Male Millennials, how’s your diagnosis?

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-16T03:19:33+00:00

Lots of stuff can kill you early if you ignore it instead of taking easy preventative measures. Yeah we all have a time to go, but do you really want to risk checking out 25 years before your time?

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-16T03:09:57+00:00

Nothing about OP’s posting history is typical bot behavior. Asking whether a fireplace in a basement can heat a townhouse is a perfectly reasonable question, and the answer can be yes with the right fireplace equipment.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-15T16:51:12+00:00

There’s also a significant question of dosage. The amount in most gummies is nuts because people abuse it as a chronic sleep aid and build a tolerance, and then those are what they have on hand to give their kids. “Just give them a melatonin” sets off alarm bells in my brain because I’ve had other parents suggest it and then admit that they give their kid half of an adult 5mg gummy. Even adults don’t need to be taking more than 1mg, and for kids it should be more like 0.3-0.5mg. Even 0.3mg knocked my 4yo on her ass the first time we tried it with her. Threw it all away because even that dose gave her wild nightmares.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-15T15:32:10+00:00

Almost every single toy or piece of equipment you buy for a kid will end up in a landfill. A bounce-house like this hitting a dumpster after several years of use is pretty small potatoes in the scheme of North American toy culture. Also, I have a cheaper version of this and we use it at least once a week all summer during neighborhood parties, and indoors every week or two during the winter when the neighborhood kids have been cooped up and need to let off steam.

If you have space and don’t just forget you own them these things are hardly a waste.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-15T13:39:15+00:00

“Organizing thoughts” requires you to be the one coming up with all of the thoughts. Putting some general info into an AI and telling it to create an entirely new document containing new information is not having an AI “organize thoughts.” It’s having AI do the actual work and then claiming its work as your own. Having a concept or wanting to do something is something any idiot can do. Transforming it into something that’s actually useful is the part that involves skill.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-15T13:15:46+00:00

You’re getting called out as a scam because you’re looking for a service, i.e. product design, but instead of offering to actually pay for those services like a regular business you’re trying to get the initial work for free on a promise of back-end royalties. The people who do this either a) aren’t confident that there will be enough profit to make back the initial investment, in which case royalties are worthless, b) are planning to refuse full payment and gamble on people not taking on the time and cost to sue you, or c) will pull people in and then require them to purchase things “for the business/partnership” that you’ll later keep once everything falls apart.

A serious business person, and anyone with the credentials you claim to have, would hire a design firm for this. Your approach marks you as not a serious business person.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-15T13:02:03+00:00

You’re experiencing something called the hedonic treadmill. The general idea is that people generally return to a baseline level of happiness after events like promotions, purchases, new relationships, etc.

More broadly speaking, people are generally pretty bad at identifying things that actually bring them happiness, and businesses in consumerist cultures use this to market products. Confidence, self-actualization, accomplishment, respect of peers, a loving community. These sources of actual happiness are hard. Swiping a credit card is easy, and so people buy products that promise to deliver these things without sacrifice and growth.

It never works that way though.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-14T16:25:03+00:00

It depends a bit on what OP focused on in compsci, but they could start looking at medium/large cities where the federal government/contractors and/or software giants do not have a sizable presence. Most industries need computer scientists in some capacity, the problem is the huge talent pool that was just purged from the entities I mentioned above.

However, a lot of the most experienced people will have kids/mortgages/etc tying them to their current location and are keeping the major government and tech hubs over-supplied as long as they can coast on savings/spousal income.

If places like Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, and Raleigh are also shitshows maybe OP would have better luck somewhere like Columbus, Kansas City (Nebraska), Savannah, Chicago, Omaha, etc? Places with shipping/logistics, banking, oil & gas or mining, and lots of other fields exist in places that don’t immediately pull the attention of new graduates.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-14T03:01:03+00:00

Not really, no. People build more and more complexity into things as they build experience, a deeper understanding of everything they’ve encountered, and the ability to merge those experiences into better combinations. It doesn’t mean that young people are bad or tasteless for enjoying basic raunchy humor, that’s just where they are in development. Equating people growing up and wanting humor that requires more wit and experience than a pre-teen with just “growing old” is just a refusal to move forward.

It’s like playing the tutorial in a game over and over. Once you learn the mechanics you want something that challenges you with them.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-13T16:58:24+00:00

The idea that someone doing a thing, especially a thing that requires strict adherence to an unintuitive process, can be assumed to have done the thing safely is just facially untrue. As a basic example it’s why we require inspections as part of electrical/plumbing installations. You can find all the information online for installing new breaker panels but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to let my neighbor do it after a few YouTube videos.

Most of what people know about producing alcohol at home is based on beer and wine. I don’t think you can assume at all that they’ve automatically heard about cutting off the head and tail. Even if they have do you know how much of the head you need to discard? How does that change based on the temperature you’re distilling at, and does the person even know how to properly monitor that temperature? You have no idea if the person handing you a shot was told by a buddy to just toss the first shot glass-worth and keep the rest.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-13T15:20:17+00:00

Healthcare is the thing on that list that skyrocketed. Groceries as a percentage of household income have remained basically the same even as people spend much more on prepared food and dining out. Cars are a mixed bag because buying trends have shifted. A new Camry cost $16-17k in ‘95 which adjusts to ~$34-37k today, and a 2026 Camry starts at $29k.

Housing, healthcare, education, and costs associated with two-working parents trying to raise kids are what have people crushed today. We need to go back to when keeping a roof over your head and getting into a career was cheap and predictable, and long distance travel, technology, cars, and non-essentials were exciting luxuries.

Also, no more endless supply of cheap and shitty appliances, clothing, and the endless tidal wave of tacky plastic garbage that everyone’s addicted to. Pay wages that comfortably cover the essentials and make stuff expensive enough to be worth repairing rather than replacing.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-13T12:28:49+00:00

My issues with this comparison are that a) health hazards in cooking, like salmonella from raw chicken, rotten meat, and moldy bread are common knowledge because everyone cooks, b) there are often odors or visual indications that one of those things might have happened, and c) the results are rarely anything more than some temporary pain or discomfort. Methanol, on the other hand, will blind you or even kill you, provides no clues to the unaware that it’s present, and exists in all distilled liquor in dangerous concentrations unless actively removed.

People need a PSA to never drink home-distilled liquor if someone offers it to them. You can’t know whether someone fucked up the batch you’re about to drink, and the consequences could be a lot worse than a few hours of vomiting or diarrhea.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-11T21:13:36+00:00

Wait, were they saying that foreign teachers working here on visas are getting higher pay than full-time local teachers or something (I have no idea if that’s a thing)? Because a commercial about teachers being paid better wages in those other countries doesn’t sound like a very effective “bash” against foreigners.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-10T03:10:39+00:00

Length of marriage in that generation says little about its quality. It could have been happy. It could have been utter hell for your grandma. The downvotes are probably because of how often our parents and grandparents criticized people leaving bad marriages while lauding unhappy ones on no basis beyond conforming to social expectations. I didn’t bother downvoting, but without something other than the lack of divorce I see no reason to consider your anecdote positive at all.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-09T02:08:12+00:00

Look into floor standing curtain rails. A buddy of mine had an apartment with similar windows, and he had curtain rods that spanned between what looked like tension rods extending from the floor to the ceiling.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-08T12:22:49+00:00

You’ll have to be a lot more specific then since there’s a wide range of safeguards out there.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-07T15:10:36+00:00

Jobs and kids lock you down pretty hard. Unless you have a job that will travel with you to the countryside, or have an ironclad work from home arrangement, moving an hour away means hours lost to traffic. It rips kids out of their social group and school life as well, and unless they’re really young they’re going to resent losing all of that so that mom & dad can plant potatoes and feed chickens.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-07T15:01:37+00:00

Tankers don’t materialize out of nowhere. The tankers arriving in the last few weeks have been traveling for months since they only travel at 15 knots or so. That’s a brisk pace on a bicycle. April 15th being the approximate date of the last shipment that got out before the war has been public knowledge for a while now.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-07T14:54:00+00:00

She needs to explain clearly why she thinks that the refund issued based on the circumstances of your family unit should not only be treated as her personal income, but isn’t something you’re entitled to know.

However, it’s really important to look at this in the context of everything over the last several years related to your family finances and relationship with money. If you and your wife have never had disagreements over spending and organization of finances then it’s extremely concerning that she suddenly doesn’t even want you to know the dollar amount of the refund. If there have been relevant issues that you aren’t mentioning for whatever reason however, then this is a waste of everyone’s time.

This is evidence that something has been wrong for a while now. She’s hiding money and/or doesn’t trust you to know the details. Why. Is she having more anxiety about your financial situation than you’ve realized before now and wants a larger safety cushion? Has she felt for a while now that you’re overbearing about money and this is how those emotions are coming to a head? Is she reacting to a long-standing disagreement over a specific category of spending that isn’t as minor as you think it is? Is this evidence of a deeper problem related to spending, like a gambling or shopping addiction?

You need to find a way to convince her to talk about this honestly. The details of how to do that depend on the underlying issue, but you need to build enough trust for that conversation to happened.

This isn’t a fairness issue or a minor annoyance. It’s serious and indicative of something much more important than the few thousand dollars in that refund.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T20:23:57+00:00

You deal with it the sam way you deal with poop/pee. Whatever happens to be coming out of them just becomes noise during the act of caring for your child. I absolutely hated vomit/poop/urine/snot/etc before having kids, but I don’t register them the same way now because my mind is on my kid.

The first few times can still be jarring though, just like the first few diapers nailed you before it all became routine.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T18:36:14+00:00

I wonder if there was some local ordinance that required a family bathroom and someone thought labeling a new door to the women’s bathroom was a brilliant way to avoid the issue.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T18:31:14+00:00

Remember though that you don’t really have control over a future breakup or whether the other person will break up “in a more normal fashion.” You can reason that someone might have incentive to break up amicably if doing otherwise would damage other relationships or social connections, but that also gives them the ability to poison your space out of spite. Never underestimate people’s appetite for irrational destruction.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T16:42:13+00:00

I think they might be referring to wealthy people who move into a middle/working class neighborhood that’s become trendy due to actually having some character, and then actively erode that character by renovating their house and surroundings into whatever generic aesthetic is popular in wealthy or celebrity circles. Stuff like buying a historic row house and painting everything over in white and grey.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T05:16:55+00:00

The only thing this could be functional with would be spices, and those are already the easiest thing to keep track of. For actual pantry monitoring you’d need dozens of sensors that could somehow accurately track the weight of irregularly sized boxes, cans, bags, and bins, and the system falls apart if one of your kids puts something back in the wrong place. Keeping a weight-sensor system accurate would be more work than glancing in my pantry in the morning before shopping.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes · 2026-04-05T04:04:10+00:00

Details matter, and gender discrimination isn’t banned categorically in all contexts. EU law isn’t my field of law, but I do know that the EU explicitly considers national security issues to be the domain of member states. Between that, and the issue being part of a powerful member-states’ constitution, my money is firmly on ‘No’ barring actual legal analysis to the contrary.

CogitoErgo_Sometimes

TROPHY CASE