For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

I’m talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won’t even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you’ve been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn’t get in school.

Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you’ll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.

Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.

I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.

Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.

If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.

From what OP wrote, they aren’t total strangers given he knows she likes comics. He sounds fairly young so I’m guessing she’s in his social circle or someone from school. If they were total strangers or just met for the first time, then yeah I’d say it would be a good idea to strike up a casual conversation or two before asking them out. You just really don’t want to develop strong feelings for them before you ask them out. It’s a recipe for pain if she says no, and can make things pretty awkward if they’re going to have to keep seeing each other regularly.

It’s a good idea. You may want to plan a second activity like lunch or a walk in the park as well.

And just be direct. Something like “Hey, do you want to go on a date with me? We can grab something to eat and go to the comic store.”

If she says no, don’t push it. Just say okay and wish them well.

I too was terrible at talking to girls. I still am but my girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind lol

Whatever you do, just don’t try any pickup artist or smooth talking tactics. It’s gross and cringey, doubly so if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off.

I would also disagree with a lot of the other comments, if you want to date this person, make it clear you want a date. Don’t try to do the be friends then turn it romantic thing. It can work but not when you already know you want to date them.

It’s still worth using cards for the rewards points. I just set mine to auto pay and enjoy having everything I buy 3-5% cheaper, plus way better purchase protection and customer service. I’ve never paid a cent in interest or accrued any debt whatsoever.

And if for some reason you ever do need a loan, it’s a lot easier to get one with a credit history. It sucks that it is that way but it’s ridiculously easy to get a score well into the 700s if you just auto pay a credit card.

The optics of paying disabled people shit wages is not good, but consider that those workers are otherwise unemployable. Goodwill is probably still losing money on a lot of them even with the super low wage.

If you force a higher wage, goodwill is simply going to replace them with abled people who can do the job much more efficiently and reliably.

The idea is that people under these circumstances should already be fully supported by disability pay (yes I know disability pay is broken right now, I’m talking about ideally here) or a guardian or caregiver, and their goodwill job is something for them to do to help with socialization, practice doing hands on tasks, and getting some pocket money.

If disabled people are struggling to make ends meet because they make $4/hr at goodwill, that’s a failure of our society at taking care of a less abled person, not goodwill. Nobody whose only option is to work at goodwill due to disability should need to be working at all. I’m not a Marxist but some level of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” isn’t a bad thing.

I do have other bones to pick with goodwill, but I’m pretty neutral on the disabled workers thing.

Most importantly, this stance doesn’t piss off AIPAC. If you ever want the overarching position of the us govt on Israel to change, you need to do something about AIPAC. They hold enormous lobbying power and will put it behind your opponents if you don’t support Israel.

Chicago is absolutely a desirable place to live, half of my friends moved there or are planning to move there. It’s the 3rd largest city in the USA, and while the winter weather sucks, it has head over heels the best urban design I’ve seen in an American city which more than makes up for it. I’m curious as to what industries you wouldn’t be able to make a career in in Chicago? They have a significant presence in just about every major industry sector except local natural resource extraction.

Regardless, it’s not desirability in and of itself that makes coastal cities expensive, it’s shit housing policy. Demand exacerbates the issue, yes, but the root cause is that there are more people trying to live there than housing units available. NYC for example is building less than 30% of the housing units required to meet demand. It’s not because there’s nowhere to put them, these units have already been designed, planned, and submitted for approval, but most of them will get buried in red tape, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism.

Outside the USA, it’s much easier to find desirable, affordable cities. There’s plenty across Europe and Asia that make American coastal cities look like hovels. Tokyo is the prime example, but outside the USA, cheap housing in major cities is more of the norm than the exception, with some outliers like London. I just randomly picked Berlin, a city I know nothing about other than it’s a fairly major one in Germany, and median rent for a 1br apartment in the city center is around $1400 equivalent. I wouldn’t say that’s cheap, but it’s nowhere near as outlandish as SF bay area or NYC.

Not necessarily. Rent is cheaper in places that have enough housing to meet demand. It’s easier to have enough housing in less desirable markets, but it’s certainly not impossible to meet demand in a desirable market too. Chicago has median rent under $2k as an example of a major city without this problem.

Typical rent in my city is like $1000-1500 for an entire 2 bedroom house. Even my brokest friends have their own place.

San Francisco or NYC? Enjoy your 150sqft shithole for $3k/mo.

There was a whole fiasco a while back where Juul got in trouble for marketing to teens. Not explicitly, but if you had seen what ads they were pushing it was obvious they knew it would be pulling in young people.

The answer to that though is of course tighter marketing regulations, not product bans. Banning any type of vape is an absolutely laughable proposition as long as ciggies are still legal.

OSMC makes some good Kodi boxes under the Vero name if you don’t need proprietary streaming services. I use the jellyfin plugin to read from my JF server, works great. Supports 4k, HDR, audio passthrough, many codecs, all the good stuff.

Between that and my PS5 it covers all the bases

It’s true, but some people go way too far with it. All it means is that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers. You could be white as sour cream and get lucky with your genetics and end up the same way. It’s having those muscle fibers that’s the advantage, not having west african heritage. In sports like basketball or sprinting where fast twitch fibers are a big advantage, you tend to see populations of people who are predisposed to that getting over-represented.

While there is no extra muscle, it is factually true that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers which is a pretty big advantage in many sports.

This is likely why the myth of the extra muscle originated.

Your proposed solution is too narrow. All housing makes housing more affordable. Just let developers actually build the places people are demanding, whatever they are. No housing you build will ever be affordable unless there is enough of it.