Standardly Unstandard

Couples fight about housework. Couples divorce about housework. Surely it would be easier if men just did more housework?

As I’ve pointed out before, women often have hugely, enormously unrealistic standards about housework that make no sense even in the context of a keeping a clean house.

And they also don’t count any labor that men do that’s not pushing a vacuum cleaner or washing dishes as “work.”

Not every woman, clearly. But many! Enough that I’ve been involved with two who did not count the vast amount of time I spent mowing the lawn, trimming bushes, cleaning gutters, taking care of the cars and such as “work.” According to them, “Men like that stuff” and, “It’s fun for you.”

Readers, I did not like it and it was not fun. I fucking hate lawn maintenance and house maintenance and now just refuse to do any of it (I pay people).

In one case I stopped mowing the lawn, taking care of the gutters, trimming bushes, hauling downed limbs, etc., and when my ex complained I said, “Oh, I thought you said that wasn’t work?”

That went over about as well as you’d expect. No one ever learns anything.

Ign

Am I a jerk for personally ignoring people that ping me in Teams with a mundane “Hi” ?

I do not give a single tiny little fuck about what your cultural norms are, if you think you’re trying to be polite or whatever other crap, if you hit me with just “hi” and nothing else I’m ignoring you for days. Perhaps forever (have done that before).

I do not have time to deal with that kind of thing in a chat application. Just tell me what you need. I’m not here for chitchat; I’m tryna work. Be concise, be clear and be quick. Otherwise: ignored.

Trump’s tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China could push up car prices by as much as $12,200.

Weโ€™re Charging Our Cars Wrong.

A small microbial ecosystem has formed on the International Space Station.

In 2008, with the bailouts, it was made clear that the US has no interest in reform.

Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed.

U.S. Demand for Gasoline Faces Long-Term Structural Problem: Plunging Per-Capita Consumption.

ITAR, la carte de Trump qui peut empรชcher l’Europe d’aider l’Ukraine.

Trump, Social Security and the mugging of the century.

Trump Promised Retribution. Turns Out He Had a Very Big Target in Mind.

Elon Muskโ€™s Looming Disease Holocaust.

From MAGA to monarchy: How tech billionaires are engineering American autocracy.

Making the World Safe for Criminals.

Trump won the White House due to inflation. Now he’s turbocharging it.

Distinguishing classical from quantum gravity through measurable stochastic fluctuations.

No matter how much a parent tries to shield their kid from the worldโ€™s hardships, they will inevitably experience them anyway.

Clop Clop

The unfortunate fact is that the average person is clownishly dumb. Just has no clue how anything works, or where food, power, clothing, information comes from, how anything is made, etc. Just fucking clueless.

And the rest of us are suffering because of that right now.

Converse

Because someone I follow linked to it, I made the mistake of reading part of an Ian Welsh piece. I couldn’t even finish the whole thing it was so insane, but what’s so repetitive about Welsh and those types is how they believe absolutely everything bad that occurs in the world is the fault of the US. Everything.

Buddy, America just does not have that much power. Clowns like Welsh buy into American exceptionalism just as much as far-right neocons and รผber-patriots. For many of them it’s that they secretly wish they were Americans and it drives them mad that they are not. Or at least it did before Trump. In their view, no other country has agency or desires or goals; it’s all America puppeteering them or that every action is solely a reaction to what the US does.

Like, come on. That’s not even remotely plausible. I only wish we had that much sway in the world.