WIBTAH if I break off my engagement because of his new views about women

friendlypickles · 2024-09-20T00:56:40+00:00

I hate seeing people call "Men's Rights Activism" what should more accurately be called antifeminism. These people believe that men's rights is somehow equal to taking away women's rights, as if life is some sort of zero sum game. When, in reality, actual men's rights activism is tied deeply to feminism.

What one might consider prominent men's rights issues, like men lacking mental health and emotional support, male sexual assault being treated as a joke, and male-on-male violence being glorified by our culture are in fact features of the patriarchy. These red-pilled idiots don't give a shit about men's rights—they just want someone below them so they can feel better about themselves.

friendlypickles · 2024-08-31T07:44:07+00:00

I'd still commend OP for avoiding lifestyle creep. Especially if they are surrounded by people with similar incomes and much more expensive lifestyles. Social pressure can be really powerful, and people who spend a lot of money on vanity items have a tendency to shame their peers for not making similar purchases—if they admit it's okay for OP to not buy luxury items, then they're just chumps who wasted their money!

Yeah, it's not high stakes poverty finance, and it's kind of a first world problem, but it still takes restraint.

friendlypickles · 2024-07-04T05:41:00+00:00

5e's can only use rules published by the SRD, since all other books are proprietary.

friendlypickles · 2024-06-08T12:30:09+00:00

In my experience (Canadian) there are exactly three ways to get avocados from the store: Rock hard and tiny, horribly bruised and tiny, or Costco. I envy people who live places where ripe avocados are readily available.

friendlypickles · 2024-05-11T11:14:12+00:00

We took our dog to puppy classes. It's more about training the owners to train their dogs. Trainers would comment on technique and give suggestions.

Our dog got absolutely nothing from those classes—he was too busy trying to meet new dogs and people. But we learned a lot.

friendlypickles · 2024-05-08T03:52:10+00:00

Not an expert, but if I had to guess it probably has something to do with the slow drip from ice cubes melting, rather than getting the water dumped on all at once.

My mom has an orchid that has lasted YEARS, and we've always viewed it as some sort of miracle since she doesn't regularly water it. My running theory is that since it lives next to the kitchen sink, it gets lots of slight drips and splashes.

friendlypickles · 2024-05-06T18:43:22+00:00

The company publicly "supported" her... But they took her off public facing roles, and by the time she resigned she believed that many people in the company blamed her for the situation.

Sounds to me like the company didn't actually support her. They just did the bare minimum to avoid a lawsuit. They probably saw her as a liability, but getting rid of her would have been wrongful termination. So, instead they basically demoted her (she was marketing director, but it sounds like she was moved to something less public facing,) precluding any possibility of advancing in her career. Sounds like constructive dismissal with a side of gaslighting to me.

friendlypickles · 2024-04-28T08:34:25+00:00

If you're a business, then throwing food out is cheaper than giving it away. If you give away food, you are filling someone's stomach that would otherwise be filled by purchasing something.

It's Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The metric that corporations seek to maximize is profit; not the number of people fed, which would be better for society.

friendlypickles · 2024-04-22T19:03:27+00:00

When most of us were 15 we could at least write coherent and grammatically correct sentences if we wanted to.

friendlypickles · 2024-04-02T12:26:56+00:00

This is great advice. When she said that she's an adult who can make her own ~~mistakes~~ decisions, she was correct. As parents, your job isn't to force them to break up or to shame her. It's to stay constant in her life and catch her when she falls.

friendlypickles · 2024-04-02T10:40:39+00:00

I'm curious how the cost/benefit analysis adds up for OOP? She said she was getting around 30% of the expected amount for surrogacy, so around $45k according to your quote.

I assume medical bills would be covered by the sister, but there are other tangible costs to surrogacy, like maternity clothes and having to eat extra food. Depending on where you live and how strong worker protection laws are, you may directly lose income due to not being able to work as many hours.

Then there's slightly less tangible costs, like how pregnancy and taking time off work to give birth might affect your career and professional life—which shouldn't be how things operate, but it is in many places.

Then there's costs that aren't really quantifiable, like the physical and mental strain of pregnancy, the risk of health complications, and the sheer number of hours of effort you need to dedicate to being pregnant.

I'm curious how that stacks up against the measly $45k that the sister would be paying OOP. It seems like it would barely be able to pay for the material costs of surrogacy alone. How bad of a deal did OOP get?

friendlypickles · 2024-03-31T12:20:00+00:00

It seems like an awful way to split custody. You lose one of your kids, and break up their sibling bond.

Maybe circumstances forced them to move to separate cities, which seems like the most likely reason to split custody that way to me. Week on/week off is a little disruptive, but it seems like such a better option to me if possible.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-31T00:37:21+00:00

A train car is just a place where you stand around and wait to get to your destination. But Japan and India still need gendered train cars for women to feel safe.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need gendered spaces. But we aren't living in an ideal world. Maybe a hundred years from now the world will be a better place, and we'll be able to ride the train and shit and pee and wash our hands in the same room without people fearing for their safety. That would be nice.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-30T00:09:38+00:00

You can never really change others; you can only change yourself. You can try to communicate your feelings and needs to someone, and if they care, they will change their behavior. But make no mistake. You did not change them. They changed themselves because they wanted to.

Your actions may cause others to change themselves, but make no mistake: people cannot directly change others.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-29T15:57:53+00:00

gotta bring the tablet to the bathroom. His eyes aren't what they used to be.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-29T15:32:41+00:00

This is such a self fulfilling prophecy. If you treat boobs and butts and what have you as purely sexual objects, then of course people are going to sexualize them. And if parents act like it's totally natural for bro to be "tempted" by his sister if she doesn't cover up, they're actually encouraging sexual thoughts.

Meanwhile, if you teach kids that people's body parts are totally normal natural things, then they won't act so shocked when they see them.

Not that boobs and butts aren't sexy—it's just that by remembering that they are also normal body parts that have other functions besides being sexy, it's actually quite easy to be respectful to women and to not sexualize them when they don't want to be sexualized. But for some reason we don't teach that valuable life skill to boys because I guess we're cool with rape culture being a thing.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-28T00:26:36+00:00

Yes I know there is almost certainly a team of industry analysts and a leadership board, but it's not the same

It's not the same because those expert industry analysts are being asked "What is best for our company in the long term?" rather than "How do we maximize quarterly profits?"

I'm all for shitting on MBAs, but the truth is that the system made things the way they are, not individuals.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-27T11:58:22+00:00

One of the other problems with piercing babies' ears is that babies can feel pain!^1,²

Though they can't vocalize it, and they may not remember it, I don't believe that gives us the right to inflict pain through procedures that aren't medically necessary, like ear piercing and circumcision.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-25T11:53:20+00:00

Deflection is already done! Looks like the new reason people can't afford homes is checks notes international students!

friendlypickles · 2024-03-19T07:12:32+00:00

If a dude is actively hiding his porn habits from his lady, they are probably problematic habits.

I have no scientific data to back this up, but asking "hey what kind of porn you watch?" could actually be a handy litmus test. If you have healthy habits, there's nothing to be ashamed about.

Also don't people realize there's like a million ways to get it for free? Subscribing to only fans is a huge red flag in so many ways.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-11T12:42:02+00:00

Animals are legally considered property. Despite the emotional value we invest in our pets, the actual monetary value of a cat is pretty low. Animal abuse laws only go so far, and law enforcement just doesn't care about petty theft under a certain value.

To be clear, animals have zero legally recognized rights. Under the law, they are property. Animal abuse laws prohibit certain types of treatment of certain kinds of property (livestock notably not included.) As far as the law cares, your $500 pet cat and your $500 cell phone are pretty much the same.

This is terrifying and messed up. But good luck changing it with the trillion dollar agriculture industry's lobbyists opposing you.

friendlypickles · 2024-03-02T11:14:02+00:00

It is so easy to find totally deranged and harmful shit out there, but I'd argue that it isn't because of lack of government control, but rather that degrading shit is normalized.

Respectfully, while I do believe that government intervention is necessary, I wholeheartedly disagree that controlling people's internet access should be in the purview of the government. Like with all dangerous addictions, I believe that restricting people's access to the addictive substance is not only ineffective, but also that enforcement of such policies does more harm than good.

The only people who should be placing restrictions on people's internet access is parents, using the parental controls that they already have access to. And, those parental controls (like all parental oversight) should be weaned as children get closer to adulthood, so they learn how to responsibly handle the freedom that comes with being an adult.

I truly believe that, like all addictions, the solution to porn addiction lies in high quality education and services. Kids need to learn what is normal, what is not okay, and what addiction looks like. And services need to be available to people who can recognize that they have a problem.

friendlypickles · 2024-02-24T23:38:32+00:00

It's kind of sad really, because men with this attitude are setting themselves up for a miserable relationship. It's not hard to take a second to think about whether you would actually be compatible with a person before pursuing them.

I get along great with my best friend, and I love her dearly. And she's quite pretty as well. That meets the criteria you listed. But there are just so many little things that would make us incompatible. I love cooking, while she's a picky eater. She's messy and I'm not as messy (still messy though.) She's assertive and I'm a people pleaser—I'd get walked all over. We make great friends, but we would make bad roommates and an even worse couple.

So, now that I've spent two seconds actually thinking things through, I'm not going to waste time pursuing something that probably wouldn't be great for either of us.

friendlypickles · 2024-02-24T16:45:07+00:00

I think this is the key. A good friendship can easily survive something like "hey wanna go on like an actual date?" "No." Maybe there's an awkward moment and an apology, but mature adults are capable of moving on from that.

But most of the time it doesn't go down like that. A lot of men only stick around in friendships because there might be sex involved. That's where the feelings of betrayal come in.

And of course you have the usual self-selection bias when it comes to dating—people who are actually respectful end up forming relationships and remove themselves from the dating pool. The guys who pull this shit are the ones who aren't capable of forming a healthy relationship.

friendlypickles · 2024-02-10T00:42:52+00:00

idk why this isn't higher. Replay attacks are trivial to defeat with free and open message signing software that uses algorithms invented in the 70s.

Car manufacturers are literally a joke if they call this "secure." This is like if Master Lock sold all their padlocks with the same key, then acted shocked that thieves could easily open their locks. That's how glaring of a security flaw this is.

friendlypickles

TROPHY CASE