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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

    I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.







  • Some of these kinds of things […] are actually intended for people who are partially or wholly physically disabled.

    After I learned this, I immediately felt bad for poking fun at these kinds of products. Normalizing their use by the non-disabled, and depicting the products likewise on TV, makes it that much more acceptable to the intended audience. If this wasn’t the case, it might sting a bit as a gift for someone that really needs it. And then there’s the economy of scale effect you mention; nobody would get a Snuggy if they cost $100 each.


  • Company: Provides amenities and services that would (technically) allow a person to live on premises. Pays you enough to retire early if you didn’t have to bother with rent or a mortgage.

    Also company: “We can’t hire you without a permanent residential address.”

    I also worked at multiple places that had fully decked out break-rooms: free food, game consoles, VR, and 60-inch TVs. Everyone was afraid to use them for fear of looking like they were screwing around. Except the interns. They used the hell out of that stuff.


  • I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.

    1. Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
    2. Does the thing
    3. Annoys someone
    4. Now there’s a rule for the thing


    Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.

    Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.


  • I am not a lawyer.

    I did some rapid web searches to dig in here because I was curious about how this might be abused. It turns out that is better worded than it would at first appear. I think the trick here is it depends on whose definition of “depressant, stimulant, narcotic” you go by.

    For example, the CDC considers caffeine a stimulant, but the FDA says it’s a “food additive”. So there’s no FDA schedule for caffeine, which means you also can’t get a prescription for caffeine pills, nor pay for them through insurance. But that also means it’s arguably not a drug or “stimulant” under this definition.

    Meanwhile, alcohol labeling is handled by the FDA, but it looks like everything about the substance itself falls under the ATF (it’s in the name after all). The ATF seems to take great care to not categorize alcohol as a depressant and goes out of its way to never call alcohol a “drug” (example). And, as it turns out, (Federally) alcohol is not a controlled substance.



  • Jumping on the “don’t use flushable wipes” bandwagon. Seriously, they can screw your home’s plumbing up.

    For anyone doubting this is even possible for a product that is mass-marketed and available everywhere, look back a little over a decade. For a hot minute we had scrubs and soaps that had tiny little plastic beads in suspension to provide some grit. All those microbeads got flushed down the drain and wound up who knows where. That is until it was made illegal.




  • Kinda? I figured that there’s some portion of the population that’s not smart - bell-curve statistical distribution and all that. But I always thought that the problem was education, or rather, access to a good1 education and all the socio-economic and political boundaries around that.

    To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it’s worrysome.

    1. Good = a program that teaches critical thinking and has access to liberal arts, trades, traditional arts, libraries, and information technology.