MetaFilter

Racists (like people who are sexist, transphobic, abelist, ect) don't think there's anything wrong with their belief system. To them, it's a just, kind, "natural" and logical way to understand the world, and if everyone would just accept their proper place in the hierarchy, all would be well. By no accident, the correct place in the hierarchy for "them" is below the person in question.

There's a lot of truth in what you say, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ursula Hitler at 2:18 PM on January 17, 2024

In the end it comes down to being a “boy’s club” which I mean in a way that says there’s a clique that keeps you in or out.

There must be in-groups whom HR protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom HR binds but does not protect.
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 11:35 PM on January 1, 2024

An inverse trolley problem

A trolley opportunity!
posted to MetaFilter by Saxon Kane at 8:46 AM on December 7, 2023

The challenge, maybe it’s an imperative, is to find ways to save ourselves collectively, to throw off the “pretense of self-sufficiency” and confess, without shame or recrimination, that we need one another.

Oh, twaddle.

Play me that tune again when you're almost sixty, have a painful and embarrassing chronic disease which dovetails nicely with your social anxiety, and you're broke. See how many friends you have left after... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MrVisible at 6:47 PM on November 24, 2023

ThatCanadianGirl: ...retirement planning is all about predicting the future.

Which reminds me: making every one of us manage our own retirement savings was a cruel trick, because if we were very good at it, investing would be our damn job already.
posted to MetaFilter by wenestvedt at 12:21 PM on November 20, 2023

it's a whole hell of a lot to learn for a job that probably pays minimum wage

You can spot the people in this thread who've never worked retail or food service.

Y'all, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. There is only undervalued and underappreciated labour. These jobs are hard and they take real skill to learn and do well.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 4:43 AM on November 11, 2023

I have to reboot it every 2 weeks because it just stops working.

See, all you need now is a smart switch that is programmed to reset every 2 weeks.
posted to MetaFilter by jzb at 12:31 PM on November 7, 2023

Nothing to keep everyone from having a robot tailor in their closets

Yes, but if you want a really good one, you'll have to learn a foreign language - German for instance; a lot of really cute ones come from over there.
posted to MetaFilter by Cardinal Fang at 4:56 PM on November 3, 2023

Having lots of churn means your entire corporate life is just a series of instances of bankruptcy litigation. Just because your restaurant dreams only lasted two years doesn't mean your 5+ year lease is going to get any shorter.

NYC has a solution to this. Or I should say, most retail storefront landlords in NYC have a solution to this, as that is who I've dealt with in the past 25 years so that's the only aspect of commercial leasing I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by newpotato at 4:07 AM on November 2, 2023

Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.— Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of the Wilderness

posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 6:51 PM on October 25, 2023

they'll push to declare a "national gun."

Of course it’s the AR-15. Honestly as the Mass shooters choice it SHOULD be the national gun.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:03 AM on October 25, 2023

Good god, 40 is young. Not to be an aged grouch (although I am), but no 40-year-old has any business whatsoever talking about the actual experience of old age.

Also -- speaking as someone who recently turned 70, the physical downsides (word chosen as tactful alternative to "horror show") of aging have nothing to do with the kinds of things that can be addressed with adornment, laser hair removal, Botox, or other aesthetic intervention. It... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kat Allison at 4:34 PM on October 15, 2023

I think a lot of people should reconsider trade school.

Nobody ever says this to rich kids. It’s only poor folks who get pushed to trade school.
posted to MetaFilter by hydropsyche at 10:27 AM on October 14, 2023

And then a couple years later they move a step up, now boasting a decade or so of political experience. And so on.

And that's how you get people like Lauren Boebert in Congress - people starting in small-stakes elections years ago and working their way up.

Except that's wrong. Lauren Boebert never held office before being elected to Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene didn't work her way up, she was also elected to Congress... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 5:20 AM on October 11, 2023

The irony of a spider supposedly having the most deadly poison in the world but a bite too feeble to deliver that poison is what gives the myth such long legs.
posted to MetaFilter by pracowity at 6:34 AM on October 8, 2023

My memory of preppy clothing is mounting a fierce resistance to it. Preppy clothes were what my mother wanted me to wear, rather than shredded jeans and holey t-shirts.

I feel this. I didn't really know how I was dressing, but I viscerally understood who I was being asked to dress like.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 5:49 AM on September 25, 2023

i have in one of my less hinged moments — i was on the train back from a punishingly long work shift — responded to someone speakerphoning next to me by playing 100 gecs as loud as possible on my phone's speaker.
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:59 AM on September 25, 2023

If only employees actually received that “per employee” profit as our salaries and paychecks!

And who's going to bell that cat? Government isn't going to do it for you, even though they supposedly represent you. You're there to mark a piece of paper and put it into a box, after that there's not much use for you, is there?

That lack of representation creates a vicious cycle where you can't improve your material lot but you can... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kingdead at 7:42 AM on September 21, 2023

tbh I think people like Brand have a vested interest in making people believe that it is all men (or at least, all men with the opportunity), since it makes their behavior seem inevitable
posted to MetaFilter by BungaDunga at 1:05 PM on September 17, 2023

Hey, we have a teacher shortage, what's the best solution? Oh, we should drive more of them away then? Perfect!

I mean... it is perfect, it's exactly what they want, for the public school system to collapse utterly and leave them free to lock their kids away (conveniently pulling their wives out of the workforce) and fill them with garbage and fascism at home.
posted to MetaFilter by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:15 PM on September 12, 2023

Also -- if you're a "leader" and you have no fucking idea how the people in your organization are doing without a generic survey, you're a shitty leader.
posted to MetaFilter by Ickster at 11:04 AM on September 10, 2023

Failure is something you want to tempt. You should court it the way the bullfighter courts the bull.

Oh, the beauty and the pain of being a kinesthetic learner. I almost always learn by doing and failing, but I also learn by reading. And I sometimes wonder if that's because I grew up as kind of a lonely, alienated kid whose parents didn't really show her how to do much. They had a "set it and forget it" parenting style, so I had to rely on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by nightrecordings at 5:49 AM on September 5, 2023

In some situations, when you talk to unhoused people, they are in a situation where, eg, lots of people will give them or buy them food but no one will give them cash. (Small bills are, of course, different from enough money to really address your problems.) Obviously if you want to help someone and they need food or want you to buy them something, you should, but otherwise give people some money. Save your small bills, set a budget for the month and give it out til it's gone, even if it's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 6:22 AM on September 1, 2023

Sam Kinison screaming!!!!!!!!1
posted to MetaFilter by wmo at 2:28 PM on August 31, 2023

The problem here is that "biting the ankles" of large corportations can clog our public courts and prevent more important lawsuits from occurring expediently.

I presume you are out every morning in front of the SDNY or Delaware Chancery protesting the obscene waste of judicial resources represented by many of the yearslong lawsuits between corporations, then?

When I hear things like this, I can't decide whether the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 1:12 PM on August 31, 2023

I support anyone taking the time to bite at the ankles of a large corporation. Maybe if we bothered about even the little things we let them get away with, we take away a bit of their power. We all know it advertising is fake and therefore we should... allow it to go on unchecked? I disagree. Corporations deserve nuisances, they're are nuisance enough to the public, aren't they?
Enough barnacles on a boat are a problem. Be a barnacle on the side of a cooperate vessel today!
posted to MetaFilter by wellifyouinsist at 12:39 PM on August 31, 2023

It echos Messi's celebration where he kissed the cup.

Women being treated the same as an object is something one or two of us has objected to over the years, though
posted to MetaFilter by trig at 11:18 AM on August 26, 2023

Donald Trump will never see your MetaFilter comments about his weight.

But plenty of fat MeFites will.
posted to MetaFilter by box at 3:20 PM on August 25, 2023

The political problem with "fixing" the housing crisis is that it'll destroy vast amounts of middle class homeowner "wealth" by reducing property values (or even just reducing the rate at which they are rising) and I'm not sure how you do that in a system calibrated to value property rights über alles.

As someone who just saw his property value (and property taxes) skyrocket purely due to market bullshit, I would be perfectly... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by NoxAeternum at 9:13 AM on August 18, 2023

To avoid abusing the edit button: I do realize that what Brooks is actually referring to is the deterioration of standards of general public civility we've witnessed since at least the mid 2010s, but I maintain that the lower incidence of public freakouts in years past was not evidence of a kinder or less fundamentally violent society. Previously comfortable whites are finally being subjected to the sort of economic and public-heath conditions that oppressed groups have borne up under--which we,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peakes at 4:06 PM on August 14, 2023

How does this preserve your privacy? You're still being tracked, you're just turning off the feature where the tracking data is actually used for your benefit.
posted to MetaFilter by zixyer at 9:31 AM on August 5, 2023

goddamn y'all must we constantly make the world a sour and joyless place of endless complaint about everything.

critical analysis is only sour and joyless if you tie your inherent self worth or identity to the products you consume

as an immigrant raised in a very secular househould, I've always found it odd how closely tied to peoples identities that branding and marketing was. I really enjoy and find plenty of dopamine... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by paimapi at 10:51 AM on July 25, 2023

Heck with Terry Gross. GWAR is the national treasure.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 9:11 AM on July 17, 2023

Uh, what?!?
Terry Gross totally skeeves me out. The massive lack of empathy and bourgeois gawking is disgusting. Not that I listen to NPR anymore, but if I hear her voice, I either change the channel or leave the room.

I don't get it.
posted to MetaFilter by garbhoch at 8:45 AM on July 17, 2023

The New York Times' habit of always using an honorific when mentioning people tends to feel old-fashioned and annoying to me, but I will say that seeing the victims' names repeated as "Ms. Costello, Ms. Mack, Ms. Barnes, Ms. Watermann, Ms. Barthelemy," felt really good to me.
posted to MetaFilter by Well I never at 12:51 PM on July 17, 2023

He got more votes than anyone else in history

I'm amazed that anyone offers this useless data point as though it actually means anything. The US population was greater than it had ever been in 2020, voter turnout was therefore higher in total numbers because there were more people to vote. "More votes than anyone in history" is thus not actually impressive to anyone who... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:54 AM on June 30, 2023

Biden can't do anything about it while staying with in the bounds of respectability—and like it or not, he was elected because we all knew he'd stay within those bounds. It's not his job. You want a less shitty world? Persuade people in all those empty white states that it's what they want. And no, "loud and weird" is not going to do that. The system sucks, but "revolution" is unattainable and would both get hundreds of thousands of people killed and also provoke a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MisantropicPainforest at 8:59 AM on June 30, 2023

Yep, it's the same "hide your queers, the normies will get upset" bullshit that gets trotted out every time this happens.
posted to MetaFilter by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:51 AM on June 30, 2023

Biden can't do anything about it while staying with in the bounds of respectability—and like it or not, he was elected because we all knew he'd stay within those bounds. It's not his job. You want a less shitty world? Persuade people in all those empty white states that it's what they want. And no, "loud and weird" is not going to do that. The system sucks, but "revolution" is unattainable and would both get hundreds of thousands of people killed and also provoke a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by N8yskates at 8:48 AM on June 30, 2023

I was told with breathless enthusiasm by every authority figure in my life that I was investing in my future. I'm 35 years old and I'm tired out y'all.

Yeah I'd like any acknowledgement that my generation was financially defrauded by literal propaganda.
posted to MetaFilter by wellifyouinsist at 8:44 AM on June 30, 2023

Slowing turning a dial marked “collapse of democracy” and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:19 AM on June 27, 2023

Oh frog, can't we just get the fuck beyond Thunderdumb?
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:47 PM on June 23, 2023

I don't like that this proposed combat might act as a male bonding ritual for these two billionaires. I'd rather they just continue as they are, without resolving any of their differences or lessening their mutual disrespect.
posted to MetaFilter by otsebyatina at 1:25 PM on June 23, 2023

A new generation is going to learn to hate CD jewel cases.
posted to MetaFilter by tomcooke at 8:46 AM on June 21, 2023

Does everything have to have a philosophy these days?
posted to MetaFilter by DeepSeaHaggis at 9:34 PM on June 20, 2023

Getting to go there every work day would make it even better.

Specifically for Boulder, houses average around $1M. Which means most of us would get to join the other 20k to 60k daily commuters into and out of Boulder. Having spent one and a half hours of my life doing that every day, 6 days a week, for 12 years, I'll take working from my living room.
posted to MetaFilter by SunSnork at 7:03 PM on June 18, 2023

Like royalty, commissioning chateaus or palaces and getting bored with them halfway through
posted to MetaFilter by Countess Elena at 10:07 AM on June 18, 2023

One clear evening, on a rooftop in Bali, Mr. Davies took shrooms with a group of crypto colleagues. “You look at the stars, and the stars are just, like, moving,” he recalled over dinner last month at a seafood restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, where he was vacationing with his wife and two young daughters. “You touch the grass, and it feels, like, not like normal grass.”

what a waste of shrooms.
posted to MetaFilter by ZaphodB at 9:31 AM on June 10, 2023

No they haven't. I mean, very exciting if true, but it's never true. I too want to believe, sort of, because if aliens can make anything that we would recognize as "craft" they might be, like, the bad kind of aliens.

If it's the alien graduate students come to remove the memory blocks that enable me to live among humans without going mad and then take me back home, that's different.
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 8:16 PM on June 5, 2023

People becoming more conservative this is a function of whether they have status and wealth in property to protect, and a much smaller proportion of millennials have those things compared with boomers and Gen Xers at the same age.

To be more specific, Xers have less wealth and property than boomers, millennials have less than Xers, and zoomers have less than millennials.

As an Xer, I feel like what I have in common with the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artifice_Eternity at 12:09 PM on June 5, 2023