I’ve seen LGBT lobby and Rainbow Mafia thrown around too. Anything to dehumanize and attempt to paint us as some faceless and unreasonable oppressors.

Upvotes ideally don’t equate to agreement though.

Interesting! I can already picture the min/max song playlists going around lol

The spelling error makes this delicious.

On a serious note, IQ tests have done more harm than good in this world.

I was gonna say, people have been falling in love with things that provide less reciprocal interactions than AI for ages (e.g., body pillows, life-size dolls).

I’m trying out a car-free lifestyle myself now. With all the hidden costs of car ownership, you can pay for ride share pretty often (running late, terrible weather) and still come out ahead of maintaining a car. Only possible in some locales, of course.

I’ve got a system going with library cards from various cities I’ve lived. I’ve got the max ebooks on hold on each so I have constant queue of books to read. It’s free and I’m supporting the usage stats for a public service.

We used to bounce around with all the meal delivery services when they were offering good deals. I’d quit one, try another, and soon the first one would have a good “come back to us” discount. That dried up so we just use the recipe cards and buy the ingredients ourselves. Saves some of the cognitive labor of hunting down recipes every week and we can cook in larger amounts to have leftovers throughout the week. I don’t know how some of you skip meals regularly, I’d be a mess.

I wish I had known about this when I lived in a place without a dishwasher! I tried an external dishwasher but it was a pain to hookup to the sink every time and the capacity wasn’t big enough make the hassle worthwhile.

Huh, we’ve never had to do that. Do you have a relatively big home or a heavy-shedding pet?

I mean, it doesn’t sound fun written out in bullets but parties are usually a great time for my own socially anxious neurodivergent ass lol. That said, besides work events, I haven’t gone to a party where I don’t already know most of the people in years. Jumping alone into a convo of strangers is my hell.

I’d add it also depends on your familiarity with the host. Most hosts don’t appreciate if the first guest is a friend of a friend or distant coworker that they feel obliged to entertain while still busy with final preparations. Whereas if you’re a good friend, they can (often) feel more comfortable saying yeah make yourself at home I’ve got last minute things to do.

I imagine it’s an even looser norm in places outside the west, considering the west tends to view time/punctuality as more “concrete” than some others. For some of my friends born outside the west, if we tell them the actual start time of an event we shouldn’t expect them any sooner than an hour after that lol.

Or this would be a lovely use of jury nullification

It’s such an interesting idea, isn’t it? Theres a lot to gain but also, a language can mean a lot to people: identity, community, history. If we’re at A, I can look ahead and see the benefits of getting to Z, but I have no idea what all happens in between.

I’d bet most people can get behind the idea that those in leadership positions or saddled with greater responsibility should be compensated more. The issue for me is the magnitude of that compensation.

For what it’s worth, I’m in the US and just as confused by the $325 pricepoint for internet as well.

If I can chime in for the faculty side of things: absolutely, we’re in this together.

I’d add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.

In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Dean’s duties, we were told there’s a reorganization and one of us has to “volunteer” to take on slew of new admin duties.

The crux for me is: I don’t know of anyone that’s saying we should “cut the fat” from the staff on the ground keeping these colleges and departments alive (it sounds like you’ve got some shitty colleagues and I empathize!). But there’s multiple tiers of senior leadership being paid on scales far and above other staff.

It’s great your president is fortunate enough to be able to donate her entire salary. But that’s doesn’t take away from the high dollar figure she and others like her are being paid. How many staff could be hired if the “extra fat” from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?

Momentum is huge for me too. Whenever I start my day with a meeting (aka forced to jumpstart work mode), the rest of my day is smooth. On days when I don’t have a morning meeting or reason to get started by X time, it just sliiiiiides until it’s 3pm and I’ve done nothing lol.

This has been a godsend for me because my personal obstacle is always just getting started. So I give myself permission: I’m only going to do 15 minutes of this huge task today.

More often than not, once I get started I just keep going. But I give myself the freedom to stop and if I do, hey at least some of it got done!

It’s not “hate” for meetcutes, it’s just resistance to the idea that a cute origin story has any substantial effect on the future of the relationship.