“are you made of sugar?” Is how I’m going to question the fortitude of people from now on

The Midwest…

Reason 475 to stop using those apps. Even if your driver doesn’t pick up multiple orders from the restaurant you ordered from, which was rare the last time I used them, they may still be doing multiple orders. Your food will be cold and smell weird.

I have an urgent request for you.

I need to see a finished photo of this display case, I think it’ll look really cool when it’s done. But I will only care for like, another weekend. So it’s urgent, it’s gotta be done soon or you’ll lose precious internet points!

Friendly reminder that every famine you’ve ever heard of was man made and completely avoidable.

Old white swinger couple that consults psychics… Yeah not conservative enough. Definitely unelectable.

We need a milquetoast woman who thinks abortion is great but also that putting brown people in prison is a great idea.

How do you think Moses crossed it asshole? By waiving his arms around?? No. He built a land bridge of old car batteries that collapsed as soon as they crossed. Trapping the Egyptian army in an acidic brine that melted their faces off.

Jesus it’s like you’ve never seen Indiana Jones

Maybe removing the mask will help push more young people further left. 20 years ago if you’d told me the DNC was just a mouthpiece for weakly resisting whatever the Republicans wanted to do I would have called you crazy. Now, every day it’s becoming more clear that the Dems actually DO want the corpo fascist state the Republicans are so desperately trying to build. They just have to pretend not to.

Maybe we have a house of Fettermens.

I didn’t realize that I could be a toolmaker when I grew up until I was already grown up.

I fucking love my job. If I had realized how cool this job was when I was in high school I’d be one of the most well paid people in my field right now. As it is I’m just doing pretty well.

Industrial jobs definitely aren’t for everyone, but that’s literally any job. I left a comfortable office job for the trades because those jobs aren’t for everyone either. And I’m far happier for it.

No. Hogg is too left for the DNC, they don’t want him anymore.

Cats make me wish I wasn’t allergic to cats.

The worst workplace disaster in US history was silicosis.

Mama I tell you I cannot get my breath

Were some of the last words a young man would speak. His mother had to carry him to his bed where he slowly suffocated to death.

Silicosis is no fucking joke. I watched my father die to fibrosis, which is very similar. He went from an energetic and active retiree to a chair bound and weak man in a matter of weeks. He lived the rest of his life barely able to walk from his car to the scooters to go grocery shopping. Doing so much as turning a valve to shut off the water to his sprinklers would have taken him an hour or more, and he wouldn’t have been able to do much else that day.

He lived for 2 of the 5 years he thought he had fighting for every single breath. All day. Every day.

You fools! You absolute bafoons and I will never be in the same place as the only thing 😉 is that you are a good person and I don’t know what to do with it but I can be the first 🥇🏆🏆🏆🏆 to do the first one of those who have been in the same place as the other day.

Absolutely.

AI generated content was always going to leak in to the training models unless they literally stopped training as soon as it started being used to generate content, around 2022.

And once it’s in, it’s like cancer. There’s no getting it out without completely wiping the training data and starting over. And it’s a feedback loop. It will only get worse with time.

The models could have been great, but they rushed release and made it available too early.

If 60% of the posts on Reddit are bots, which may be a number I made up but I feel like I read that somewhere, then we can safely assume that roughly half the data these models are being trained on is now AI generated.

Rejoice friends, soon the slop will render them useless.

He’s too demented to understand them anyway. He wouldn’t care even if he could.

Y…yeah … sure. Yeah totally. The last one standing totally gets to keep everything and will absolutely be leaving the arena alive. Yup. That’s how we’ll do it.

They’re only 20. They’ll learn.

Got lots of 65 year old factory or construction workers, do ya? And I’m talking about laborers, not supervisors etc.

Yes.

The oldest guy on our seniority list has had one job his entire life, he’s 72. He refuses to retire. The entire first page of seniority is guys in their 60’s. To be clear, if they’re on the seniority list, they’re not supervisors, they’re machine operators, welders, paint line guys, and tradesmen.

I, at 40, am one of the younger people in the building.

We recently started sucking up as many students as we could for the trades jobs because of how dangerously close to retirement most of the workforce is.

These jobs are not nearly as bad as people think. It’s not construction, which absolutely can and does destroy bodies. Factory work is engineered around being ergonomic and safe. If for no other reason than there simply isn’t the workforce available to replace people that leave young. But there’s actually lots of reasons. It’s legally required, it’s watched closelt by more than one federal agency (at least it WAS…). The factory literally can’t make money if these guys are getting injured all the time, and it’s way easier to make something safe to do than deal with constant injuries.

You’d be surprised. Most industrial jobs are not all that physical anymore. I felt the same as you did at your age and I spent 20 years grinding jobs I absolutely hated because I too had no ambition coming out of high school. I ended up bouncing around call centers while trying to find something I enjoyed at college enough to be successful at, all the while being passed over by people who actually enjoyed what they were doing.

I’m a tool maker now, I do a little troubleshooting, a little machining, and my job is immensely satisfying. It’s not for everyone but that’s every job.

Honestly even if you’re opposed to industry, I wouldn’t bother with an expensive education until you have some idea of what you want to do. Find some place that’ll give you an entry level job and provide tuition reimbursement, get your core studies out of the way while you figure stuff out.

Chinese made parts are generally worse. At least industrially. We buy a few things from China that we need in high volume and we have to go over every single part because inevitably 25% will be out of spec in one way or another. We’ve bought Chinese steel a few times and about half of that material was basically useless.

We avoid Chinese tooling, parts, and steel as much as we can. We will buy used Western made machinery before buying new Chinese machinery for the same reason. The two Chinese made presses we have have had to be rebuilt twice, and were only ever used for light duty stamping. Those presses, only about 20 years old are being decommissioned rather than repaired any further.

Most of what we use is American or German made. German parts generally hold tighter tolerances but they seem to last about as long. We have a few French made lasers that work really well until they don’t, and then they’re a nightmare to service.

None of that matters. Because we cannot function without these things coming in from overseas. I don’t know of any industrial building in my city that can. We make a lot of stuff in this town you need that you’d never think about. Conveyors, refrigerated trailers, the hydraulic fittings and irrigation systems that literally supply the entire agricultural sector, all of it depends on a vast intercontinental trade network that is actively collapsing. The latest order of punches and die inserts we ordered are sitting on a boat in Schenzhen and have been for weeks. Because even though we’re willing to pay the tariffs on the few things we order, the ten thousand other customers may not be. And until they can fill a boat with goods people are willing to pay a premium on, that boat isn’t going to leave harbor.

Empty shelves are only the beginning of how irrecoverably fucked we’re about to be.