Just started “A Curse of Krakens” by Kevin Hearne (the guy who wrote the Iron Druid series). This is the third in the Seven Kennings series. The series has been pretty fun so far, with an interesting magic system. The prose is only so-so, but the way the story is told is unique and fun.

Those are talent captures. A lot of times managers have enough budget to barely hire someone but don’t really have the need to justify a guaranteed expenditure. They put out a job opening to see who applies. If a rockstar applies, they’ll hire them just to get them into the company. Good people will always find a spot. If a bunch of normal people, who might be just fine workers but aren’t standouts, apply then the fake job doesn’t get filled.

I’ve canceled very real job openings because the quality of people who applied didn’t really excite me and I didn’t really NEED someone. My team was chugging along and I had a little extra budget to help out, but my team continued just fine without hiring someone else. My budget got cut the next year by about what I would have spent on the new person, which would have made me get rid of a normal person while a rockstar would have been able to move somewhere else in the company.

I totally agree that housing for locals takes precedence. 30 years ago families were content to just cram into a hotel and deal with that annoyance, or spend a lot of money on vacation rentals found through classified ads. The market has changed, and hotels have not changed to keep up. And local jurisdictions are not pushing hotels to adapt to help out.

That’s more than a bit insulting to the women of the world choosing to work instead of have kids. Sure, some of them are forced to because they wouldn’t have enough money to live without a job. And many of the jobs these women have chosen aren’t necessarily long term careers.

But it’s condescending and insulting to say those women have no other contributions to the world outside of working a menial day job and would rather stay at home having kids if only they could afford it. Calling a career a clown term is so edgy and cool of you! As if there aren’t people out there who absolutely love what they do for a living and aren’t happily working for crap pay just to do what they love. All of the adult women I know who have chosen not to have kids have really good careers, and all but one have a great salary.

And to your point that the vast majority of people don’t have “careers,” sometimes an entry level position that is just a day job and not really a career can lead to a bigger career. My mom started as a secretary at a small company and showed she knew how to do the job of her boss, so she got his job when he left. Then she ended up starting her own business in that field, which absolutely flourished and became the thing she did for the next 30 years.

“Corpo speak…” you are such a tool.

Do the ultra-orthodox support what is happening in Palestine? Are they pacifists who want the killing to stop?

I’m all for letting people refuse to fight if they are sincerely anti-war. But if they are out there cheering the genocide that’s happening, then make them put their necks on the line.

It’s one thing to have hotels in the city do this for the millions of tourists, but to force this on the highest performing athletes trying to achieve peak performance at the absolute most important competition of their life is kind of shitty. It’s a two week event for about 11,000 people. I’m pretty sure the AC from that doesn’t put a dent on the AC from the rest of the tourists from the event or the tourists throughout the year in freaking Paris.

Taxes are less of an issue. Airbnbs pay proper taxes, too, both occupancy tax and in some cities a registration fee along with it. I have no idea if they pay less taxes per guest than hotels, but they do collect occupancy tax like hotels. Not sure if they also have all the other local/city taxes that get tacked onto hotel rooms, though. Maybe?

The issue is people are buying houses that could be a home to someone living on the island full time, but those houses are rented to tourists. The islands are small, so it’s not like they can just build a bunch more houses for locals. And even if they did, the demand for tourist housing is higher than the number of rooms available so those new houses would just get rented too. So you can charge all the taxes you want, but it won’t make up for a lack of housing for locals.

What is clear is that hotels are not catering to the desires of traveling families. People usually aren’t renting houses through Airbnb because they are cheaper than hotels. They are renting because they are way more comfortable when you have more than a few people, either a family of 4 or multiple families together. Parents can get their own bedroom to change clothes in, have sex in, whatever without their kids being around. Kids get their own room so the parents don’t have to deal with them. Couples can get separate rooms from other couples when traveling together but still have a shared space to hang out and watch movies/drink together. They can also be cheaper per room if you look at getting multiple hotel rooms for a group of people, but not always. There just aren’t very many hotels with large spaces like that. The ones that do are called presidential suites and cost $4000 per night.

Good, vote out people who vote for bad things. And good for her for stepping up and taking on the fight for what is right.

Insert Star Wars “right? right?” meme here.

A) That may be true for some Democrats. It’s definitely not true for a lot of them, though, since a lot people really do think genocide is bad. Shocking as that may be.

B) So what? If that is what the voters really want, is that so bad? For instance, most voters don’t want abortion bans. Assholes like Cruz keep pushing for stuff most people don’t want.

Mixing kids who are simply in government care with ones that are violent, was never a good idea though.

That’s the issue here. There’s a huge difference between the kids in state care because they are orphaned and the kids who get sent to juvenile detention centers or even what we call in the US “alternative schooling.”

OK, I just didn’t hear the times he said he opposed them. I do remember him saying we should increase them, since at the time I thought that was a good idea (not sure anymore, since they can so easily be used to just bring in lower paid people instead of how they are intended).

Thanks for that!

For reference, CA is limited to 1.1% per year.

Yeah, the “washing machine” while you try to find the bottom to kick off. You’re in 3ft of water and can’t find either the bottom or the air.

Just swim sideways or float. It’s so easy to float in the ocean and doesn’t take much energy. Most people panic, though, and don’t remember to do simple things. When I was in lifeguard training, most of the stuff they teach you is how to deal with completely irrational actions people do when panicking.

Also, never underestimate the ocean (or any moving water). I’ve been swimming, waterskiing, surfing, scuba diving, whitewater kayaking, sailing for over 40 years, and I’ve had a TON of instances of “oh shit, I have zero control over what the water is doing to me right now.” Just completely powerless as the ocean tosses you around or the river pulls you down behind a boulder and holds you until you can find the bottom and kick out of the “hole.”

I’ll never understand why people like what I don’t like. It’s so dumb for everyone not to be like me.

Honest questions, because I don’t know much about Cyprus. Do they normally allow Israel to do military exercises from Cyprus? Are Cypriots known to be aligned with Israel?

If they don’t normally do stuff that would make a country think they would help out Israel militarily, then yeah, this is surprising. If they do have regular interactions with the IDF or are politically close to Israel, then I can see why someone would want to warn Cyprus to stay out of it.

That boy is looking at Death himself and is trying to maintain his own sanity.

Trump has been pushing for more foreign student green cards since before 2016. He said numerous times that he wanted to raise the number of H1b visas.

That’s not how it worked for any of the people I knew on student visas. All of them had to hope for a job with a company that would support getting them an H1b/EB2/EB3 visa. Trump has been pushing to raise the limits on H1B visas since before the 2016 election, and it’s one policy idea of his I (think I) agree with. One of the reasons so many foreign students stay on for grad school is because it allows them to stay on a student visa if they can’t get supported by a company.

There are 5 ways to go from a student visa to a green card: marrying a US citizen, employee sponsorship (H1b/EB2/EB3), the green card lottery, political asylum, get sponsored by a relative who owns a US company. There is also a 6th way that doesn’t require a student visa, the EB1, but that requires being a recognized leader in your field.