u/wafflescorpion

I don't buy the whole Overton Window concept when it comes to legalizing drugs. Maybe in the past for things like marriage or civil rights, but something doesn't feel organic at all when it comes to what's being done with drugs.

You started seeing the weed narrative getting pushed very hard in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when people started losing their jobs and the economy started to turn towards the hell we have today. As things progressively got worse and especially once you hit the police brutality movements, suddenly a ton of states pass marijuana legalization and dispensaries magically open up absolutely everywhere. People suddenly have legal access to all the weed they want, all the gummies and other products too. There's no in-between, no pushback, no debate. Nobody is being stopped, and in fact people are actively being encouraged by popular culture and social media algorithms that peddle all sorts of products.

What has happened in that time? People aren't having these huge, angry protests anymore. You don't see these big coordinated movements. Give me a break on the No Kings protests, which themselves did not feel organic at all and were just peaceful, pointless weekend strolls. How are you ever going to get things like the massive movements and riots in the 60s when people are just kept dopey and inebriated? Where the hell are all the labor and food cost riots we should be having? And now they're talking about legalizing psychedelics. Come on already.

All of this is being done to keep people happy and dumb. They know exactly what they're doing and all of this is planned and intentional. You can't notice things when you're not even lucid and your life consists of giggling and having "bruh" moments.

I was too young at the time to have been commuting, and didn't directly know anyone that used the system. Did they shut everything down like the MTA did? Were a lot of people stranded in the city?

Sometimes you'll see an alert that a train was delayed because of police assistance being needed. What's happening, usually? How bad does the passenger need to be acting?

Had a weird bus commute this morning (115) and I'm genuinely curious what the actual NJ Transit operating procedure is supposed to be here.

We stopped to pick up a passenger in a wheelchair at the last stop before getting on the Turnpike. The driver tried for about 20 minutes to get the wheelchair lift working, but it was completely broken. Eventually we were told the bus had to be taken out of service and that everyone on board had to wait for another bus and transfer. The next bus was coming in a half hour at that point after we'd already been sitting there. By the time we finally started moving again, we'd lost nearly an hour. I normally get to work roughly on time, instead I got there extremely late.

To be extremely clear, none of this was the wheelchair passenger's fault. He was just trying to take the bus like anyone else, and if anything I felt bad for him because he had to sit outside while an entire bus full of pissed off people stared out the windows waiting for NJ Transit to figure out what to do. My issue is entirely with NJ Transit and the way the situation was handled.

What I don't understand is why, once it was obvious that our lift was broken, the bus couldn't continue while NJ Transit sent something over for the passenger. He had to wait for the next bus regardless. Instead, he waited for the next bus and so did the entire busload of people already onboard. Nothing seemed to improve for him by keeping us there. The only apparent difference was that dozens of other passengers were also delayed by nearly an hour. What if somebody had a doctor's appointment, job interview, or a job where showing up an hour late actually has consequences?

I'm not arguing that the driver should have just shrugged and abandoned a disabled passenger, and obviously NJ Transit has an obligation to provide accessible transportation. I'm asking what the actual procedure is supposed to be when a lift fails like this. Was taking an otherwise functional bus out of service immediately and holding everyone until another bus arrived actually required? If so, why? And if it is required, how the hell are wheelchair lifts apparently not being checked reliably enough that this situation can happen in the first place?

I've made it through all of Junior High, High, Next Generation, and Next Class. Never thought the day would come, but whatever it takes, I know I can make it through.

With that being said, I need another series to watch in the evenings while I'm doing hobby stuff. Do any of you have any recommendations? My favorite seasons were basically the first four seasons of Next Generation, so if something captures that vibe, it would be greatly appreciated. Bonus points if it's Canadian.

The air conditioner on my bus wasn't working this morning, which gave me a great time when I was stuck on it for two and a half hours due to the usual crisis actors breaking down in the tubes.

Does NJ Transit actually fix anything when you report it, like the MTA does on their equipment, or do you just get a generic condolence and waste your time?

My mother is, by far, the single biggest stressor in my life. I have other things that have gone on, or are still going on, that are pretty terrible, but so much of it traces back to her, and it's something that has only worsened with age. As a general statement, I'm in my 30s, she's in her 70s, and I've already gone through nearly a decade of mental health treatment with a phenomenal psychiatrist. I've worked through a good deal of my trauma and I'm pretty stable on my various medications.

Let's go back to the very beginning. My earliest memories are horrific. She was brutalized by my biological father, who she was married to at the time. I don't know the context of what had gone on before I could remember things, and she is so much of an unreliable storyteller that I will never know the full story. All I can remember was extreme violence at home. Rape, brutal beating. I myself was molested by him. The divorce happened when I was five, after police had been called to respond to domestic violence and at least five or six officers had to pin him down while he was naked and violently fighting them off and screaming. I got to watch all of this. Then there were the times afterwards when he'd come kidnap me after school, or when he'd break into our apartment and stand over her while she was sleeping and sharpen a machete.

You would think that after all of that, after when she fought for full custody of me, that this would be the basis for some close relationship between mother and child. Some sort of Lifetime movie plot. No. There was a hard period where we didn't have enough money to turn the lights on, and we didn't have money for food. She had already been cold and distant towards me before the divorce, and this continued afterwards, where she would constantly pick out things in me that she claimed were just like my biological father. Completely innocuous things. She told me I was a mistake. I had to beg her to love me. When preschool had ended for the summer, I hid in a cabinet because I didn't want to leave and go home.

She managed to find a guy and quickly married him. It didn't matter that this guy immediately started beating me when he first met me. None of that concerned her. He was the most heavenly, perfect being to her because he paid the rent. She loved him so much and would constantly gush about how she wished she could clone him. I spent all of elementary school being beaten by him. She would tell him that I was "bothering" her and he would tell her to give him "the stick" and he would take me into the bedroom, close the blinds, and start repeatedly beating me with a broomstick. Once he was done, he would pick up the phone and tell me he was going to call my biological father so that he'd come pick me up and take me away. 

These sessions continued until I was in junior high, when I reached puberty. After this, it switched to emotional abuse. There were times that things happened to me that were so horrible that I blacked out and can't remember. She was always at his side. When I was twelve, I wanted to die and openly stated this to fellow students. After this was reported to the guidance counselor, I was taken home and she told me that she refused to have a child that was "not normal" and that I was lying and making it up. She made me look up a child psychologist on my own, and she then took me to the session and coached me beforehand to tell them that everything was normal and that I was "just joking" with friends. This was because she had to work and didn't want to miss work because of her child.

After high school came college. It was a struggle, but I finished my degree even while having a horrible home life. My GPA wasn't as high as it could be, but I did my best. At some point I found out her beloved husband was cheating on her. I chose to keep this to myself, as the situation was unstable and I was trying my best to stay afloat. It ultimately didn't matter, because what really set her off was that her sweetie was sending massive amounts of money to his family back home and had stolen large amounts of cash from her. This caused a crisis at home that got particularly bad while I was desperately searching for work after graduating. As soon as I started my career, they started fighting until he finally left after a year of threatening to kill us. I was engaging in a totally normal life at work during the day while sleeping with the bedroom door locked at night.

Ever since then, I've been stuck with her living with me. It wasn't for a lack of trying, there were several times that I made an effort to get out of the arrangement, though these attempts failed or were just not viable. She has always slept in my living room and has been functionally homeless since I pay the rent and utilities. Her contribution is doing food and cleaning, although I make more than enough to pay for these things on my own, and I can do these for myself too. She works part time jobs and has utterly ruined finances, because she never filed taxes for so many years and receives the tiniest amount of Social Security, just barely enough to cover her Medicare Advantage plan. At the same time, she has keeps just enough in her bank account that she doesn't qualify for any form of public assistance. Everything is set up in such a way that she is permanently dependent on me, with absolutely no chance of the system helping at all.

I have an absolutely wonderful spouse who I am only able to see on weekends or when we go on vacations together. My spouse is incredibly supportive of me and deeply understanding and patient and means the world to me. We've been married for just over a year, and have been together for nearly a decade, and yet I've been unable to live with the person I married because of my mother. There's no possible way to share a unit with her, since nobody in their right mind would want to subject themselves to her behavior. My spouse also lives with their parent in a retirement community with a strict HOA, and pretty far away from where I work, so there's no way for me to live with them. Every time I leave to go see my spouse, I have a wonderful time and I'm able to decompress, up until I get to the point that I have to go home and once again get treated to my mother.

For someone who lives rent free with me, you would have a reasonable expectation that my mother would be appreciative and supportive and kind. You would be wrong. She is an absolute living nightmare. Everything is in a constant state of crisis, with a new one each week, and the expectation that I need to solve these for her. She is severely emotionally volatile and hooked on Xanax that a doctor gives her "for sleep" but she takes every single day. I'm told by her that I ruined her life. When I'm in earshot of her, she makes sounds of distress, wanting attention and sympathy for whatever her latest ailment is; these disappear when I go to another room. There's always some grand new plan or scheme that she has, but she's unable to articulate just what it is, so she tries to make me think for her. She will throw tantrums like a toddler, stamping her feet on the floor and making the most pathetic noises while screaming at great volume, her face red and her eyes shut and teary. Any accomplishments I've ever had, she minimizes and either makes about herself, or doesn't care about unless she can gain social capital with her friends. If I go outside and do anything, when I come back she glares at me like I've thrown her into a bottomless pit for ten years. Anything good that happens to me, any gift I get from others, she wants it too, and will openly weep that nobody wants to give her anything and that nobody wants her and that she has a bad child. When she needs something from you, she is friendly, when you have no value to her in the moment, she is frigid.

At no point did I ever want her to live with me, and I don't want her in my life. She was dumped into my lap. I never asked for this, and yet this is the hand I have been dealt. You can't just throw an elderly woman on the street. There is nobody that can take her in and I am the only relative she has. She qualifies for absolutely nothing. I cannot discharge her, I am forced to care for someone who is increasingly aging and worsening in health, and she is screaming and clawing all the way down. Some people tell me I am making a choice here to take care of her. Other people tell me that you're supposed to  care for aging parents and that it's some important bonding experience and wonderful and that it's a fair trade for them taking care of you when you were a child. There's the repeated attempts at guilting by people who meet her superficial charm on the surface and don't dig any deeper and think I'm a monster for not making grand displays of filial piety. Everyone who knows her on a deeper level is horrified by her or has the fortune to be able to cut her out of their lives.

I don't love my mother.

Let's say I want to buy a ticket. I go through the usual process, selecting the destination and location, and I select my payment method. Suddenly, it tells me that I need to sign in due to inactivity, so I have to do that, and then it doesn't remember where I was, so I need to go through the process a second time.

Is there any way around that, or do I need to contact them? That's just bad user experience design. If you need to be logged in to buy a ticket, then it shouldn't let you progress in the app unless you're signed in.

I work in an academic research environment. My boss and I agreed on a promotion. The department then agreed on a promotion. It went to HR in March, with a backdate for the salary change. Now we're in July, and nothing has happened since.

What's going on in the backend of things? It just seems odd to me that it would take this long if everyone has agreed on it and the department has sufficient grant funding.

I like to collect autographs of world leaders, heads of government, and heads of state. Sometimes you get a genuine response (my favorite was Kazakhstan), sometimes it's just a preprint, but I'm doing all of this for fun and because I like to get stuff in the mail.

After getting responses from all the EU/NATO countries I've been trying to branch out, but I'm aware that some options are possibly going to raise eyebrows. For instance, I don't think it would look very good to receive a letter from the Taliban government in Afghanistan, assuming it would even go through.

What are some of the other ones that would get me on a watch list?

I'd really love to get some of the actors from back in the day, like Craig and Rick, but I don't want to bug them if they don't do autographs in the mail!

Something that struck me about the Democrat primary for this round was that we had several candidates making progressive noises, but none of them were able to pull ahead and Mikie Sherrill won by default.

Was this because the other choices weren't good candidates, or because voters wanted to play it safe, or because state Democrats just aren't into more leftist politics?

Outside of Trump, who do you admire, and why?

I'm from New Jersey and a coworker of mine was from Cleveland. At one point, she brought her husband to work to meet all of us. His name was Julius, so I jokingly asked him if at any point he'd been called Orange Julius (like the drink), since it's not a name I commonly see. All of the sudden, his expression changed, and he told me not to call him Orange Julius, because that term is racist. For context, I'm white, he's black. I obviously apologized and said I was unaware and would not say it again.

​

All of this was maybe a decade ago at this point. I have never heard of or seen Orange Julius in any sort of racial context. He was not pulling my leg, he was deathly serious. Is this some sort of localized slang to Cleveland? This has haunted me for years and is deeply enigmatic and I have never seen him again so I have had no way to ask him about it.

It's in the 90s, a work day, and we have severe weather advisories, so let's take bets on the notifications we'll see at 5 PM sharp.

Catenary wire failure? Brush fire by the tunnel? Signal problems east or west of Penn Station? Work train stuck? Trespasser fatality?

I ride one of the long haul interstate buses into the city for work. Had a lovely incident this morning where a lady flipped out on me hard after the bus discharged at Port Authority. Earlier, when she got on, she decided to sit right next to me in the back even though the bus was empty, and promptly began having a loud conversation on her phone. I got up with an exasperated sigh and sat somewhere else because I could hear her over my headphones. When we all got off, I noticed her walking right next to me, loudly telling me that I didn't own the bus, and she was following me for several minutes through Port Authority while yelling at the back of my head. People were staring, but at her, not at me. I was not reacting to her at all.

What do you even do in a situation like this? I don't have viable transit alternatives so it's not like I can just take a different route. She looked so generic that I can't tell if she's a regular on the bus or not and I don't know if I'm going to see her again. I'm a jittery person and I seem to attract emotionally volatile people on public transit for some reason.