An American citizen says to a Chinese citizen, "In my country we have freedom of speech. I can stand in my country's capital and scream 'Fuck America' and nothing will happen to me."

The Chinese citizen replies, "In my country we have freedom of speech. I can stand in my country's capital and scream 'Fuck Israel' and nothing will happen to me."

If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.

I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.

In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.

I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.

When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.

What is to be done?

I want to throw out a quick tactic in rhetoric for this particular line because it is so common but is often bungled by comrades online and in real life and the counter is easy. Allow me to illustrate through a hypothetical conversation between a comrade (C) and a liberal (L):

L: I don't hate immigrants, I'm against ILLEGAL immigration.

C: Okay, what if I could pass one law that would get rid of all illegal immigration overnight and there would be no more in the future ever again. Once you hear it you'll understand exactly why illegal immigration could be eliminated this way. Would you support it?

L: Sure, sounds great.

C: I would make ALL immigration legal. Every immigrant would from now and forevermore be automatically approved and put through the process to longer term residency or citizenship status.

Posing your fix to immigration like this immediately exposes the lie that they don't hate immigrants. The next sentences out of their mouths will be why some immigrants are not worthy or how this is unthinkable (even though it has been the norm for 99.9% of human history). It's such an easy retort. It's leftist. It jumps right into the contradiction their ideology holds.

Now of course they will try and dig into details but it's important not to ever get bogged down in details of how such a policy would work. Of course, as a mental exercise for yourself it might be fun to think about but the details of the policy are irrelevant. The point here is they hate ILLEGAL immigrants. You can propose to get rid of the ILLEGAL parts. Would they welcome all immigrants who are LEGAL? No, of course they will not. It is important to keep reiterating, "but they will be legal and those are the immigrants you like."

As with all rhetorical tools it will not convince most people. The goal with using rhetoric and responding to rhetoric is often not to convince the person you are interacting with. It is to put them in an uncomfortable position while appealing to an audience.

I like this one because it plays into everything most liberals and even many conservatives don't want to admit: their anti-immigration ideology is racist and they can try and hide behind the law all they like but they cannot once that shield is stripped from them. Of course, that means that this kind of rhetorical retort is useful in for some other policies as well. I often like to propose legalization when someone says they don't like the ILLEGAL aspect of something. They are almost always using that to shield racism, classism, or some other form of sociological bigotry.

Hope this helps.

Should be described as "human-made".

Women hold up half the genocide.

No, this isn't 1960. 2008-2023 is the date range. Only records were kept for people buried after 2016.

One of the bodies is a man who was hit by an off-duty officer. The PD said they could not identify him. His exhumed body had his wallet in his pocket with a state issued ID and an information card with his home phone number on it and current address. They charged his mother $250 to reclaim his body for a proper burial. That same woman had her brother killed by the same police department when they brutally beat him to death on the side of the road. A pig went to prison for it.

Death to Amerikkka. Fuck this demon cracker nation.

Over 16 years ago I fell in lust with my wife. She was an older woman and family friend going through some hard times in a relationship and I was a young man in my early 20s feeling lonely and getting over the hardest breakup ever. I heard about her troubles and reached out. Misery loves company.

We chatted for a while before she finally cut things off with her ex and I steered the conversation towards romance and sexual talk. Soon we were sexting. Sending nudes. We lived over 1000 miles apart. We would have phone sex regularly. Then, we planned a trip to New Orleans together. It was going to be our getaway. The day we were supposed to fly out everything was cancelled because Katrina made landfall.

Months later I made plans to travel to her and stay a week. My childhood friends that I still keep in touch with and father lived nearby but I was going to see her primarily. I stayed at her place that week. Our time together was AMAZING. Everything was dream. We cried when I had to fly out and I knew we were a thing and there was no returning to normal so I got right to making permanent plans. She was completely on board. We weren't in lust anymore. I loved this woman.

I told my family that I wanted to move back to her area to be closer to my friends and my father. I told them I was going to be her roommate because I had reached out to her and she had an extra bedroom at her place and could use the extra income (all true). Everybody bought it and we kept the charade up for a few years. We weren't roommates and it was almost everything I hoped it could be. The secrecy made it so much more exciting.

There was one problem. She is an alcoholic. Even in the beginning I knew but I never really grasped how bad it was. Her blackout drunk does not seem to be blackout drunk. She slurs words and stumbles around but is otherwise often pretty lucid. You know she's drunk but not in an "I won't remember any of this and will act like a fool" kind of drunk but she was totally that drunk. Often. When she wasn't she would be functional alcoholic drunk. I think in 17 years you could count the days she was stone cold sober on your fingers and toes.

Eventually we told my family of our relationship. It was a little awkward but it went well. They accept our relationship completely. After some years and many struggles (the 2008 crash left us homeless for a while) we were able to build up a life for ourselves. We are barren, so no kids, but after a few health scares for us both we got married. 10 years seems like yesterday and for all our struggles it really has flown by. I love my wife and it has been so worth it.

A few months ago, of her own volition, she got sober. I had tried to help over the years with that but it never worked. It's very hard to watch someone you love so much slowly kill themselves. It had caused a lot of dysfunctions in our marriage and we've gone through rough patches. I'm happy she is sober but the sober her is not who she was for the past 17 years. She is a different person now.

And I'm falling in love with that person. We talk almost every night. We lie in bed as naked lovers and hold each other and build each other up. My sober wife's bedroom preferences are not anything what her alcoholic bedroom preferences were. She is warmer to me in general. She is kind. This is not who I married. I think part of me misses that person but a much greater part of me loves this new person more. It's been 17 years and I'm courting her like we are dating anew. We are rediscovering ourselves and our sexuality together and I couldn't be happier.

I love my wife so much. She is named after a Greek goddess and my heart worships at her temple every day.

Sorry but no TLDR, comrades. If you want to know you have to read.

is just a tip jar for the staff, right

like surely none of the minimum wage workers are actually passing that along so the corporation that exploits them can use those donations as a tax writeoff, right

I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out.

Add a little teaspoon of your favorite unsweetened gelatin-based pudding dessert powder mix to your protein shake. I put in vanilla or cheesecake or chocolate flavor but whatever you like and then I give it a good blend with a blender or milk frother. It doesn't really change the flavor much at all, adds less than 5 calories, gives you collagen which is good for joints, and makes a GIGANTIC difference on the texture of the shake. No graininess. Just a silky smooth drink even if you are just using powder, water, and a small bit of gelatin. Night and day.

EDIT: One caveat for our vegan/vegetarian comrades - research this. Some flavors of pudding are vegan/vegetarian friendly and some aren't. It even varies within the same brand apparently. I'm not vegan but I don't want to advise you folks to violate your dietary needs. Be well.