Maybe perception on my end too but I feel like the quality of clothes at the fast fashion level has cratered in the last five years

Appreciate the clarification, I was not aware that some federal workers were outside of the social security system!

The clothes thing is interesting to me as an American living in Europe. I feel like our clothes are shapeless blobs made in china for fast fashion exclusively, while the clothes in Europe and UK seem to be much better in cut and quality. They are certainly more expensive in UK and western Europe though!

It means you contributed to a pension directly or indirectly as well as social security and now you don’t get the social security that was part of the original deal. It’s a little nibble away at the edges to soften retirees up for the next nibbles

I hate dish towels hanging on kitchen drawers. Do people just like picking up the towel every time you need a fork?

Regarding election of a minority, I think this country would elect an Arab American before a woman. Anecdotally, talking to right leaning voters who really had no great feeling for trump, the theme came up again and again “how can a woman go toe to toe with Putin or the Saudis?” “Will generals listen to her?”.

Thauts n’ prairs

There is nothing alarmist about raising the alarm when one candidate wants to bring back the spoils system to give regulatory power to the world’s richest man, and leadership of some of the most important health organizations in the world to an anti-science, disturbed individual who mutilates roadkill. It is objectively alarming when a candidate for leadership of the most powerful military complex in history cozies up to dictators and admits that he would like to be a dictator, just for one day. This candidate himself will be serving a final term and has displayed questionable mental health, and is facing significant criminal and civil liability and therefore has nothing to lose.

Make no mistake, this election is between more of the same, with many of the negatives it implies, and an inflection point in world history the likes of which we have not seen since perhaps 1985.

Guessing you don’t run a couple docker containers to support local development;-)

Spot on, this is my otherwise nice neighbors line of thinking.

currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population

This is only a problem if production does not increase dramatically, as it has for the last century. The reason it feels like there are insufficient working people is because parasites siphon from the resource distribution between more and more productive workers and their non working counterparts

In addition to the excellent hotel analogy, they had a specific conceptual and technical problem, say, how to mix flour evenly into water when thickening a sauce. The challenge was to make a roux and show the steps I used to evenly mix the flour.

It was a realreal medium sized start up ;-)

I did one where I went through a few rounds of interviews, technical and otherwise. In talking with the developers, they mentioned that they were trying to integrate a certain client side framework into their backend frameworks build process, without success. Get to the final stages, and the director of engineering asks me to work on this take home project to, you guessed in, integrate the js framework into the build process of the backend framework.

I sent them a strongly worded rejection email. It was a realreal eye opening experience.

Ridiculous take home tests are probably the number one reason I decline to continue interview processes. If you think that building a client, an API, wiring it up to some other third party API, then deploying is a reasonable scope for an unpaid interview challenge then you are very bad at scoping software projects and the most important thing I can do for you is tell you as much.

I told one start up if I built what they asked for in the interview, I would pursue funding from their investors and launch it as a competitor- it was that similar to what their actual app did.

Confidence is indistinguishable from correctness if you lack competence and experience. Now in addition to the competent and experienced having to interpret the requirements and do the work, they must also sift through half baked AI solutions.

I wouldn’t hire someone who was too lazy to proofread over someone who wasn’t; would you?

Since “would you?” is incomplete, a comma would be correct here rather than a semicolon.

South Florida is full of these small cinder block houses because everything else gets wrecked and these survive. Sure, they might need some new roof sections, and maybe the drywall cut 4ft from the floor, but porcelain tiles on a concrete slab with cinder block walls is going to last until the rebar rots.

There’s a house that just went up I saw which meets the recent Florida keys codes, and it is a goddamned fortress. It’s on a lot that is raised 4 ft, the house is made of concrete and sits on 15+ ft concrete pilings, ceramic roof, and high impact windows all around. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/374-Mahogany-Dr-Key-Largo-FL-33037/104218949_zpid/

Do you think you are not somehow paying for each and every one of those expenses as well as a healthy return to investors, in your rent?

This is the real explanation. There is no more choice to rent a cheap apartment or buy an expensive house. You can live in a van maybe but that’s being outlawed in many states. My brother in law and his family are paying almost $2000/month for a shitty apartment built in the 1970s. I bet the same place will be $4000 in 10 years, and even shittier.