Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!

When I was in the office, always metal. At home I’m more likely to listen to classical, but still metal if I need to be totally focused.

I put on music, preferably with full coverage noise canceling headphones to block as much outside stimulus as I can. Depending on the mood, I might put on something soothing (listening to Sean Townsend on YouTube right now) or I might go with metal.

If you are in US K-12 education and have a diagnosed condition (depression, anxiety, autism, etc.), you can have your parents request a 504 plan with the school. This requires the school to make reasonable accommodations for someone with a disability or illness that makes it difficult to be successful otherwise. When my daughter was suffering with anxiety and panic attacks, we worked with the administrators to setup safe places where she could go to calm down. The teachers were required to let her go any time she needed a break from the classroom.

To some degree you can get use Glassdoor with the help of the element zapper from ublock origin. What you can circumvent is pretty limited, but you can at least get a bit of information without jumping through all their hoops.

What that said, I would not put a ton of trust in the reviews section. As people have mentioned, companies can get bad reviews removed, but also most happy employees aren’t taking the time to go submit a review. I use it more to see salary ranges for job titles, both generally and at specific companies. Even that is subject to how honest users are about their title and salary, but employees have much less access to that kind of info compared to employers, so I have to take what I can get.

In my experience, most men wearing business casual dress very poorly. I typically see ill-fitting khakis, boxy shoes, and a polo shirt (frequently a polyester golf shirt). Companies that have moved to casual dress (jeans) have done the world a favor by letting these poor guys wear jeans and sneakers (still the polos though…).

I have the opposite problem. I have a dead PS3 and a bunch of games that I can’t play anymore because Sony refuses to offer backwards compatibility. I would love to be able to play those games on my PS4 or PC, but so far I haven’t been able to get an emulator working for that.

I got my lawnmower about 9 years ago secondhand and have never done any maintenance on it. I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to do it.

Same, I actually use a french press and then pour the coffee into the insulated carafe from my dead coffee machine to keep it hot until I finish it.

I’ve noticed this with my kids’ schools. Many kids are open about who they are - LGBT+, neurodivergent, mental illnesses, etc. - and people are generally accepting of that. When I was a kid, people were bullied relentlessly for showing any form of difference from “normal”. It makes me happy to hear them talk about things like that like its no big deal…because it shouldn’t be.

https://www.positive.news/

This site usually has some good stories worth checking out.

But were there bread knives before bread? I’m not going to slice my bread with a butcher’s knife or a cleaver, that’s barbaric!

I’ve been curious about this too, but haven’t been able to find anything that puts a real price (including future profit margin) on GenAI. For example, having a chat conversation with a customer service agent in India might cost about $2-3. Is a GenAI bot truly cheaper than that once you factor in the energy & water costs, hardware, training, profits, etc.? It might be, but I’m skeptical.

Strange Horticulture…I’m probably fine.

Yeah, I plan to do in-person early voting rather than take my chances with mail-in voting.

I recently took a voluntary lay off from my job after almost 20 years with the company. I found out my dept was going to be reorganized and I was not very happy about the direction things were going, so I put myself on the severance list. I had been planning to look for a new role this year anyway, though I originally thought I would be looking for something in the same company.

It has been a couple of months now and I’m getting fewer interviews than I expected. I still have plenty of time to find something, so I’m not too worried yet, but I do question if I made a bad decision. Of course, I expect more layoffs within the next year, so it was reasonably likely that I would have been laid off eventually anyway.

Last year’s reorg for my dept, they broke into two rounds, the first round mostly got rid of supervisors and managers and kept more analysts than were needed long-term to get through all the work changes. Then, in December, they came back and laid off the extra staff. They knew that was the plan when everything was announced in April. They actually discussed telling people up front so they would have 8 months notice + severance, but decided not to at the last minute. I’m guessing they were worried those people would leave or not work hard enough through the transition.

Long before Covid, the company I worked for started trialing work from home for some call center agents. They had a whole list of requirements for an acceptable work from home space: dedicated work area with a desk, locking file drawer (why??? I don’t know), first aid kit, fire extinguisher, etc. Someone would actually go out to physically inspect the space to make sure every box was checked.

My guess is someone from legal wrote up the requirements from a workplace safety standpoint. They probably could have just had the employee sign a statement agreeing that they met all of the requirements, but someone in the middle got overzealous about their role. During Covid, everyone got sent home permanently without any regard to any of those rules, so clearly they weren’t that important in the first place.

This is probably a good thing. I packed on a ton of weight when I was in college because fast food was really cheap. Things like dollar menu sandwiches, 5 for $5 at Arbys, $0.29 hamburgers on Sundays at McD, etc. I remember strategically buying bags full of fast food and putting them in the freezer because I couldn’t make food that cheap. Reheated from the freezer tasted HORRIBLE, but it was cheap and I was broke. At these prices I would have made better decisions for my health.

I love the games (haven’t played 76, but the rest are great). I watched the first 3 episodes and thought they connected well with the games thematically, but I never cared enough to continue. Every now and then I think I should get back to it, but I always have something that interests me more, including just scrolling Lemmy. To be fair, I don’t really enjoy watching TV or movies that much though.

We only feed dry food.

It’s been a long time since I worked in that space, but I think it is basically like a reloadable prepaid card you can get from visa or mastercard. I would assume there actually is a bank behind it, but the account is essentially being sponsored by someone else and there is less risk for the bank because you can’t write a bad check or overdraw the account. That makes it potentially useful if the reason you didn’t get an account is because the banks refused you or you couldn’t afford the fees. For people who are just anti-bank or worried about financial privacy, they would still want to go cash only.

On a side note, reloadable cards can also be useful if you have friends or relatives that you want to help out now and then, especially if they are not local and maybe make poor decisions. It’s cheaper than Western Union or a money order, more secure than mailing cash, and no risk of them having access to your bank account number from sending a check.