Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

If the others suggested aren’t quite right for you, you might try looking for an interval timer app. These are generally used for fitness, but it seems to me that type of setup might do exactly what you want if you just set up a “workout” that has a single 30 min interval and repeats.

Or use a scale.

If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.

Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.

Funded and authored by the company wanting to sell you their disinfectant.

Conflicts of interest: Drs. Julie McKinney and M. Khalid Ijaz are engaged in R&D at Reckitt Benckiser LLC. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Funding/support: This study was funded by a grant to the University of Arizona from Reckitt Benckiser.

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

Elevated blood pressure is a common alcohol withdrawal symptom, but it looks like 9 days may be a long time for this symptom to last. As you’ve already seen from others, talking to a dr is probably a good idea at this point (if you have the means to do so).

Yeah, the whole kids and inheritance thing is a really big sticking point. I saw your other comment about this being based on a discussion your family has had. The thing is, that even if your family was discussing jobs on the surface, if the people they are picking from are other family members (or at least people they actually know), their decisions are weighed by all their other knowledge and feelings about those people.

I can see you’re trying to figure out how much value people put on each of these particular career cicurmastances in isolation but kids and inheritance is just a terrible framing for that for the above reasons. As a framing exercise, I think the question would have needed to be framed in a way that puts the reader in a much more distant position. This could be something like:

An eccentric billionaire gives you the following list of people and tells you to choose one person from the list for him to give a million dollars to. The billionaire says you must make your decision based solely on the list. Who do you choose and why did you make that choice?

Still maybe not a great framing, but it helps alleviate some of the rejection of the premise.

Even accepting the premise that this inheritance is indivisible, their jobs are far from the most important factor.

By my read, this is the core of the articles argument:

But if these billionaires’ largesse was designed to retain the conservative judge on the country’s highest court, the donations might fall outside of the definition of tax-free gifts, which according to the Supreme Court must stem from “detached and disinterested generosity.” If the benefits showered on Thomas were designed to elicit court actions or job decisions, they could be considered taxable income, whether or not there is definitive proof of quid pro quo on Thomas’s part.

Just spitballing here, but the “dream job” question might also come down to the destruction of the middle class (and the recognition thereof). 20 years ago it looked a lot more like you could make a good living working for someone else, doing something interesting. Plus there was more trust that employers would “do right” by their employees. There were pensions and quality healthcare benefits.

Now all that (and the security it brings) has dissolved. It may not be Gen Z people wanting to make it big or be a celebrity, but a desire to live comfortably and seeing that they can’t trust an employer to let them do that. If the only way you can build security for yourself is by building a big pile of money, then people are going to seek that out.

Edit: and when I say that “20 years ago” these things existed, I don’t mean that they were still functioning like they did another generation earlier, but it was way better than it is now and there was less awareness of what was happening.