Not that we need to open this can of worms here, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that “vanilla” has become a term used to mean plain, boring, sheltered, standard, mediocre, underwhelming, basic, and uninteresting.

Vanilla is an amazing flavor that comes from orchids that must be hand pollinated to cultivate at scale, and has a long and interesting history. It’s the second most valuable spice after saffron.

Just feels wrong to use that as a synonym for bland and blah.

Most jobs like that, or really any pay scheme other than piece work or an hourly wage usually has the process of:

1. You can take as much PTO as you like.
2. You can take as much PTO as you like…provided you get all your work done.
3. You work like a dog, get all your work done, and take time off.
4. Since you were able to get everything done and have time left over to not work, your boss increases your workload, so now you have to work like a dog, all the time, or else you’ll never get everything done.

It’s like playing chess, and while the other player can’t change the rules as they go, but a condition for playing with them is that they get two moves every turn.

Fucking cormorants…they kill lots of fish that they can’t even eat, plus a ton of fish that they do eat…and they’re federally protected.

My thought is more along the lines of, “Regardless of his talent level, is this really the kind of person that his country wants representing them on the world stage?”

Like, okay even if he’s the absolute best by an order of magnitude…if he were from my country, I’d rather lose every match than win on the talents of someone like that.

legions of career bureaucrats who run federal departments get replaced with Trump loyalists.

For many of those bureaucracies, this is absolutely foreseen and intentional.

See…while bureaucracies often get a bad rap for being slow and inefficient, there’s often simply no (superior) alternative. It’s like how everyone bitches that it takes so long to get from point A to point B on the interstate, but taking an alternate route that avoids it takes even longer.

And while they may be frustrating, they’re usually run by capable people in the federal government. The lazy federal workers that the civil service is known for do exist, but they don’t typically rise to the level of making their bureaucracy work or not work, they’re low to mid level functionaries who’ve found a niche where their team will carry them and pick up their slack without creating a department-sized blip on the radar of any high level official.

These P2025 people…and MAGA Republicans in general…are trying to set up a win-win for themselves with this tactic: either they replace bureaucrats with loyalists and turn it into a reward system they can use to shore up support…or they remove enough pieces of the Jenga tower that it collapses under its own weight, proving their accusations that these agencies are dysfunctional, and using it as a flashpoint to push to eliminate these agencies and privatize the functions they performed…both allowing them to turn that service into a profit source for friends while also freeing up those tax dollars for their own purposes. And in the process, the American taxpayer gets sold down river to an organization looking to charge as much as the market will bear for the services that were once funded through taxes. The people will still pay the taxes, of course… they’ll just get less in return for them and have to pay more of their wages to get the same or worse services.

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.

I think it’s mostly because it brings in money and for whatever reason, the community seems to be just fine with it, even if they don’t participate or understand it, so from the furry side, they’ve found a city happy to have them, and from the city side, they like the economic boost, so if everyone’s happy, why change?

Lemmy doesn’t want to hear it, but you’re correct.

Democrats want Biden to drop out because they don’t believe he can beat Trump.

To this point: for those who think that, do they think anyone else realistically could, at this point, other than Biden?

While I’m not thrilled with his chances, I will say that if he wasn’t to be the nominee, that decision needed to happen in 2021. At this point, I do believe that statistically, he’s got better odds than anyone else, so regardless of his debate or mental state, he’s our guy.

Well said on all counts.

Reddit was never perfect, but in my 12+ years there, it was never as bad as Lemmy has been the entire time I’ve been here.

Basically I’m only still active here because Reddit’s mobile app is such trash and Lemmy is more convenient to browse from a phone.

Honestly I’m not on the spectrum at all (that I know of) and your SO’s half of those exchanges sounds utterly exhausting.

Like, in their shoes, I’d probably just start sharing less and less about how I feel, especially when I’m not feeling well, specifically because I wouldn’t want to have to play 20 questions every time until you finally gave up on the analysis.

Like, I totally get that you’re just trying to help because you love them…but maybe you could simplify the process (and cut to the chase and give them some more agency) simply by saying something like “Ugh, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. Is there anything I can do for you?”

That lets them express their own thoughts/feelings/desires without having to pass a gauntlet of questions.

Again, I totally get that you mean well (I end up on your side of this exchange whenever my own SO isn’t feeling well…you just want to fix it for them), but I’ve also learned by time and experience that often my best move is to offer help, and if the answer is just needing some time and quiet, I just tell my SO what I’ll be doing nearby (but not up in their business) and if they need anything at all, just let me know and I’m happy to help.

Or it has little to do with emotions at all and more to do with physical changes based on environment.

And the middle east and their known long history of free expression.

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

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.

I’m not even sure these GOP reps are getting a dime from Russia.

More likely: they’re not getting anything from Russia, but their god-emperor Donny sure is, and he’s also got a vendetta against Ukraine after the whole Biden investigation debacle, so he’s using his inexplicable political clout within the party to pressure them into doing his bidding, with the penalty for falling to do so being that he says bad things about them, costing them an election.

Come for the spite toward Reddit, stay for the lack of content and somehow even worse community!

Yeah anytime I’m in too good of a mood and need to be infuriated, I know I can always read about the aftermath of WW2 and the fates of so many nazis and how so very few of them faced any sort of actual justice, let alone anything remotely proportional to their actions.

If gay would mean many things, the word would be useless.

Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s definitely why there aren’t any words at all in the entire English language that have more than one strictly defined meaning, and that meaning has never, ever changed.