It is definitely tough to shed that sense. Growing up knowing I was “weird” and therefore bad (no, it was just undiagnosed autism, but I was an adult before I knew that and that element of myself had long since been solidified) meant that if I wanted people to like me then I had to give more than they did in order to just break even, which is exhausting and unfair, especially since I have a tendency to read neutral expressions as negative ones.

One thing that has helped me is the realization that that happy feeling I get when someone came to me for help and I helped them? Goes both ways for good people. And it sucks for them, too, if you’re suffering and they could help but you were afraid to ask. Having standards is both a defense of yourself and a means of determining which people should stay prominent in your life.

It’s the lack of awareness that gets me. You’re operating a 2+ ton vehicle at speeds significantly faster than humans can reach by themselves, amongst a group of other people doing the same, and you figure it’s okay to be unpredictable?

Unfortunately that’s not something you can really test for, that blasé attitude towards interacting with traffic, since most early drivers are going to be on their best behavior, and this is developed after years of getting away with it (or NOT but somehow still doing it?).

Which is so silly when you think about it: “this tire expert isn’t a REAL mechanic”. Okay…and?? We need both.

When you can deal with the aftermath but they can’t.

A discussion of orthopedic shoes.

Note: the above site is trying to sell you on them, but the concepts/justifications they discuss pertain to your question.

I usually start off intending to only retie, then I walk around for a bit, get annoyed, and do the other one.

Your strategy of accepting the inevitable makes more sense which is why I will promptly forget it.

This comment right here.

With burnout and depressive states your ability to foresee the good in life, or even experiences outside of the grind, is severely curtailed: you essentially develop emotional tunnel vision. A psychiatrist can help you break the negative spiral.

When another trustee asked Dungan if she personally objected to an illustration of cross-racial friendship, she demurred, simply declaring that she was just trying to avoid “situations like that.” Situations like what, exactly? She didn’t say. Dungan’s behavior is a perfect illustration of the “anti-woke” tap dance. The person alleging nefarious wokeness never admits to their own bigotry, instead pretending that they’re reacting to “woke” people who are “pushing” an agenda, in this case through innocuous poster art. Of course, the entire premise of the argument is rooted in bigotry, as this example shows. It presumes that the feelings of real or imagined bigots who might take umbrage at such an image are of paramount importance, and that everyone else’s freedoms must be curtailed to appease them.

Fucking thank you, Amanda Marcotte. Nail on the head.

And thank you for using the word “innocuous” because my god it’s a picture of people holding hands in a school. It probably had something like “teamwork makes the dream work” on it because holy fuck these people probably boil their eyeballs in piss before they stick them in their sockets.

They’re not rich ghosts who can shrug off the loss of a vehicle and disappear. Most are, in fact, tethered to a small area BECAUSE they’re undocumented, and as such can’t rent or buy housing or cars anywhere, and the vast majority are in jobs that are, at best, scratching the floor of the middle class.

This argument makes it even more appealing to get them licenses and therefore insurance by tying the car involved to a name.

…where are you getting the idea that letting someone who isn’t a citizen drive legally means that they can’t be charged with vehicular manslaughter?

Related reading.

Whenever I think of bots selling to other bots I think of this, with apologies for Youtube.

I’ll have to look that one up, thank you!

Your resiliency matters more than your fear of making a mistake, and you’ll never cover any ground if you can’t take a step.

Does it feel like these “game changing” techs have lives that are accelerating? Like there’s the dot com bubble of a decade or so, the NFT craze that lasted a few years, and now AI that’s not been a year.

The Internet is concentrating and getting worse because of it, inundated with ads and bots and bots who make ads and ads for bots, and being existentially threatened by Google’s DRM scheme. NFTs have become a joke, and the vast majority of crypto is not far behind. How long can we play with this new toy? Its lead paint is already peeling.

This statement is trying to go for neutrality in the same way that asking a woman clutching a black eye “What did you say to him?” is just gathering information.

That is: it’s not, we see through it, and we’re tired of it.

”Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with this,” said Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney. “You can’t attach Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell’s crackpot idea.”

“Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!” an employee from the firm Sullivan Strickler, which was hired by Sidney Powell to examine voting systems in Coffee County, wrote in a group chat with other colleagues on January 1.

Former New York Mayor Giuliani was consistently referred to as “the Mayor,” in other texts sent by the same individual and others at the time.

“Most immediately, we were just granted access – by written invitation! – to Coffee County’s systems. Yay!” the text reads.

Props to the authors of the article, Zachary Cohen and Sara Murray, for the excellent comedic structuring.

Dictionary.com has an interesting page just on this topic, and it’s more complicated than you might expect.

Higgins also pushed back on the notion that Democrats and the liberal left engage in their own echo chambers.

“Critics would say that the liberal echo chamber is CNN, MSNBC and mainstream media,” he said. "I would say in response to that, that quite frankly it’s b*******. “At the RNC all we had to do was repeat talking points and it would go on Fox News as is. Democrats don’t do that, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] doesn’t do it.”

He added: “Also, I think an important thing about what differentiates the left and right and the media—the left has no similar echo chamber as evidenced by the lack of a left-wing freedom caucus.”

Even the ex-Republican staffer doesn’t pull a “both sides” because he knows firsthand that it’s not true.

Hamlet looks like he’s just realized he wasn’t ready for synthetic nip.