• 2 Posts
  • 140 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2023

help-circle


  • You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

    I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

    I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

    I would have thought that was abundantly clear.





  • First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

    Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

    Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.





  • You should not discontinue medication until you speak with your healthcare provider.

    Neuroanatomy and neurochemistry are complex systems. A high level symptom like depression could be coming from any one of a myriad of causes. A given medication works against specific causes, but will not work if your symptoms are being caused by something not targeted by that medication.

    Until our technology and understand improves to the point that we can do some kind of neuroimaging to diagnose, the only thing we can do is to listen to your symptoms and make a best guess. If it doesn’t work, it means that guess was wrong, and you either need a dosage adjustment or a medication change. If it does work but has unmanageable side effects, that’s the same. Any continuing symptoms or side effects have diagnostic relevance, and you need to work with medical staff to dial it in.


  • I think you mean “critical of” and not “critical to.”

    And while there is welcomed and active debate in the community on our approaches and domains of concern, people who are actively hostile and unwilling to engage in a well-intended discussion are not welcome, in the same way that homophobes aren’t welcome in the LGBT community and far-right types aren’t welcome in socialist communities. We don’t want racists in spaces for Black persons, and we don’t want to engage with transphobes in trans spaces.

    In men’s lib, we study the semantics and semiotics of masculinity both in specific cultures and how the ideas developed over time. We study sex, sexuality, and gender. Most importantly, we try to understand these things as they impact the communities we live in. While most people would be happy to discuss any of those issues, someone coming in from a “feminism bad” perspective is not going to be interested in discussion. They have a lot of learning to do before they’re ready, and they’re usually more interested in arguing than learning.






  • I’ll change my socks every day, and more if I’m swapping out workout clothes for fresh clothes.

    Oddly, I really don’t experience foot odor. Other bits can get rather ripe, but whether I’m wearing boots or going barefoot, my feet just do t get funky. That said, I have had athlete’s foot and I’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t change their socks after days of marching and working in the field. I know it’s not a major danger for me at this point, but I’ve got a whole drawer full of socks, and in any case I want them to match with my shoes and pants.


  • I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

    My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

    In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

    It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.