My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.
Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.
And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.
I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.
There’s a bunch of factors.
So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.
Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.
It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.
Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.
This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.
This was a favorite for a long time, by the high water marks: https://thehighwatermarks.bandcamp.com/track/suicide
It feels like suicide or something worse
I’ve got this curse on me
It seems I only dream about the things
that shouldn’t come to be
always I try to find a way it feels
it seems to real to me
I just can’t let it go
I’ll let you know
Just what it means to me
As days go past and it all moves too fast
And I won’t think about it
And when I do it all comes back to you
And I don’t want to change that
Markdown fornatting is really tedious to do on the phone so I’m not going to fix that more.
But the song sounds upbeat, but it’s lyrics are a sad loop they want to break and also don’t want to.
Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.
But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”
As others have said, working from home has many benefits
The commute alone is pretty big. If your commute is like an hour, that’s changing your salary from like $x / 10 hours to $x / 8 hours. That’s a big bump. If your daily pay was $1000, that’s like going from $100/hour to $125/hour.
Not good.
They could be ignorant and not understand how politics affects pretty much everything.
They could be foolishly cynical and think that “none of it matters”, so they just don’t pay attention.
They could be like pathologically avoidant and don’t want to talk about a potentially disharmonious topic.
They could have shitty views they don’t want to talk about.
Not good. Not good people.
Many complaints against prostitution also apply to trading labor for money/shelter in general. People just have a stronger emotional response.
Emotional responses are rarely a good foundation for policy.
Prostitution should be legal with safety regulations. All labor should have protections, unions, and such, to protect them from being abused by the wealthy.
Some specific things would probably remain illegal or disallowed, in the same sense that you’re not allowed to work construction without safety gear. People can wear condoms as easily as hard hats and hi-viz vests.
It helps that I’m not a picky or demanding eater. I make a cup of rice in my rice cooker, get some canned beans, and throw in a random assortment of spices and/or condiments. Not afraid to try some weird combinations.
I’ve been feeling okay on the beans, peanut butter, and sometimes peas.
If you have cheap vegetarian options I’m open to recommendations
Left to my own devices it’d be about $100/month.
Rice, beans, pasta, peanut butter, oatmeal, and then whatever fruit and vegetables are cheap.
With the social life included, there’s more expenses. Did dinner out last week for $60 (a nice local Thai place). Ordered a pizza with a friend who was feeling down and watched Star Trek together for like $30.
Other non-rice meals with my partner can also be more expensive. We air-fried up some potatoes and vegan “meat” last night and it was good.
There’s an app called “too good to go” that lets you get cheap food near the end of day. It’s stuff the restaurant or grocery was going to have to throw out. Sometimes you get like four slices of pizza for $4, or a platter of Korean food for $6. Seems good and not enshittified yet.
I’m in NYC, for context.
The young adult and youth experience in the UU church was pretty great. Less church-y, more interactive. I made a lot of good friends when I was younger there.
It’s not really that different from like
my_get_mock = Mock(side_effect=Some exception("oh no"))
result = some_func(http_getter=my_get_mock)
There’s many ways of writing bad code and tests, but mocks and patches aren’t always a bad tool. But sure, you can definitely fuck things up with them.
Javascript has mocking with jest: https://jestjs.io/docs/mock-functions
There’s an example there of mocking our axios (a common library for network requests, a la python requests)
It’s been a long time since I’ve used java, but mockito exists: https://site.mockito.org/javadoc/current/org/mockito/Mockito.html#2
(Usage note for anyone unfamiliar, but despite the name java and JavaScript are radically different languages.)
I vaguely remember Java also has mocking libraries, as does JavaScript. (Though JavaScript isn’t a language I’d hold up as the ideal.)
with patch("some_file.requests.get", side_effect=SomeException("oh no")):
result = func_using_requests()
Though not every language makes mocking as easy, and multiple responsibilities in a single function can quickly get messy.
I used to be better at math and coding. If I pulled up my old project euler solutions I’m not sure I’d understand them anymore.
At one of the bigger groceries I’ve been to, the wheels would lock up if you got too far from the store. Well, we’d parked outside that range so the wheels locked up and I had to awkwardly drag the full cart to the car.
Being a good person, I went to drag it back to the return spot. The wheels did not unlock. Dragged it all the way back anyway.
But given this, I can see why someone might just abandon their cart if the wheels are locked.
Oh man kids and making shit up.
There was a kid who told me he had all these new mortal Kombat games. Just complete fabrications.
I told another kid that if you got all the chaos emeralds in sonic 3 (I’m old) you could turn into super sonic. Imagine my shock when that turned out to be true.
On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.
On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.