You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. "Hedonism" is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radial rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.
A general reminder—periodic cicadas pose no threat to anyone and their plant damage is limited to nipping off the ends of twigs. Please do not hose them with pesticide. They are slow and clumsy and confused and only want to make friends with other cicadas and eventually die of sexual exhaustion.
Yes, the screaming is a lot, but they’ve been extremely quiet neighbors for thirteen years, cut them some slack as they go through the most fraught time of their lives.
An incomplete list of things that employers commonly threaten that are 100% illegal in the United States
"We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)
"If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.
"Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.
"If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.
"We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.
"If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.
"Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.
"We'll deny that you ever worked here" not actually possible unless they haven't been paying their share of employment taxes or forwarding your withheld tax to the government (in which case they're guilty of far more serious crimes, and you might stand to gain something by turning them in to the IRS.) The records of your employment exist in state and federal tax data, and short of a heist that would put Oceans 11 to shame, there's nothing they can do about that.
Like an utter fool I let both World Unicorn Day and National Farm Animal Day go by this week and didn’t post any unicorns or farm animals. Those two things are basically all I draw. Unforgivable. Please accept these apology ungulates.
They once forgot to pay me for 8 extra hours that they needed me to work on Thanksgiving weekend. They simply needed me to be present for 8 hours in order to quickly fix any problems that happened during their busiest weekend, and no such problems ended up happening.
When they saw the mistake and paid me for it, the gross pay for that day was $420 (base of $35 x 8 hours x 1.5 for overtime).
The first thing I noticed was how that compared to what I got paid at my warehouse job before I became a programmer. When I started the job at the warehouse, I got paid $10 an hour. For a full time week, I got paid $400.
I got paid more for that one day of doing practically nothing as a programmer than I did busting my ass at the warehouse for a whole week.
So enough about this "I work harder than them so I deserve more pay" bullshit. You're all the working class. In our fucked up system, hard work does not equal more pay. If you want more pay, you need to fight back against the rich assholes who profit off your labor and pay you jack shit, not fight with other people who are underpaid about who deserves to be more underpaid.