Rant: I just got off a very long overnight flight and was kept up all night by kids (and an adult) playing touchscreen games on the back of my headrest. It’s like someone tapping you on the back of the head constantly.

This is the third time this has happened to me.

Who tf thought this was a good idea??? Does this drive anyone else crazy?

I mean the touchscreen ui makes sense for starting movies, etc... but putting games on it seems totally nuts to me. Am I alone in this opinion?

I'm having a bit of a reckoning where I'm working a call center job, and when I like it, it's okay, and when I don't, it's a drag, but just recently my wrists have started to seriously act up and impact my work and life some, and my work insurance won't cover treatment. On a related note, Mom is willing to love and support bribe me back into going to school since I can go back on her insurance as long as I'm taking classes full time. Normally, I would respectfully decline because I'm prideful and petty, left school on academic probation 4 years ago after blowing off classes and am still nursing an underlying fear of failure and psychological hang-ups due to previous academic overextension. But I do have savings to fall back on, I am at a point where I can reasonably pivot, Mom will likely never let this one die, and my job causes me pain. So, what do?

By “happiness” I don't mean “the place where happy people are happy all the time”, but rather “the absence of persisting suffering”.

For some context, I've been suffering from clinical depression for over nine years now. Maybe more. I've been hurt by other people many times in my life, especially in childhood and during school. I have almost never felt connected to another human being, and the older I get, the harder it gets to get any kind of intimacy. I feel like “I'm a creep and I'm a weirdo” regularly, as if my teen angst has never left me. On a good day I will merely be tired, and I think I don't need to describe a bad day.

Recently I've been discovering interesting approaches to therapy and using awareness to “pull yourself by the boot straps”, but whenever the time comes to actually use them in practice, a very real question: “Why should I do it? Happiness is impossible, I will always be what I am, so why go through additional pain of trying to change anything when the result isn't guaranteed?”.

So the question is: how do you answer this (loaded) question? How do you get back your faith in better future for yourself when you have so little experience actually being better? Can you actually do that?

cw: discussion of specific types of bigotry

I used to kind of think that Reddit's bigotry was relegated to the hate subs (TD and friends), and that you'd only find it if you went looking. But wow, Tildes has made me realise that it is EVERYWHERE.

Whenever I take a trip back to Reddit, I'm always blindsided by the fact ordinary threads about unrelated topics are so hateful. For example today I was on an r/movies thread about the new Terminator movie and there's queerphobia, transphobia and sexism all highly upvoted, right near the top of the comments. I guess being immersed in that environment for the last seven years of my life made me a bit desensitised to it, but now I'm horrified everytime.

Reddit is a far worse cesspit than I realised, I'm glad Tildes exists and I hope it keeps getting better and better. The internet needs it.

I am currently looking for an apartment because I am moving away for my masters. My girlfriend and I have contacted 15-20 people and we have received 2 answers. Both tried to scam us.
I noticed he was scamming because of the way the message was formed, it has a very typical structure. If anyone wants I can share it. I also noticed the pictures looked too good, a reverse image search showed that it was from a hotel.

This time I had the email address, so I sent him a mail asking whether this link also contained pictures of his apartment. Behind that link there was a picture of goatse lol. I am not sure if imgur counts my views twice, but so far it has had 3 visits. Just felt the need to share

To summarize, I am annoyed that there are two different standard for 4-pole audio connectors. For those curious I mean this.

You have OMTP and CTIA, the difference is they swap the mic and ground pins. This is irritating because Apple vs Android use them differently. This becomes especially annoying when you want a feature like an inline mic mute switch (one designed for CTIA for example will disconnect the ground pin on OMTP instead of mic)

This has been an ongoing frustration for me for a while. I really enjoy a good pair of headphones because I use Discord and I work from home which necessitates using headphones for extended periods of time to listen to music, take calls, chat on discord.

I just want there to be a device that does OMTP/CTIA swapping AND include the ability to physically mute the mic. Like this but with something that will break the mic pin. Im currently designing something in fritzing that will allow both direction switching as well as selective muting.

/rant

Has anyone else had any similar experience or frustration with this problem?

I considered sending this only as a PM to Deimos, but since it actually involves the community and Deimos has no real control over it, I think it's better suited as a public post.

Users are always quick to point to the "paradox of tolerance" clause in the Tildes vision:

Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to "if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault".

But I believe there's an even more important clause, right in the actual Tildes Docs:

If people treat each other in good faith and apply charitable interpretations, everyone's experience improves. (emphasis mine)

A lot of users here, including some well-known power users, are quick to call "Hate!" where there is no actual hate. Controversial statements are quickly interpreted to their most extreme. Yes, there have been some hateful incidents here and I won't deny that, but a lot of well-meaning discussions are lumped into the mix and shut down because they might lead to hate or because they are associated with hate.

Honest discussions, political or otherwise, can't be had in a climate like this. Echo chamber, hivemind, circlejerk... call it whatever, but that's where things are heading.

For the record, I absolutely agree with this part of the Tildes vision, as written by Deimos:

I believe that it's possible to support the ability to freely discuss important and controversial topics without also being obligated to allow threats, harassment, and hate speech.

Threats, harassment, and hate speech have no place anywhere. But sadly, instead of supporting controversial topics as written, it seems certain topics will have no place here because they are controversial. Tildes right now is not the Tildes we were promised, and seems to be veering further away by the day.

If this is the Tildes everyone wants, that's fine of course. But to me, it's no better than Reddit.

(EDIT: Those in the comments have asked me to remove specific names. I have replaced names with emoji that I like.)

We recently had:

• a thread whose OP defended a confederate statue erected by white supremacists on purely apolitical grounds
• a thread whose OP defended scientific racism on purely apolitical grounds

I'm really annoyed. If you really want to defend something that looks to everyone else like white supremacy, please avoid:

• Claiming to be apolitical while disagreeing with someone's politics. If you're telling someone else "your political stance is wrong," you're having a political opinion. "You're being too political" is a political opinion the same way "there is no God" is a religious opinion. This happened like a kajillion times in both threads.

• Granting benefit of the doubt to white supremacists or sources only used by white supremacists. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦇 effectively said "OK, so the builders of the statue hired a white supremacist speaker to commemorate it -- but they're not white supremacists and neither is the statue." Seriously, come on. And stop citing the spokespeople of white supremacist groups to prove they're not white supremacists -- they intentionally tone down that shit for the media, which is why you look super tone deaf when people post actual accounts of things they did, like holding town hall meetings about how great lynchings are when they thought no one was looking.

• Claiming you'd agree with whoever's arguing with you, except for one inconsequential fact you never mentioned any other time. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦈 said that he wouldn't mind if the statue had been taken down legally -- but every other time it came up he said it was wrong to take down the statue at all, because that was whitewashing history.

• Calling leftists "childish" and "easily-offended." Words like this do have a place in politics, but you've been misusing them. I read both threads front to back -- one or two people ended their arguments with "I'm offended" but basically everyone also said "here's why your view of the world is wrong" or "here's why this is bad and it hurts people." When you start your post by saying "oh, how childish!" and then just repeat the thing you said in the first place, you're basically saying "I'm not listening."

• Accusing leftists of being unwilling to grapple with the facts. Again, this is allowed and fine when it's true, but you've been abusing it. For instance, in a thread by 🦐 on The Bell Curve the original poster claimed The Bell Curve was state-of-the-art, and leftists were ignoring it. That's not true: there was a huge leftist response immediately after it was published, from academics and popsci guys too. Several people linked leftist articles and takedown videos, which he ignored. Maybe the leftists are wrong, but it's not that they ignored it.

Here are some of the ways you were possibly tricked into believing white supremacists:

• They told you their sources were good, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you left-wing sources were shrill and unresearched, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you there was a conspiracy against their viewpoint and that's why the criticism isn't credible. (For The Bell Curve, it's the political correctness conspiracy -- for statues, it's the easily-offended liberal masses.)
• They told you there was more nuance to the situation than it looked like and made an emotional appeal. Intelligent people like to imagine there's no way things could be as simple as they look -- "not everyone would be smart enough to uncover that this apparent act of white supremacy was, in fact, politically neutral!" -- so you believed them.
• You are probably a little bit racist. (Or even a lot racist.) You might not be racist enough to hate black people, but you might be racist enough to find white supremacists more credible than their victims, even though you know the historical facts say their victims were telling the truth.

Here are some preemptive comments:

• I don't want to censor anybody. This thread is not censorship.
• I do want to shout bad opinions down with better opinions. People who support free speech, which I think is most of the people on this website, also want this. This is an example of me trying to do that.
• Yes, leftists can do all the things I listed. (And yes I'm a leftist.) When I go to a site like Twitter or Tumblr I see left-wingers saying all kinds of horrible, unsupported shit they heard from their idiot hippie friends. It's frustrating and sickening and it's a giant part of the reason I don't go on those sites very often. But on this site I only saw right-wingers doing this stuff, not left-wingers. That kinda surprised me because usually it's the side with the biggest groupthink bubble that says really stupid stuff and keeps on trucking.

Thank you and sorry for the long, mean post.

Increasingly over time, I've been seeing reddit less and less like the cool startup I used to think it was and more like a business. Not a day goes by where I don't see a post breaking the site wide rules, but Reddit does nothing. And that's on top of other hate subreddits like r/The_Donald that break the rules every day. Occasionally you'll hear about subreddit mods getting PMed by admins asking them to control their users in the same way Winrar tells you your free trial is about to run out. The worst are when the admins are clearly only banning to appease their user base, like banning r/incels just for it to come back as r/braincels and the admins once again ignore it.

So, I am currently attending a big scouting event in Europe and there are people from over 50 different countries. And I have noticed, that quite a lot of them are acting (at least for me) in a very disrespectful manner towards the flag. Starting with the smaller thinngs, most people have flag tied on a rope between their tents (the flag is tied in top left and top right corners). In my opinion, it should only be tied on the left side, while the right is hanging freely. But I can kind of understand that, because the flag is much more visible, it's easier and nicer to do it this way. However, it gets worse. Earlier today, when it started drizzling, I saw some people using their flag as head protection. And, in my opinion the biggest sign of disrespect, when we had the opening ceremony, there were people laying their flag on the ground and sitting on it, not caring who steps on it or anything.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Is this just me overreacting? Or do you think this is a serious problem?

My north Seattle-area service provider is Frontier, to whom I currently pay USD $42/month for "50/50" Mbps service (which in practice is closer to a download/upload ratio of 42/12 Mbps, even through LAN cable).

I do not recommend Frontier, as I got the above "discounted" price after calling to cancel my prior "30/30" deal (again, overly optimistic speeds) when that $40/mo. bill spiked to $52 for no reason. Plus, I had to lodge an FCC complaint against Frontier when they overcharged me by $200 a couple years ago, which was resolved in my favor after nearly two months.

My mobile internet provider is Google's Project Fi. I pay them $20/mo. for their phone plan + around $5/mo. for the data I typically use. Highly recommended.

A rant honestly, but I thought this might belong in tech since it's a bit more of a tech society thing for me. I'm sure other industries have this issue too, but tech definitely does. If others disagree, please feel free to move it.

So yesterday, we had two new hires show up and we were informed this in our weekly leads meeting, so this is a pretty private setting. When our manager gave a quick blur of one, it was "we expect a lot from him, he's a bit more knowledgeable, did well on our tech test", that kinda thing. And then, when discussing the woman, he kept referring to her as a "girl", so I pointed out that maybe we should use "woman" instead.

I got made fun of - "maybe we can use lady or female or ..." honestly started tuning it out, can't remember the rest. Also accused of nitpicking.

I've been in the industry for a while now and though in general things are good, every now and then something small like this happens and it makes you check the date (yes it's still 2018, I didn't go back 20 years).

To be fair, I know my manager was being funny, but it's easy to joke at someone else's expense.

Wondering, other's experiences on both sides. Have you noticed changes in your workplace, for better hopefully? Maybe other ways you were discriminated against or singled out?

I'm sure a lot of us are aware of WHO officially recognizing gaming addiction, and probably have read some follow up news articles about it as well.

I really dislike how news and media outside of gaming communities in general portray gaming. It's always this foreign, voodoo magic-y thing. Often, games are just talked about as a giant whole, instead of breaking it down into reasonable categories. For example, being addicted to online poker is very different from committing to a MMO raid. But, to be fair, there is always that one guy that takes everything way too seriously.

In TV series, such as The Big Bang Theory (I know this is a cheap shot), their MMO episodes were outright offensive. It was definitely more of what non-gamers think of gamers than actual reality.

So I guess I'm just wondering:

• Have you ever been accused of being a gaming addict, and looking back were you?
• How do you explain gaming to non-gamers?
• Does your gaming actually cause any conflict between you and your family and friends?
• Did you ever forget or do something stupid because of your gaming?

Just anything I guess.

I'm a bit behind the news cycle, but I saw the first images of the families being separated on the news last night. I'm aghast. I'm just so utterly confused. Not addressing the issue of immigration or even the splitting up of families...

We don't fucking lock people in cages.

(Sidepoint: I know prisons exist, but this is a very different situation.)

I live in the US.

I used to play music every day. I used to skate almost every day. I used to surf TWO times a day. I used to write songs and poetry. I used to contemplate the cosmos and reality and come up with fun projects with friends. I used to garden. I used to spend more time with my pets.

Now I work.

I work and stress so hard that I wear myself out, drink too much to "help me sleep", still stay up stressing about my job - how I can improve my standing, and stress about needing to do side projects to supplement my income AND stress that I don't do any of the fun things I used to do.

This is all to be able to afford a living space and ensure that if a disaster (personal or natural) happens I won't be completely screwed.

Any friends that did have loans are still paying them off. I have been fortunate enough (and diligent enough) to pay off all my loans, but I had to ditch my hopes and dreams.

Will I ever be able to afford a decent house in a metropolitan area? No. Will I ever do the things that used to make be happy? I don't see how. Will I ever be truly happy? I have no idea.

Is anyone else in this situation? What are you doing to mitigate? Moving to a more affordable area (leaving friends and family)? Are you learning a new trade to up your financial standing? Are you as bummed out as I am that we have to work so hard just for a mediocre standard of living?

In case you don't live in the US and don't know, it is very common for health insurance to be tied to employment.

I've held four jobs over the last twelve months. Health insurance has been the most frustrating part of it. I'm married, I have kids. I don't want to go months without health insurance. My wife is self-employed so no employer subsidized insurance for her. We live comfortably so no option for government subsidized insurance.

The cheapest plan with insanely high annual "deductible" of something like $10,000 (the money you have to pay before insurance will pay) I can get independently is around $1000 / month. For comparison, with my current employer, my part of the insurance is around $440 month with a $3000 / year deductible.

During the past year I've four different insurance companies, one of them paid entirely out of my own pocket, no coverage for dental care for a while, no coverage for eye care for a while. Really WTF? Why are teeth and eyes so different from other medical care?

I'm now three weeks into my current position, insurance coverage with this employer began on the first of the month (so after about one week of working) — another gripe, the waiting periods to start coverage; my position before this had me working six weeks before coverage began; this time I had no idea when it would begin until I spoke to HR on my first day. I finally got my new insurance cards yesterday.

So today I decided to try to cancel my out-of-pocket coverage. I have until the sixteenth to cancel for this month. Haha, no. I can't. Not only are the human operators not working today (which granted is a Saturday), but the website is shut down for the weekend. I can't make any changes until Monday.

If the cost to me was the same, or close, I'd just buy my own insurance all the time instead of dealing with the hassles of constant change. But the costs are no-where near close. And I've got college tuition costs coming up very soon, so it's not like I'll have money to spare.

I feel like health insurance in the US is the worst of all possible worlds.

Each element in the report has an 'Evaluation Time'. The catch, as I'm beginning to realise, is that only those rendered 'Now' actually have any ability to expand or collapse the bands within the report. i.e. it makes an initial pass (evaluation time 'Now') and figures out the sizes, and then goes back and recalculates the content (but not the size) of the stuff.
Which is great, except that I'm trying to print something (which should disappear when empty) from a subreport, which only works if it's deferred. Guess I'll have to accept that that band can't be collapsed when empty. It's OK, I'll just redesign my report then.

/rant over.

My husband and I went out for a really nice dinner last night at a "farm to table" restaurant. While the waitress was explaining the menu, she warned us that since there are no fresh tomatoes right now, one of the dishes on the menu used tomato paste. I had to try hard not to snort, it was so absurd.

Is it just me or is "farm to table" the ultimate in pretentious self delusion? You act like you're saving the world, but actually you're demonstrating your privilege?