikocosmonaut) April 24, 2023

Finally someone else is recognizing that the cognitive load of modern society has gone way up, though I think the actual IQ needed to live effectively now is around 110 or so.

Since the left has convinced themselves and others that intelligence does not exist it’s impossible to talk about this. However, that does not make it less true.

It continues to delight me how much Adele losing weight makes people angry. She looks great and that is the best revenge.

The best and worst thing about being a man is that nearly all of the time, no one pays a bit of attention to you at all pretty much ever, nor gives a single fuck about you.

This means that about the only time anyone pays attention to you, though, is when they want to hurt you, or want to demand something from you.

DuckDuckGo disables most search filters from Search.

I’m just waiting for some assclown dipshit mook to tell me (as with the Firefox devs) that this is for “security” and was done “for my own good.” I know it will happen. It does every time necessary features get taken away.

Nothing is gained from debating say an anti-vaxxer or a holocaust denier. You’re playing on two separate playing fields. They’re not constrained by facts, and you’re just helping to promote their poisonous ideas no matter how smart your arguments are.

— Jean-Michel Connard 🎃 (@torriangray) April 24, 2023

Exactly. The only solution to a Nazi is punching a fucking Nazi. Or putting a bullet in their head and getting rid of the evidence in a Toro chipper-shredder. You know, whichever one is more convenient at the time.

Gah I am so judgmental about people’s arms now! I see stick-thin arms and I’m like, dang, someone needs to get to the gym.

Relatedly, our hotel room overlooks the pool. Even in my younger days I was not much into scoping out hot babes or whatever boring shit of that nature, but these days there are none to scope out. If you do look out over the pool you only see tons (literally) of obese people and that’s it.

The Fat Acceptance clowns want you to think this is natural and normal. Don’t buy into that nonsense. Nothing about that looks natural or normal.

Why are people on subs like /r/AmITheAsshole so quick to tell people to end long term relationships over mild arguments?

Because many there are 15 and have never been in a real relationship. Or they are Gen Z or younger millennials and have the life experience of a 15-year-old even if they are 32.

If you're like 31 plus & remember a pre 2017 left a pre Bernie left or even a pre Occupy left its really hard to communicate consistently to many people the message of "we already tried being like that"

— daniel (@escargotpro_) April 22, 2023

What if you remember a pre-Clinton left? Heh. (And I mean Bill here, not Hillary.)

Deskilling on the Job.

However, there are plenty of places where you are socialized into a profession through menial labor. Consider the legal profession. The work that young lawyers do is junk labor. It is dreadfully boring and doesn’t require a law degree. Moreover, a lot of it is automate-able in ways that would reduce the need for young lawyers. But what does it do to the legal field to not have that training? What do new training pipelines look like? We may be fine with deskilling junior lawyers now, but how do we generate future legal professionals who do the work that machines can’t do?

The same is true in my field. Used to, people would come up through help desk and then become a junior sysadmin or similar before moving on to more challenging jobs. Through that, they got very good at troubleshooting, understanding how systems work and even more importantly, how they fail. But through the advent of “money-saving” high-volume, low-skill call centers that people rotate through in months, automation, offshoring, and deliberate obfuscation, nearly no one matriculates through those lower tiers — learning as they go — any longer.

Thus, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve encountered anyone at all even 1/10 as good at troubleshooting as I am. There’s a whole two generations of tech people who can’t troubleshoot a goddamn thing. They just do not have the experience nor the skills even if they are “senior.” I’ve encountered so-called senior people with four-year degrees in my field who can barely open the command line and can’t even do anything once they are there.

I have no degree in my field and I invariably end up doing 99.9% of their troubleshooting for them.

In many ways, though, it’s not their fault — they’ve been deskilled and don’t even know what they’ve missed or that there is any behind-the-scenes system to understand.

Europe: “USA u should really care about the environment more”

USA: “ok”

Europe: “wait not that much stop” https://t.co/2bjlN8i0SJ pic.twitter.com/EPjT4njV9b

— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) April 21, 2023

That shit has been hilarious to witness. The EU so-called intelligentsia are all up in arms because we actually did something useful and constructive (or at least are starting to), rather than their poseur bullshit as they shut down nuke plants and burn more coal.

Three! I’m slipping. 😉

Fuck, y’all, I love being strong and fit again.

Listen to Fat Acceptance claptrap if you want. Screw yourself over if you like. I recommend against though.