I asked my family what the last useful thing Congress accomplished that made life better for Americans.

The only 2 answers were the 2010 Affordable Care Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Two actions in 40+ years.

I have a growing personal hatred of people in white pearl-coat cars right now. They are the new BMWs for me.

This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

Interesting! Thanks. That has some more nuance than I was expecting.

PA state government is rife with corruption of every level and so we as residents tend to leap to conclusions that every state official, especially the elected ones, are always committing some kind of crime and it’s just the unlucky ones who get caught and tried. The State Treasurer in particular has a recent bad history.

Source? He was a State Treasurer involved in a complicated bribery and contracting scandal. It’s not a he-said-she-said sort of case. His accuser was a deputy comptroller for Pittsburgh Public Schools who noted contracts were wildly overvalued for the work and called the State Auditor General who called the FBI to investigate the matter. Who are you suggesting was lying?

Damn, I’m old enough to remember this post the first time it happened on Reddit. I laughed about this poor fool all day. Good times.

True, but the second part was far more important. It’s not that they think they are right, it’s that they are CONVINCED that everyone else ALSO thinks they are right and are too scared to say so. So they are thrilled to force their racist beliefs on everyone because they are sure we are just victims of the “woke mind virus” or equivalent. They are sure they are saving us from ourselves and it makes them insufferable.

We didn’t do a good job in the aftermath of the Civil War cleaning up the people who caused the problem. We were too quick to pardon everyone and try to get back to normal.

That gave the losing side the idea that it was only a temporary setback everyone secretly thought they were right or else we would have been more angry with them and it’s been a huge fucking problem ever since.

Can we call it the Tri-State so every “Tri-State area” has no hope?

On purpose or by accident?

What proof do you have that your waste is being processed correctly? I have proof mine is not and plenty of news reporting from across the US in the last 5 years that says consumer curbside recycling is basically dead.

I’m just speaking as someone who does carefully separate everything, only to watch the truck put it all the same place. My individual actions mean fuck all if the rest of the process doesn’t work.

It’s hard to blame them entirely when the facilities to separate and recycle the waste were never fully built in the US and we spent decades shipping bales of consumer recycling to Asia where it was often deemed too dirty to use for recycling and was burned instead. You can find tons of great articles about the collapses of consumer recycling and the unraveling of the plastic recycling lies sold to the American public, it came about 2021 and continued to be a hot topic through 2023. Today, my shitty neighborhood has collectively stepped down from a proper waste pickup with bins, to 4 guys and a truck who collect and take the waste to a nearby incinerator. We know it can’t be an “official” waste collection company by the “We Love Junk” signs on the truck enjoying our cans, but we’ve been told this is fancy hand collection that is quieter than standard trash trucks and we should be grateful. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

In the US it’s nearly impossible since the pandemic. Most waste collection firms are dumping both cans in the same truck and not recycling anything. Plastic recycling in particular turned out to be much more expensive than waste management was prepared to keep doing so they stopped.

'96 Saturn Wagon in red. Mom bought it after a car accident left her unable to drive a manual transmission for a year when I was a freshman. She made me learn to drive in it, then as soon as I passed my test she brought herself a brand new Honda CRV with manual transmission and gave me the Saturn. I drove it until I finished graduate school in 06, I gave the Saturn back and she gave me $15k to buy a new car of my choice as a graduation present. My new husband and I chose a Ford Focus wagon, manual transmission, which we drove happily until it’s final demise in 2023. Mom sold the Saturn to a friend in the next state of over for a few grand but she drove the poor thing into a flooded road and killed it less than a year later.

I have a WeVibe Tango and have loved it for a very long time.

That’s super pricey for this. Any $15 vibe from Amazon will do.

Not -always- but when things are really goopy and not going anywhere I can vibe for a couple of minutes until it’s looser and then blow my nose and get my allergy spray in. It’s a nasal spray so I need any room in there to get the meds in. I rub it mostly on my upper cheeks and nose and a little on my forehead.

I use an intimate vibrator on my face occasionally to loose up my sinuses. Just give it a good wash before and after; there’s nothing wrong with it.