shikitohno

I think the biggest pro for me would be that sane policies at the federal level that are broadly popular in my region could stop getting blocked by yokels representing states that sometimes barely even have the population of the semi-rural county I grew up in in the Northeast. Ditto for not having to worry about corporate interests from those same states filing frivolous lawsuits that manage to block the implementation of the odd policy that does make it through, like student loan forgiveness.

Also, I'm not above admitting that there's a great deal of appeal in the potential schadenfreude of all the "But I don't want my taxes paying for the trans, minority welfare queens getting bottom surgery! Down with any social safety net!" Republicans from the South and Midwest being forced to reckon with the fact that they have actually been the welfare queens this whole time, and it's only been by the grace of those dang liberal states paying in disproportionately high shares of taxes that get funneled towards red states that their shithole states haven't yet collapsed entirely. Let's see how Alabama fares with its whooping 1.1% of the national GDP when they no longer have federal funding to prop them up. Their top 5 employers are all public institutions that likely depend on federal funding to remain operational, and 2/5 of them are military bases. Good luck, guys, the South will fall again.

For cons, obviously it'll suck for the people who still live in those states until they finally move, but that's been the case for a long time. If the decent regions help finance the move for those who are willing to leave, but unable to for lack of money, I'm kind of fine with it. Same goes for overlooking criminal charges when people are unable to leave their state due to some BS non-violent crimes landing them on parole and being refused travel permissions. If Mississippi wants to lock you down as exploitable labor because you got pulled over with some weed, or loaned a kid a book that said gay people actually aren't the spawn of Satan sent to destroy US civilization, come on over. They can keep their sex offenders and violent criminals, though. For the folks that don't move because "Oh, but my family is here and I love them too much to move away," or similar reasons, good luck with living through the second feudal age, but that's your own choice.

Likewise, it'll be sad to see them destroy national and state parks in the name of business, as well as visiting those places while they still exist being a much riskier proposition.

Honestly, I think most red states severely underestimate how poorly things would go for them if they were to be cut loose, while overestimating the popular support they would enjoy and their international appeal as trade partners. Even for the ones who are in a relatively favorable economic opinion, like Texas, would probably see absolutely insane levels of brain drain from industry and higher education that would leave them dead in the water, barring state-sanctioned violence to prevent people from leaving.

That said, their economies would be devastated. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky would all see between 20.7%-30.7% of their overall revenues for state and local governments vanish overnight if they stopped receiving federal funding. States like New York and Texas could probably come away at a net profit just by retaining the taxes they'd previously passed on to the federal government, even factoring in how many new services would have to be provided for at the state/regional level that were previously financed by the federal government. For the states like New Mexico, Mississippi, and Alabama that manage to claw back almost all of what they contribute in federal taxes, if not get more back in federal funding, good luck. Somehow, I suspect their new, libertarian overlords in Texas aren't going to be so keen on subsidizing their impoverished neighbors to any real extent.

Complaining loudly about how it wasted so much of my time, before I proceed to pay by check. No, I won't let the machine print the info for me, I'll just spend the next 10 minutes fighting the tremors in my hand to fill it out and pay for my two slices of deli ham and single can of cat food.

Have they tried pulling out the "Make a vehicle that's not a massive and shitty death trap," or "Boot the Nazi from the company" stops? Because, I suspect doing those two might help it out.

Same, especially before the inevitable attacks on the Internet Archive to come. Who knows what nonsense will be in the works to try and get this removed, or the whole project shut down in the coming years.

Native English, then Spanish, Portuguese and French, in order of proficiency. I speak Spanish all day at work, have a fair amount of Brazilian media and a sizable Brazilian population here that I interact with on occasion. Ironically, though I've been studying French the longest, I didn't have any real use for it aside from reading after high school. Now, there's a couple of French podcasts I'll listen to, but I still find French television to be pretty boring, so I mostly get to use it at a French book club, on the rare occasions I can attend. Currently, about halfway through a degree to try and address how lopsided my skills in French have gotten, while also having an easy option to tick the box for jobs that want a degree, but don't care what it's in.

I still have a long list of languages I'd like to learn, but they tend to share the unfortunate characteristics of simultaneously being difficult to learn, while also having very limited practical application for me. One of these days, I'll actually stick with learning something more useful again, like German, rather than going through Japanese, Icelandic, Finnish or Irish for another round to see if I can stick it out.

I mean, white women were the single demographic group to benefit most from affirmative action, despite racists preferring to paint it as a program that only benefited African Americans in their reverse racism arguments, so yeah, they count in my book. Especially when you consider that a large portion of far-right white men want them to occupy the trad wife role and not been seen outside the home and church again.

The highest I’ve ever seen someone get into without specific education was a department manager.

I've seen people do it when I worked at Whole Foods fairly often, but the work conditions worsened as you went up in some pretty big ways. Once you hit the level of department manager, you could be swapped into working at any store within a 50 mile radius of your home store, without any option to refuse if you wanted to keep the position, so having a car was basically mandatory, though they didn't swap them around that much if you were doing a good job where you were. If you went one level up to assistant store manager, swaps got way more frequent, and you were salaried. Store managers seemed pretty stable in their locations, provided they were putting up good numbers, but them and their assistant managers both had to work some pretty crazy hours. On the plus side, they did get pretty sweet bonuses. My store manager at one location would sometimes earn more in bonuses than he would in his salary. This was all pre-Amazon takeover, though, so I'm sure things have gotten worse in the interim. Heck, they started making it more shit while I was still there in the bid to get Amazon to buy them.

Point is, even in companies where it is possible to go from the shop floor to upper management, there's always a catch to it.

Or, just maybe, they could adequately staff their stores instead of constantly running skeleton crews. If they were actually sincere with their cries of high theft, more employees on the floor could deter would-be thieves, while also giving them time to help customers when needed and pack out product so the place doesn't always look like an obstacle course left in the wake of a hurricane, with piles of stuff on the floor blocking half the aisles.

Any place that requires an app for me to shop at is a hard no for me, much less all the other nonsense they want to include.

Basically, as soon as other reliable methods became widely adopted. No, I don't have any phone call related anxiety or whatever, I'll call someone if I really need to, I would just rather not. I'd much rather get a text that says, "Hey, we're meeting up at 7pm to go out and do, XYZ, do you want to come?" than a phone call that starts with that and turns to "So anyway, did I tell you my mom blah, blah, blah... And I don't know what to say, because I kind of want to go, but it would be a lot blah, blah, blah."

Phone calls with friends and family have a way of spiraling off into tangents when I don't necessarily have the time to entertain them, but don't want to be a dick all the time telling people I don't have time at the moment to listen to them. If there's a self-service section to a company's website or app, I can usually do whatever I need faster than it would take me to get through the automated menus and hold music to call and have them do it. Like my pharmacy, if I want to refill a prescription online, I log in, check a box and hit submit. Done. If I call them, I need to go through three menus to get patched through to the pharmacy, tell them what I want, hold for a moment while they help someone in the store, give them my info and wait for them to look it up, etc.

When I plan to meet up with people, I make plenty of time to talk to them and listen to whatever. When I get what I think is going to be a short phone call that devolves into tangents, I don't necessarily have the time to entertain whether the fact that my friend's cousin had his toe amputated due to gangrene means he should get the spot on his nipple tested for leprosy, or if he should just improve his personal hygiene and see if it washes off in the shower.

If something really is going to be a pain to communicate via text, schedule that conversation and we can have a call to discuss it, but I'm not answering phone calls whenever somebody calls out of the blue unless I'm interviewing for jobs or expecting a call about some sort of emergency.

Not just that, but you'll also experience a good deal of social pressure from your friends and family, or future co-workers. Some can be of the patently ridiculous variety, like "Oh, that's a man's job, why would you want to try and do that?" but you also get some that can be well-meaning and grounded somewhat in reality, like the potential risk for violence and/or sexual violence that a female cab driver would be perceived as more exposed to. These can be mitigated to an extent, if you find the right niche to go into. For example, I would think the risk for violence would be lower if you were just doing airport runs, or medical transport for the elderly, rather than being the late night driver picking people up from clubs and bars to bring them to their private residences.

For a job that has an old boy's club formed, a new, female employee can also often expect to have to deal with regular harassment, whether it's old-fashioned, paternalistic sexism, or active efforts to drive away women that the men working there view as encroaching on their private domain. I'm not excusing this behavior or saying it's something women should put up with, but that is the simple reality of many career fields society views as "men's work," and knowing this in advance will often discourage women from even trying to get a job in these fields, absent credible signs that the company they're considering is making substantial and concrete efforts to change this culture and make the work place not be misogynistic, or some other pressing urge (i.e. "I can't get a job somewhere else where I live that will pay my bills and avoid homelessness and starvation, so I guess I'll put up with the harassment and misogyny until I can move elsewhere or something better opens up.") that means they're willing to overlook it. Rather perversely, the men who see women leave the job in short order due to the men's behavior, rather than the actual work or work-related conditions, often take it as confirmation that women aren't cut out for that line of work. Meanwhile, those women who persevere, but don't take shit from their male coworkers and dare to make them actually face consequences for their own words and actions will frequently be maligned as "bitches" and socially isolated at work.

It's hardly surprising women don't actively seek out to subject themselves to such conditions on a regular basis, absent some external influence that either seeks to ameliorate the hostile environment they face, or else compels them to tolerate it as the least terrible option available.

Harris was no more of a crap candidate than Biden was in 2020.

Biden was able to get away with it in 2020 coming off Trump's first term and the shitshow that was COVID's handling under his leadership. Harris didn't have this benefit, being second in command in the incumbent regime, was unable to capitalize on any of the points the Biden administration could claim as wins, while stubbornly refusing to put any distance between him and herself on his unpopular stances. Add in that this was occurring while popular sentiment was clamoring for an inspiring campaign that wasn't the usual DNC paint-by-numbers, march to the right campaign of, "Well, actually, while I can appreciate Hitler's passion for the arts, animal welfare and the health risks of smoking, you'll find that we, uh... disagree about the best way to deal with the Jewish question. Thank you, you're seen and heard, even you Jews out there. Vote for me, 'cause the other guy's Hitler, and I'm not entirely Hitler."

The entire Democrat effort (or lack thereof) was a massive unforced error on their part. Instead, they keep sidelining any candidate who seems to actually excite people and inspire them with hope for the sort of systemic change they want, unless they find they can eventually drag them into their usual shenanigans.

Personally, I think they'd also do best to drop their tokenism with candidates that trot out the same means-tested policy drivel. Rather than go harder on the adjectives next time and hope people show up to vote for, "The candidate who would be the country's first female, Chinese, Navajo, amputee, Leprauchan president in history," have policies that don't include the means-testing and would broadly lift up the working class and poor voters, while also addressing historic inequalities for the many groups that have been disadvantaged and/or excluded from US society for its history. You can tick all the diversity boxes you want with the candidates, but it's patronizing to think people will blindly fall in line for such a candidate assuming they'll represent them, when we've seen that it's mere lip-service paid to very real issues impacting the lives of millions of Americans, which will be promptly forgotten upon taking office, if it lasts that long.

It may have a large part to do with where in the UK you were coming from, and where in the US you wound up, in fairness. Bog-standard eggs are $8/dozen just outside a major metro on the East Coast, while less than half that for posters in other regions. Last week, I was in Manchester, and a 15-pack of eggs at the Lidl on Piccadily Gardens was about £3 or so, which would probably make $8/dozen seem pretty crazy in comparison. I think the lowest I saw while there, further from the city center, was £2.15 for 15 eggs.