When I read things like that I wonder who is mischaracterizing what. It seems like many mental issues are things that are normal to a degree, but very different scale from being diagnosed with the corresponding mental disorder.

Clearly you’re not Fidelity

…. Nor my tree guy, nor my doctor

Huh, not that it comes up often but there are doctors who don’t? One of my kids has this issue and they’ve always seemed receptive

Edit: missing question mark makes this the opposite

Do those ever work? I’ve tried them a few times but always have to try again the next day when it never happens

Definitely music, no matter how bad. I know call centers are intentionally understaffed so I will be waiting a long time (and they hope I’ll give up). Ill be putting my phone down and on speaker: I need something that reminds me the call is still there but is audibly distinct from a voice so I notice when they pick up

Hunting is meh. Some hunters are bad, careless or dangerous

I grew up listening to the sound of rifles from my bedroom and being warned not to go into the woods during the season. Whoever y’all are, you should be in jail for hunting in a populated area.

Then after the season was over, we had to haul trash out of the woods. Whoever y’all are, you need to got back to Scouts to relearn “leave no trace”

I have to admit to using Amazon pretty heavily so I rarely need to shop anywhere beyond my local grocery.

But I more focus on buying less, buying choices that last, rather than where it comes from.

I’ll also answer to Justin Thyme

Yes we need a nationwide movement for lizard acceptance. Let those poor oppressed lizard people step out in the open to rule us publicly as their true selves

Controlled flooding gives a place for the water to go when there’s too much. For example I remember reading about dikes along the Mississippi for flood control, but when there was too much water it would flood less inhabited farmland before city areas

When I was a kid, one of the fields at the local park where we used to play football and soccer was lower than the rest and separated by berms. It was designed as a controlled place for water to go when the river flooded every spring with snow melt.

Of course, climate change means we now have a more permanent solution to snow melt

Seems like a fun experiment. Especially with a kid who likes gross stuff

Seriously. I can’t even be bothered to answer whether I prefer my short name or long name (like Pat or Patrick/Patricia). I’ll answer to anything that seems relevant.

For sure, and I’ve said that about the town I grew up in as well. It was an ibm town when I was a kid, so very tech oriented. But it was a smallish town in the middle of nowhere and no other tech company replaced ibm when they left.

I came back for my 20 year reunion and just thought everything was grey, run down, stuck in time. It horrified me how many people I knew had just stayed. One of my brothers friends was driving the same Camaro. The same guy with a mullet was selling weed. My best friend from that part of my life admitted he had never travelled more than 50 miles. His gig as a DJ at the community college had been cool at the time but …… doing exactly the same thing? It had been 20 years and I got caught up in no time because nothing changed

My interpretation was

• you gotta get out of this little neighborhood where nothing happens

Southie has a very different stereotype from many other parts of the Boston-Cambridge metropolitan area. All those schools and industries Boston is known for, are NOT in southie. It’s known more as a blue collar town

a small neighbourhood in South Boston.

Aside from the underlying do something with your talent, I took the literal meaning to be getting out of southie. The Boston-Cambridge metropolitan area has many top schools and tech oriented companies that would be excellent opportunities …… but none are in southie. Southie has a very different stereotype than say Cambridge, or the financial district, or many tech areas

That’s actually the logic I use- if we hadn’t had those tax cuts we’d still have a huge debt but not “pain is unavoidable”. We could have been running a relatively flat deficit that you could argue we’d eventually grow out of. You can’t argue that anymore but perhaps restoring those taxes would bring us back to more sane territory

We have pretty strong real world evidence that austerity contracts the economy, makes things worse. Government spending brings more money into circulation, stimulates the economy.

Austerity measures may seem obvious, but we’d be far better off rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy of the last several decades, and provide better/more services to those who need it.

We have the world’s first trillionaire, yet he pays a lower tax rate than most of us.

A big reason for the success of WPA was hordes of cheap unskilled or less skilled labor.

But now everything is automated or has higher requirements. You can no longer hire 1,000 random people to build a road, a bridge or a dam, and the results would be far below what skilled people with the right tools can do.

So what types of jobs would this organization do and how well would they be able to match skills with jobs?

Public transport? What’s that?

• Most of the us doesn’t have functional public transport
• as a single datapoint, kids in Boston public schools get t passes. I don’t know if it’s some or all but a coworker had her kids get to school on their own using transit, with passes provided by the school system
• I live in an older suburb of Boston, and my kids walked to school. However it was falling to the same disease as so many suburbs: neighborhood schools closing into fewer and much larger ones across town.