It is both super cute and annoying af that our pets have become so used to us being home, our one cat now walks around the house yeowling at top volume whenever insomniac is in the shower.
Like, we're talking full-blown kitty air raid siren letting us know that he's been orphaned forever and shall live the tragic life of a little Victorian matchstick girl..... because the humans are not in his line of sight and also maybe a door is closed.
@GreenFlashlight said in Dead Celebrities 2020:
This hurts more than I expected it to. I'm trying to comfort myself with reminders that dying at home, surrounded by friends, and probably being given the best painkillers money can buy after having lived eight decades is one of the best ways to go, but... still. I didn't know Alex Trebek, so it's not like this is a personal loss, but it feels like a cultural one; like American society as a whole is diminished by his absence.
Oof. Great, now I'm going to work crying.
Don't feel bad about this. Your reaction, I mean, not about him dying.
I was in one of the worse depressive cycles of my life and just starting to come out of it when Robin Williams committed suicide. He'd always been a part of my life, either from all the hilarious kids movies he did in the 90s to growing up watching Nick at Nite reruns at my grandparents' house to listening to his standup on college roadtrips.
And somehow my dumb garbage depression brain latched onto the idea that he meant so much to so many people and so it just wasn't right or fair that I got better and he did not. You'd think my favorite uncle died by the way I reacted and it made no sense to anyone except my husband, who listened to me ramble about it for a month.
Feel your feelings. They're the thing that make us human, even when they're weird or embarrassing or other people don't get it. It's okay.
@silverfox This is rough. This is really rough, and I want you to take what I'm about to say as reassurance, not dismissal of how shitty this is:
We are in the middle of a pandemic. Our job to keep our people -- our kids, our families, our friends, our students, our patients -- alive right now. Everything beyond that is extra.
We can aspire to more. We should aspire to more.
But the definition of 'okay' is radically different than it was a year ago. All any of us can do is our best, acknowledging that our best is going to fall far short of 'normal' for the foreseeable future.
@tributary See, all of that sounds entirely reasonable to me. I don't mind if a class is hard work. I don't mind if a professor is a harsh grader. I don't even mind all that much if a professor is almost entirely inflexible.
I do mind when professors don't communicate their expectations, put it on students to guess what it is they want, and then punish their students for guessing incorrectly.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE, JUST TELL US WHAT YOU WANT.
@auspice said in The Work Thread:
@aria said in The Work Thread:
@ganymede goddammit, let me be excited about one thing in 2020
have the kind of confetti you won't find in your bra three days later
EMERGENCY confetti.
....Well, cool. Looks like I'm reporting my manager's immediate peer on our sister team for using a racial slur in writing, in front of two people that it would apply to, and hope that HR keeps it anonymous.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ME.
So I haven't taken a French class in, like, fifteen years but please excuse me while I go cry in a corner.
Also, if you're learning French and want to sign up, you can do so here.
Someone called me brave today.
I think they mean "too pissed off to know when to keep my mouth shut", but I'll take it.
I just bought concert tickets for the first time in well over a year and am completely losing my shit.
I swear by all that is holy and all that is profane, it is going to take every ounce of willpower that I have not to straight up murder my teammates for an MBA project.
Being as I majored in English for undergrad and literally just accepted a job whose business jargon title translates into "I'm going to write change communications for tech bros who speak beep-boop fluently but don't know when to use capital letters", I volunteered to act as editor and proofreader for everyone else in the group.
After reviewing, editing, and standardizing the entire piece, I uploaded it only to discover....
Two of my teammates just straight up copied shit from the internet. Not even a sentence. I mean entire paragraphs slightly adjusted with the liberal use of a thesaurus.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, DUDES?
You had to write all of three paragraphs each. That's it! You had a whole week to do it! It didn't even need to be written well. It just needed to either not be copied or have links dumped into the appropriate areas so I could create the citations for you.
If I hadn't read the SafeAssign originality report, we would all be failing this assignment at the very, very least.
<just gonna leave this here>
@crawfish said in Crafting Thread Part ?:
@aria I made her a golden tabby with dark points.
Eta and black eyes.
Yeah, her description of black hair and black eyes really does not lend itself to cat paintings.
This should probably be moved to the Politics forum more than anything else, but there's several pages of posts here that I can't do that with.
But to strip it down to it's very core:
No. It would not be far far far far right, because as I said above, we don't really have left-wing parties in the United States, and so almost every bit of familiarity we have with any sort of libertarian politics is with what are generally extreme right views.
In a very, very general sense, anarcho-syndicalism posits that the state as it exists now serves only one purpose -- the protection of private property, to the privilege of the very, very few. This focuses particularly on capital goods, aka "the means of production" for goods and services. The other two kinds of producer goods are land and labor. The latter is especially important in anarcho-syndicalism because it essentially and fundamentally connects economic activity with political activity and as much direct action on behalf of labor (aka, workers) wherever possible.
The classic example of this is the worker's union. Anarcho-syndicalism is very, very, very pro-union and sees the ideal economic state as one where a series of union-managed workplaces send delegates up the chain in increasingly high-level structures until you reach the federation level. Here's a handy-dandy chart I stole from Wikipedia.
Long story short, it posits that the people closest to an issue are the ones that know it best and should have the greatest say over how it's managed and how resources are allocated.
I should note that anarcho-syndicalism is extremely focused on labor to the exclusion of almost all else, though, so if you're interested in broader anarchic movements, you might want to consider green syndicalism (syndicalism + environmentalism) and anarcho-socialism, which quite closely related but includes other concerns like individual freedoms.
@greenflashlight said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@ortallus said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I honestly don't know much about anarcho-syndacalist, but wouldn't anarchy, technically, be the extreme far far far FAR right? Absolutely no governmental regulation?
No, anarchy isn't about no government regulation. It's about power structures being arranged horizontally rather than vertically because vertical power creates hierarchies that are inherently exploitative. Most anarchists I've been exposed to want a democratic government, but a directly democratic one instead of a representative one and one in which any official can be removed from power at any moment by a simple vote.
^ This. Anarchism is not The Purge: Now in 24/7 Mode! despite a bunch of fearmongers trying to make everyone think it is. It's essentially "direct power over others turns people into assholes" made into political theory.
Also:
PS - If you're pro-choice on the basis of "it's not my business what people do with their own bodies" or pro-gay marriage on the basis "the government shouldn't get a say in who you love, as long as everyone is consenting freely".....
SURPRISE!
You have some left-wing libertarian social values. It's just that no one told you that because we usually associate the word libertarian with survivalist crazies who are like "Imma storm and squat on federal park land as a stand against the gubbament, because that sounds like a good idea. Send snicky-snacks, please."
@mietze said in RL things I love:
I'm fully vaxed. I wear a mask to put other people at ease and because I still do not want to potentially get it even if I've got some protection against the worst illness and also for the comfort of others. I don't really care about wearing one.
^ This. I've been fully vaccinated since the end of March, since health reasons put me in Group 1B. I also still wear a mask for the sake of other people and not freaking them out/encouraging unvaccinated anti-maskers in their bullshit.
It's proven quite effective in chiming in to support employees in public places who ask people to put one on or wear it properly.
@arkandel In our case, they've decided that pretty much everyone except for people processing customer transactions can WFH two days a week. And for those folks processing customer transactions, the speed of them is mandated by federal regulations that were temporarily loosened due to the pandemic. That one is really not our call. Home internet simply cannot support the infrastructure required to meet those restrictions once they're restored.
The trouble is, they've decided that everyone on the hybrid schedule is going to be in the office and working from home on the same days.
Our space issue isn't going to get any better because we're going to need the exact same number of desks for our employees. Our parking and traffic issue isn't going to get better because all the same people will be on campus on all the same days. Our conference room issue, which has been a problem at least since I started in 2014, is actually going to get worse because people will not be shifting to Teams meetings despite our increasing number of offices globally. They're going to try to cram five days of in-person meetings into three days of conference room availability. Meanwhile, because we own the bulk of our buildings (at least in our US offices), that means that for the other two days of the week.... most of campus is just going to be sitting largely empty, costing us money to operate for the very (comparatively) small number of people on campus.
For people at my company who have both spouses employed there -- which is not unusual, as we have over 15,000 employees -- family care is going to get harder rather than easier because both people will have to be in the office on the same days. Including people in departments who already had customized schedules that will now have them overridden, even if those arrangements have been in place for years. I know at least one couple whose family is completely fucked now because of the shifts his wife works as a nurse really needing the schedule he'd had so their young children aren't left alone for two hours every morning, which just isn't an option at their ages.
It's especially aggravating given the fact that our space issues had necessitated that entire departments in certain areas work on a 3/2 model already, so it's been proven that with a rare few exceptions due to the nature of certain jobs we can manage just fine when employees pick their days with manager approval. Is it harder to keep track of in the paperwork? Yeah. But it works, we know it works, and because of the allotted flexibility, most of our employees are more than happy to shift their home lives around without any complaint or excuses for big lifts that actually need them, if you just give them a little warning. And for the departments that were used to it, there was absolutely no stigma associated with attending meetings remotely because literally everyone does it. It was just a question of which meetings based on which day they were booked, which actually made them easier to get on the books.
Whose stupid "solution" was this?!
