The Washington Post got the What’s App transcripts and multiple participants confirming the content of the chat. They then asked the mayor’s office about it and the spokesperson said that the question was anti Semitic.

Correction, they asked about the Zoom meeting (which they had the transcript and on the record participants):

Asked about the Zoom meeting with chat group members, the mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that New York police entered Columbia’s campus twice in response to “specific written requests” from university leadership. “Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false,” Levy said. He added, “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”

Eric Clapton is wildly overrated

He was a developer on whatever company he had that got folded into PayPal. It would be accurate to say that he never was a good developer.

There are enough vegans who absolutely discuss their diet immediately to keep the joke alive. Given how difficult and isolating it can be in many places, I get how it can become really core to one’s identity.

Loose tea isn’t very common on supermarket shelves. If you live near a store that has a bulk section, then they might have loose tea in bulk. I end up ordering online from Stash or Harney & Sons

China does have a lot of agricultural and manufacturing workers who aren’t on computers all day. And they have some pretty poor rural areas. But I’m calling bullshit on Japan’s numbers. Tokyo looks like Blade Runner at night but and the office culture is famous for long hours but no one is looking at screens? Get the fuck outta here.

makes dating and marriage seem pointless too. Can’t even afford a place of my own how am I going to support a wife and maybe kids? Assuming she doesn’t work which she would almost have to anyways.

You should date to enjoy someone’s company (or find someone who’s company you enjoy). That’s the point. It doesn’t have to have a larger point where anything not getting you closer to marriage and kids is a waste of time.

I don’t know about the point of marriage and kids, those have pretty personal motivations, but it would be a shame to let buying a house be the gatekeeper. You can have a very happy marriage in a rented flat. You can raise lovely children without owning a house or even having a great financial outlook. Sharing expenses with a significant other who has similar values can be a huge financial boost (on the flip side, marrying the wrong person can lead to financial ruin). Like don’t have 20 kids that you can’t afford to feed, but don’t feel like you have to be wealthy to have a family, if that’s what you really want out of life.

If people who believe in a magical bearded sky father manifesting their bedtime wishes and helping devotees win sporting events and awards are somehow taken seriously, well, I feel perfectly fine choosing to believe in free will.

Humanity didn’t have a clue about all kinds of shit just a few generations ago. It’s quite possible that there is more to the world than what we currently understand and that we really are more than some crazy elaborate finite automata. It’s an egotistical blindspot to think that there are no more unknown unknowns.

I used to stick to that rule and get a sensible mid sized Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord that’s a few years old as needed. But in 2013 (the last time I needed to get a new car) the cost savings were really low compared to new. I think the used market was particularly hot so you’d save less that 10% of the cost, so I ended up getting my 1st and only (so far) brand new car ever.

Most people don’t want this. Most people are one paycheck or emergency away from financial ruin. There is no social safety net and most workers have long hours, long commutes and not enough days off. No one can get off of the treadmill because they’ll end up homeless, starving or unable to get needed medical care.

It’s cool that you were able to improve your situation with a lot of luck, hard work and sacrifice but a basic middle class existence shouldn’t require a lot of luck.

Sewing, learning to draw, knitting, reading, macrame, playing with my dog, video games, pottery. Maybe go to thrift shops and look for hidden gems that you can fix up?

Sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sucks that you’re going through this; I hope the situation improves and you don’t get furloughed.

I’m guessing that if you could get to all your jobs without the car, you would have already done so? Saving on gas and insurance can help, but depending on where you live that might not be realistic.

You could try contacting local food banks and see if they ever make accommodations for people who are working during operating hours. They might not but there’s no harm in asking.

Right now you’re in a serious hole from missing work for a family emergency. I don’t have much advice for getting back onto steady ground aside from being super crazy frugal and working extra hours in the short term (which is fucking exhausting mentally and emotionally and physically). Do you have any long term plans for having more breathing room years from now? If your steady state is “one car repair or illness away from defaulting on payments” then that’s a hard path. Do you or your wife have prospects for better paying jobs in the future? Are there training or educational opportunities that could help? Are there cheaper places you could live (smaller, worse neighborhood?) to save money while working towards better job prospects? Living on not enough money in crappy circumstances sucks but it is definitely more bearable if you know it’s temporary and you’re making progress towards something better.

Good luck.

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Anyone who says their smart overestimates themselves. Anyone who says their dumb underestimates themselves. How does anyone even answer this question?

I think it’s possible for someone to know that they are generally pretty smart or not very smart without over or under estimating. A lot of people will over or under estimate but if you’re just looking for a rough placement in a third of the bell curve, there’s a lot of feedback in everyday life to help.

Pedants who choose to make big deals over minor issues are always out to prove something and are objectively not smart.

Some people sincerely have trouble adapting to different precisions of language in different situations. I know some very smart and successful people with autism who struggle with this. It can be super annoying when they are way too pedantic for the context but I don’t think being deficient in this one area makes them dumb.

Up gets me every time.

If no one is allowed to wear any flair then that’s fair. But everyone is allowed (and possibly encouraged?) to wear pride stuff in June as part of the anyway corporate rainbow-washing. So I have to ask why it’s OK to wear “LGBTQ+ folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff but it’s not OK to wear “Black folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff? Why is stating that Black lives have value so offensive that it’s worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ban it?

I’m mad at both. Amazon is trash. The current court is trash. And all the ghouls that got us this shit ass court are trash, from Mcconnell to Trump to every dummy that votes for Trump to the stupid stupid Democrats who didn’t fight tooth and nail when Obama’s pick didn’t get a hearing and didn’t pack the courts at the 1st opportunity. Oh and fuck RGB who should have fucking retired at the start of Obama’s 1st term. Octogenarians who survived multiple bouts of cancer don’t have the luxury of hanging out so the 1st female president gets to appoint their successor. Democrats are so fucking inept it’s hard to believe that they aren’t sandbagging us on purpose

Jumping between Mac and Windows I keep accidentally awakening Cortana when I try to copy and paste. Now that god awful, universally reviled feature if finally getting deprecated but it still brings up the damn window/modal/pice-of-shit just to tell me that it’s gone. If you want to be gone, then go! Don’t make a fuss telling me about it. Just go. No one wanted you in the 1st place. Fuck.

If you use a neti pot or bottle, use two salt packets. The extra salty saline helps draw water out of your nasal tissue which helps with swelling