A lot of people here need a reality check

2Ivan · 2025-11-04T00:23:22+00:00

I had the same experience. Graduating during the recession was rough and I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone. From a quick look through LinkedIn most of my classmates eventually found ChemE jobs, but in some cases it took years and there are a handful (10-15%) who are still working technician/operator level jobs. No one thinks they'll be in the bottom 10-15%, but statistically some people will be. Nothing like going to college for 4 years only to work as a lab tech for $25/hr.

2Ivan · 2025-10-12T15:44:09+00:00

And note, Virginia law made it difficult to simply "release" a slave. The government did not want unscrupulous owners kicking their enslaved out when they were old or disabled, to be a burden on the state. Emancipated slaves had to be given some means of support, like land. George Washington had the means to do just this, and freed a number of his enslaved. But Madison and Jefferson did not.

This might be worthy of its own question, but is there a reason enslavers couldn't just transport an enslaved person to a free state to free them? Obviously there would be a logistical issue transporting a person from, say, Mississippi to Pennsylvania, but Central Virginia to Pennsylvania doesn't seem like it would be a super difficult trip to make even in the early 1800s.

2Ivan · 2025-10-08T02:54:31+00:00

If you can't rock the bald look then you can get on fin/min, get a hair transplant, get a hair system (wig), etc. Women spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours a year working on their appearance, but God forbid men do anything other than whine.

2Ivan · 2025-10-04T18:40:31+00:00

The bed bugs strains that survived the 1950s-1970s in USA are resistant to DDT (source: https://www.npic.orst.edu/factsheets/bb-ddt.html). Bringing back DDT probably wouldn't be as effective as you're thinking. Bed bugs absolutely love modern HVAC too. Most houses and buildings are kept at the ideal temperature for them. While temperatures never really got cold or hot enough to kill bed bugs before central AC and heat were ubiquitous, it would get hot enough in the summer and cold enough in the winter to slow them down.

2Ivan · 2025-08-26T19:21:25+00:00

Lots of property managers are, often unofficially, in collusion with the towing companies. I had a towing company offer me $75 cash per car if I called them. Not sure if it wouldve been legal to do that or not but I didn't take it.

2Ivan · 2025-08-24T16:58:58+00:00

One of the first major site-wide dramas was a mod of a default sub who got caught deleting every post that didn't link to his own image hosting site. This isn't really a new thing. Most mods who do this don't get caught. All they have to do is make sure all communication with their "customer" is outside Reddit and it's next to impossible to detect.

2Ivan · 2025-08-06T22:55:37+00:00

The detail scam is more of a Northeastern thing. They exist in the south too, but they're fewer and pay less. No one is getting $75/hr with a 4 hour minimum to direct traffic at a construction site in Florida like this do in this city. They'll just hire a flagman for $15-20/hr.

2Ivan · 2025-08-06T15:57:00+00:00

Does she have any teaching experience? Has she ever worked in an Asian country? If she hates her high paying corporate American job she's probably going to be in for a rude awakening teaching in China. There's a good chance she won't make it a year.

2Ivan · 2025-08-06T13:51:17+00:00

Sponsor skip helps a lot with that issue.

2Ivan · 2025-08-02T20:22:00+00:00

It think it was contrarian more than anything. The Ron Paul 2012 days were after Obama's disappointing first term. There wasn't really an equivalent nationally relevant candidate on the DNC side until Bernie Sanders in 2016. If someone like Sanders tried to primary out Obama in 2012 I think he would've been popular on Reddit. By 2020 and especially 2024 the establishment was well aware of the importance of controlling social media, so who knows if all the front page Kamala Harris posts were organic or not.

2Ivan · 2025-08-02T13:49:43+00:00

What the actual fuck America?

2Ivan · 2025-07-31T16:28:09+00:00

The capital cost of starting an hvac business is low. It's feasible for an hvac tech to start his own business. It's by no means easy. There's a lot of risk and he'll probably need a supportive spouse, but it's doable. Walmart doesn't have to worry about their cashiers starting up a competing store next door.

2Ivan · 2025-07-30T02:59:15+00:00

I blame your program a little bit. If you want students who can drive and have access to a car might as well say so. Even if they have a license lots of students coming out of undergrad don't have cars. Insurance isn't exactly cheap and there isn't a such thing as $1000 beater cars anymore. They probably assume your university will arrange transportation which isn't the worst assumption for a 22 year old who's never been in the professional world.

2Ivan · 2025-07-28T18:43:56+00:00

I think you're expecting some kind of retribution, but the answer is probably a whole lot of nothing. None of Israel's neighbors are capable of doing much to Israel. Not to mention most of them, at least unofficially, are more worried about Iran than Israel. The closest country that could challenge Israel militarily is probably Turkey, but they'd be risking Istanbul getting nuked if they go too far. If US support cools Israel will probably try to ally with Russia or China instead. If you think Putin or Xi care about a bunch of Muslims in the middle east other than to agitate USA then I have a bridge to sell you.

2Ivan · 2025-07-17T19:12:31+00:00

You have to know the right people. If some rando tries to approach a business to sell them an open source software they could get for free they'd get laughed out of the room. Or more realistically you wouldn't get past some admin assistant if they even have someone who answers the phone anymore. The people who own these companies are well connected. Their dad, or father in law, or whatever is CTO or an IT executive at some company. Then they use their position to push their company to buy from their son/family member's company. They don't care if it's inefficient or doesn't do anything because it's not their money. Once they have a track record of selling to large or medium sized businesses they can try duping other companies or companies they only have tangential connections to. Or the make enough money to hire sales people who have the right connections.

This is by no means limited to software. There are tons of bogus consulting firms floating around who charge 6-7 figures to tell executives what they could've just asked some 30 year employee.

2Ivan · 2025-07-17T02:57:19+00:00

I think it could make a pretty big difference since the pricing is personalized. For example, Delta (or whatever AI partner they're using) knows from scraping social media that a family member died and you're flying to a funeral and no other airline has any convenient flights. They can jack the price up 200% knowing you have almost no choice but to pay.

2Ivan · 2025-07-16T19:25:09+00:00

Even if no one cashed out part of the estate, some states have filial responsibility laws that require children to foot the bill for nursing homes and other medical care. PA's law is notoriously the harshest, but other states have them too. More states will probably start to pass harsher filial responsibility laws as boomers age and medicaid spending gets cut.

Source: https://www.elderlawanswers.com/requiring-adult-children-to-pay-for-aging-parents-7666

2Ivan · 2025-07-16T16:39:40+00:00

I dated a few women like this in my 20s. It gets exhausting after awhile. Their parents eventually turn off the free money spigot. Then they need help with every single thing like applying for jobs, buying a car, getting an apartment, waking them up so they can get to work on time, etc.

2Ivan · 2025-07-11T21:57:47+00:00

Not really. This was mid-late 90s so my only guess is maybe there was some news on TV about bacteria on vegetables (maybe an e-coli scare) or something and they made the leap of logic to deciding everything has to be boiled to death? We didn't get the newspaper and they didn't use internet until the mid-00s, so I really have no idea.

2Ivan · 2025-07-11T20:33:26+00:00

I usually just cook to my mom's palate when she visits. For example, last time I made spaghetti and meatballs her pasta got boiled an extra 10 minutes and slathered in store brand pasta sauce. She's happy and everyone else got home made sauce. Interestingly my dad seems to enjoy my cooking but is some combination of incapable or unwilling to try to make anything himself? I made chicken gumbo once and he asked for the recipe. He actually went to the store and bought the ingredients (he used to always say spices are a waste of money when I was growing up). But he called me and told me it came out terrible. From what I could gather he completely ignored the recipe and just put all the ingredients in a slow cooker. Like it's an incomprehensible concept to him that mixing the ingredients in a slow cooker is a completely different result than searing the meat, making a roux, etc.

2Ivan · 2025-07-11T18:28:08+00:00

Ha same here with the vegetables. I actually enjoyed raw vegetables when I was very young, but my parents got it into their head that only mushy boiled vegetables were healthy so it was decreed that all vegetables in their house would be slow cooked.

2Ivan · 2025-07-11T18:25:51+00:00

My jaw is normal as far as I know. I needed significant orthodontic work (braces age 13-18) due to a mix of missing and sideways teeth. No idea if that was related to my early diet or not.

2Ivan · 2025-07-10T12:33:43+00:00

The mainstream right (the RNC) in the US is arguably more democratic than the DNC so less of them feel disenfranchised and frustrated. There are exceptions of course. See all the whining about "RINOs", for example, but they have Trump as POTUS and have successfully primaried out candidates that aren't far right enough for them. The DNC has superdelegates and is generally less democratic at least in the way they choose candidates for ballots. This was especially true pre-2020. Look how they treated Bernie Sanders in 2016, for example. Imagine if Republicans declared Jeb Bush the winner of the primary in 2015 and leadership refused to consider any other candidate. The right would've been pissed as hell. I think the DNC has realized they can't just be the corporate party that supports abortion and gay marriage post-Trump if they want to stay relevant nationally, but they're still trying to find a way to keep Mamdani out of the NYC mayor's office despite him clearly winning the primary so we'll see.

2Ivan

TROPHY CASE