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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • My sister is a nurse. Hospitals are constantly trying to put more and more workload per nurse than is feasible/safe. That sounds like it’s to your point, but it isn’t really. My sister was making like $25 per hour before covid. Her job was to take care of NICU babies. For $25 per hour, with a degree and a fair amount of student loan debt. And they keep adding responsibilities and assume they will work overtime “for the babies”.

    Why would anyone want to go to school to get into an underpaid field where literal babies’ lives are constantly in your hands, and the hospital is trying their hardest to decrease their nursing payout by decreasing nursing staff?

    We need regulation. Nurses are quitting the field because they cannot handle the stress and the pay certainly isn’t worth it.


  • Wait your hot take is “yes I agree, cut my government pension fund so that my EMPLOYER doesn’t have to pay more taxes”??

    This isn’t you getting more in your paycheck now. This is your employer not having to pay as much in taxes. They will almost definitely not give you that money.

    Sure I mean, the stock market might go up a bit for a little while with this extra cash flow, but eventually those people who would rely on the government pension fund will need to draw money from SOMETHING. Then those market gains will crash.

    In what way is this beneficial beyond “stock market will go up a couple more years”? Which, by the way, unless you already have close to enough to retire now, just makes it MORE expensive for you to buy.





  • I think that’s the idea. Heroes “do it for free”. You don’t see superman getting extra money from saving people. He holds a job. Same with Spiderman. Even Link has to pay rupees for his gear to save the world.

    So businesses have figured out if they give you the praise of being a hero, they don’t have to pay you. Just like a superhero would never ask for money, you shouldn’t either, hero.



  • I liked the Speaker for the Dead from the Ender’s Game series. Instead of some guy reading off fluff about how kind they were, how they would be missed etc, they had a position called Speaker for the Dead who would speak there.

    Before the funeral event, the Speaker would be like a journalist, studying to learn and understand the person who had just passed. Then the eulogy would be more of a story of the person’s life, what goals they pursued through life, etc. Explain why and who the person was. Felt kind of like the difference between just seeing the grumpy man in Up, and seeing the intro to the movie to see who he was through life and why he was grumpy now.

    I wish our funerals were more like that. Let me see and understand the entire life that just ended. Let them have their story one more time.





  • US didn’t really ban it because they didn’t like it. While there was a women’s group protesting against the alcoholism in the country, I don’t think it would have had any traction were it not for the anti union push.

    Saloons were a great meetup spot to make unions. Everyone from work was already there. If companies could make saloons illegal, it would make it harder to make unions. But there was a problem. The US got a lot of its tax revenue from alcohol taxes.

    So they pitched the idea of replacing alcohol tax with income tax, making the budget balance (in fact much improve!). So it got passed to benefit the US government budget, and help the union situation for companies.

    It was not prohibited for long. As you stated, it quickly went awry. But it didn’t matter. The US government now gets its income tax, plus alcohol tax now. Saloons became less popular since they were gone long enough for habits to change.


  • What’s nice about apple is that they use high enough quality components that it lasts awhile. I’m the kind of guy to drive a Honda until it’s just about dead before buying another. I bought my MacBook pro in I think 2011 (maybe 2013, I can’t remember). It still runs fine. The battery is not worth much, maybe 30 minutes. But I have no real reason to replace it. Everything is fine. Compared to when I had cheap laptops before, I think I went through 3 in a span of 6 years.

    I’m guessing the key here is getting a laptop with high quality components that isn’t apple, but I don’t know which ones are actually good, and which are just artificially expensive laptops. Reviews don’t help too much either because so many are fake, and also that I don’t think many people keep their laptops 10+ years to compare longevity. I will probably go buy another apple when mine finally dies.



  • My wife and I were fine with a small wedding, but her parents wanted to invite all their friends to a lavish event. So they booked a very expensive place with the food and told us that was their contribution. We just had to pay for everything else. The photographer, the DJ, the cake, miscellaneous expenses. It all added up. I think we ended up paying around the same as they did, which was approximately double what we had budgeted for our small wedding we wanted. So four times more overall. But we got nice wedding photos and they got their extravagant party with their friends.

    Tldr; boomers gonna boom




  • Not quite that easy but I agree in general. I would have to add:

    • cap school costs to a % of expected income
    • continue to pay pharmacists more than techs to incentivize the lost years of wages for school, but decrease how dramatic that pay difference is
    • All jobs should pay a living wage as a minimum. Those with a bit more responsibility for people’s lives should also come with an incentive for the increased difficulty, so pay the techs a bit more than the minimum, or no one would want to do it.

    Techs do currently make (barely) a living wage in my county. But by that I mean the living wage on MIT living wage calculator, which is BARELY enough to get by. No vacations or any frills. Just not getting further behind every month.


  • It’s not that the techs do all the real work. There was a time when pharmacists kind of let that happen, but it was a short and long gone era. Now pharmacists must also work hard and we as a team pull together doing the same job to make it happen. Every day is a huge challenge for the whole team-the corporations ensure that’s how it works.

    For the workload, pharmacist salaries should probably be smaller than they are and tech salaries should probably be higher than they are. Pharmacist student loans of $250k+ don’t really support that though. It’s a tough situation.