Adopting kids ain’t easy. People always say “you could just adopt” but they don’t realize just how much expense is involved. It could easily cost $50k.

This happened to me. I got a PhD and expected to be able to get a tenure track job in academia. Sure, it’s hard. But it wouldn’t be me that failed at it, right? Wrong. Three years later, no job, scraping by on adjunct work.

I went back to law school. Sometimes you have to redefine your life in a way that gives you new opportunities. Does it still hurt that I couldn’t get my dream job? Yeah, but I have a lot of good I can do for the world in other ways, and I’m not going to let that dream’s death prevent me from doing it.

Whoa TIL I’m a slut

I think it depends on where you live. I get almost no Christian conservatives, but I live in Seattle, so they’re pretty rare here.

One thing I’ve been annoyed with after switching to Firefox is the iffy password manager performance. It’s so common for it not to remember a password that it should, or, weirdly, for it to only remember the password once I’ve typed the whole username in and hit tab.

To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is pretty difficult these days).

When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.

This sounds like a great idea to pass right before we elect a guy who’s promised to be a dictator.

Man, where do you live where unemployment is nearly a year at 80% of your salary? When I was unemployed here in Washington, it was six months and more like 50% of my salary. And from what I understand, Washington is a lot more generous than most states.

Lots of good reasons why someone might end up in debt. I got divorced and laid off. Dog needed $2k surgery to not have a terrible quality of life. Got a terrible staph infection on my chest after losing health insurance. This all happened in a four month period. I moved to a cheaper apartment, cut off any subscription aside from internet, which I need for two of my four jobs, got a cheaper phone plan, and mostly ate rice and beans every day. Still, it’s taken a year just to get back to zero.

It’s remarkable how this is basically exactly where I’m at, too. I’m two months of salary away from zero.

Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes.)

Maybe you are, currently, in the United States of Europe. But this is really more a function of liberal democracy than capitalism. You could get vanned for saying the wrong thing about the great leader in quite a few capitalist countries. You’d be in high danger of having pretty terrible things happen to you for saying the wrong thing in the US until pretty recently, and the US has been capitalist pretty much since its inception.

Yeah, as far as socialist countries go, Cuba is more democratic than others.

Any socialist society needs to be democratic first, socialist second. Many more democracies have gotten closer to socialism than socialist societies have gotten close to democracy.

In my experience it doesn’t work well when you have more than a couple people editing the file. My company had a group of ten modifying the same file in live time; it led to huge desync problems.

It’s pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.

Now, if we’re talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity…that’s pretty much impossible.

Yeah, I’m a leftist and I find Islam as abhorrent as Christianity. I get that Muslims are a minority in the west, and so they’re often unjustly persecuted. But that doesn’t mean we should accept conservative nonsense just cause it comes from a minority religious group.

People should be allowed to wear what they want. That said, nobody should voluntarily wear these terrible symbols of sexism and oppression. The literal religious purpose of the abaya and even the hijab is to promote modesty, with the rationale that men can’t control themselves and it’s women’s responsibility to do that for them. Fuck that message and fuck the ideology that it perpetuates.

How do they know that you’re on a VPN?

I got a PhD in philosophy. I have exponentially more experience applying for jobs and getting rejected than most people.

Argue with random people on the Internet so they can see how cool I am and how smart my ideas are.