To say nothing of how much cabling is covered by plastic.

Audio

Video

Vehicular

Aviation

Appliances…

…Telecommunications…

…Power…

…when the bishops blessed the blueshirts down in galway…

Household economics are both micro AND macro.

The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.

You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.

The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.

Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.

The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.

Just a heads-up, in some states “debris” coming off of your vehicle qualifies as an “unsecured load” and will get you a nasty ticket if it flies off and hits another car, moving this up from a shitty life pro-tip to an illegal one in some jurisdictions.

I’m working to overcome a particularly troublesome piece of technology right now and enjoying a cold, refreshing, Diet Dr. Pepper, so I guess the sentiment stands.

Better hope your dump stat wasn’t charisma, then!

"Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad."

I was under the impression that, by definition, blended chickpeas were only one ingredient in hummus.

I thought in order to qualify as hummus it had to have blended chickpeas, tahini ( which is just blended sesame seeds, IIRC), oil, and lemon juice.

I literally never bought pb that isn’t 100% peanuts. Sometimes with a bit of salt. Stop buying junk.

It’s not automatically “junk”, it’s flavored.

It just happens to be the most popular flavor in the U.S.

I like my spicy red pepper hummus, other people like their extra-oil-and-sugar smooth consistency non-separating peanut butter.

It’s like the difference between corn flakes and frosted flakes.

It’s interesting because I didn’t really like Janeway a ton until her first interaction with Q. Like, there was nothing outright bad about Mulgrew’s portrayal, I just wasn’t completely and totally sold on the character yet from a writing perspective.

Something about a captain interacting with an omnipotent being really seals something for me personally, because Sisko’s interaction with Q was what sold me on him right away, too.

I enjoyed Gibney as Benteen, so I’m sure it would have worked out, it just would have been…different.

EU was a sea of toxic filth with alarmingly small amount of competently written and good material in it, which once recognized as good had every other half rate writer trying to pin their next bad idea on it.

I remember running across a D6 dice rolling table for generating the plot of the next Kevin J. Anderson book when I was looking for West End Games SW tabletop supplemental (or fan-created) stuff on Geocities.

If the table had been juuuust a little more generic for things like “qualities possessed by big bad”, “motivations of antagonist”, “reason for melodramatic interlude”, and “type of mcguffin” it probably could have actually been used to generate future books.

Owing partially to LucasArts restrictions, a LOT of the EU was pretty derivative/formulaic but most of us didn’t care because it was MORE STAR WARS in an era that hadn’t seen any for 15+ years.

they find Luke’s hand and use it to make an evil clone of Luke that’s named… Luuke

And suddenly, completely unbidden, the name “Joruus C’Baoth” springs into my head.

A quick look at wookieepedia shows me that he’s the dude who created the clone.

I’m actually kinda shocked that I remember that from a single reading of the thrawn trilogy back in the 90’s.

often toasting the outside more than the inside

So, unless I’m mistaking your meaning that’s where I’d flip each bagel half 180 degrees before putting it in the toaster so the inside half faces the “more toasty” side of the toaster’s heating elements…unless I’m completely misunderstanding you?

Not even remotely.

That’s how old I was when I started pursuing it seriously instead of just dabbling. Two decades and change later and it’s still a choice I don’t regret.

The basics are fairly straightforward and the field is wide, deep, and mutable enough that everyone’s always picking up new things anyway. The only thing that’ll make you different from your peers is the ratio of how many birthdays you’ve celebrated v. how much direct experience you have. Thankfully that metric is spread out far enough amongst CS folks that it’s only useful as a point of conversational amusement and has no bearing on one’s ability to do the actual work.