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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Inflation was on the rise before Trump left office. It continued under Biden for the first two years of his term, but he managed to get key legislation passed in that span of time that has measurably reduced inflation. It’s still not back down to what it was pre-pandemic, but we are leading almost every other western democracy in that metric. It really is incredible that people are giving Biden shit for the economy when he is actively fixing the problem, and it shows that the Democrats have a tremendous failure in their ability to do effective messaging.

    If it doesn’t feel like inflation has been improved under Biden, that’s because the price you pay at the gas pump or the grocery store has more to do with what they chose to set their prices at than what the current rate of inflation is. The “vibe economy” is real, but they aren’t casting the blame for it at the right people. For once, government did it’s job. Who knows if the current trend will continue under Trump, but given that he set off the massive inflationary spending spree by injecting a ton of cash into a booming economy with stimulus checks, I imagine he’s not going to care much about the fundamentals of a healthy economy and will instead do whatever makes his donors happy.








  • Small acts of rebellion. Take extra long breaks. Automate parts of my job and then don’t tell anybody that I did it. Break some shit on purpose and act like it was an accident. Steal as much stuff that isn’t nailed down as possible. The list would go on, but I’d honestly have no idea what I would actually do in that situation.

    I’m certainly not giving it 100% at whatever job I’m working at. I would say form a union, but that’s hard to do when you are working for 56 hour workweeks plus commute, not including overtime. That’s assuming the 7 day workweek remains 8 hour shifts rather than moving down to something like 6 hour shifts with an unpaid lunch break.






  • The political culture is embracing you to never think past the next election.

    I am absolutely thinking past the next election. I want to make sure, at any cost, that the person who has vowed to become a dictator on day one, deport millions of legal immigrants, terminate the constitution, and use the military against his political opponents does not win.

    In other words, I am voting in this election to ensure that there is a next election.

    Since the bad faith leftists seem adamant that genocide is genocide and that there are no shades of grey involved, then my support for either candidate hardly matters in that regard, so I’m not going to let it stand in the way of casting my vote to support other issues that I care about. Women’s right to bodily autonomy and the rule of law are two big ones in my book.

    I’m sorry that innocent people are dying in Palestine in a senseless conflict, truly I am. I hope the people of Israel do their own part to hold their government responsible for these atrocities, because ultimately that’s what needs to happen. Israel could continue the war indefinitely even without U.S. support. We are not the lynchpin holding the Israel-Hamas war afloat, we’re just one cog in the machine.




  • At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

    It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.




  • This emoji has two meanings:

    1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

    2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

    edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.