https://youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8

Ugh. Best of luck to your youngest.

Much like the advice ‘don’t eat the yellow snow’ requires you to not be colour blind, the advice ‘only listen to those worthy of your respect’ requires you to be capable of telling the difference between compassion and obsequiousness. Both are good advice, but there are prerequisites which may preclude the handicapped.

I saw something maybe a year ago that was about how Florida has some of the best education stats in the USA.

…

Yeah…

You can try fantasizing, which I was told primes the brain to dream, though I don’t know how supported that is. The big thing is to not stress about not being ‘asleep’ too much. You need 8 hours of contiguous rest but it doesn’t all have to be deep sleep. You can lay in the dark for an hour with your eyes closed and it will be better than not. Stressing about being awake is worse than not resting at all.

You want us to send you creepy, unsolicited, dick pics? Odd hobby, but okay.

The word ‘friend’ is practically useless. It can refer to a classmate you invited to your birthday party mostly just to get an extra present or it can refer to someone you’ve known for most of your life, love in a completely platonic sense, and would trust to help dispose of a body.

I think I’ve been a curmudgeon since age 6.

Gen Z is not specific enough to be a useful demographic cluster. You have to overlay it over another specification or it’s trying to pretend someone who is somewhere in an ill defined age range, living in Shanghai as the child of a politician is going to have something relevantly similar to someone of a vaguely similar age, though with possibly a full 10 years difference, from Nunavut, put into the foster system.

It depends on what your local store has at best prices, really. Depending on where you are, you might find anything at a locally better price.

Famously, though, the absolute cheapest sandwich that some people still love is a salt&pepper toast sandwich, literally softened butter on bread, toasted if you have a way to toast it, or maybe fried, with a sprinkle of salt and pepper, stuck between two other slices of bread. I have made it before and it’s way better than it sounds. If you’re wanting to push the price as low as possible, the salt and pepper might be gotten from fast food places’ condiment stations, maybe even the butter/margerine as well if you have the right kind of place.

A mash sandwich is also deceptively good if you make good mash or have good condiments, and skin-on potatoes are almost always good nutritional value for money.

Beyond that, almost any sandwich can be bulked out with leafy greens for not much cost. Great iron in spinach. Lettuce other than iceburg is mild and nutriticious so helps almost any savory sandwich. Fiber helps you feel full too.

AI companies don’t see normal people at all. They’re too busy worrying about keeping the scheme rolling or trying to birth the digital god they think will give their life meaning.

What would you call an efficient way to turn hydrocarbons into useful work?

Ooh, yes. Actually, I’d put that over Steam in priorities. Steam is serviceable as is. Itch needs more love.

I’ll probably just keep using Heroic because it unifies libraries. If it ever becomes possible to bring in the steam library as well, it’d be great.

Efficiency is always dependent on the variables chosen as your metrics. Burning can be a very efficient way of getting rid of garbage under certain metrics. Burning wood is very efficient in terms of startup costs for heating up an area. Burning coal gas released because you want to make coal coke is materially efficient in thermal output per tonne of coal. I do have to wonder what the timeline would look like if some of the more efficient designs for vehicle engines had been in use all the way back when Benz was starting up.

If you are rude, there’s harassment. Anything that makes your coworkers feel uncomfortable qualifies. You are riding on their desire to avoid conflict. If anyone who has half your willingness to engage in conflict arrives in your office, you will be gone the moment HR hears the word attorney because they don’t have your boss to answer to, they work on behalf of the company as a whole to prevent lawsuits. The company may reward you for being callous, but they’ll do the same to those above you, who will drop you like a sack of dog droppings the moment you become inconvenient for the company, hire someone cheaper, and pocket a bonus for shrinking the budget.

I’m guessing you are enough of an asshole you won’t change your behaviour, even after they fire you. You’ll just be that guy, neck deep in his cups, complaining about these snowflakes who ‘can’t stand not being coddled,’ (read, aren’t willing to put up with your BS) and ‘got you fired.’ You’re a loser. It just hasn’t hit you yet.

And if everyone’s distaste for being around you leads to bad quarterlies from your manager, bad peer reviews from your colleagues, your IT tickets being mysteriously deleted so they don’t have to deal with you, your team filing reports with HR for harassment, and no one liking you enough to give you the benefit of the doubt, you can take that rudeness into the interview process at a new company and see how far it gets you with their HR.

We also used to build houses to ‘breathe’, specifically encouraging air flow through the walls, etc. to carry away the water leaking in through all the unsealed holes, and allowing any efforts in heating and cooling to go out that same way. In the days of yore, the gas lines that fed English streetlamps with coal gas were allowed to just flow, even when not lit. It’s a wild thought to wonder how much longer the end of fossil fuels could have been put off if efficiency had been a priority from the start.

Maybe as a demon, posessing the motivation, because I’d say self-hate would be part of the motivation.