She tried to find the most unflattering picture and this was the best she could come up with?

Getting lucky/being in the right place at the right time is DEFINITELY a big factor in success. So much is out of our hands.

and what you don’t get, is that some people stop trying entirely and basically just fail automatically, and then blame other people for this, because they refuse to take responsibility for themselves.

I’m not referring to those people, though. You are. I agree that they exist and that they chose the wrong path.

I’m referring to the people that try and still fail, as per my original post. Can you acknowledge them?

If people try their best to make it work and fail: I don’t think they’ve made the choice to fail.

yes, but they make the choice to stop trying, and then then are guaranteed to fail.

I never said they stopped trying. You can keep trying and keep failing. There’s a point in time where something becomes essentially impossible to succeed at with your current resources (including time).

Take the class example you were giving, where your nephew didn’t get a perfect grade and gave up/adopted a bad attitude that made his academic progress falter.

Isolate this time period to one packed class. Some students are going to sleep through class and still get an A. Others are going to try and study every night, yet still get a back grade. Others will be like your nephew, sure. This is the reality of life. That doesn’t mean they should give up for the next class, but surely you see what I’m saying, right? Once the class ends, there’s no opportunity to go back in time and get a better grade.

Salt bad for water cooling components? Idk

why is it that, they have no decided ‘this is not how i want to live my life and I need to do things to not be in this situation.’

because people do, make that choice. they make the choice to not be paycheck to paycheck, and some folks, spend their entire lives, no matter how much they make, living paycheck to paycheck.

If people try their best to make it work and it works: they made the choice to do better

If people try their best to make it work and fail: I don’t think they’ve made the choice to fail.

Our disagreement seems to be somewhere in these details.

but hey, it’s 2026, where being a hard-working person who builds up your own life through hard work and good choices makes you a selfish bad person? warped timeline we live in.

You believe this? Why?

yep. you could always downsize your lifestyle to take a lower paying job.

This is extremely hard if your lifestyle is already downgraded.

In the USA, many are only a few paychecks away from being homeless (going 3 or 5 years unemployed would be a pipe dream to them). A downgrade could be moving your kids into a tent or having the state take them away from you.

Rock and a hard place, in these circumstances.

it’s that you’re that arrogant.

you’re not that morally significant. you’re not a hero. you’re an average person.

I don’t think I was thinking of myself as anything but an average person, in this regard. I figured I could do my part to improve a system, then realized that there would need to be way more of people with that mindset at my level before a change would manifest.

Sorry if I gave the impression that I thought I was going to be a one man army, hahaha. Wouldn’t that have been awesome?

they don’t have one to begin with.

I joined a morally grey child company for a parent company that is, in my eyes, immoral. I did it to see if I could make positive change from the inside.

I don’t do anything in my job that directly contributes to the stuff that I think is bad in my company, but I doubt I’ll make a change at this rate. I’m too small.

I’m glad I tried but I think I’m just really stupid about how to change the world for the better.

Yes, it’s hard for me to continue on. If the job market wasn’t horrible and I didn’t have a family to support, I’d likely be elsewhere by now.

You can opt out of employer insurance. Some companies charge an arm and a leg though.

It won’t dent animal food production. It will probably produce more food waste though. The corps will probably remain just as profitable, at the least

Real talk: being barrel chested could be a sign of a health problem. For Elon it might just be the weight, but I remember working with a smoker that had it due to issues from smoking or with his heart or both. Look after yourself! 2026 will be our year!

So can we rake it and use it what we collect for anything useful?

Blue MAGA is as out of touch with reality as regular MAGA is.

Choosing hard mode difficulty over normal mode difficulty

That 2019 article is wild to read with the state of everything in 2026.

I’m sure the extensions on other browsers are doing the same thing, to be fair.

The chrome web store is also used across other chromium browsers like Vivaldi, right?

Not a lot of people understand what parenting is going to be like before they have kids.

Imagining a world where the headlines aren’t click bait and the articles are well researched. One day…

It all costs too much now, and my backlog will hold me over until I die of old age. I’m at the age now where I don’t care about the new stuff.