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.

I have a risk mitigation strategy for them which ought not to be novel, but sadly seems to be, which could probably bring this risk down to statistically insignificant for most of these people. Don’t build your business on amassing obscene amounts of wealth via trampling the rights and dignity of millions of people who are only one bad week away from destitution and having all they’ve struggled their entire lives to build stripped from them, who have literally nothing to lose when it all goes pear shaped. Consider not only the financial, but the social costs of your actions.

The executive and financial elites of this world seem to have forgotten that humans are animals, and an animal backed into a corner is at its most dangerous, prone to lashing out in unpredictable ways.

I’d like to send out a special “Fuck you” to the asshole that called this tip in, whether it turns out to be the real shooter or not. I can’t imagine being such a piece of trash to go do that.

Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.

On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?

That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.

Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.

When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.

I hope they come through for him, because the video of a bunch of his fans being arrested and him hauled out would probably be hilarious.

I can’t understand why anyone would expect most people to want to have kids. I can hardly afford to take care of myself, things look like they’re only likely to get worse, and all indicators are that if I did have kids, they would be facing an even worse future when they hit adulthood. Why would I do that to them?

Yeah, talking about jobs being created without any context on the types of jobs being created is meaningless. Great, there are now more part-time jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits and erratic schedules near me, just the sort of job creation I was waiting for so I could regress in my career.

I think at this point, all of us poors are just crossing our collective fingers and hoping the rent doesn’t go up, we don’t lose our jobs and we don’t have to move for any reason. I’m hoping my landlord turns out to be immortal right now. “Affordable” units in the hood here are going for $3,000+, and you need to make less than the equivalent of minimum wage at a full-time job each to qualify for them. We stumbled our way into a three-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $2,200/month, and he hasn’t raised the rent at all. The people who lived downstairs before said he charged them the same rent for close to 10 years before they moved out, so hopefully that streak will continue. Just have to worry that he’ll die and whoever inherits the house comes in and jacks up the rent once they can, in which case we’d definitely need to move pretty far away to be able to afford something.

If you’re going to say Hamas’ attack was an attempt to draw the US into a war, I think that falls a bit flat. When was the last time the US did anything beyond provide the same sort of aid it currently gives Israel? Especially in light of Iran not giving into Israel’s provocation to attempt kick up a regional conflict that would draw the US in, I think this accusations is lacking.

If they wanted to draw the US into the conflict, why would they just push for one large attack and then just let Israel steamroll Palestinian territories while demonstrating they can get on with things just fine without the US doing anything but provide the same sort of weapons aid they always have? Why not take the bait with the most recent provocation?

Besides, even Israeli publications admit that it has been Israeli policy to prop up Hamas, so this smacks even more of propaganda efforts to distract from Israel’s culpability in creating this situation.

Yes, Iran has provided backing to many of these sorts of groups, but they’re hardly unique in this in the region. Why is trying to kick up a regional conflict when Iran does this, but Israel gets a pass on buying oil from ISIS and aggravating the situation there? Heck, Israel’s past actions in Lebanon helped kick off the founding of Hezbollah when they overstepped what they could get away with under the pretense of chasing Palestinian forces over the border.

The truth is necessary to arrive at a sound opinion, and Iran are no angels, but there’s far too much handwaving away of Israel’s role in creating the current situation while demonizing Iran with exaggerated capabilities.

Which Iranian attack is this that’s supposed to have started a war to drag in the US? Their most recent attack on Israeli targets was in response to Israel attacking them in a third country, and Israel has been trying to provoke them into a response that would kick off a war the US would get involved with to draw attention from their ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Are the antisemitic protests in the room with us Joe? Can you point to one of them for us?

Just more finger pointing without substance to try to discredit protests. Yesterday’s CNN article specifically about antisemitism at Columbia protests didn’t provide any more specifics than one Jewish student saying how scared he was because someone confronted him. Doesn’t say about what or offer any specifics of the confrontation, just that he was scared.

Blanket accusations of antisemitism continue to undermine efforts to call out legitimate antisemitism, which is still a problem.