Thrashy

Time to bring back gibbeting!

I'm currently 100% remote, and to be honest I do sometimes miss having coworkers to shoot the shit with, and there absolutely are practical drawbacks to being remote -- especially if you are the one remote worker on a team that is at least partially in office together. At least for me the benefits of being home all the time do outweigh that, on balance, but I'd be lying if I told you that I felt that I was as well-integrated with the rest of my teams as I could be, or that being just a voice and/or face in a video call doesn't have some amount of impact on my long-term prospects.

That said, I really only miss a small handful of my in-office coworkers, and we still do make a point of grabbing lunch every month or three. The rest of the in-office experience can stuff it.

Be careful about that one, though. In addition to Word, for whatever reason iPhones automatically convert “--“ to “—“ so if you’re dealing with anybody like me who marks mid-sentence breaks with double dashes out of old habit, you’re going to get false positives.

Interesting that drop kits are an easily-sourced thing nowadays, I've looked at modern trucks and genuinely wondered how one is supposed to access the bed without a stepladder as they come from the factory. I think it's subtly damning that GMC, among others, has been marketing their multi-position tailgate's ability to function as a bed step. They've made trucks so tall as a vanity thing that it negatively impacts the their ability to actually work as a utility vehicle.

I've been begging (sometimes literally, I know a guy who works at Ford) for a small Maverick or Ridgeline-sized PHEV pickup for years now, and the Big Three seem to be specifically avoiding making such a thing. I don't need to be able to tow a guided missile cruiser, I don't need to sit ten feet in the air to feel safe, I don't want dual 30-gallon fuel tanks in case I need to drive to Cape Horn without stopping for some reason. I just want to be able to commute in town on electric power, handle small home-improvement hauling tasks (mulch, appliances, lumber, etc), and still be able to road trip or pull a small trailer in a pinch. And there are dozens of us, at least! I see people asking "PHEV Maverick when!?" anytime I search the Net for news on the topic. But nope, no PHEV pickup for you, unless you want to buy a Ramcharger -- and deal with being associated with the kind of person who drives a Ram product. No thank you!

Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.

Anti-discrimination laws in the US apply to discrimination based on what's called a "protected class," which essentially boils down to a small set of personal characteristics you're not allowed to base a decision about a person on. For the purposes of housing, this includes race, skin color, and national origin, gender and sexual orientation, whether there are minor children in the family, and disability.

"Being somebody who the loan officer has a deeply personal vendetta against" is not a protected class, and if the original OP did in fact reject a mortgage application on that basis they'd most likely be legally in the clear. Whether their employer would be happy to know about it is another story, but if it was anywhere near a coin-toss decision I doubt they'd ever have to justify themselves.

Once-upon-a-time print shop employee here: the secret to professional-looking print media is good paper. Almost everything except insanely high volume products is are printed on a color laser printer, and most of the useful difference between a cheap Brother printer and a five-figure digital press has to do with printing larger pages, faster, on both sides automatically and/or on cardstock. If you’re patient, have a small color laser printer, a good template for designing trifold brochures, and don’t need anything bigger than 8.5x11, you can have as many oddly specific pamphlets as your heart desires!

The counterargument is that Missourians keep passing progressive ballot measures while simultaneously voting for people who vocally oppose said measures and immediately repeal them because they see politics as a team sport rather than anything that actually affects them. A progressive message might speak to these voters, but voting R is, some reason, as baked into their identity as rooting for the Tigers is.

I was hoping to avoid credentialiam, but… You assume much of what I do and don’t know. I grew up with a parent in higher education administration, and due to my own career I am regularly in communication with a range of R1 research universities, including two which I am currently preforming long-range lab space demand forecasts for. I have had a front-row seat to how the sausage gets made in higher education for the last three decades, and I am regularly talking to senior leadership at one of the top 5 schools in the US for medical research, specifically about these kinds of staffing issues and how the illegal impoundment of NIH and NSF grants are affecting them.

Am I intimately involved with the budgeting process at Harvard specifically? No, but then I’d wager you probably aren’t either, and it’s not that hard to look up stats about their endowment and do some basic math about them. You’re stuck on this one point that about 80% of is earmarked for specific uses, when their overall endowment is so enormous that that number is practically immaterial to the argument. (10% of it is specifically earmarked for the School of Medicine, by the way, which is where most of the lost grant money was concentrated.)

I am not proposing that there is some grand conspiracy at work to throw researchers out of Harvard. Rather, as the tone and tenor of the article linked above would suggest, Harvard's administration is laser-focused on the money, and is starting from the notion that line must always go up no matter what. I don’t doubt that the usual academic politics is preventing the broader university from thinking that it might be worthwhile to share the load to keep scientists working while Harvard fights this, and that’s a shame.

Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.

Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.