Does this mean $Melania is worth more than $Trump? There’ll be ketchup on the walls of the Whitehouse today!

A woman abuses a boy and the first thing you do is use it as a gotcha moment against… who, exactly? Anyone saying all men or only men, rhetorically, expect you to know if you aren’t part of the problem. So, why so defensive? Just relax, man. No one here was accusing you of anything.

That’s all fair. We still vacation, although they are sanitized “family” vacations for the most part. Plus we aren’t the kind of people who want to be tooling about foreign countries without a curated experience. Take us to your beaches, cuisine, alcohol, and cultural artifacts.

You have a lot of work flexibility for those vacations. I can work remotely, but usually I’m not allowed to take my equipment out of the country to do so. My wife has a lot less flexibility. So we are limited by time more than anything else. We live modestly and I make a good living for the cost of living here. Kids would certainly put a damper on that lifestyle, but in our case, they aren’t holding us back.

Overpopulation is a whole other thing, of course. Looks to me like we’re headed toward another global conflict or pandemic that might resolve that in part. Not saying that’s a good thing, but I think life has a way of correcting imbalance whether you do it voluntarily or not. I certainly don’t want my kids to have to live through that, but like most other things, that’s out of my control and I can only help where I can and hope for the best.

Bluesky is “fine” if what you want is Twitter without [as much] fascism. It’s a better user experience than Mastodon. The average user doesn’t care about federation and all the rough edges where you have to understand technical details in order to understand what’s going on is frustrating for them.

I hope Mastodon learns some lessons from Bluesky (curated follow/block lists, and curated feed algorithms) but I still hope federation is the future. Bluesky will eventually enshittify because it has financial backers who want a return and could give a fuck about uses or ethics. But for the time being it’s a good platform, and perhaps more importantly the best shot at breaking Twitter, and I will strategically support it while it remains a good alternative.

Rednote I have no idea about. Not happy about Chinese propaganda and censorship, but not any happier about right-wing American propaganda and censorship, so fuck it. I haven’t made an account yet but I might at some point. TikTok was by far the best algorithm at delivering what I want to see in the moment, and as I only spent a handful of minutes a day on TikTok on average, that’s really valuable.

Insta is useless as you seem to have to curate your feed to only be a single thing. Plus, fuck Meta in the ear. So if Rednote gets the content creators and the algorithm, I’ll probably check it out eventually.

Eh, I’ve got five kids and they run the gamut from incredibly cool to assholes. One is pretty accomplished professionally and made sure to find ways for both her dad and me (step-dad) in her wedding. Another went no contact over the divorce/remarriage of her mom. Another has struggled with addiction and mental health, but has overcome the former at least and recently graduated and is working as a nurse. The last two are still at home and one has emotional issues and some autism and weaponized incompetence, the other is hard working and responsible and has drive balanced with emotional maturity (though hormones are kicking in so…)

In my opinion, there is too much emphasis on being perfect parents and having perfect kids leading perfect lives. We love them all and make sure they know it. We try to set healthy boundaries and allow them the same. But at the end of the day, they are people and they are going to struggle and much of that is out of our control beyond being here with advice and help in times of crisis.

And even the assholes are pretty cool in their own right. Not fun to parent, but still people who I think are great to have in your life.

I do occasionally lament the path not taken, but if I didn’t have kids this would be the path I lament. (Probably just a smaller house and nicer vacations.)

I’m not trying to convince you, but I want to put in a word as a parent of assholes who sometimes daydreams about where my life might be without kids. It was a good decision for me. And if I didn’t have them to be accountable to, my depression might well have gotten hold of me in a moment of weakness and I wouldn’t be here to write this. My kids don’t make me happy (well, sometimes) and it’s not their job to, but I’m very glad I had them.

Probably pays really well. Well enough to forget your conscience.

Everything’s good so far, I appreciate it.

They are student loans that the parents take out for their kids, yeah. Because they can’t lend kids enough foot their own bill.

When you sign up for college, loans for the student and parent are the default assumption. We had one kid so far go to college, two more didn’t, and two more are a few years away from that. We couldn’t afford 150k in debt (that’s nearly what my house cost!) to take out loans for all of them equally, so we had to tell them we wouldn’t help any of them.

What you paid for university is less than what my step-son, who recently graduated with a nursing degree, pays every month in student loans, and a huge chunk of his college was paid by his dad’s military service.

This wouldn’t be possible without a bunch of people already working for the new administration over the current one. I’m deeply concerned about how quickly and efficiently they are doing things—the opposite of the incompetence that was the hallmark of his first administration.

It’s just assumed we’re going to take loans out for our kids. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, no, I can’t afford that shit either.

Ah that’s different. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone do that, but certainly more than a few cutting through parking lots in a similar way and pissing people off.

That’s what I mean. Their own native search that only searches Reddit. I’m not saying it would be great, just better than Google for many uses cases.

This isn’t me talking up Reddit—I haven’t been back in over a year. This is me trashing Google.

I was more going for if he wants to play the fool, I’ll choose to believe him.

I could see the EU backing down a few years ago, but these days they have watered down any actual advantage in search by filling their results with ads and low quality content. Not that I use Reddit any more, but a good Reddit search engine would probably be better for a lot of use cases.

“Like, I think, like, the CFPB, like, this financial I don’t even know what it stands for. It’s the, it’s the financial organization, that Elizabeth Warren had set up. And it’s basically like, we’re not a bank.

I’ve always known he was a slimy toadie, but I always assumed due to his background in tech that he was smart. Now I’m forced to consider the possibility he is actually stupid.

Maybe it’s performative, but stupid is a stupid does. Because it has “financial” in the name they should only look at banks? That’s… really stupid.

I’m not sure if I’m picturing it correctly, but this just sounds like a Michigan left, which is how a lot of intersections here are designed (left turn is forbidden, you have to go past, u-turn, and turn right).

You’re thinking about this all wrong. The age of marriage and childbearing have been going up. Think of the kids who would just decide fuck it might as well just stay married and do this. This could be the arranged marriage of the future.

This isn’t a loophole, it’s straight up illegal. And a dick move to the person who buys it next thinking they’re getting a new one.

The Bible isn’t even consistent on what exactly the Ten Commandments are, much less prescribe a single way of life. The tenets depend on how each person/congregation chooses to negotiate meaning from the text.

Two different people can read the same book and come away with two very different understandings of how to be a good person. At some point, they were either told how to be a good person by a mortal authority who cherry picked passages, or they chose for themselves what meaning to take from it. There are either good people or they are not, owing nothing to any god or scripture.