I was offered $21/hr to remote work at some google outsourced company for one of their LLM projects. It was going to be grueling work, full-time, no benefits. It took about 120 applications (two responses) to even get there, and they ghosted me after a second interview. It’s awful out there and I feel for you 100%. Best of luck, genuinely.

Tradition dear boy

There’s a lot of good advice here already, so I’ll just add the potentially expensive (depending on insurance) next step: allergen immunotherapy. I’m about as allergic to dogs as you are, and some of the advice I got was “why not make them an outside dog?” — first of all, hell no, they’re family, and second, I lived in an apartment at the time, so that was impossible.

The immunotherapy, or allergy shots, starts with the tests others mentioned. They can do skin pricks or blood draw, and to save you a lot of misery, I suggest the blood draw. Then you get vials drawn up that effectively tincture allergens over time into your body for about three-ish years, so this is a time commitment.

Some advice on allergy medications I’ve received: avoid Claritin and Benadryl due to their links to dementia in long term use, try Zyrtec and Xyzal to see which works best (Costco/sam’s has the best value for these).

A higher MERV filter in my air unit, based on what it could handle, and an air purifier helped me a lot.

Because we need merchandising uwu

There’s an anecdote about a U2 naming a song “One Minute Warning” if I recall correctly: many years ago, when a UK prime minister learned the US got 6 minutes, they asked how long the UK would have. The response: “I suppose we’d have about a minute.”

There are also many more Teslas on the road, and the “full self driving” incidents are more widely reported on since the new ownership likes to overpromise and vastly underdeliver. Other commenters have already addressed the tech side, but a few years ago, the Tesla-specific FSD was found to be active right up until a split second before some prolific collisions with emergency vehicles, leading to speculation on liability. Tesla aside, I think it’s just laziness on the part of drivers used to FSD doing the menial tasks of driving.

And, on whack-a-mole, when one vape import gets banned, another company starts right up doing a very marginally different chemical mixture and ships it out. They can say “well you banned X, but technically not X” and the whole process starts over.

I hate Duracell for this reason. Thank god we finally got decent rechargeables.

Federal holidays can be observed by private companies, but then who will run the movie theaters on Christmas for us to go watch CGI robots fight each other? Or serve us fast food on Labor Day? Etc etc. It’s stupid.

National holidays don’t apply to private companies, apparently.

Mydayis (dextro- and amphetamine salts) seems to be more stressful on me than Vyvanse. The extended release mechanism also varies things. But hey, there’s a new goddamn shortage every week and we go with what works well enough.

As it was explained to me, you basically got three options: amphetamines, methylphenidates, and the “other stuff” (Wellbutrin, strattera, qelbree, guanfacine etc). This is a purely anecdotal analogy and oversimplification of how stuff works as it was told to me:

Amphetamines (adderall etc) hit the front door in the front of the brain — more dopamine, intense concentrated focus. Methylphenidates (Concerta etc) hit the back door in the front of the brain — more norepinephrine, longer-lasting, more alertness. The Other Stuff is back of brain, like if you turned down the ambient noise of a room.

Long and short of it is that one of these three approaches will tend to work well for an individual with ADHD, but the other two not so much. It’s pure trial and error, and it sucks, but with a decent provider and time (and insurance) you can eventually settle on one at a particular dose. Best of luck!

Example of note: France won’t sell Sudafed, so bringing any might be a risk unless you have a printed and signed rx. That being said, their pharmacies are pretty good. Shoutout to the migraine medication with codeine in it.

An interesting case (from a book which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of) from when Jack Benny’s career transitioned from radio to tv: he hated the laugh track, so much so that he demanded it be cut way back and lowered in volume. He also utilized it in an unexpected way: when he had a live audience in certain cases, if a joke or gag got an unexpected big laugh that he didn’t think deserved the reaction, he’d fill in a laugh track with a more muted response.

No, no, totally relatable. When I finished/passed my dissertation defense (zoom meeting due to Covid), I closed my laptop, put my stuff away, and thought, _ that was it?_ Zero sense of accomplishment. I had lost interest in the whole thing a year or two earlier and this was just an exercise in completion. I don’t think you’re alone with this pattern or feeling in the least.

If it’s part of a performance, for example. I guess the point of the debate here is that context matters and that you can do it under very, very specific circumstances.

“Free speech” is very much misunderstood as a form of carte blanche as your example demonstrates. It’s written as “Congress shall make no law…” etc., implying you’re protected only from the federal government, but as time and court cases and legal discourse have shown, there are limits and implications for lower legislatures to model from. The classic hypothetical example is “yelling fire in a crowded theater.” Can you? Yes. Should you? Unless there’s a fire, no, then it could cause panic and injury, and you’d be responsible. That sort of thing. (The US loves a lawsuit).

Tl;dr to answer your question: no.

Your commission, Debo: “about two hundred dollars.”

Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.