JDubbleu

My partner and I live in Silicon Valley and it's cheaper for us to rent a car when we need it than to own one. We'd use it maybe twice a month so rentals just make more sense. We're moving to San Francisco soon though and at that point we'll likely never own a car and just transit everywhere.

I grew up surrounded by guns and they're fun as hell. I've considered buying my own many times but ultimately I don't want the responsibility with gun ownership.

The most well equipped people I knew would never talk about them with anyone except those they knew well or while shooting the shit with the range master when we'd go shooting. Posting a picture or even just taking a group picture with firearms would be a massive no. At absolute most we'd take a group picture at the range, but no guns or the range itself would be in site.

Think of The Pirate Bay, but you have to get an invite to make an account to be able to leech/seed.

It's a private torrent tracker with strict rules (you must seed every show you download for at least 24 hours, and every season pack for 5 days, both within 2 weeks). If you break that rule you get a mark on your account, and after enough of them you get banned. As a result of these rules just about every torrent has download speeds above 500 Mbps, and almost every TV show you can imagine is on there. It's also full of people ripping new shows as soon as they come out, so new episodes pop up day of release.

It's almost impossible to get into without knowing someone who's already in.

I recently got into Broadcast the Net through a friend of a friend and it is infinitely better than any streaming service in combination with the *arr suite and Plex. I had almost forgotten how much better piracy is until Netflix pulled their no account sharing bullshit. Now they get $0/month from me and that money goes to BTN.

I get locked 30 on mine with some rare dips. As usual though it'll get better as the emulators get updates. Still haven't even finished BotW.

Not the person you're replying to, but I bought an Optiplex 5050 with an i7-7700 for $75 to use as a server because an RPi 5 is more expensive and way less powerful. It even has a CD drive.

Many of the conservatives in California are still liberal by Texas standards. I grew up in the central valley and it's not nearly as hard right as people believe.

Something people don't tell you is you can file federal and state taxes at completely different places (they're 100% separate anyway so it really doesn't matter). I did this one year using freetaxusa for federal, and some other tax software that did state for free but charged for federal.

This next year though I'm hiring a CPA because my shit has become complicated.

Never thought writers would have to deal with that too, but i guess everyone thinks they should write a book now. Software engineers experience the same shit. "It's Facebook, but inconsequential feature that no one will use". I've started quoting people twice my hourly rate from my full time job and it's gotten it to largely stop.

This is entirely a cultural problem if that's what you experience with remote employees.

My company is remote-first with WeWorks for those who want them. Every meeting 90% of people have their cameras on, and the other 10% are either attending to something more important than the meeting or just not feeling it that day. No one questions them or gets onto them because we're not children.

If many people regularly have their cameras off in meetings then maybe your meeting isn't worth their full attention, and they're working on something else. Not every meeting needs everyone to be there. I'd wager part of the reason my company doesn't have this problem is we have an extremely low meeting culture. Impromptu meetings/discussions are encouraged and we often Slack huddle for 5-10 minutes when needed which cuts out a lot of the bullshit.

At my prior job we accounted for 2 hours a day of meetings when planning and it was a fucking drag. Now I have 3 1/2 hours of recurring meetings per week, with a sync for new projects/initiatives every few weeks. I get so much more done every day because I'm not listening to an endless stream of information which should have been an email.

The other solution is to work for a remote-first company if your job allows it and you can swing it. Best decision I've ever made.

No people in the real world say this

I've heard similar things from women when I was in college, and not someone joking around or being ironic.

This whole thread seems filled with people who view men as victims of something. They aren't.

This is a thread of men supporting each other emotionally, and venting about how society largely disregards any problems that affect primarily men. There are a few shithead bigots who are gonna try to shove in their vile opinions, but they're all pretty down voted and a small minority. All the top level discussion seems pretty reasonable to me, and venting about the very thing you're doing with this statement.

Men, as a group, are not general victims of anything they didn't choose.

I don't think the young men in Russia who were forcefully conscripted and sent to die in the Ukrainian war (or a Russian prison) chose to do so. You can't just generalize the struggles of an entire demographic and brush them aside as their fault. It reminds me of the rhetoric of women being sexually assaulted because they dressed a certain way. It's extremely sexist and gets us absolutely nowhere, only pushing people further into extremes.

Men, in general, have higher job mortality rates, higher suicide rates, shorter life expectancy, and higher homelessness rates to name a few things. None of us "chose" this. However, because the problems affect men they're often swept aside.

You can benefit from a system in some ways while still being a victim of it in others. I completely agree that much more work needs to be done for women and people of color, and that there are much worse/more skewed injustices that they face (which is why that's where society's focus is/should be right now). However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge the struggles men face when they're brought up.