shikitohno

The highest I’ve ever seen someone get into without specific education was a department manager.

I've seen people do it when I worked at Whole Foods fairly often, but the work conditions worsened as you went up in some pretty big ways. Once you hit the level of department manager, you could be swapped into working at any store within a 50 mile radius of your home store, without any option to refuse if you wanted to keep the position, so having a car was basically mandatory, though they didn't swap them around that much if you were doing a good job where you were. If you went one level up to assistant store manager, swaps got way more frequent, and you were salaried. Store managers seemed pretty stable in their locations, provided they were putting up good numbers, but them and their assistant managers both had to work some pretty crazy hours. On the plus side, they did get pretty sweet bonuses. My store manager at one location would sometimes earn more in bonuses than he would in his salary. This was all pre-Amazon takeover, though, so I'm sure things have gotten worse in the interim. Heck, they started making it more shit while I was still there in the bid to get Amazon to buy them.

Point is, even in companies where it is possible to go from the shop floor to upper management, there's always a catch to it.

Or, just maybe, they could adequately staff their stores instead of constantly running skeleton crews. If they were actually sincere with their cries of high theft, more employees on the floor could deter would-be thieves, while also giving them time to help customers when needed and pack out product so the place doesn't always look like an obstacle course left in the wake of a hurricane, with piles of stuff on the floor blocking half the aisles.

Any place that requires an app for me to shop at is a hard no for me, much less all the other nonsense they want to include.

Basically, as soon as other reliable methods became widely adopted. No, I don't have any phone call related anxiety or whatever, I'll call someone if I really need to, I would just rather not. I'd much rather get a text that says, "Hey, we're meeting up at 7pm to go out and do, XYZ, do you want to come?" than a phone call that starts with that and turns to "So anyway, did I tell you my mom blah, blah, blah... And I don't know what to say, because I kind of want to go, but it would be a lot blah, blah, blah."

Phone calls with friends and family have a way of spiraling off into tangents when I don't necessarily have the time to entertain them, but don't want to be a dick all the time telling people I don't have time at the moment to listen to them. If there's a self-service section to a company's website or app, I can usually do whatever I need faster than it would take me to get through the automated menus and hold music to call and have them do it. Like my pharmacy, if I want to refill a prescription online, I log in, check a box and hit submit. Done. If I call them, I need to go through three menus to get patched through to the pharmacy, tell them what I want, hold for a moment while they help someone in the store, give them my info and wait for them to look it up, etc.

When I plan to meet up with people, I make plenty of time to talk to them and listen to whatever. When I get what I think is going to be a short phone call that devolves into tangents, I don't necessarily have the time to entertain whether the fact that my friend's cousin had his toe amputated due to gangrene means he should get the spot on his nipple tested for leprosy, or if he should just improve his personal hygiene and see if it washes off in the shower.

If something really is going to be a pain to communicate via text, schedule that conversation and we can have a call to discuss it, but I'm not answering phone calls whenever somebody calls out of the blue unless I'm interviewing for jobs or expecting a call about some sort of emergency.

Not just that, but you'll also experience a good deal of social pressure from your friends and family, or future co-workers. Some can be of the patently ridiculous variety, like "Oh, that's a man's job, why would you want to try and do that?" but you also get some that can be well-meaning and grounded somewhat in reality, like the potential risk for violence and/or sexual violence that a female cab driver would be perceived as more exposed to. These can be mitigated to an extent, if you find the right niche to go into. For example, I would think the risk for violence would be lower if you were just doing airport runs, or medical transport for the elderly, rather than being the late night driver picking people up from clubs and bars to bring them to their private residences.

For a job that has an old boy's club formed, a new, female employee can also often expect to have to deal with regular harassment, whether it's old-fashioned, paternalistic sexism, or active efforts to drive away women that the men working there view as encroaching on their private domain. I'm not excusing this behavior or saying it's something women should put up with, but that is the simple reality of many career fields society views as "men's work," and knowing this in advance will often discourage women from even trying to get a job in these fields, absent credible signs that the company they're considering is making substantial and concrete efforts to change this culture and make the work place not be misogynistic, or some other pressing urge (i.e. "I can't get a job somewhere else where I live that will pay my bills and avoid homelessness and starvation, so I guess I'll put up with the harassment and misogyny until I can move elsewhere or something better opens up.") that means they're willing to overlook it. Rather perversely, the men who see women leave the job in short order due to the men's behavior, rather than the actual work or work-related conditions, often take it as confirmation that women aren't cut out for that line of work. Meanwhile, those women who persevere, but don't take shit from their male coworkers and dare to make them actually face consequences for their own words and actions will frequently be maligned as "bitches" and socially isolated at work.

It's hardly surprising women don't actively seek out to subject themselves to such conditions on a regular basis, absent some external influence that either seeks to ameliorate the hostile environment they face, or else compels them to tolerate it as the least terrible option available.

Harris was no more of a crap candidate than Biden was in 2020.

Biden was able to get away with it in 2020 coming off Trump's first term and the shitshow that was COVID's handling under his leadership. Harris didn't have this benefit, being second in command in the incumbent regime, was unable to capitalize on any of the points the Biden administration could claim as wins, while stubbornly refusing to put any distance between him and herself on his unpopular stances. Add in that this was occurring while popular sentiment was clamoring for an inspiring campaign that wasn't the usual DNC paint-by-numbers, march to the right campaign of, "Well, actually, while I can appreciate Hitler's passion for the arts, animal welfare and the health risks of smoking, you'll find that we, uh... disagree about the best way to deal with the Jewish question. Thank you, you're seen and heard, even you Jews out there. Vote for me, 'cause the other guy's Hitler, and I'm not entirely Hitler."

The entire Democrat effort (or lack thereof) was a massive unforced error on their part. Instead, they keep sidelining any candidate who seems to actually excite people and inspire them with hope for the sort of systemic change they want, unless they find they can eventually drag them into their usual shenanigans.

Personally, I think they'd also do best to drop their tokenism with candidates that trot out the same means-tested policy drivel. Rather than go harder on the adjectives next time and hope people show up to vote for, "The candidate who would be the country's first female, Chinese, Navajo, amputee, Leprauchan president in history," have policies that don't include the means-testing and would broadly lift up the working class and poor voters, while also addressing historic inequalities for the many groups that have been disadvantaged and/or excluded from US society for its history. You can tick all the diversity boxes you want with the candidates, but it's patronizing to think people will blindly fall in line for such a candidate assuming they'll represent them, when we've seen that it's mere lip-service paid to very real issues impacting the lives of millions of Americans, which will be promptly forgotten upon taking office, if it lasts that long.

It may have a large part to do with where in the UK you were coming from, and where in the US you wound up, in fairness. Bog-standard eggs are $8/dozen just outside a major metro on the East Coast, while less than half that for posters in other regions. Last week, I was in Manchester, and a 15-pack of eggs at the Lidl on Piccadily Gardens was about £3 or so, which would probably make $8/dozen seem pretty crazy in comparison. I think the lowest I saw while there, further from the city center, was £2.15 for 15 eggs.

I always had my day brightened at an old job by emails from this guy in Master Data. His email signature was just MC Hammer lyrics disguised as Bible verses, something like Hammerlonious, 4:16-24. Nobody ever asked him to change it or gave him grief about it, since rather than implement something normal like SAP, the company had decided to roll their own in-house ERP system, and he was the only one who actually knew how a good chunk of it worked.

You can go the nuclear option. My mother used to complain constantly that her computer was slow, and could I take a look at it. This developed into a fortnightly ritual where I would remove the Internet Explorer toolbars she'd added that took up a full third of her laptop's screen, then run an antivirus scan for 5 hours or so to remove the malware she kept re-installing. Eventually, I got tired of it and told her I would either install something she couldn't mess up as easily, or she could fix her own problems going forward. She agreed to trying something new, and her laptop got a nice Linux Mint install. I guess she really loved her malware, as she soon lost interest in the laptop, despite offers to show her how to do what she wanted to, which really weren't more elaborate than opening Firefox and going to her email, facebook, etc, but I guess a new desktop icon and no toolbars was a bridge too far for her.

The Irish are cool most everywhere tho.

Lol, get the Irish started on the Travelers, and it'll come out for them, too. The amount of times I hear "They're knackers, they're just scumbags," or similar when one of them shows up was pretty surprising, initially.

See, that's the fun thing, advice won't help at all. This is just the ruling class trying to shift the blame for the current situation onto a lack of paternal figures in Gen Z's life, or broken families, or some other moral panic BS to make peoples' suffering their own fault, rather than having to point out that this is the inevitable outcome of our chosen economic/political system.

No amount of advice is going to convince a younger adult that they were mistaken when they looked around and accurately noted they're stuck in a world that is quite rapidly going downhill, with no realistic prospect of it improving in the near future. They're stuck with crap jobs that are constantly trying to overload them more and more, for ever less pay. Between ghouls of the older generation and those who failed to amass enough wealth in their younger years to be able to leave work, positions throughout the career ladder are still being occupied by people who ought to have retired long ago, meaning that there's little prospect of any significant career growth. In other words, they can't even push through all the shit for a light at the end of the tunnel, where they'll get theirs and finally find some stability in later years if they just put their heads down and grind through it.

Even if older relatives have some sage financial advice to give, most people and their families simply aren't in the position to provide the sort of real, material support that is necessary to alleviate this, nor should they have to. These things should rightly fall to the government, either in the case of regulations to prevent companies from pushing so many into such precarious positions in the pursuit of making the line go up for another quarter, or as a social safety net to help the inevitable number of people who fall on hard times no matter what.

Just more gaslighting nonsense from the powers that be to deflect from systemic failures of our society.

I mean, they kind of have to be pretty good to entice you into the walled garden to begin with. Get people in the door with a smooth, super-polished experience, and then you've already got plenty of them pretty well won over. You'll lose some users with previous experience with another OS to "It doesn't work the way it did on $ancient_version of $OS, I hate it," that go back, some just get tired of the same thing and want to try something new, and others that hit the walls of the garden and decide they want out. If it was straight garbage and restrictive, on top of being expensive, nobody would hang around until they got comfortable enough that overcoming the friction of changing was a real obstacle to switching.

There's just a disproportionate representation of folks like myself in tech communities versus the general population who are opposed to any walled garden, no matter how polished, when there exist a free alternative.

Japan also has a problem much like exists elsewhere, that older voters are the ones who vote most, so their interests and views get disproportionately represented in election results. I'm sure that's only exaggerated in a country that's so lopsided in its age distribution as Japan is. I also wouldn't be surprised at all if it were to turn out that elderly voters tended to be more xenophobic and resistant to changes in immigration policy.

Japan really needs to get it sorted out soon, though, as they are desperately in need of work in all sorts of fields, but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn't seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan, do a few years of work and go back with enough money to buy yourself a home. Like, I looked into it for a laugh a month or two ago, and I actually have work experience that would qualify me for a visa as a skilled worker, but there's no way I would consider going. You could only use it for a maximum of 5 years, it cannot be renewed, as far as I could tell, it also cannot be reapplied for, and it's ineligible to serve in any capacity for establishing residency. You also cannot bring your family with you. That's a pretty hard sell for all but the most desperate of people to uproot their lives for, even before you get into Japan's famously terrible work culture.

I do understand a certain reluctance towards migration that doesn't result in cultural assimilation to a fair extent, especially considering how big of an export Japan's cultural products are, but xenophobic reactions to any possibility of change are going to back Japan into a corner where they have to pick between collapsing as a society, or just opening the floodgates to immigration in a way that will leave them way more susceptible to the sort of massive cultural shift that so many Japanese voters seem to fear. In my layman's opinion, they would do far better to go about massive work culture reform and allow much more immigration with an immense amount of support for people learning the language and culture, and assistance in integrating into the community. It'll probably be painful for all involved, but the result of kicking this can down the road perpetually will be far more painful, and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves.