Tja. Mein Mann hat gerade seine zweite Ausbildung gemacht.

Seine Erste war als HFW und er hat jahrelang auf eine Stelle gewartet, für die man nicht gleich eine Franchise kaufen muss, also sich gleich verschulden muss. Nachdem er mehrere Jahre immer noch nur hinter der Fleischtheke stehen musste, wollte er seine Beschäftigungschancen erhöhen. Das heißt, er hat Mitte dreißiger Jahren eine (zum Glück gekürzte) Ausbildung als Metzger gemacht.

Bis vor kurzem hat er rund um €850 für 128 Stunden Arbeit (plus regelmäßige Darstellungen von selten bearbeiteten Fleischstücken an seinem freien Tag/Schultag- er sollte um 4 auftauchen und nur bis sieben bleiben, also “fast das gleiche wie ein freier Tag”) und 32 Stunden Schule pro Monat verdient. Ich bin Studentin und darf nur 80 Stunden/Monat arbeiten, also war es wirklich stressig, teilweise normal zu leben.

Ich komme aus den USA und hab mich wirklich gewundert, dass man in Deutschland so viel unter dem Mindestlohn verdienen darf.

Tasha Yar winks and puts on sunglasses as The Who blares in the background

I don’t fully disagree with you, because I think AI music sounds okay, but I intentionally don’t listen to it. I get disappointed when I find out a song I enjoyed is AI, because I don’t want to support that type of music production.

I do have pretty unselective taste though: I can get into almost anything if it has the right tempo, is sad enough, or employs powerful vocals. My old department once played a team-building game where everyone sent in their favorite song and we had to guess which was whose, and my boss afterwards asked me if I was just fucking around or if it was a reference to something. It was just my favorite song.

That’s because in the old world, social cohesion was the most important factor in your group’s survival. Anything that got in the way of that, like neurodivergence, being otherwise different, or not having children with other members of your group when it was expected, could endanger your survival*.

Thankfully, we’re not in that world anymore, and the differences between our world and the one in which those rules/laws arose are what make morality developed during that time irrelevant. We can explain why murder is still wrong today without relying on religious texts for justification, but we can’t explain why eating lobster is more wrong than eating beef anymore, nor can we explain why just being different is wrong anymore.

The people who made those laws lived in a rapidly desertifying climate before refrigeration or indoor plumbing - if your group wanted to eat lobster, they would have a lower chance of survival overall. You can find reasons like this for most religions’ rules, and some of them, like banning murder, still contribute to our group survival, but that’s not a reason to assume any given religious prohibition is sensible today.

*to be clear, I’m not suggesting that any of those things were actually wrong or inherently contrary to a group’s survival, because many cultures had no issue with weirdos, neurodivergence, or queerness. The people making these rules probably believed they were good for their group, but they didn’t have access to the information that we do now, nor did they have the benefit of the intervening millennia of philosophical developments. The groups that prohibited queerness and observed dietary restrictions were also trying to separate themselves from the groups around them, to strengthen in group feeling, and they enforced it later when converting new groups as a way to mark a clear cultural shift from the old ways.

It’s hard to sometimes though. I like to be thorough.

My solution is to make sure I spend sufficient time on cleaning everything properly in my bakery, and if that means customers have to wait a little longer, that’s too bad. I don’t do a bad job, I do a very good job, it’s just got less of a customer service focus than my employer would like.

contrarian, chin-stroking, finger-steepling sages

This, from the gray lady herself. Any wonder anti-intellectualism is on the rise?

At this point they’d be like 26 and 29, which is a much more manageable age gap…

It’s hard for me to know whether I am dealing with people who are genuinely misunderstanding my arguments, or if they are simply trying to cast doubt on my conclusions by pretending to misunderstand how I arrived at them.

That’s hard for me too, but if you start out by assuming both, you’re going to offend people.

I’m trying to do you a favor by telling you. I’m no longer trying to discuss the original thing at all, because I don’t feel like you’re going to engage well with the conversation. I get the sense that you’ll continue to try and cover all your bases with one comment, starting off seemingly genuine and then ending with passive aggression.

I will make better use of my time going forward, so I won’t be engaging further, but I hope you realize that I have been genuine with you.

What about fresh onion, pickled capers?

The tone switch makes it obvious that the initial comment wasn’t genuine, which makes me feel like I’m being sold something.

You seem to be confused about how my two arms point relates to the rest of my comment. It is somewhat confusing tbf, especially if you have a reason to misinterpret it in a specific way.

…

It has nothing to do with making sweeping claims about all 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet, it has to do with probability and risk, and I think deep down you probably already knew that.

Well, hey! That seems ideologically consistent and all, but the swing in angle hits me as creepy, so sorry.

I’m surprised trump hasn’t tried starting something similar but I guess he’s going the uneducated population route which also seems to be working

We were already there before trump, so he didn’t need to. I’ve been in places where the American public spontaneously applauds a veteran. Think about all the people who like to “thank veterans for their service” or the idea that military experience prepares you for holding office. We do also fuck our veterans over constantly, but that’s because they’re no longer useful to the war machine and they’re considered inconvenient if they need help, but that’s just the American way.

This is more like asserting that humans are generally otherkin, proportionally. There are 1.5 billion Muslims.

I had a friend who was a very pretty woman, but she drew a bunch of tattoos on her face in eyeliner and wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans one year for Halloween and it was uncanny. She already had super long ringlets and she just fucking nailed it.

Poor Webb Haymaker, he tried…

Honestly, I think he probably succeeded in helping a lot of people, he just couldn’t keep going forever. It’s absolutely tragic that he didn’t make it to meet his daughter though.

I’ve always been an atheist, but the older I get, the more I wish there was a traditional Christian afterlife (just with the moral values determining where people end up significantly tweaked). It would be nice to think he and Yoshi could be reunited and at peace.

So we’re basically all fucked, compared to what we’ve seen so far. I definitely ate more sugar as a young child than my grandmother, born just before WWI. My parents might have had more than me (though almost certainly not), but lots of places still had food rations for much of the baby boomers’ early childhood.

At least we now have judicial clearance to block the AFD, so when we wait until they’re even more popular and can’t, it’ll be… oh, no wait, even more infuriating

Nothing wrong

Strength is throwing a rotten tomato hard enough to explode on impact.

I think it’s a combination of guilt, shame, helplessness, and an inability to connect with their autistic children that makes them hate it so much.

Guilt because autism is partially genetic and they blame themselves (of course, many genuinely stupid/brainwashed people think they caused it with vaccines). Shame because they’re too close minded to be proud of children who aren’t like them. Helplessness because there’s no cure for it and the symptoms can be incredibly severe. The inability to connect could be due to the severity of their child’s symptoms, but it’s more likely because their child doesn’t respond the way they expect and they and their child don’t recognize each other’s emotions from their body language.

All of that is made even more difficult if they themselves are on the autism spectrum and reject that.

I’m autistic and I come from a family of high functioning autistic people. My dad doesn’t think any of us are autistic, even though it’s very clear (he and I used to bond over our mutual love of excel and he has always been uncharacteristically thoughtful about my absolute intolerance for the sound of knife sharpening). I think part of the block for him is accepting that his own family history of ham radio operators, train engineers, and cryptographers might not be totally neurotypical.

He has accepted his ADHD, but it’s a hard diagnosis to disagree with when you’ve literally had over 60 jobs. Another barrier is that he feels like it’s “too many things” to have more than one mental health diagnosis, even though he is aware of the existence of comorbidities. Because he thinks he’s normal, he thinks everyone struggles with social cues, overstimulation, and changes in routine. Even though he knows he has ADHD, he got a master’s degree and had a successful career (despite changing jobs a lot), so he feels like people who struggle with ADHD are weak or lazy.

It’s fucked up, but it’s also a predictable reaction to growing up in the environment he did. Luckily, none of his kids takes his opinion on this to heart, and he was always good and reasonable enough to help us seek treatment for our mental health. My siblings are raising their neurodivergent children with much more acceptance and support than what we got as kids, just as he raised us with more than he got. Hopefully my family is not alone.