Oh shit, you’re right! I had no idea, good catch.

I came here to suggest the same thing. Ego death is freedom.

A good friend of ten years ghosted me after his wife left him. My wife and I helped him through a lot of it, then he just went incommunicado. I’m still not sure why as he won’t return my calls, texts, or emails.

Pistachios, because almonds aren’t actually nuts. They’re drupes

Edit: they’re both drupes!

I think more men are aware of the existence of toxic masculinity than before and many of them are trying to get out from under it. A lot of young men still are unsure of how to fit into the world, though, which is how the alt-right snaps them up with easy “answers” to complex problems.

I definitely see a lot more women fighting against traditional gender roles than men. They’re killing it, it’s really great to see.

Much of my exposure to younger adults is through my work. It definitely attracts more progressive candidates, although nothing like fields such as social work, psychology, etc., so take all of this with a grain of salt. I do work fairly frequently with more traditionally “macho” workers like the trades, and they’re starting to reject toxic masculinity simply because it’s bad for business.

Hell yeah. My experience may be skewed due to my field, but I’ve noticed my Gen Z peers are SO much better at critical thinking. If someone asks most of my millennial coworkers to do something, they generally just do it. Ask one of my Gen Z coworkers and they’ll usually ask you why, often followed by probing questions to better understand what they’re doing. They’re full of healthy skepticism.

As a cohort, they’re also better at enforcing work/life balance. I’ve been fighting for employee rights for years but for so long felt like I was alone. Now I’m at home with the newer coworkers who (politely) tell their bosses to fuck off when asked to do extra unpaid work (we’re all salaried) or to work outside of their job description.

While many aren’t technically advanced - many couldn’t build or troubleshoot a broken PC - they are as a group fairly technically capable, having uniformly been raised using technology. Teaching my computer illiterate boss to use Excel is so frustrating that it feels like repeatedly punching myself in the side of the head. Teaching my equally Excel-unskilled, twenty-something coworker the same is a breeze. He has no fucking idea what he’s doing, but he picks it right up. He knows how to use a PC, just not how to use Excel in particular. My boss knows neither.

I absolutely love working with them, Gen Z is the best.

I think their metaphor is referring to ease of use and the knowledge required for use. I have a few personal anecdotes as examples.

I’m an eighties kid. My first PC was a Commodore 64 and my first car was a 1966 VW Bug. Neither was reliable nor easy to use. I had to learn to utilize interfaces that were more finicky and complex than modern equivalents, and I spent a great deal of time learning how to make them work when they glitched out or were broken. The alternative was not having them at all. It was hard to get BBS advice when your PC took a dump and no one else you knew had one you could use, and then where would you get car advice? Certainly not from my dad!

A kid growing up with an Apple anything and driving a 20 year old car doesn’t face the same kinds of difficulties. Many things just work more reliably and aren’t as difficult to use. One can easily buy gaming systems now where we often had to build our own to get what we wanted. My buddy’s 23 year old daughter had never even heard of CLI. That’s all I had!

It doesn’t make one generation better than the other - younger people today are skilled in ways I could have only dreamed of. We just have different opportunities for excellence.

I had the same experience! It HAD to have been astroturfing. The reviews were simply glowing but it’s honestly one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It’s not even so bad it’s good, it’s just page upon page of cringe cliche.

I became curious if you had been in Vegas when you mentioned billboards with lawyers. That’s a Las Vegas peculiarity (although it may be a peculiarity elsewhere). Where I live in the States has no billboards and it’s great.

My wife also works in HR and I now work in an adjacent department, EHS. I came to post pretty much the same as you did.

I will add that it’s interesting reading these threads and seeing the conspiracy theory type comments uniformly painting HR across the world. They speak as if the employees that comprise HR have no agency or are uniformly of one mindset, protecting the company at all costs, even though that doesn’t benefit them personally at all. It’s a simple solution for a complex situation, so it sounds good but doesn’t hold up under the merest scrutiny.

We get the same shit in EHS, how we’re just there to prevent company liability and don’t really care. It’s quite frustrating since it’s anything but true and tends to be perpetuated by employees who don’t actually engage with EHS, so they don’t actually know who we are or what we do. Reading through the comments, it’s much the same here.

I have ADHD with ASD tendencies, despite not being autistic (long story). People like us are more frequently the types who find something new to be interesting, then dive in and learn EVERYTHING about it. For example, I recently bought a new car and spent days near obsessively learning about it. How it works (first electric car), how to model current vs acceleration, how to tear it down and rebuild it, etc. I’m now in the process of compiling a FAQ for my wife, who doesn’t share my obsessive tendencies and can’t retain my frequent “hey sweetie, this is interesting!” data dumps, and setting up monitoring and automations for it on our home lab.

I used to think this was what everyone did. Turns out it’s not normal.

I just tried this and it’s genius! I haven’t ever given side mirror adjustment any thought.

Perfect five out of seven.

Nice

Just a one off gamble aided by a cocktail of ADHD impulsiveness, COVID anxiety, and the stress of living in a 5th wheel with three cats, a dog, and my wife. We did some weird shit.

We were living with family and we had no rent/mortgage for a few months. We live in a high cost of living area, so not having that payment means having an extra $2k+ per month. I miss that part but not much else.

Rezolute. They’re a biopharma company.

Not super rich, but we’d be doing substantially better financially if this went differently.

The year: 2020. I was playing with the stock market and decided to buy 10,000 shares of the cheapest stock, just because it was funny to say I had 10k shares in anything. It cost about $800.

A couple of months later, lo and behold, my $800 was worth about $5000! “Holy shit,” I said, “I made money on penny stocks!” I promptly sold all of it.

Several months later, I check on it again. The company has announced new technology and its share price has skyrocketed, from a few cents per stock to $25. I could have made $250k, but instead made $5k.

Your comment made my teeth hurt. IYKYK.

I’m guessing your wife might be a redhead and/or has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as both groups are resistant to certain types of local anesthesia. I have the latter and novocaine does next to nothing for me without using massive volumes.

Assuming I’m vaguely correct, if she hasn’t done so already, consider trying articaine, bupivacaine, or mepivacaine. I explained my situation to my dentist and he allowed me to trial each before jumping into dental work. Articaine was the first we tried and it works great for me.

Here’s the article I provided as evidence I’m not just crazy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6834718/

Ahoy!