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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: April 8th, 2024

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  • We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.







  • My current workplace has an official policy of flexing hours for salaried employees. Which is exactly what you just described: if you work time outside of your regular hours, take comp time off for it. And my supervisor is probably the best boss I’ve ever had, she’s super respectful of our team’s time and work-life balance so we don’t even need to run flex time by her. As long as we mark it on our calendars we can just do whatever. A good boss makes such a huge difference.


  • I’m also 9-5 salaried, hybrid with 1-2 days in office each week and the rest from home. It’s very nice.

    Salaried can be a double-edged sword. The occasional self-motivated “I actually really need to get this done” is no big deal, but some workplaces will pile work onto salaried workers with no respect for work-life balance. So you’re left with either not getting your work done and feeling stress because you can’t keep up, or regularly working extra hours for free so you feel stress because you don’t have enough personal time. What kind of job it is can depend really heavily on your direct supervisor and general workplace culture. I had to suffer through a few of the bad kind of salaries positions before I lucked into finding a good one.


  • I sincerely doubt anyone at that zoo didn’t suffer a severe emotional loss that day. That was an awful situation, and while I do think the zoo has the blame it is not because of their decision that day. For the employees, the death of an animal at a zoo can easily cause grief akin to the death of a family member or pet, depending on how closely they worked with the animal.

    Once that child was in the enclosure they really didn’t have time to try out different options that may have aggravated Harambe. Any option, including the lethal one, presented a risk to the child. They chose the option they thought gave the best chance to save the child.

    Where the zoo has blame is the design of the habitat such that a child could just crawl in. I know they’ve learned from their terrible mistake and changed the design, but they really should have known better in 2016.



  • Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to get back on Lemmy until now. Bit of a now-or-never situation. The housing market is absolutely bonkers where I live (maybe where you live too, from your username). We had both made big leaps in salary recently that put the monthly payment in the barely-doable range, and her parents had some fixed funds available to help with the down payment.

    Both the gift money and our salaries were going to be outpaced by the housing market if we waited, and interest rates were already on the post-COVID rise. I don’t think it was a terrible financial decision in the long run, because at least now we’re building equity and the house value will rise with the market. But until we sell (which we won’t be able to afford to for a long time), those assets aren’t liquid, so our month-to-month finances are a lot tighter than when we were renting. Which makes the repair work from the dipshit former owners hurt a lot more since it’s gonna take a long time to recover from big financial hits.


  • My wife and I were able to buy a ridiculously priced starter home only because we had the privilege of her parents being able to help with the down payment. We had to move farther away from work than where we were renting just to be able to even consider homes.

    Our mortgage is twice what our rent was, and we only gained about ~100 sq ft of interior space. Plus a whole host of problems because the previous owners were jackasses who DIYed everything and did it all wrong.



  • Fuck, I’ve never even heard of those. This whole system is garbage, how am I supposed to know how to protect myself from fraud when these companies just somehow automatically have authority to let thieves steal my identity? At the very least we should have a centralized government agency that you can issue a blanket freeze with. Better would be an actual proper ID system.