One thing worth taking into account is that the Diplomat will be a much heavier pen than the Sailor. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing will come down to your preferences, but searching around reveals the body of the Diplomat weighs 21g alone, versus 10g for the Sailor.

Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it’s hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but “enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children,” is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.

The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.

Also, not everyone that is good at a job has the personality to be in management. I’ve found myself in several management roles before I realized I absolutely hate being responsible for other peoples’ work and am just not cut out for it.

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

Just a friendly reminder, documentation is crucial in any work environment, and do not believe any BS about great policies and employers that really care. Make sure you are fully aware of your legal rights, and if it’s an option in your case, go through a legal procedure, rather than some internal “we’ll work it out with a conversation and a handshake” process that your company will try and get you to go for.

I can’t speak for anywhere but the US, but if you’re having serious issues that might impact your ability to do your job/regularly show up, look into whether you qualify for any leave under the FMLA. Your mileage may vary, especially with smaller companies, but there are actually consequences for violating the law and/or retaliation under it. My experience at larger companies has been that they do not like to mess with it, and tend to farm compliance out to a third party to avoid any hint of impropriety. Again, there will certainly be differences, but across multiple companies, all my employer got from the process was a yes/no decision about whether I qualified, details of any duty restrictions applicable, when my claim was up for renewal and whether or not I marked my days of leave in compliance within the time limit established in the policy or not.

If they handle things in house, obviously don’t trust HR. If an external company handles it, your employer shouldn’t really know whether you’re missing work because you’ve got cancer, you’re insanely depressed, or whatever else the situation might be.

Regardless of how your company handles it, document everything to death, and make sure you’re able to access your documentation in the event of losing the job. Should it come down to it, it doesn’t matter how in the wrong your former employer was, you will not win any grievance or legal action if you haven’t got the documentation to prove they did not meet their legal/contractual obligations.

Are you in licensed dispensaries? Pretty much all the ones I’ve been to, the edible options are 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg. My other thought, are you sure you aren’t looking at the THC content of the whole container? I have some 10mg chocolates in the freezer, but dead center on the lid’s label is “100mg THC”, then underneath and in a much smaller font, “per bottle.” I’ve noticed that on a lot of packaging, as well as dispensary websites, they choose to list stupid big numbers by just listing the overall content, and not what you would get per unit.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

Something similar, years back when I was taking Norwegian classes, my teacher was telling us about a relative of hers. According to our teacher, it was pretty common for families with the means to do so to send their kids off to an English-language immersion camp over the summer around the time they were 14 or so. She said most of the people would go to camps in the UK and come back with something of a posh British accent, but her one relative’s parents dropped the ball on signing up and missed the chance to send her there, as all the spaces were booked by the time they checked. They looked around and found another immersion camp that was still accepting applications, and sent this girl off to perfect her English, in Arkansas. She came back with quite the accent, leaving people she spoke to in English baffled at how she wound up picking it up.

Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.

Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.

For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance.

With a few caveats, yes. At least with the insurance I had last year when I hit the max for the first time, it has to be both deemed medically necessary to do, and be in network. Just because you hit your annual out-of-pocket max doesn’t mean you can get free cosmetic surgery, for example. Out of network treatment also had a separate annual max, so if I saw the wrong specialist or went to the wrong hospital during an emergency, I could still have gotten hit with another $10,000 in bills before that kicked in. And finally, I learned that there are actually annual maximums for certain types of treatment. In my case, I have an autoimmune condition and my doctor wanted me to get blood work done for it every 3 months. In their boundless wisdom, my insurance decided I shouldn’t need blood work more than three times a year, and I got a $1,700 bill for going over the annual limit for such care.

The limitlessness of their wisdom and beneficence is matched only by my pettiness, so I had the pleasure of having my first colonoscopy and an endoscopy the day after Christmas because my gastro said there was a tiny possibility of me having a problem more serious than hemorrhoids and I knew those assholes would have to pay for it, since they pre-authorized it, which added a few grand to what they had to pay for the year.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

On the other hand, that’s a pretty rough looking 27 year old. He looks like a 60s something bro who never stopped lifting.

Time to go take the Browns to the Super Bowl.

• SMT III Nocturne
• SMT Strange Journey Redux
• Grandia I

The Shin Megami Tensei games have some replayability between multiple routes, NG+ and coming up with the perfect team. Grandia is just one of the first jrpgs I really got in to, and I still love the characters today.

Aside from this, at least in my state, if you opt to cash out your vacation days without taking them, they get taxed at a higher rate. I used to tell my teams, “If you take your vacation days instead cashing them out, you get more money after taxes and you don’t have to be here, so please just take your vacation time.”

They mostly seem to think something like “I’m not intolerant, I’m just stating uncomfortable facts that the liberals/socialists/etc are afraid to acknowledge!” I think @AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de is right in that certain topics being off-limits for acceptable discussion in liberal circles just serves to drive them towards the right. This, combined with right-wing dominance of media in the US and poor communications operations from the Democrats just serves to legitimize and invigorate the far-right here.

Just look at something like the discussion on crime and quality of life. Democratic leaders will point to statistics and uncritically say, “Crime is down, I don’t know what you’re talking about, things are fine.” Statistics require context to interpret successfully, and they also obey the rule of garbage in, garbage out. It would not invalidate the statistics at all if, for example, overall crime were down, but more crimes were being perpetrated out in the open where people could see them than occurred previously. They also only capture the crimes that are successfully reported. Sexual assault is pretty famously under-reported, owing to a variety of factors. Having lived in the hood for a long time, I’ve also experienced it first hand that cops just flat out refuse to take a report sometimes.

Whatever the case may be, if the topic of crime and safety comes up these days and you post something like, “I get the stats say its down generally, but my neighborhood/commute/city has deteriorated significantly over the last few years and I no longer feel as safe as I used to,” you’ll get a bunch of replies mocking you with a few canned responses like “The plural of anecdote isn’t data,” or calling you a Republican plant or something, and not one that actually tries to engage with it. You should be able to look at the Republican platform and realize this isn’t something that should cause one to overlook all the terrible things the GOP advocates, but many people will do just that when they feel that the Democrats have been ignoring them and their concerns for long enough.

If enough of your electoral base are voicing concerns that run contrary to your data, you really need to look into why that is and how to address it, or you run the risk of the opposition siphoning voters away when they acknowledge those concerns and validate them, even if you know for a fact they aren’t actually going to address them.

If capitalism is decaying, how will it continue to work as intended for capitalists?

I don’t think it necessarily will in their eyes, but as I see it, they view it in two ways that aren’t mutually exclusive. Firstly, as capitalism decays, it could give rise to a system that allows them to exploit others even more mercilessly than they already do, and they’re eager to reap the benefit of this development. Secondly, they think that their riches will allow them to escape the negative impacts of capitalism, regardless of what happens. Look at the billionaires buying up islands or building remote doomsday bunkers to escape to in the event things really go south. They fully expect that in the worst case scenario of extensive warfare, environmental crises and societal collapse, they’ll be able to retreat into their castles, pull up the draw bridge over the moats, and live out the rest of their days in comfort while the rest of us suffer and perish.

I would argue the main benefits are to teach people how to effectively switch registers as the context demands, and to expose them to a range of language they likely wouldn’t ordinarily encounter in their daily lives. English teachers could do to lose the judgmental aspect of “This is the one true way to speak English, the way you talk amongst yourselves is wrong and you need do stop,” but there’s a definite value in teaching students, “This is a way to write/speak clearly and effectively that will be understood by quite nearly every other educated English speaker you might encounter.”

As far as exposure to a broader range of language than one normally encounters in their life, I saw the importance of this first hand with many of my coworkers who were heritage speakers of Spanish. It’s not my native language, but it was my primary work language for a good 5 years, and I wound up getting put on interpretation duties for our safety meetings over a native speaker with pretty limited formal education in Spanish. For topics to do with daily life, family, friends, etc, this guy would be able to speak much more naturally than I could. I might not say something that was exactly wrong, but perhaps I would be too formal or make odd word choices he wouldn’t. The problem was, he completely lacked any technical and professional vocabulary, and had no concept of what words/phrases were unique to his own country and what alternatives might be more widely understood.

We would have safety meetings once a night, and they would have topics like, “When a forklift has its forks in the air, don’t walk beneath it, as hydraulic failure could lead to injury or death.”. He translated that one night as “Cuando la vaina del pasillo tiene esa vaina de en frente en el aire, no pasen por debajo de la vaina. Es peligroso.” Basically “When the thing in the hall has the thing in front in the air, don’t walk under the thing. It’s dangerous.” Best case, he might say “El forlift,” but he would never land on “el montacargas,” or even think to look it up. Some of his wilder attempts at interpretation didn’t work for anyone, and the ones where he just used a Spanglish version of technical terms only worked for other coworkers who already knew at least a bit of English, and probably didn’t really need the translation that much to begin with. Unfortunately, we had a fair number of employees who were monolingual Spanish speakers that he found himself just completely unable to communicate with effectively.

Granted, not everyone takes full advantage of it, but English classes do (or at least should) expose you to a broad range of the language, as it’s used in various contexts and forms, while also furnishing students with the ability to expand upon that and adapt to new contexts on their own in the future. Failure to do so leaves students with stunted linguistic and communicative abilities.

Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.

For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”

To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.