Man, this is the only explanation for the closure of the lone Italian place in town a few years back.

No Italian restaurants currently exist in a 50 mile radius.

Town’s haunted now.

Zpoopa del giOHNO

What if we work backwards on this?

1. Introduce community boxes at junction points where USPS already delivers, and/or next to a parks so you can say hi to your neighbors and stuff. Ensure any box is within a tolerable walking distance for the average community member served. (Best figure five minutes here folks.)

2. Allow residents with mail being delivered to their physical addresses to opt in to delivery at their associated neighborhood box.

3. Market the boxes as happy medium between visiting a staffed post office at the center of a city and risky doorstep delivery. Locked boxes large enough to accommodate everyday parcels basically nix those pesky pilfering porch pirates.

4. Continue regularly scheduled deliveries to individual addresses because the route will continue to exist at some level of specificity anyway no matter how many or how few community boxes materialize. Carriers essentially keep the same routes but get to drop mad loads of male mail into a bunch of ready and willing local slots near you, driving efficiency up and logistics strategists wild.

5. Promote additional box patronage by offering a slight discount whenever postage/shipping is purchased for a specific physical address utilizing delivery to a community box. Immediate and total coverage of community boxes across America is neither expected nor necessary, but hell, reward those who lighten that load for others.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk!

sincerely, louise dajoy

Edit: got high while writing and it took a turn for the weird

My brother in Christ you have described almost the exact same specs I visualized. The only difference is in the level of resolution of my “scene.” And by that, I mean essentially I did a few more render passes in my head to anchor everything you’ve written within a sort of Impressionistic, highly softened, out-of-focus backdrop. I saw hints of shadowy cabinets, the concept of a darkened kitchen out of sight. The shape and finger placement of my slightly more textured, clothed yet featureless male. The gray-brown feeling of a floor below, a dark white ceiling above, and the faded glow of sunlight through an unseen dining room window grazing one end of that oaken table.

But the basics … They’re the same, and before being asked to recall them. Damn.

Okay, this is fascinating … And makes me wonder how often this–what I will call “academic honorable discharge”–really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.

I haven’t delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess … Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?

Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in… making teen aggression more aggressive?

Right?! Especially if it was an off-the-cuff agreement. But if I had a few minutes to think it over, I would buy that anyone serious enough to get verifiable competitive offers using a third party would be serious enough to come back for those better offers if the current employer doesn’t bite. (This is assuming you can’t arrange new employment without the temp agency’s involvement for whatever contractual reason. Not sure how they typically work.)

Have you heard any specific reasons for the mail hoarder’s actions at your current workplace, or is it still a fresh case? I’m guessing it was nefarious, since the mail outbox was closer and seemingly more obvious than the secret stashing cabinet. Just wanted to be a dingus to intended mail recipients? I’d also be curious if it was all mail they handled or just select pieces. So many burning questions!!

I am a contractor so I don’t work in a standard office setting right now. I miss the heck out of juicy office gossip, at least about those who deserve such sordid stories! (Karen in accounting is actually really nice, Carl.)

With the rest of the house being normal-to-very clean, it’s almost like the parents were never able to make her clean her room because she was a territorial “devil” child, and they just let it slide for years and years.

Maybe what started as s genuine attempt at hangout ended up with her finally recognizing how embarrassing the situation was, leading to her cooling off during later chats?

Either that or it was all an elaborate ruse to get the wild child a free room cleaning and the parents were somehow in on it and everyone except you in this story is actually nuts!

Quite the spectrum of possibility, really. But honestly, I have a feeling your help might have helped her grow up and out of her family’s (or her own) neglect. It was a kind thing you did, regardless of the weird-ass circumstances!

deleted by creator

Holy sheeps, I’m not the only one?! I know I need to get my butt off Windows, but oh my lordie, the slowness of typing feedback gets so bad on Word or Mail that it literally sometimes refuses to graphically acknowledge an entire short word, leaving the screen void of the word I know I just typed, until I backspace one measly letter and the word (minus the letter) finally shows up.

It is absolutely, unironically infuriating.

Don’t forget the rectum bleacher! You’ve gotta whiten up all your pearly bits when grooming personally with these here personal grooming products! From teeth whiteners to skin toners, nipple brighteners and our ever-popular melanin relaxers, they’re all conveniently listed in this one incredibly inconvenient list! No matter which parts of your body, which orifices, which end of your digestive tract you reeeally want to whiten up: Lighten Up, We’ve Got You (Un)Covered!®

Man, this is fucking rich, telling someone to hang with a better crowd, a crowd you couldn’t possibly know about, all the while insinuating they are trash and literally bringing them down.

Take a hard look at yourself, bud, and figure out which trash really needs to be taken out here.

I wonder if the effect would be akin to mixing every paint color and getting “super dark greyish black-brown” as a result.

My guess would be “super icy horrifying franken-fruit.”

It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.

(Please take the following as pondering general discussions of obesity between doctors/patients and not specifically directed at you.)

This was a really thought-provoking summary for me, your belief that doctors are telling people to lose weight out of “laziness.” If a suggestion like this is lazy, are patients who don’t listen to their doctor somehow not lazy?

The idea that doctors make weight a scapegoat seems prevalent in American healthcare (probably because we’re generally obese). It feels a lot like projection of one’s “laziness” (mentally it’s much more complex than that) onto a doctor, even though that doctor has probably seen hundreds of cases with the same predictable outcomes and knows that appropriate weight management would head off more serious treatment.

Frankly, I think doctors are anything but lazy when they are “forced” to order and perform risky and invasive treatments on a patient who refused to meet them halfway before the treatment became necessary in the first place. I get it, nobody likes being told what to do, especially when it seems (and literally is) so personal. But doctors also don’t like to be told what to do (“fix me!”) when a patient deigns even the gentlest suggestion to take some control of their issues at hand.

I am now 30lbs below my highest weight. The severity of my issues (joint pain, lethargy, depression, etc.) has palpably lessened losing that 30lbs very inconsistently over the last four years. If anything, I think doctors need to better read the psychological resistance many people have with weight loss and then illustrate to, rather than tell, patients how to attain weight loss in ways that don’t seem restrictive.

That 30lbs of mine, could I have done that in 30 weeks or fewer? Sure, but I didn’t want to feel perpetually hungry. In fact, I never even set a goal weight. Instead of thinking “Idgaf about my weight” or “I must lose 20lbs by Christmas!!” I just made the tiniest changes, the biggest one being taking advantage of times I wasn’t hungry by (gasp) not eating.

… Shit, I guess lazy weight loss works, too!

So I am still tapering off Zoloft since this “aha” realization only happened this week… Everyone please take my extra serotonin, please!!! (/s)

For real though, being depressed was its own terrifying animal and I hope anyone suspecting it gets the help they need. I’m glad I could work through it with meds and now therapy, but it’s crazy how delicate the balance needs to be with brain chemicals!

I had definitely thought that as well! But then I googled it and found there can be “major interactions” between Adderall and Zoloft, and that Adderall can actually affect serotonin (not sure if it promotes more serotonin or inhibits reuptake). It must be some kind of compounding effect?

But great point on the Zoloft! It seems it was definitely an OD factor, especially if there is more serotonin floating up there “naturally” and the re-uptake inhibition becomes way more effective. 😬

(I’m still actually dealing with tapering off Zoloft, but oh my gods I am so much less physically anxious already.)

On the flip side, too much of that sweet, sweet serotonin will fuck you up. At the very least, it’ll make you sweat like a stuck pig while you (unknowingly) begin tiptoeing toward the precipice of full-blown serotonin syndrome.

Source: Was on Adderall 30mg plus tiny 25mg Zoloft dose “for anxiety maintenance” for two years. Well, at some point this past fall and spring, I must have started making more serotonin naturally or magically idk, not a doctor or witch doctor. And I only recently reread the serotonin syndrome symptom shortlist and finally put two and two together. One’s face should not literally drip sweat walking around a 74° house to grab laundry and one’s heart rate should not be spiking to 160bpm merely attempting to put gotdamn makeup on that very same face, the face full of fuckin sweat fountains.

I wasn’t just maintaining my anxiety, I physically manifested my anxiety in all the worst ways.

Noooo!! You’ve managed to both unlock a core memory about some unnameable PBS show featuring clock-loving clown ladies AND INSTANTLY RUIN IT!!!

wot in the nation of tarn

I was sure that was a young Seinfeld until I zoomed in. Mixed feelings on this dude’s sexy sharpness now.

… He’d probably say he’s too young for me.

Maybe she could spin that, too? Like she’s a bad girl, “Muy 'Mala” or something. That probably has too much of a sexist bent to it (in taken like she needs to be punished, she could probably spin that back at Trump again too, in that he needs to be punished), and probably too “sexy” in some of the more positive associations (romantically “baaaad”).

But overall, it could capture an audience who appreciates the inclusion of simple and understandable bits of a language a huge facet of American people speak on the daily. I don’t know, like friendly bits of inclusion flying back in the face of grotesque, obtuse exclusion?

Edit: I am partaking a bit and my high ass thinks I should frame this. Like the next pillar in the Character Counts set or something. OMG does anyone remember Character Counts?? Fairness and responsibility first come to mind.

Just an FYI, although they aren’t physical products like this Roku, many apps and digital services have added the very same binding arbitration clauses recently.

The McDonald’s app for one. I ended up deleting the app after it tried to force me into binding arbitration and I didn’t want to go through to opt-out process for marginally cheaper, shitty food, so I just deleted the app altogether and haven’t eaten there since November.

Watch out for it if you drive for doordash or ubereats as well. I opted out of both, although they claimed you couldn’t opt out in an new contract when you didn’t before (a bunch of BS, if the current contract you are about to sign says it supercedes all others, you can’t make the lack of an opt-out on a previous contract hold up).

On-going services might make sense for these shitty enough clauses, but to be strong armed into it for physical product you bought free and clear … Disgusting.

It’s like all these companies are locking themselves down to minimize legal exposure because they know that their services and products are getting more awful or something.