Wait, where’s the part where he calls a woman a *fat whore who can keep chasing Chad but she better not come crying to him when she turns 30 and hits the wall?

*about 75% of this is just a reworded comment I saw today on an article about dating in my city.

Oh I’m the opposite - I’m not a very good cook because I don’t enjoy doing it. I’m pretty good with flavors because I’m not afraid of seasonings, but my knife skills are bordering on Worst Cook in America levels. The abuse I have wrought upon poor, innocent, delicious onions is a crime.

Also, if you like the fried onions, have you seen the jalapeno version? So good. I’ve started putting them on everything.

I’m the worst about this. My mom and I will try a new restaurant and I’ll be talking about “oh this needs acid, that’s the perfect amount of heat, blah blah.” Meanwhile, I’m over here “cooking” noodles with a pile of kimchi every other day because that’s all I ever have in the fridge.

Hardness of the Sexbots?

It’s really dependent on the field. I started a job as a temp and then proved that I was smart enough to do other things, so I got hired permanently, but it wasn’t in the field I was studying, just something I ended up enjoying. There are some jobs where that won’t cut it. Whatever your dream job is might be one of those, but I don’t really believe in dream jobs, so I was open to stuff that seemed kind of weird on the surface. I learned a lot about what mattered to me in a job doing that.

I’ll second what another commenter said about talking to a doctor, because it does sound like this might be more than just disinterest. That said, drop out. Get a job and work for a while. Try different things. The path we think we want in our late teens and early 20s is often very different from where we end up, and that can be a good thing. I finally quit trying to force myself to finish my degree when I was 22 and I wish I’d done it much sooner. I did eventually go back and get a different degree in my 30s, but in the meantime, I worked at jobs I never expected to find interesting and learned a ton while building a solid resume. College is great, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s definitely not for everyone at “college age.”

Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.

It’s part of the media wing of a cult. Shen Yun is another part of it that a lot of people are familiar with - they perform all over the place doing “ancient Chinese dance” (which was invented in the 1950s). Epoch Times is the “news” piece. It’s all propaganda.

Cheese with both hot sauce and ranch, or black olive and pineapple. It’s great because no one ever wants to steal any of my pizza.

Waffles. But my roommate in college bought a puppy before the summer, named it Waffles, took her home, and came back in the fall with an untrained dog that peed in the house and he never cleaned it up. Poor Waffles, she didn’t ask to be raised by terrible owners but I ended up moving out early because of her.

Where did it come from? I really want a collection of oversized square-ass animals to hang up in my office now.

They didn’t say GIMP itself sucks, they said leaning to use it sucks. Those are two different things.

Good. It’s what he deserves. I was 9 or 10 when that happened and I remember thinking it was so gross and being confused why people were just like…cool with it? I’m glad people are calling him out now - better late than never, I guess.

No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.

I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.

Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.

It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.

My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.

We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.

I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.

Even if you’re not personally experiencing the things pop music is currently about, there’s still plenty of really great stuff coming out all the time that you’ll miss out on if you stop listening to new things. For example, NPR popped up recently with a Tiny Desk Concert (which feels like a very Old way to find new music in itself) from Chappell Roan, and I would’ve been missing out big time if I’d skipped it just because she’s 15ish years younger than me and in a different phase of her life. A lot of it feels more nostalgic (fucking Casual, man, so many of us have been there) than current to my life, but it’s good music. And as a queer woman, gosh it’s great to see these queer artists who are able to write their feelings and experiences without having to keep plausible deniability in the lyrics.

I mean, the company straight up said they’re pretty sure at least some people are buying them for fetish purposes.

Pfft, I always buy a frozen pizza specifically because I already know I’m not gonna feel like cooking after grocery shopping because it sucks. I don’t even pretend anymore. All that fresh food is for another day.