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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I would hesistate to word the last sentence like that though I get where you’re coming from. It’s more like being unwilling to learn these basic skills because they believe that they’re above them somehow.

    It’s the dudes who bitch and moan about how women need to do all the chores around the house when it’s clear that they couldn’t even figure out how to boil water on their own. The dipshits who don’t even know how to clean their own ass properly.










  • Jesus H Christ that’s wild.

    Good on you for standing your ground, though. I think if more people said “wow you should have planned that better then, huh?” we’d be in a much better place. I’ve done longer days only to still get bitched at and so I decided that I will only ever work overtime if I feel as though it was a personal failing or a promise I failed to keep that someone is relying on.

    I seriously don’t get how these people get themselves so much power and money. Well, I do, and that’s that they get there on the backs of others who let them do it for one reason or another. If we just stopped taking their bullshit they’d have nothing since they have no real skills on there own. They aren’t fuckin’ archmages who’ll bend us to their will, they’re dweebs with no real skills and their power is only as strong as the people willing to enable them.


  • The culture, especially for younger people these days, is that management constantly “drops hints” that people who don’t let them commit labour violations will be first to get laid off. You’ve been working for at least 30 years and have a senior position but, bud, it ain’t like it was.

    My dad’s a very well qualified verification engineer and even he’s finally starting to realize how toxic that environment truly is. If you don’t let people walk all over you don’t have a job. If you complain when execs set unreasonable deadlines you don’t have a job. If you go home at the end of your 40hrs you’re not a team player don’t have a job. Oh you’re complaining about your two yearly sick days and measly two weeks of vacation fine here’s a long vacation and don’t come back.

    I got canned in March because “it just wasn’t working out”. I got along with people, did a good job, and was on large projects so what was the problem? I asked for more money in as polite a way as I could. I pushed back against a senior engineer who wasn’t even aware that his building code needed to be updated. I didn’t make the partners feel like special little boys. North American work culture is, for the vast majority of people, incredibly toxic. I’m glad your experience is different.





  • Absolutely, though as someone who notices louder exhausts I gotta say that, as much as they stand out, they’re really quite rare. It’s the never-ending drone of tires on pavement, loud cooling fans, heavy diesel trucks, and whatever other clattering and clanging that make up the bulk of the noise. The main street where I live goes pedestrian in the summer and I remember just how much noise a late-ish model Honda Civic made as it drove across it slowly one day even though it’s engine was essentially silent. The contrast between the peaceful pedestrian street and this single, “very quiet” sedan was startling. I already had sorta known but that moment is really where I decided that there’s no such as thing as a “quiet” car.

    Our school busses have gone electric, though, and city busses are rapidly being replaced with hybrids that are quiet when they sit or need to accelerate. Those have reduced a lot of noise, and that’s super nice, but again they’re not the bulk of the noise. Removing the worst offenders but keeping the “quiet” cars doesn’t actually help beyond making us feel like we did something. We gotta start making main, commercial streets pedestrian only year-round. We gotta start being aggressive about making public transit accessible. We gotta start building on a human scale.


  • Rant:

    I have a vaguely ok life only because of my parents and my grandmother. Help from my family has helped pay for car parts(repairs), some exercise stuff, French classes, and hell I only finished the third “optional” part of my education because I was able to not work while I did it. I haven’t been able to buy a single one of my instruments myself, they’ve all been from parents or my grandparents and I don’t have expensive instruments(ok one was $50, that was a good feeling but I got real lucky there). If it wasn’t for the family plan phone I’ve got no idea how I’d pay for a phone on top of everything.

    I’m do a bit to save, still. I fix my car myself almost every single time, even if it’s big stuff, but I can only do that because my dad has loads of tools and my parents’ driveway is large enough. I built my own computer, modified one of my basses instead of buying a more expensive one, have learned basic luthier skills to get my instruments playing out of their price range, and a lot of my home stuff is actually either on a longterm loan or was handed down. And you can forget buying clothes all that often; I’ll go a year not buying anything and when I do finally grab a nice new shirt I feel guilty. My place makes me look way richer than I really am and there are times I’m embarrassed by it given how vocal I am about our low pay problems.

    I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people have serious challenges and no support system. They don’t have tools or space to fix their vehicles cheaply, or parents to give them kitchen supplies, or friends who move away and leave their furniture behind for indefinite periods of time. They don’t get to stop working to go to school and further their education, and there is no one to save them if they get slapped by a huge bill out of nowhere. It is so GODDAMN expensive to be poor and if I can feel that then those with less…well that is no way to live.

    It’s fucking disgusting how we treat the poorest among us and how we’ll turn around and act like someone like me is some wonderful hard worker while my classmates who get bad marks are dumb or lazy but no one accounted for the fact that they work nearly fulltime and help support a family while trying to also do school. Life gets easier the more money you have and yet we collectively choose to believe that people without it are lazy or not trying hard enough.

    Without all this support and privilege and luck I’d be nothing and I’m not so insecure that I won’t admit that.



  • The problem with the car thing is that there is noise reduction on cars. It’s the tires that are making most of the noise you hear from regular cars so even electric vehicles will make more noise than you’d think. It’s always wild to me that my aftermarket muffler isn’t as huge a difference in disruption as you’d think(it’s also not a high-pitch, obnoxious one). Either way I still keep it quiet at night or near pedestrians, and where I live now I’m glad that I basically never need to drive.

    I’m real happy to hear that you live somewhere much more compatible with being a human being!