Bonus picture of Minerva

OMG my dad does this while I'm on the phone with him. If I had a dollar for every time I had to tell him to turn off the video on his phone so I could hear him........

OMG! So many things. I'd probably spend months looking through the stats of my life alone. But first, dinosaurs! What did they actually look like? How did they act? What actually killed them?

Porn.

Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.

I'll go first.

I had a long distance GF when I was in my 20s. We only saw each other about once a month so obviously we spent a fair amount our limited time together fucking because, 20 year olds.

So, we're going at one Saturday afternoon and halfway through, I hear a group of guys on the other side of the bedroom wall making fake sex noises to mock us. Normally a pretty passive guy but in what might have been my most "establish dominance" moment to date, I just fucked her harder because she was a screamer and I knew she'd drown out any noise these dudes were making.

Anyway, that's how we found out that the exterior walls of that apartment were just as thin as the interior walls.

Public speaking ability. She was on speech and debate teams all through HS and college so she is utterly unbotherered speaking in front of a crowd. Once we were the best man and matron of honor at a wedding where the grooms had said they didn't want us to give a speech, when the DJ double checked this the day of, they were clearly regretting the decision. She caught the DJ and told him to be ready for a toast in 15. She disappeared for 10 minutes, came back and gave a speech that literally had people in tears.

Meanwhile, I have threatened to leave a church if they insisted on making me read the pre written Sunday morning announcements.

Same here!

They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.

I used to work in field service for a machine tool company. One of the machine brands I serviced had a couple years in the late nineties that hated to work on. The machines were always cheap but those years were egregious. Corners cut everywhere and the original parts were so shitty we'd usually have to retrofit shit from a different year. Eventually bumped into a guy who'd worked on them at the time who explained the history. The owners of the company at the time were about to sell out to another manufacturer and they wanted to jack up the profits before the sale so they cut every corner they that they didn't think would be noticable before the sale.

The brand stayed afloat for another ten years but everyone I know who was in the industry at the time said their was never any coming back from the damage two years of shit machines did to their image.

Worst part about was, because the machines didn't start having issues until after the company sold, the new owners got all the blame and got stuck with bill for all the warranty work. Literally no incentive for anyone else to not do exactly the same as the original owners.

I think if it were over 100 it would be almost always be a yes. But to be entirely honest, t probably depends a lot on the day and the mood I'm in. There are days I might do it for one or two. On the other hand, there are days when I think the planet probably needs fewer humans so yeah, as bad as it sounds to say out loud, it depends entirely on the type of day I'm having.

Today, I think it'd take at somewhere between 10 and 20. I guess I'm feeling optimistic.

If we're just talking voyager, it's "Delete the wife". If we're talking all of trek, it might be "Hey Worf, Eat any good books lately?"

Several years ago, I was in a waiting room while my father had heart surgery. Two things I remember were that for some reason they had us in an area that was primarily the waiting room for pediatric surgery and, a woman with one of the other families in the same lobby was getting a call every 5 minutes. I remember these things because the woman's ringtone was "If I die young" by The Band Perry. Every 5 fucking minutes, this woman's phone started screaming "If I die young, bury me in......." This was enough to make me want to fly off the handle waiting on my 60 year old father's surgery. I can't imagine if I'd been with a family who was waiting to hear about a child. To this day I can't hear that song while seeing red for a minute.

I think my wife and I might be one of the last couples to be embarrassed enough about meeting on the Internet to lie about it. When we talk about how we met around our niblings, we always have to explain that "we met on the Internet back when that was something you lied to your friends about"

When I was in my early twenties I was friends with this girl and, we would flirt with the idea of hooking up from time to time (never did though). One night we were texting and I honestly thought she was suggesting that she wanted one from me. I sent it, basically got an "OMG, WTF dude!?" In reply. Eventually, she admitted that she was trying to suggest it but only because she never thought I'd actually send it. At that point we were good friends (very much just friends) and I kinda suspect that she was trying to make me feel better about the whole thing.

So I guess the answer for me is... kind of?

I think that while there are some who make this assumption, I'm not sure that it's the universal takeaway and it is certainly not a safe assumption at all. I work at a large organization in a department that is nearly 50/50 in person and work from home so most meetings take place online and are attended by people both at the office and in their homes. The work culture is such here that a virtual background is generally considered the professional approach to having your camera on even if you are at the office. The company has even issued several company branded backgrounds for this purpose. We know for a fact that many attendees have very presentable spaces but virtual backgrounds are the norm due to the amount of people attending from shared living spaces or drop-in offices.

Attending meetings with your camera off is also still very common. In fact, I have several co-workers who I didn't recognize in person after working with them for over a year because their company picture was significantly out of date and their cameras were never on during meetings.

Condolences, that really sucks.

There wasn't sad food to go along with it but, my wife and I had a very similar experience. My nephew passed away after 3 months of trying to repair a heart defect (HLHS specifically). My SIL, her husband and, her other kids had been living with for the past six months because we lived near the hospital he was treated at. Their extended family spent a lot of nights with us as well.

The day after he passed away, they all went home. My wife and I are child free so we were just alone in this quiet, empty house that had been loud and crowded since we found out our nephew was going to be born with a bad heart. The weight of the past months hit us all at once and we sat there sobbing for what felt like hours. It's been like three years and I still get teary thinking about it.

This is my favorite version of this encounter. Well done!

So my wife lived in Waco 15 years ago and bought a cheapo enameled DO at the grocery store. Her mom liked it and bought herself one there too. Two years later, the enamel on her mother's was cracked and peeling. Wife bought her a replacement. Two years later, same thing. Meanwhile, the original one my wife bought has been the workhorse of her kitchen for 15 years and the only chips it has are exterior ones from damage during cross country moves. I've often wondered if that company's quality control sucked and we just got lucky or if my MIL was that hard on them.

So, I work in a maintenance position that really isn't possible to do remotely but we have a fair amount of desk work too. We're in the process of setting up a workstation to program and new head ends for our systems. The first thing on everyone's list when we were deciding on a location was "as far from everyone else as possible" because we all know that other people being around to make small talk is a distraction that will easily double the time it takes to get this shit done.

In every maintenance position I've had, every one of us has had our own secret workspaces where most other guys didn't know to look for us just so that we could get some desk work done in peace. Co-workers are a distraction more often than they are a help and I think we've all known this for years.

Seconding this. The best money is still money.

If you can't get a good stable currency or you have legitimate fears that the currency you can get is in danger of some kind of collapse, gold or silver coins would be your best second bet. In this case you'll want well known coins minted by an actual government such as an American gold eagle or the Canadian silver maple leaf rather than the coin shaped "rounds" that a lot of places sell. The rounds will have the same issue as jewelry, you'll have to haggle over weight and quality every time you sell one. Actual coins issued by a government mint will have pretty well established values so they will be easier to sell at a fair price.

If your business relies of billions in VC money every year to stay afloat, then you don’t have a sustainable business and probably shouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing.

This right here. We need to see unprofitable "disruptors" close before they wreck existing systems and drive up the cost of living and/or drive down the quality of life for everyone. How many previously profitable businesses who provided decent jobs closed because they couldn't complete with Amazon while Amazon wasn't even technically making a profit? How much of the current housing crisis is driven by AirBNB and such? They drove up housing prices in the name of cheap weekend rentals and now the weekend rentals aren't even cheap anymore.

There used to be lots of delivery models that were profitable while paying people fairly. Door dash and others just convinced us all to cut each other's throats for a brief window of savings.