I’d say that your argument describes the total opposite of the reality of the situation.

By your rationale, I suppose I could have a position as my personal assistant, where the assistant runs all of my errands and takes all my calls and drives me everywhere…all for $30 per month.

I’m willing to wait as long as it takes to find the right person for this exciting opportunity (in the meantime I’ll handle my own mundane shit) but by your theory, because the position exists, then someone out there is willing to work for that wage!

If the position exists at that wage, then someone is willing to work at that wage.

You sound like a company I interviewed with years ago, who, straight-faced advertised a position they were trying to fill for a skilled technical professional at the mid-to-low end of a competitive salary 6 or 7 years ago…but that was mid to low based on a 40 hour work week and they were asking for 45 minimum, with mandatory overtime bumping that number to 55-60 per week for about half the time. And oh by the way, to put in that OT, you were required to work it when other members of your team were on site as well, so most teams just always planned to put in at least a half day every Saturday if not a full day, if not some OT as well. Some teams also came in Sunday.

I explained to them that breaking it down by the hour, they were offering a pay cut to anyone with the skills they demanded, not to mention the obliteration of anything resembling work-life balance…and ended the interview prematurely.

Now I’m job hunting again since I want to relocate and going to switch to remote work full time, and I see they’re still posting that same job to the various sites.

So I guess the fact that they’re still looking, for most of a decade, means that someone out there is willing to work for that ridiculous wage and schedule?

And I told you why…and where in case you were interested.

Why does the executive branch have any say over the judicial branch?

That would be the Constitution.

I believe Article II, Section 2.

Israel-Gaza conflict aside…what makes you unhappy about voting for him?

I have to admit that I wasn’t thrilled about voting for him in 2020, but I also have to admit that in the intervening years he has at the very least met my expectations in most areas, and shockingly, he’s exceeded them in a few areas.

As I get older, I’ve learned from experience to temper my expectations in a president, and with those adjusted expectations, I am surprised to find myself feeling better about voting for Biden in 2024 than I did four years ago.

I don’t disagree…but the party-line Democrats have been telling progressives exactly that since the Clinton administration.

Again, to be clear: I’m happily voting Biden this November, but the Democratic party has become very good at doing just enough to keep their core loyal while also doing nowhere near enough to keep the country out of constant existential peril, effectively cultivating that crisis as a (pardon the pun) trump card that they then use to tell progressives “what you want is less important than the current crisis! Just go along with us in this election and we pinky swear to do more for your causes!”.

They know if they move left they’ll be displaced by a combination of progressive candidates and centrists, so they have basically adopted the strategy of keeping the right just dangerous enough to be credible while keeping their left flank secured with a drip feed of snail’s pace “progress”.

Isn’t she that crazy woman that ran the bakery with her criminal husband?

Not to mention the entire premise of the post being, essentially, “I don’t approve of the entertainment my sibling chooses to consume. Please make suggestions for me as to other entertainment that I can then use to regulate said adult sibling, removing their entertainment that I don’t like and forcing them to consume something I find more acceptable.”

Like…I think Rogan’s whole thing is stupid and most I’ve talked to who like his stuff are similarly ridiculous…but to go from that to full out “I plan to take it away from them and force them to do something I find more acceptable” is really quite a leap.

Missing a few colors for a small patch of Philadelphia-region “youse” and Pittsburgh-region “yinz”.

I don’t.

And she’s also wildly incompetent and biased, with this just being the latest in a long string of obvious moves to help him.

They should have gone after the school too; that’s horrible!

Even when that person is putting others at risk, both directly and indirectly?

I mean…if some anti-vaxxer survives a bout with covid only to spread it to one of your immunocompromised loved ones, who isn’t so lucky and dies from it?

In that hypothetical, harsh as it may sound, I’d much rather the one with agency to take preventative measures and chose not to take them be the one to suffer the consequences of their selfish inaction and poor decisions.

I’m not saying they deserve to die, I’m just looking at it from the angle of how this person will use the life they’ve managed to hang onto and how they’ll negatively impact society and the people around them with the time they have.

I don’t disagree, but that bigger picture sentiment isn’t keeping the lights on at Joe’s house.

For the record: I am completely against the notion that we should stifle technical progress to preserve jobs and the status quo, but I just also feel it’s something that we owe it to ourselves as a society to manage that issue alongside the progress so nobody gets left behind.

That’s how we ended up with the solidly blue rust belt turning very purple over the past 50 years, and a state of coal miners like West Virginia becoming blood red.

Sure, but I’d imagine that Joe the Bricklayer may have a slightly different reaction when you tell him the exciting news that he doesn’t have to lay bricks anymore because a robot can do it.

Yeah that was a persistent “it’s just generally known” type of thing in the area where I grew up.

Yep, I had a bully in elementary school and my mom tried to work with the system of teachers, principal, admin, etc. for months, and nothing at all was ever done about it.

Finally when the bullying escalated to physical levels and started to impact my personality outside of school, my parents basically told me that while I might still get in trouble at school, they wouldn’t be upset with me at home if I did decide to stand up to the kid. They stressed to me the fine line between standing up for yourself and becoming a bully yourself, and sent me on my way.

A few days later, my bully found me at lunch and started messing with me. Pushing over my stack of booking, taking some food off my tray…I didn’t do anything until he tried to push me out of my seat then it was kind of blurry, but basically I just took a swing at him and knocked him back out of his seat and he hit his head against the wall and started crying.

I did get in some trouble at school but nothing too bad (especially once Mom was called in and she explained how if they tried to suspend me, she’d put them on blast for how they’d ignored the situation for so long), and that kid was nice as pie to me for the rest of our schooling.

Engine breaking destroys the engine.

Unfortunate typo.

This is a good point, although maybe I’m just unlucky, but quite a few times over the years, I’ve encountered friends, and friends of friends, who were vegetarian or vegan and seemed to make a primary hobby out of shoe-horning that information into any and every conversation they could. And every time, it was very deliberately and openly presented in a way to praise themselves and demonize anyone not like them.

Not only is food very foundational, as you’ve said, but I also strongly feel that a reason this particular set of -isms is such a lightning rod is because (perhaps due in large part to that foundational aspect of food in society), it seems like vegetarianism and veganism very much becomes who someone is, as opposed to simply describing an aspect of their lifestyle.

Not only that, but it becomes a part of their Identity in a way that frequently impacts the people around them.

So someone is a Catholic. That’s cool. I’m not one and I might have my issues with the Catholic church, but unless they’re extremely devout, chances are, their Catholicism is more “how they worship” and less “who they are” in everyday interaction. It just isn’t likely to affect me, and as such I’m much less likely to really care. As such, I’m cool with Catholics. Add to that: most Catholic people aren’t painting their religious belief in superiority either overtly or implicitly these days. They’re just going to mass on Sunday and doing their thing.

On the other hand, someone is vegan. That’s also cool. I might have preferences and a lifestyle that conflicts with their views and vice versa but we can coexist, and our preferences on what to eat won’t ever lead to conflict between us, right? Well…if they’re a coworker…or a member of a friend group, now any and every time that group of people wants to eat, that foundational aspect of society, now the group must accommodate that -ism which they don’t share. And that’s probably fine for everyone in the group sometimes…and some of the group all the time…but generally speaking, looking at all of the group, all of the time, that’s statistically likely to eventually rankle at least a few people. Then, depending on the individual, there’s a very real chance that they eat with this group, some of which may already be annoyed by having their food options limited by the choices of this individual…and on top of it, that individual takes that opportunity to make a comment that invokes morality into the situation…and it should come as little surprise that this type of person gets a generalized negative reputation.

If you’d like to break the stereotype of insufferable vegans, you might consider starting that process by not being one.