I understand where you’re coming from, and it wouldn’t apply in this specific context (where locals had rejected the poor boy), but in a general sense, the idea is to partner or invest in such a way to enable locals to lead the change efforts, or at least have a significant stake and voice.

In the business world, there are often silent investors who back entrepreneurs. Their financial input make a business possible, but leave the operations to the entrepreneur. The investor backs the entrepreneur, and they both profit.

It’s a different model and it takes more time and effort to find local partners to build up their capacity over time, but enabling locals will get stronger long-term results for the recipients of charity. It’s the difference between providing food packages to people and giving people agricultural tools to provide food for themselves in the long run. Obviously, in a situation of dire need, providing food is an immediate need, but only providing food instead of also providing tools keeps the recipients in a dependent situation. If they’re dependent on foreign charity forever, it’s just another form of control and colonialism.

What this woman had done, by caring for this poor boy, was long-term investing in him. Now he has an education and will be able to work and care for himself.

Your choice of wording is telling. You compare child commitments to leisure commitments, as though people without children only have leisure to think of. While the comparison is children and no children, making one side obvious and the other side highly variable, but, for example, many people care for other family members and extended networks who are not biological children. It is definitely not leisurely to care for a parent with dementia.

The problem isn’t that parents should get special understanding and special treatment, the problem is that capitalist society (distilled into the work scenario) values productivity over humanity. Automation, and now AI, were supposed to let us work less and still sustain the same output, but instead, we’re demanded to produce more and more, and we’re pushed to work even more than before.

Its the classic strategy of making the poor blame and fight each other instead of fighting the ruling class together.

Personally, I’m in favour of “mamsir”, which is the obvious compounding of “ma’am” and “sir”. The Internet tells me it’s used in the Philippines, but I could have sworn I first heard of it being used in India 🤷‍♀️

If I know someone is a terrible person, I can’t enjoy their work. Besides not wanting to financially support them, I like to put myself in an author’s, actor’s, writer’s shoes when I watch/read stuff.

That said, I don’t purposefully look into people’s lives; I’m not into celebrity gossip. But sometimes a person is such an outlier or just so vocal about it that it’s unavoidable.

It seems a probable case is she misunderstood or misheard what was being said to her as “she needs to finish the drink” and complied with the request she thought was being given to her.

Heck, even as a hearing person, if someone told me I can’t have an open beverage in a space (alcoholic or not), finishing it seems like a reasonable way to be rid of it.

Good God, of all the ways one could gamble, this sounds like playing Russian roulette with five bullets loaded in the revolver.

Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss’ personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy’s pay.

My boss isn’t worried about the financial health of the organization, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.

It’s happened to me several times that other shoppers have come up to me in a store to ask where such-and-such is, which I didn’t know the answers to 🤷‍♀️. I have never even worked retail before. (Food service, yes, retail, no.) I think maybe just walking with purpose gives off a vibe? I walk with purpose because I want to just buy what I need and get out 😂

I know you didn’t say they are (can be) racist, I am. I’m disagreeing that they are uninformed; a lot of Asians actively side with Trump and Musk. I know this because I am Asian myself and hear it from my parents and their friends who are Pro-Trump, anti-immigration, and racist against Black people, Hispanic people, Brown people, Muslims, LGBT people…

My dad defends every accusation against Trump. He thinks every bad thing said about him is a lie made up by his enemies. My mom’s best friend loves him and says he’s so smart, and everyone who disagrees with him is too stupid to understand.

A lot of Asians people are racist against non-white people and Asians of other countries. There are Pro-Trump Asians just as there are Pro-Trump Latinos who think they’re “one of the good ones” and all about pulling up the ladder behind them. The people buying cybertrucks at best don’t care and at worst are positively for it.

Truly, I don’t understand why, but there are fully grown adults who believe that anything an LLM says is true. Maybe they think computers are unbiased (which is only as true as programmers and data are unbiased); maybe its the confidence with which LLMs deliver information; maybe they believe the program actually searches and verified information; maybe it’s all of the above and more.

I know a guy who routinely says, “I asked ChatGPT…”, and even after having explained how LLMs are complex word predictors and are not programmed for factual truth, he still goes to ChatGPT for everything. It’s a total refusal to believe otherwise, but I can’t fathom why.

As a childless adult, it’s my duty to be part of other people’s lives and support families by being a trusted adult (trusted by parents and kids) and be a good role model for others’ kids.

Why? Because we live in a society. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s adults. There are, unfortunately, a lot of terrible social influences out there, and parents can’t battle society alone. Young boys and girls need to learn and develop healthy relationships with men and women alike, beyond just their parents, in order to have something to model themselves after and to learn how to treat others with love and respect.

And this is especially so for singletons. A lot of the bad and warped ideas about “relationships” and even self-esteem comes from unhealthy views of romantic relationships. Ideas like if you’re not good enough if you don’t have a boyfriend/girlfriend. Or ideas that men and women cannot “only” be friends (objectification of other sex). Ideas that men are owed relationships and sex by women (incels). Ideas that it’s better to be with a bad partner than to be single (abuse).

Parents can’t fight all of that on their own.

I, for one, am a fan of bringing back the ascot. (but perhaps not during the height of the summer months.)

It gets better… In the fifth and final season.

There were actors and characters I really liked (Doug Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Jason Isaacs top that list), but the stories… Fortunately, I think every NuTrek series is better than Discovery and I like them all in their own way. The biggest appreciation I have for Discovery is that it made the way for all the others that followed.

Except Section 31, that was pretty bad.

Around two or three years ago, I was on a sales call/app demo as a potential customer–not for TikTok, of course. It’s an American company and I’m based in Canada. I asked the sales guy about their data storage, encryption, privacy, and the like; he didn’t know. I said I needed to know that if our group uses the application to communicate internally about, for example, helping refugees, the government won’t be able to access it. The guy asked me if that really was a concern.

Well, you tell me now, sales guy, is it really a concern?