This is a lost cause. This company will lay him off within a few months of moving back. This fake RTO was designed to force him to quit so they did not have to do a formal layoff. He should cut his losses and look for another job ASAP.
Never trust employers and always have a large reserve of funds. Never put yourself in a precarious position like this. An employer will screw you over the very moment they think it will make them more money than not doing so.
People like to talk about how it’s impossible to lose weight and always reach for some made-up number like only 1% who try to do so keep it off. The real number is between 20%-30% are successful. (Though that is still not great, admittedly.)
However, I lost a lot of weight and kept it off now for 15 years1. Seemed pretty easy, really. What’s so different about me?
Fat Acceptance bullshit is so clownish and harmful. And greatly contributes to the problem by accepting defeat preemptively.
There are more than a few, but they are all massive dumbasses who couldn’t find a taco in Taco Bell.
A lot of people here in the US like to pretend that there is anything at all normal about the US healthcare system. But I’ve lived in other countries and I also have friends in various places around the world. And I can assure you that we have the dishonor of having the worst in the developed world.
It’s two things that allow them to believe this absolute delusion of how amazing and flawless the US healthcare system is. The first is status quo bias and the second is that they identify with the wealthy, who mostly support the current system. Perversely, this is true even if they themselves are not wealthy and would get the usual subpar health care and denial after denial if anything happened to them.It’s true that some countries (usually ones in decline, like the UK and Canada) have long wait times for some exams and procedures. I’ve yet to see anyone explain to me how that was better than denial of coverage, ruinous medical bills and general thievin’ at every layer of the US healthcare system.
When I was in the UK some years ago (before they had started to go downhill so severely), I mentioned to a friend of mine while we were at a pub that my stomach hurt pretty badly. She said if it kept hurting that we could “Pop over to a clinic down the avenue.” And I, being an American, balked — because in the US, there’d be a 2-10 hour wait, it’d cost $5,000 and it’d be just a general nightmare where I’d probably be misdiagnosed anyway.
She laughed and said the wait would be like 10 minutes, it’d cost at most £30, and they were very competent. I told her more about how the US healthcare system worked and she was appalled, as are people in most normal countries are when they hear how it is here. She said it sounded like we “lived like savages.” Which, you know, we do.
I think nearly everyone who is not rich has known someone murdered by the US healthcare system. I know of at least three, and as I’ve said before I don’t know many people.
We have the worst health care system in the world by far of any rich country, yet people still defend it to the death. Which they’ll probably receive if they go to any US hospital and then get denied coverage.
Did the overlords of media outlets and Reddit (et al.) really believe that suppressing views critical of the health care industry would actually help? I mean, what is even the point of that?
This suppression just increases anger and causes people to hate the system even more. But I guess it temporarily makes the advertisers happy enough to spend another buck.
These people are fucking delusional and are still claiming the near-certainty that phones serve ads based on overheard conversations is a conspiracy theory:
I’ve told it before but I’ll relate it again. I was hanging out with a friend in a hotel room. Neither one of us had used our phones to search for barbecue grills. Ever. She has no interest in barbecue grills and doesn’t own one. I at that time did not own one and had not for a while.
So we were joking around about barbecue grills for some reason. It was all of a 20-30 second bit of a longer conversation. After we were done talking, she got on her phone to look at something and said, “That’s odd. I just got an ad for a barbecue grill. I’ve never gotten an ad for that before and we were just talking about it.” She went to a few other sites and also got some ads for grills. I confirmed with her after that she’d never searched for barbecue grills, didn’t own one, and had never had one as an adult and that no one in her household did or was likely to have searched for one.
Now, what’s more likely — that her phone was listening to her, or that a random ad for barbecue grills (that, again, she had never seen before) just happened to pop up 2-3 minutes after we’d discussed it?
Hmm, I wonder.
People just accept the corporate line without even a single fucking thought in their heads, don’t they?
Bird flu might be coming. So won't somebody please think of… the gain-of-function researchers?!
I'm baffled by how often big newspapers advocate for actively bad stuff, even when it won't get many clicks. It takes hard work to be so consistently wrong; how/why do they do it? pic.twitter.com/zfyPOkzCwI
— Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) December 24, 2024
Especiallly since it was those poor, besiegned GoF researchers who almost certainly caused Covid. Insanity.
In so many areas of life, as in that video from the 1980s I linked below, we used to have a level of freedom that people who did not live through those times quite literally cannot even imagine. When you tell them about it they deny it was real and claim it only happened in movies. That’s how far-removed we are from human flourishing now.
We’ve all descended disgustingly into slave morality and have no will it seems nor desire to transcend as we once did. We used to have so much more, be so much better. Now we click and drool and laugh at anyone who says anything else is possible.
“Slim doesn’t always mean healthy” and such claptrap is functionally equivalent to a lie, though it’s semi-true just often enough that it’s not quite a complete fabrication.
The truth of course is that being slim means someone is far more likely to be healthy and stay that way. Where the Fat Acceptance and related self-harm movements allow their nonsense to slide in is that some (a few) slim people are in fact unhealthy. Those such as anorexics, cancer patients and people with genetic defects can be svelte but on the edge of death.
This allows in the faulty logic that slim == bad. Which of course is heavily promoted by the obesity-benefting food industry in the US.
Fat Acceptance really did a number on us (with food industry financial and propaganda assistance).
Noah Smith really, really does not understand how health insurance works or that insurance is a tug-of-war between providers and insurers. He sees insurers as a blameless mediators caught between costs and providers, principally because they do not make much obvious profit. In reality, they are a source of inflationary pressure in a continual arms race between how much money required insurance drives up de facto costs, how much providers attempt to grab, and how much they are bilked and can bilk.
It’s a multi-layered fraud combined with financial conflict and beset with huge inflationary pressures, mostly caused by insurance itself.
In other words, they are all villains and none are blameless. I’d say providers and insurance companies are about 40/40 villain, with other 20% being various other health care parasites.
The entire US medical system is a scam and insurance companies are no less evil and no less crooked than any other component.
Remembering this insane COVID moment from 2020 when LA officials filled the Venice Beach skatepark with 37 tons of sand to prevent people from using it pic.twitter.com/CrPFFHcqG2
— captive dreamer (@captivedreamer7) November 28, 2024
Covidians: Lockdowns weren’t real! No one was even mildly inconvenienced by Covid restrictions anywhere in the world! It’s all lies!
Reality disagrees. Those who became mentally ill because of Covid (not the infection itself) are just angry that the political changes they wished would occur were not brought about by the pandemic. It’s sad to see.
Because it’s a cop-out for adults who are committing or want to commit bad behavior or unethical acts and not be called out for it.
Every bit of the “you won’t understand until you’re older” stuff told me to when I was a kid was bullshit. None of it was true. All lies. All was designed to manipulate me and others. And I think that’s almost always the case with this from everyone everywhere.
For sure. And, relatedly, anyone who wears a keffiyeh in public is terrorist-aligned. They are implicitly celebrating the death of Israeli innocents.
This essay isn’t as much degrowther nonsense as I thought it’d be. It still leans that way, but not to the pathological degree that the modern left tends to. You know, the version that would kill billions and cause a regression of 500+ years in societal progress.
But it’s still pretty bad. It’s not even that it gets many points wrong, exactly. It’s just all steering the wrong direction. The modern left has been so stunned and staggered by their recent losses to those that they see as their inferiors that they can’t even think.
I don’t have the energy to write a long-ass essay (or assay) myself this evening, but I will say that in the disavowal of progress and improvement for a focus on fixing things now, the modern left precludes any advancement in the future as well. This essay is, strangely, an example of what it decries: nostalgia for something that can never be and furthermore has never been. It’s a fiction based on a fiction; a dream whose dreamer is deceased.
Relatedly, the left could’ve had Elon Musk on their side. But most of them are not interested in conversions and conversation leading to solidarity. They want vengeance no different than the thug conservatives — they just couch it in squishier language. And here I use “conversion” deliberately because the left’s asseveration and beliefs are as religious in nature as any ecclesiastical evangelism ever seen on this Earth.
And now my three minutes are up and this mini-essay is at an end.
Charles Hugh Smith: Unaffordable Housing and Homeless Encampments: How Did It Get This Bad?
Charles is one of the few (maybe a few dozen?) in the country who actually understand how housing prices currently work in the United States. Basically no one in the press does. None of the real estate “analysts” except maybe one or two do. Zero real estate agents do, of course, because they know nearly nothing.
It’s insane that something so important and that is the repository of vast wealth is so poorly understood by so many. I think that is deliberate, though — if people actually comprehended how it works and why it works that way, far more of them would rebel against it and demand change.
Hence, all the propaganda is designed to lead one down the wrong epistemic path.