bonus for wool.

Good lord, man! Scratchy as hell.

I love it when guests are this comfortable because it means I don’t have to tend to them and interact with them 24 hours a day.

“Could you bring me an old sock, please?”

So AI is losing money hand over fist, and the solution is for AI to lose even more money? Thank god our economy is on a sound footing.

All of my local grocery stores offer sushi, and all of the signs say the same thing: “sushi under new management” and the signs never change. You’re not going to trick me like that, colluding grocery store chains.

“I’m Hatin’ It!”

we have to be able to forgive and start building bridges together

This is a nice-sounding sentiment, but in practice it just means not prosecuting Republican crimes during the brief periods when Democrats have a small bit of power. I’d be happy to forgive Republicans … after they’ve been frog-marched to prison. Letting them off the hook has always meant they just come back worse than ever.

They make $8 more per hour, but are getting hung up on $90/month union dues? They do know that the difference alone would pay for that in like 12 hours, right?

They actually are so bad at math that they don’t know that.

I dunno if school bus drivers are public workers or not… If they are, the Supreme Court ruled a few years back that they don’t even need to pay full dues, even if they are part of the collective bargaining unit and are receiving all of the benefits of contract that was fully negotiated by the union.

Yes, they get the benefits of the union-negotiated contract even if they are not in the union themselves. But as I mentioned, that contract is negated if the union membership drops below 50%.

There’s one other important lesson capitalists can learn from Steve Jobs: eat a lot of fruit instead of getting chemotherapy.

Americans don’t love freedom, they love being special.

Yeah, we love our own freedom, not freedom for other people.

Throw them back into the trenches.

The problem there is that eventually you don’t have trenches any more.

What happens while you’re training that new human?

My managers always had a simple solution to this problem: pretend that new programmers fresh out of college require no on-the-job training at all. Or for bonus points, pretend that they’re even better than the guys who have been doing this for decades and pay them more.

I’m a school bus driver in the US (Teamsters union). Our monthly dues are about $90 and we’re finding it difficult to get new drivers to join because of that. Our district is surrounded by non-unionized districts where they make about $8 less an hour and get none of the benefits we get, which include subsidized health insurance and a pension after ten years. We’re OK for now but if our union membership ever drops below 50% of the drivers our contract will be voided and then we’ll find out how shitty it is to not be represented by a union. But I can’t get the new drivers to understand this; the anti-union propaganda for the last fifty years hear (really, for a lot longer than that) has just been too overwhelming.

I’m a school bus driver in the US. Not only do we not get unlimited PTO, even for our paid holidays we don’t get paid for them unless we show up for the workdays before and after the paid holidays. This is so that we don’t attempt to stretch the long weekend that a Friday or Monday holiday provides by taking extra sick days before or after. I was a programmer most of my working life and I never encountered any time-off like this, but the other drivers say this is common in “blue-collar” jobs.

TBF our bosses have absolutely no flexibility in terms of the work that has to be done. A bus route needs to be covered or else 100 kids don’t make it to school. We have standby drivers but not an unlimited number of them. The day after the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, about a third of our drivers called in “sick” and the transportation director had no choice but to cancel multiple routes. I was more pissed at our drivers than she was – we’re almost all in our 60s and 70s (and a few are in their 80s) and have no business drinking ourselves into massive hangovers. I’m actually surprised nobody died.

It’s like Requiem for a Dream. Great movie, would recommend it to anyone except my elderly mother, am not gonna fuckin ever watch it a second time.

Thiel and his crew have talked about wanting the US to have a population of 100 million. They don’t want a permanent underclass of unemployed people, they want a permanent underclass of dead people.

I’ve been feeding my local crows unsalted shelled peanuts for more than five years. They know me and fly into the tree above my driveway and caw when they see me. They’re still not at all comfortable around me and won’t come down for the nuts until I go back inside. They’ve never given me any kind of gift unless you count the bird shit on my car.

They’re like a Marvel movie in terms of power comparison. If a hawk shows up, they will chase it away. Meanwhile, a single bluejay a tenth their size will chase off five crows by itself. And the crows will just stand there glumly watching a squirrel eat all their peanuts.

What’s it about LA that they’re associated with/have a large homeless population?

It’s great weather to be homeless in.

I watch one British guy’s videos from where he lives in China. You can actually rent fucking robot legs there that walk you around. Robot legs!

It’s wilder that we don’t use gasoline in our barbecue grills.