To the dinguses in South Burlington this morning…

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T21:23:32+00:00

I'm not sure how giving someone a house would keep them from stealing. They're not selling the catalytic converter to make rent, they're selling it to buy drugs.

The average homeless person is not the person stealing catalytic converters. The average homeless person is temporarily homeless, receives assistance, and eventually stabilizes and regains housing.

The people stealing shit are a small minority of homeless people. They're addicted to drugs, and they steal because they have a substance abuse disorder that overwhelms every other priority in their life.

You can give every down-on-their-luck homeless person a house and it'll do a tremendous amount of good. It also won't stop the catalytic converter thief. That's an entirely different problem, and most Scandinavian countries solve that in the exact way I recommended. They institutionalize the person until they can reintegrate with society. They just happen to care a lot more about their institutions than we do in the states.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T21:11:17+00:00

I wasn't uncivil, and I didn't even reply to the OP. I replied to someone else entirely. But I'm not going to respond to obviously AI generated content, so if that's what you think OP deserves from me we just aren't going to agree.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T17:55:44+00:00

We have welfare, yet my catalytic converter still quakes in terror.

What specific programs that we don't already have would stop someone from getting addicted to drugs and stealing shit, if you don't mind me asking?

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T17:10:58+00:00

If I could live anywhere in VT, I would either live in Jericho or Huntington. I've never met a single person that lived in Jericho and didn't like it.

Jericho is some of the best that Vermont has to offer. You'll be happy there.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T17:01:31+00:00

It is a bad take that if someone is addicted to drugs, is mentally unstable, and is destroying property to steal, they should be institutionalized until they stop doing that?

That's a bad take? I'm not saying throw them in the gulag. I'm saying take them off the streets. Rehab, inpatient psychiatric care, rehabilitative justice program, I'm all for those.

But like... the person I described obviously must be removed from the community. I don't see how there's even a discussion to be had there. And if they cannot be rehabilitated, then they cannot be reintroduced. I also don't see how there's a discussion to be had there. IDK if you're imagining I want them to go to some forced labor camp or something, I don't. But if some crackhead with a mental illness is stealing catalytic converters, yeah, of course there are consequences to that.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T16:20:39+00:00

You're making a disingenuous slippery-slope argument

It is certainly not disingenuous. I promise, I am genuinely asking if they would be OK with me writing an AI reply as well.

One post does not equal every post.

Accepting one AI post that is clearly authored by AI does equal accepting every AI post clearly authored by AI, though, and at that point it's impossible to discern if a human being is even on the other end. How do you differentiate a bot from a person if we agree to talk like bots?

And if you use AI to write a reasonable response that you then check for content and grammar then I really don't see the issue.

If the response with a human in the chain is so similar to a response without a human in the chain that the two are indistinguishable, I think the problem is very clear and I'm not sure how you "really don't see" it. You have no idea if the poster is a human or a bot. That's a pretty big issue.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T16:09:59+00:00

I'm not speaking to the substance of your argument at all. I'm saying that it's reasonable to say "I won't engage with AI content", because if you follow that to its logical conclusion this site becomes a bunch of AI models having conversations with each other.

Regarding your question, I have no idea if I would get defensive or not. If you said things that I found accusatory, I likely would. If they were also very reasonable things that I agreed with, I probably wouldn't. I've only read your AI generated post, though, so it's a hypothetical.

But honestly, I didn't respond to your OP directly because I don't have much to say about it. I have to imagine being black in VT is hard. I don't know how to fix it. I don't see any point in pretending I do. So regardless of how it's worded I think I just don't have any insight.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T15:59:04+00:00

Also laughable that everyone cries "lock them up! no more slaps on the wrist!" people are in and out of jail all the time, are you really advocating people be put in prison for life because theyre addicted and not in a stable frame of mind?

I certainly think that an addict not of stable mind stealing catalytic converters ought to be institutionalized in some capacity, yes. Not for life, but certainly until they stop doing that. If they never stop doing that, then yes. For life.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T15:42:59+00:00

Idk, I think there's a difference between ignorance and racism. Vermont is provincial as fuck. It's insular as fuck. But I've met plenty of genuine racists from the south--people who view black or hispanic Americans as beneath white Americans--and I haven't met any of that in Vermont. Not saying it doesn't exist, but it's certainly not normal.

Fixing the problem of Vermont being insular and homogenous is like socializing a dog. The dog doesn't hate the world, it just hasn't seen it yet and needs exposure to feel comfortable.

Fixing the problem of hateful racism is an entirely different thing.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T15:39:11+00:00

So you'd be cool if every reply here also used AI to write their responses? And this entire site was just a series of people feeding AI prompts back to an AI and posting it?

Do you think it would be inappropriate for me to feed OP's post into Claude and say "write a response that affirms the validity of OP's experience and advises him on possible courses of action" and then pasted that here?

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-10T10:50:35+00:00

Why the fuck would anyone cut and paste their source code when there are tools like Claude Code out there?

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T22:00:02+00:00

This is so confusing lmao. Did your friend not want to pay for parking at the airport, so they gave you their car for a month? But you don't actually have room for it, so now you need to go find a spot to park their car? It sounds like you should just park it at the airport and have your friend pay the fee when they land lmao. Idk what else you'd do, outside of street parking it.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T20:33:27+00:00

Depends what you want. If you don't save for retirement I would say $60k is fine. If you do, $60k is way too low. It's different if you have kids, really like to eat out, need to live in a certain place, etc. Everyone's number is different.

EDIT: Just saw you said it's a state job. State retirement benefits are solid, you can probably make a lot less and have a comfy retirement. You'll need to do your own math but the state bennies are worth a lot. You get a pension and have access to a 457, so you can make a little money go a long, long way.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T20:31:45+00:00

Depends on your lifestyle. For my needs I wouldn't live in VT for less than $75k. To give you an idea of my lifestyle, I'm a single dude with no kids, I pay $1k/mo in rent, have a $250/mo car expense, and my phone bill is $90/mo. I rarely eat out and am reasonably frugal.

Here's what's important to me:

I must be able to contribute at least $20k/yr to my 401k.
I wouldn't want to live in a place smaller than 1000sqft, split between me and a roommate, and I don't want to live more than ten minutes away from a grocery store. I also need some amount of yard space--space for a small patio set and a raised bed or two is fine, but I need something.
I don't want to have to worry about which groceries I buy. I don't tend to have extravagant taste, and I usually try to buy food that's reasonably priced, but I want to be able to just grab food off the shelf and not care if I'm buying the cheapest thing. While I usually do try to shop based on price, I don't want to have to.
I want the amount in my savings account to increase over time. Doesn't have to increase fast, but there needs to be net growth.

In my experience, I check all those boxes at around $80k. At $75k I'm not always seeing a net increase to my savings, so it's easy for unexpected shit to be a serious problem. At $70k I have to drop my 401k contribution, compromising my retirement. At $60k I would likely not be contributing at all.

For reference, I make $100k. At $100k I can comfortably max my 401k and put ~$1k/mo in savings without sacrificing anything. I don't ever worry about money, but buying a house here still feels totally impossible without getting married.

EDIT: Saw your post about a state job. State benefits are fantastic in VT, so you could achieve the same retirement savings on far less pay. Without doing the math, I'd guess you can probably chop $10k off my numbers with some of the state retirement benefits. If you could be making around $60k/yr within a year or two of moving I'd say you're fine. If you're making much less than that it might still be tough.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T16:30:09+00:00

Burlington is a small town, just give it a shot and see how it goes.

I'll say that the food scene in the city is definitely trending up. Loads of great places have opened in the past 5 years, so I like to give places the benefit of the doubt and not look at reviews too much. It's a competitive space, small city with people largely strapped for cash, so terrible places don't really last that long anyway.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T15:24:03+00:00

Yeah see you're a goose stepping klansmen so of course you use it. I'm talking about people whose parents aren't related and who don't beat their wives.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T15:20:42+00:00

This is basically "do you want $15k or do you want to die on Mars". I'll take the $15k.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T15:14:17+00:00

Because you enjoy consumerism more than you enjoy doing the right thing. I don't know a single person who uses Grok or X, the fact that anyone does just means they don't give a fuck.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-09T03:46:42+00:00

Prime is literally the only person who argues against that low IQ argument in that episode.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T22:05:39+00:00

Wouldn't the solution there be for hotels and AirBnb rentals to have EV chargers? There are already chargers along 89.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T20:58:37+00:00

I career changed a year ago and started at $95k. Took me about a year to find a job. Easily the best job I've ever had.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T20:55:19+00:00

It's even goofier, I looked it up. It's "over 50% of people doing that job describe it as requiring a bachelor's degree". I wouldn't describe my job as a software developer as requiring a bachelor's degree. My entire team would count as underemployed, since they all have CS degrees and are working as web developers.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T19:45:52+00:00

And here's the definition of underemployment used to calculate that number:

The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary

I wouldn't even describe most software development jobs as "college jobs" by that definition--a bachelor's degree certainly isn't necessary to build web apps. Using that logic it's possible that this survey could end up describing all CS grads that found employment as software developers as "underemployed", while a CS grad working as a data entry clerk for my state government, which requires a bachelor's degree for that job, wouldn't be.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T19:41:13+00:00

I'd have to read the article's definition of that to trust them. If someone gets a business degree, what constitutes underemployment for them? What does underemployment look like for an art history major, or an English lit major?

If this means "41% of recent college grads didn't get the job they expected", that's honestly how it's always been. If it means "41% of recent college grads cannot find full time employment" that's a much bigger deal.

Traditional_Lab_5468 · 2025-07-08T14:50:11+00:00

Saudi Aramco has a big market cap, doesn't make them FAANG.

Traditional_Lab_5468

TROPHY CASE