Dude is this you too Mr UAW President?

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2025/03/28/united-auto-workers-supports-donald-trump-auto-tariffs/82686652007/

Maybe you shouldn’t support someone when their policies just happen to accidentally line up with you on occasion.

Yea, one of the items says that local bakeries don’t exist anymore? What? There are plenty of local bakeries.

I imagine people share these for 3 reasons.

1. People encounter information at different times. Sure you’ve seen the article but someone else hasn’t (although for popular topics, this likely become near zero quickly enough)
2. People want to signal to their group that they are in the group. Why do people share anything with their little opinions attached. In part it’s so that they can cement their place in their tribe. Democrats or republicans or anything else, you are supposed to be angry about the things that anger your tribe and happy about the things that please your tribe.
3. Anxiety. Our brains are sorta wired for “stress -> action -> relief” cycles. We survive because we encounter a stressor, take some action to address it, and are then relieved of that stressor. Feel hunger, eat food, feel better. The current world has many stressors that can’t be meaningfully impacted in an individual level. You can read an article about something that outrages you or highlights an injustice you believe is occurring, but then there is no action to take. So sharing becomes an effective action substitute. Did it solve anything? Nope, but your brain doesn’t care, it’s just happy you took some sort of action.

If I were your partner, although it might not feel like it in the moment, the sooner the better.

If you aren’t going to commit to them, that’s your choice to make, but free them up to find someone that will. Every ounce of love and time and attention they pay you from the moment you make the decision to leave until you find the gumption to do it is a waste for them. The most respectful thing you can do is not waste the precious and finite moments of their life.

Let them know what you’ve decided. Have the courage to tell them plainly and honestly that you are leaving and that you won’t be the person to love them. Let them get over you so they can find the person that will love them.

And don’t you dare double back unless you mean to stay. If you stay do it because it’s what you want not because you feel bad. That partner is a human being, one that deserves the truth and to be loved. If you can’t do that, or don’t want to do that, that’s your choice.

This is the least we owe our partners, to be honest with them, to love them or let them find love elsewhere.

I know you are getting a lot of downvotes. Choosing to leave someone you love is not a popular opinion. I could not do it and I think most couldn’t. In time I suspect you will find one of two things to be true.

• You will find someone you truly love and you will recognize that this relationship had affection and care but was different.
• You will find that what was out there wasn’t worth what you gave up, that this was love, and you will wish you had it back

This is life though, the hard decisions, and only you get to make them. I hope you make a good one, and above all, if you want to be a decent human being, treat your partner well. If that means standing by their side in love, great. If that means being honest with them so that they can be happy, also fine. Just don’t lie to them, don’t be needlessly mean in ending it, have the courage of your convictions and tell them the plain simple truth. Don’t make up a reason that feels better, don’t blame them for the relationship falling apart, don’t trick them into hating you.

You owe them that at least.

Explain your situation then.

Sounds to me like you love your partner and they love you. You’d like to leave to go have other life experiences.

It’s pretty easy, which do you value more, the love you have for your partner or these life experiences you could have?

I don’t know you, but my guess is that if you are thinking about it enough to want to find an answer, then you already have your answer. You value the life experiences more, you care about your partner, and you don’t want to hurt them.

I’ve been married to my wife for over a decade now, I love her with all my heart, I can’t think of any kind of life experience that would make me want to leave her. I imagine that love is not a binary on or off type thing that there are degrees and kinds of love. It’s very well possible that you love your partner but not enough to want to stay together forever.

This is really a question that only you can answer. Which do you want to do, it’s your one life, you get to choose. But don’t stay with your partner because you are afraid of hurting them because if that’s why you stay, you will become bitter and resentful and the idea of “what could of been” will always be this perfect thing that they kept from you.

Stay because you want to stay or leave because you’d rather leave.

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

Brand that old uncool politicians go on tv and beg people to buy.

Good thing American consumers love desperation.

I’m neurodivergent, let me take a crack at this.

First off, disclaimer, autism is a massive spectrum so this whole thing is a gross generalization.

Neurodivergent people act differently than neurotypical people for 3 broad categories of reasons

• different stimuli processing
• different thinking patterns
• different skills

First, is stimuli processing. Have you ever been in a crowded room and there’s lots of people talking but your brain does you a cool favor and ignores all that noise so you can focus on the person in front of you? Did you do anything to make that happen, probably not. It’s just a thing your brain did for you when processing all that stimuli, you placed your focus on the speaker in front of you and your brain filtered the rest. What if you couldn’t do that?

Stimuli processing issues can present in both dimensions, both over processing and under processing. Neurodivergent people are often placed into situations that are relatively easy for neurotypical people to process but can be very challenging for neurodivergent people to process. If you want to do a thought experiment (or actual experiment) select a stimuli you can’t ignore, pinch yourself hard every few seconds and try to carry on a conversation. You will notice it takes a lot more energy to focus on your tasks and ignore this unwanted stimuli.

Second, different thinking patterns. We all process the world differently. Neurodivergent people can have very different ways of processing information, I know first hand of three patterns that are common and that I exhibit.

• Perseveration. Perseveration is when you can’t stop thinking about a topic. Kinda like getting a song stuck in your head, but for me it’s having a difficult technical problem and literally being unable to carry out other functions because I can’t keep my brain from working on it. I wake up at 4am thinking about technical problems and then can’t go back to sleep. A puzzle might be a fun diversion for you, it can be a dangerous trap for me where I know my brain will continually turn it over again and again no matter what I want.
• Hyper literal thinking. I think about things in very black and white terms. It can be very frustrating for things to happen outside of the rules I’ve established. There are rules that make obvious sense and the contravention of those rules is distressing. For example, you aren’t supposed to hurt people’s feeling but you also aren’t supposed to lie, this makes white lies distressing (I find all kinds of deception distressing, and it’s amazing how much you are just supposed to lie to people in many social situations).
• Hyper focus. Neurodivergent people often have special interests that they can focus on for extended periods of time. If people were to leave me alone, I could write code for days, only stopping when hunger or some other undeniable physical pain occurs.

Third, different skills. Frequently neurodivergent people find social skills difficult. I said to someone recently that neurotypical people seem completely insane to me. The complex web of contradicting rules make little sense. On top of this, rules are often predicated on being able to ascertain the feelings of the person you are interacting with. Many neurodivergent people find this difficult to impossible.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is it’s like being color blind. I struggle with understanding facial expressions, body language, tone, etc. I also have problem displaying the correct things in kind. To operate in the world, many neurodivergent people adopt a system of “masking” where we learn what we are “supposed to do” and carefully study people and make sure to make our faces look right and make our bodies look correct. This is extremely taxing even if you get it right, so neurodivergent people end up sometimes getting it wrong and also spending a huge amount of energy doing this.

So to sum up. Neurodivergent people are asked to operate in a world that is constantly bombarding us with negative stimuli, spending extra energy trying to understand social signals that come naturally to others but our brains don’t pick up. Following these weird scripts requires a ton of energy and it’s easy to mess it up and then someone wonders “why are autistic people so weird?”

It took a lot of persistence and luck. I had found my wife a new doctor to do her medication management and I ended up just politely hounding her staff explaining calmly but firmly the catch-22 I found myself in.

The trick I’ve learned over caring for my chronically ill wife, who I love with all my heart, is to be very nice to the front line medical people but to never give up. They take crap all day from angry people, so I make it my mission to never yell at them, never get cross with them. I just explain what’s going on and my goal is always to get them on my side, be my person on the inside.

That worked here too. After calling a couple times and being nice, one person working the phone remembered me and I could tell they wanted to help. I just kept asking them for options, people like it when they can be part of solving the problem. They got in the doctors ear about this and suddenly if she did a virtual evaluation of my wife she could write a preliminary prescription to fill the gap.

Is this how things should work? No. Should you have to beg and cajole and get lucky that someone will help you? Absolutely not. But this is how I’ve figured out how to navigate this broken system.

Tl;Dr - Be very nice to office staff, be persistent, make it a problem you can solve together, keep reminding them that you are advocating for a flesh and blood human being you care about and that them just suffering will never be a good enough answer.

Also don’t get frustrated if you don’t make progress and need to call back, I think it only took calling 3 days in a row for them to figure out they better help me or they were going to have to talk to me every single day

Anyone that might be thinking this is an exaggeration, it is not.

My wife has adhd and takes vyvanse for it, a strictly controlled substance. I have to be extremely vigilant about making sure her prescription gets to the pharmacy and that the pharmacy fills it correctly.

We recently moved across country. Here’s a fun puzzle to work on.

1. You can not get more than a 30 day supply of the drug
2. Due to lack of providers, you can not get an in state prescription for more than 30 days
3. while it is perfectly legal to fill the out of state prescription, every large pharmacy that can get vyvanse has a corporate policy against filling out of state prescriptions for it
4. smaller pharmacies are willing to fill the prescription, but can’t stock the medicine.

The amount of times I had to explain this to people and just exasperatedly go “so should I just prepare my wife to go through withdrawal of this medication she has been prescribed and taking for nearly a half a decade? Is that ok with you, is that an ok patient outcome? Is that what you’d let happen to your wife”

Luckily shes married to an angry, persistent, yet very polite man who will shame the shit out of people until he gets it fixed. But I have no idea how she was supposed to navigate this alone, while facing the terror of withdrawal.

Agreed. I like the film but it feels like two movies stuck together.

One about the vampire society which is really interesting and novel. And another which is just a run of the mill “rebel faction finds the cure and restores humanity story” that you could find in any zombie film.

I sorta get it though because I think it’s a problem a lot of comments in this thread deals with. An interesting world is not an interesting story. You have this cool vampire society, but then what’s the story? I sorta get why it always ends up being the hero’s journey just in a cool world, because otherwise the comments here are “super cool world but nothing happens”

At least in an extortion scam you get to keep your store from being burnt down by the mob.

It’s an extortion scam coupled with a party that fucking refused to do anything.

Vote for us or a women’s right to choose will be gone!!! Ok we voted for you, you want to do something… no you can’t just ask the lady living her life like a chapter of the handmaids tale to pinky swear… and the Supreme Court just got rid of it… and I have a text asking for $20 to fight like hell…

Fuck the dems. They aren’t getting one red cent from me. Time for a new party that isnt crawling with consultants figuring out how best to milk donations

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

Normally these are optional wellness features. Insurance companies will bug you to download a meditation app or go get a checkup because preventative medicine is cheaper.

These things are generally safe to ignore, if you are really concerned though the best course of action would be to call the number on your insurance card and ask them if anything is up. If you owe them money or need to do something they won’t be shy about it.

The best thing everyone can do is just tune out this bullshit.

MAGA is what happens when edge lords grow up. They love laughing at people freaking out over every dumb thing they do.

During the first trump term I watched the news, I got angry at every thing he did, his supporters lapped that outrage up.

This time fuck it. Rename the Gulf of Mexico to trumps big boy bathtub if you want. Enjoy it MAGA people, enjoy all your epic trolls but I won’t be on the other side getting upset. And then enjoy when the tariffs make your construction business unprofitable. Enjoy when his bungling jacks up prices sky high and you can’t buy bananas anymore because he threatened to nuke the countries that grow them for reasons no one can identify.

This term they can just enjoy the fucking mess they’ve made and I’m not going to give them any satisfaction in getting upset and yelling at the village idiot to not play with fireworks. Go ahead, blow your fucking fingers off dumbass.

Lazy comedy punches down. You find a group that it’s socially acceptable to make fun of and then you do, because you don’t need a punchline.

Go back and watch some sitcoms or comedy from the 90s when it was acceptable to punch down at homosexuals. Comedians didn’t need to write the hard part of the joke, they could just do a gay lisp and the audience was in stitches. Sitcom writers didn’t need to work hard just put a character in a situation where another character would think they are gay, audience whooping and hollering.

Were these moments funny? Not really. But at the time homosexuals were a group it was ok to make fun of so people did and audiences liked it. They liked it because implying someone was part of that group was scandalous, the members of the group could be treated with derision, and it affirmed in the audience their own goodness merely by not being a member of the group.

Blackface was working for largely the same reasons. It was acceptable to mock and denigrate black people. It requires no hard thinking or creative writing to have a character slap on some blackface and act in a stereotypical fashion. Doing so was as easy crowd pleaser because it was a joke “everyone was in on” and it made the white audience feel superior.

Telling audiences comfortable jokes that affirm that they are good people is a great way to make boatloads of money. What jokes are comfortable and what makes people feel like good people changes over time and we look back and go “cringe, why the heck did we find that funny at some point?!”

Excellent point and kudos to you for knowing that widgets are juiced based.

Tariffs suck for the country implementing the tariff. But before I tell you why they suck, let me tell you the way they are supposed to help.

Here’s the way tariffs are supposed to work according to people that like tariffs (spoiler alert, this thing I’m about to describe is a fantasy and I’ll explain why).

Let’s say people in the US can make widgets for $10 and sell them for $12 and have a viable business. But mean old foreign country can make widgets for $5 and sell them for $7 and have a viable business. The foreign country sells the people of the US widgets for $7, which is great if you live in the US and want to buy a widget but sucks if you live in the US and want to make a widget.

Tariffs are supposed to protect local businesses by making foreign goods less competitive. Let’s say we pass a law putting a $10 tariff on foreign widgets. I used to import widgets from foreign country and pay the manufacturer $5 per widget and sell them to Americans for $7. Now when I import the widget from the foreign country I still pay the manufacturer $5 per widget but now I have to pay the US government a tariff of $10 per widget. Each imported widget now costs me $15 and so I have to sell them for $17 to make a profit. This now means that American made widgets are competitive again, the locally made $12 widget is a great deal compared to the $17 imported one. Great if you are a US widget maker and shitty if you are a US widget buyer.

Now you might notice the people in the US buying widgets, even in the best fantasy scenario, end up getting dicked over. The theory goes that widget making jobs are good though and if we do that enough then everyone will have to pay more for goods but we will have lots of jobs making stuff that pay ok.

Now here’s the part that really, really sucks. Let’s say you are a US widget maker and now you know that your foreign competition can’t make a widget for less than $17. You could sell your widgets for $12 and have a viable business or you could sell them for $16.99 and have a super profitable business. I’ll just gesture broadly at the sea of corporate greed we find ourselves floating in and let you decide which is more likely.

Tariffs induce even local manufacturers to raise prices because it hurts competition. It’s basically a massive transfer of wealth from local consumers to local producers by cutting out the foreign producers and the competitive pressure they exert on the market. This is why basically every economist said “do this and kill the economy”

So why do people want tariffs? Well the promise for your average voter is that the tariffs are going to bring back good solid blue collar jobs. You can go work in a factory and pump out widgets and get a nice middle class paycheck. It’s a nice sales pitch and a lot of people would really want that to be true. I suspect though that the manufacturers will automate most of this work and pocket the profits, again, gestures broadly at the late stage capitalism hellscape all around us.

I like how none of the points are correct.

At best they could be a critique of the lives of the people that voluntarily join up to starfleet. Really the only thing that rings true is that, like any military, they have uniforms and you have to follow the orders of the chain of command.

They show tons of citizens of the federation doing whatever the fuck they want. Doing weird science experiments, going to conferences, settling planets, running a vineyard in France, Captain Siskos dad just has a restaurant for the fun of it.

I bought a $20 cast iron pan at target, I season it like once a year. I just wash it and make sure to dry it, I’m sure this is against the rules. Seems to work fine for me though. I wouldn’t say it’s nonstick but it’s mostly fine.

A $20 Teflon pan would be flaking and unusable, so for $20 it’s a good deal.