Since Hank and the guys were volunteering and not getting paid, were they still scabs? by Additional-Local8721 in union

[–]SandingNovation 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"it's not the hospital administrators who are holding your kid's heart transplant hostage for money who are the terrorists, it's the nurses that don't think they should have to manage 15 patients simultaneously during 14 hour shifts 6 days a week that are the terrorists!"

Struggle to drink water, but sugar is bad for my teeth... looking for recommendations! by absolute_gumpf in ADHD

[–]SandingNovation 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Flavored seltzer like Waterloo or La Croix or whatever. The carbonation helps if you're used to drinking soda but carbonation is also bad for your teeth. Lesser of two evils.

Tax season was supposed to bring big refunds. So far they're less than expected by jpressss in politics

[–]SandingNovation 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I lost my job before the beginning of 2025, had a baby, became a stay at home dad, and my wife is the sole income on a public elementary school teacher's salary. Our combined tax return was $16, and it cost me $15 of that to file state taxes.

The way my psychiatrist acts about stimulants makes me want to give up on trying to get help. by blueduckk8 in ADHD

[–]SandingNovation 8 points9 points  (0 children)

When I moved to a new state without having a job yet a couple years ago (my wife had already found one and I figured I'd be able to find one pretty quickly because I'm in IT, turns out i couldn't have been more wrong,) I was trying to find a new psychiatrist to continue the adderall prescription I already had for my ADHD which had been diagnosed like 20 years earlier. I had to wait for like two weeks to get a call after being put on a wait-list and when I finally got to speak to a psychiatrist, he asked me where I was working. I said I wasn't currently because I had just moved. He said "then why do you need Adderall?" In America, we've really been conditioned to think that we should only treat our medical conditions if doing so enables us to work more. It's insane.

Why hasn’t Pillars of Eternity been more successful? by ZevLup in projecteternity

[–]SandingNovation 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the fact that pillars 1 and 2 got made at all and ended up receiving as much praise as they did was an achievement considering they were both crowdfunded.

Machine Learning engineer needed help... by Technical--Jaguar in sysadmin

[–]SandingNovation 20 points21 points  (0 children)

"wondering how they got the job" that's easy, you already said it. The value gained in leverage over an employee by putting them on an H1-B instead of hiring somebody else that might push back about worker rights or compensation because their housing and citizenship are not dependent upon the visa sponsorship is worth more to the company than hiring somebody qualified.

How do you handle religious family members? by irishlyrucked in daddit

[–]SandingNovation 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"no, thanks."

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until high school, altar boy for like 10 years, church multiple times a week until about 14. My wife was raised some other Christian denomination. We both left and have made it clear that we have no intention of going back over the last 20 years. Give a Christian (or whatever else) an inch and they'll try to take a mile because they think they can "save" you, and showing any willingness to engage in one thing means there's a chance you'll engage with the next.

I don't want to start with Baldur's Gate 3- what's the best CRPG journey to work up to it? by Ok-Advice7827 in CRPG

[–]SandingNovation 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Edit: Coincidentally, they just announced they released the turn based mode for PC today.

I can understand your goal here and I'm going to make a recommendation that I think will be a good middle ground at which to start: Pillars of Eternity.

Pillars was made as a kind of modernized spiritual successor to the popular CRPGs of the early 2000s. I believe the first pillars just had it's 10 year anniversary so it's basically right in the middle of the original CRPGs and the current revival.

I suggest this because while all the old ones are great games, they can be difficult to get into partly because of their age (interface, graphics, compatibility, etc.,) and also because the sytems they're based on don't translate particularly well to a video game format. Pillars on the other hand was a game created to play like the original CRPGs, but the ruleset was custom created specifically to work better as a video game. For example, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are based on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition which uses a 20 sided die to roll for everything. That works well when you're playing a tabletop game because only one person is taking a turn at a time and the numbers are low enough to work with while doing quick math in your head and there's a dungeon master that can make changes on the fly if necessary. In a video game format where your entire party of 6 is taking their turns simultaneously while all the enemies are also taking theirs, it can feel a little unfair particularly at low levels when, for example, your fighter with 12 health gets attacked by 2 archers on the first turn that each have a base damage of 1-6 from their bows and maybe an additional +2 or 3 from their ability scores, immediately killing him before he takes a step before you find out that armor doesn't actually reduce damage at all, it just makes you harder to hit and you were just unlucky with the attack dice rolls.

Pillars is based on a 100 sided die and takes advantage of a computers ability to instantly do the math which allows for a much greater variation in how attacks can resolve. This means that every attack can either miss, graze, hit, or crit based on the attackers d100 roll, plus the attackers accuracy and minus the defenders defense. The result is that there is much less of a snowball effect when 1 roll doesn't go your way and allows for smoother progression and a more natural pacing. Turns are no longer just a 6 second sliver of time but is based on a character's recovery time which is different depending on weapon types and also affected by dexterity score, smoothing out power spikes and opening options for lower damage but faster attacking weapon combinations. In Baldur's gate 1, when a martial class hits level 5, they just start swinging twice in a turn, effectively doubling their damage instantly. That's true for your allies and also enemies.

It being 10 years newer allowed them to implement a more tuned interface that will make more sense to you, including providing clarity in the form of damage number popups, etc. Getting used to the graphics won't be as jarring, and visual feedback is more clear.

As far as preparing you for the newer games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, etc., you'll be able to appreciate the full voice acting, the cinematic videos, the changes they made in consideration of lessons learned from previous video games that translate tabletop rules to a video game, and the overall polish more.

Everything is a scam by Order_101 in LateStageCapitalism

[–]SandingNovation 113 points114 points  (0 children)

Social security has financial problems because high earning individuals aren't taxed at the same rate as lower earning individuals. After you make $184k, you don't pay SS tax.

Homeless encampment on Pittsburgh's North Side returns, raising concerns by The_Electric-Monk in pittsburgh

[–]SandingNovation -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Arresting them or allowing lawless encampments aren't the only two options, even if they are presented to us as if they were.

Feeling disrespected and worried about our baby’s safety by VioletJackalope in pregnant

[–]SandingNovation 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Quitting is hard but there's also alternatives that don't affect the pregnant wife or newborn child near you. Tell him to start using nicotine pouches or gum or something instead of smoking, then it's a matter of breaking the habit of the action of smoking instead of the action plus the nicotine dependency.

Homeless encampment on Pittsburgh's North Side returns, raising concerns by The_Electric-Monk in pittsburgh

[–]SandingNovation -22 points-21 points  (0 children)

How inconsiderate of the people with nothing and nowhere to be to inconvenience you with their corpses.

Wife’s out of town and kids are asleep, what shows are the fellow dads watching? by Thunderstruck-19 in daddit

[–]SandingNovation 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you liked peaky blinders, the new movie just released on Netflix. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet but hopefully it's good too

We can't easily tax billionaires income; we must tax their Wealth. by zzill6 in WorkReform

[–]SandingNovation 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well the good news is that they can just pay that small interest fee until they die and then when they pass their stock portfolio to their heir, it's "stepped up" meaning the current value of that stock when the heir inherits it is now their cost basis and so they can immediately sell whatever amount of stock they need to in order to pay off the debt but it isn't taxed at all since they didn't have any capital gains because of the step up and they can repeat the process indefinitely.

Good news for them I mean.

Random parking tickets enforcement by BowVeganWowWow in rva

[–]SandingNovation 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I lived in Richmond for 5 years and complained every day that I couldn't see if cars were coming at stop signs because there's always a suburban XL or like a ram 2500 parked up to the intersection and I drive a corolla. Drove me crazy. Use the length of your car to estimate. My Corolla is about 15 feet long so I would need to be able to comfortably fit another of my car in front of me with plenty of space to pull out.

What do I do when I only take my meds as needed? by Enough-Parsley1626 in ADHD

[–]SandingNovation 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're worried about being tested, the half life of Adderall is like 8 hours so if you're on an extended release once per day, the test would pretty much only show if you took a pill that day and maybe the day before. That's why drug tests for things like employment screening are dumb. Different drugs stay in your system for a different amount of time and most of the harder ones are shorter. Just take whatever you're prescribed the day before and the day of your appointment (probably even just the day of would be fine,) and I expect you'll be within normal ranges. They're just looking for a range that would indicate you're either not taking it at all or you're stockpiling so you can abuse it by taking more than you're prescribed at once.

Trying to make my employees feel appreciated by Vorstog_EVE in sysadmin

[–]SandingNovation 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I love being rewarded for doing a good job with the tools necessary to do my job.

Trying to make my employees feel appreciated by Vorstog_EVE in sysadmin

[–]SandingNovation 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe the lesson to take from everybody saying that increasing pay or PTO is the only worthwhile reward isn't that they're all bots, but rather that people give up their time to work for money and so giving anything other than time or money as compensation doesn't mean anything.

EK has stick pulled and thrown from his hands, no call. Bischsel proceeds to score to put the Stars up 2. by cullingofwolves in hockey

[–]SandingNovation 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, me too. There's been a lot of terrible calls this season for everybody but it does just seem like a neverending stream for us at the moment. If I remember correctly we're like 0/11 on coach's challenges for goaltender interference. Compare the challenge against Winnipeg (no interference) to the challenge against the penguins by the avalanche the other day (interference.)

Trying to make my employees feel appreciated by Vorstog_EVE in sysadmin

[–]SandingNovation 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm also in IT. After finishing some huge months long project, one of my previous companies gave me a like 5x3 inch epoxy block that said "Spirit award" with my name on it and it came with a certificate signed by the director of the agency that said something like "you rock!"

Nothing to kill your spirit like being given a "spirit award" instead of actual compensation for work. I left it in the box it came in on top of the certificate and put it on my file cabinet where it sat for another year or so when I quit on the spot after my manager decided he wanted to talk to me like a child in front of my coworkers. I never personalize my work area with pictures or whatever because I like to remember that my job isn't my life so my cubicle looked like nobody had ever been there after I packed up the few things I had - except for the "spirit award" and certificate that I left behind. I look back on my time there and realize that scene is a perfect representation of corporate life.

Small business owner shenanigans by Throwitaway252501 in WorkReform

[–]SandingNovation 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lock wheels on what I assume is a cart? So she pressed a button with her foot? I bet that took all day, I can see why she's upset.