I have friends who quit working. Two kids in daycare, you got a clear 30k take-home to make it work, and if you’re barely making it work with that, on top of killing yourself, that income stream just doesn’t make sense. It’s dumb.

I had a friend who was the director of a YMCA daycare, and I have no idea how they kept functioning. I crunched numbers and they barely had enough to pay their teachers. She made jack shit. It was crazy. And we still paid a fortune to go there.

That is a good point. I see a lot of people suggesting it hasn’t been a thing since the '90s, when for me it stopped probably shortly before or shortly after COVID, and mainyl because I have kids. But I won’t disagree that shits expensive everywhere, and I’ve certainly said to myself “Yeah, that ain’t worth that.” So I’m with you there.

I think I could still hop on down to my local watering hole and meet up with some friends and put some beers away though. The beers there have always been expensive, and so that at least hasn’t changed.

When I was younger, certainly before kids, yeah, we had a couple different restaurants or bars where we’d meet up fairly regularly, for either a couple beers or some food, or both, or more.

This thread highlights the reality of Lemmy, and how it’s representative of only a sliver of the population. The number of people saying “Friends?” is depressing.

Childcare is closer to 1500 per child, FYI, at least in Jersey.

Yeah, this seems like part “things are bad” and part “I’m bad with money.”

The right potato will work just fine.

I believe it means something.

You reawoke memories of summers on Reddit, hard to believe that was a thing, because it’s been all year summer for the last decade it feels like.

I still post. There’s niche subs that I still think are quality. I completely understand anyone deciding to leave, though, it’s really a shell of it’s former self. The algorithm that decides what’s on top of your feed kinda ruined everything. I can sort by new, and somehow it’s not sorted chronologically. It doesn’t make any sense.

Yeah, but also 2 would never be true. Nobody is a primary guitarist and hobbyist astronaut. Astronaut is always someone’s primary, and the rest is an afterthought. At least “real” astronauts, not space tourists.

Reddit used to be different too. It may seem stupid, but you used to get criticized on Reddit for making posts that were completely devoid of grammar and whatnot. It kinda functioned to a similar level of editorial sources, despite much of the information conveyed being silly memes and whatnot.

Personally, I think that people taking the time to write out things in a cohesive, thought out manner, versus shortening words (like “stg”, looking at you OP) and the like, to me ends up with a better discourse. You’re not rushing to spill out as many words as quickly as possible if you’re taking a second to type it out correctly. Maybe just me.

But as with all things, popularity up, quality down.

This is it. My mother has the exact (maybe not exact, but really similar) setup, and she’s got some pullouts like these. $190 seems pretty reasonable too, these things can get expensive AF.

I dunno, I’m from New Jersey. I can tell you about New Jersey though. Our two main providers of electric and gas utilities are PSEG and JCPL. Putting aside that they’re both major corporations and those suck, JCPL also sucks at providing the service it basically forces you to get (because there’s obviously no real alternatives), and PSEG is pretty good. I have not had a legitimate (>2 hours) power outage since I bought my home 11+ years ago. Regardless of my good fortune, we experience struggles in presumably the same fashion as much of the country: the hots are hotter and shit is expensive AF.

I’m sorry none of this is relevant.

But it’s not the AI farm’s fault, because they get paid to turn off during times the grid is under a lot of stress. So they make money 100% of the time, don’t worry!

Your response here is an excellent example of shitposting. You are the new moderator. Keep up the shitty work.

Yeah, shitpost needs some better moderation. Shitpost has literally just become post whatever you want. And if that’s what it is, I guess that’s what it is, but the term “shitpost” to me had always been someone coming and derailing serious threads with nonsense opinions, unrelated pics, etc. So silly trolling.

This post is a picture of a tweet about a near mid-air collision. Unless the second plane was just fucking around, shitflying as they say, I don’t know that it qualifies for the low, low bar that is shitposting.

I have that same stool (three, in fact), and they are all as tall as the bowl, not doable for squatty potty.

I also have shorter ones that would work great. Kids come in all sizes.

The digestion thing is always interesting to me. I’ve been doing recreational drugs with the same people for close to 20 years now. Frequency down to about once a year at this point, but from when we were kids to now when we have our own, I’ve always been the one who comes up fast off anything we ingest, and my other buddy has taken anywhere from 30 to 90 (and sometimes more) minutes longer than me. He’s tall, but lanky. We’re built roughly the same. I guess that whenever the uptake starts to happen is just earlier a long in my process of digestion. We’ve got it down to a science now though, and I’m always last to dive in for an evening of letting the minds go.