We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.

We haven’t progressed far enough to be detectable by intelligent life in other star systems, even the closest ones. The filter can easily be in front of us. It could just simply be that interstellar space travel is too infeasible, so intelligent species never reach beyond their home system.

Sounds an awful lot like the political positions I hear all the goddamn time in the US.

My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.

It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.

Getting screenshots or videos off the Switch is laughably arcane. Nintendo is so weird about modern tech conveniences.

I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.

You have to accept these pieces of paper I printed out instead of me paying off my credit card debt because I invoke USC 420.69 Hocus Pocus Debt Begonus.

My current workplace has an official policy of flexing hours for salaried employees. Which is exactly what you just described: if you work time outside of your regular hours, take comp time off for it. And my supervisor is probably the best boss I’ve ever had, she’s super respectful of our team’s time and work-life balance so we don’t even need to run flex time by her. As long as we mark it on our calendars we can just do whatever. A good boss makes such a huge difference.

I’m also 9-5 salaried, hybrid with 1-2 days in office each week and the rest from home. It’s very nice.

Salaried can be a double-edged sword. The occasional self-motivated “I actually really need to get this done” is no big deal, but some workplaces will pile work onto salaried workers with no respect for work-life balance. So you’re left with either not getting your work done and feeling stress because you can’t keep up, or regularly working extra hours for free so you feel stress because you don’t have enough personal time. What kind of job it is can depend really heavily on your direct supervisor and general workplace culture. I had to suffer through a few of the bad kind of salaries positions before I lucked into finding a good one.

You have to recognize how absurdly fucked this logic is, right? “You have to vote for the guy currently in office who is actively supporting and supplying genocide or else you support genocide.”

I’m not saying don’t vote, but I am saying that if you want to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you then you need to find a different tactic.

I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.

Yeah, I’d definitely recommend working in a quick step of thinking “is it reasonable to expect the people who read this to know what this acronym means?”

…NARB? I feel like it should be pretty obvious that whatever that is, it’s not a well-known enough acronym to use without definition. I can guess the B is boner but I haven’t a single clue what NAR is.

This is probably just my layperson showing, but I honestly wouldn’t be all that afraid of a cheetah. If I were in that situation in any other big cat habitat I would be absolutely terrified. Smaller cats like lynx I wouldn’t really be afraid for my life but I would be fearful of attack and injury.

Cheetah I wouldn’t really feel much fear, more just confusion about what I’m supposed to do. They really don’t have the same cat software that all the others have. Much more chill.

While true, it’s also true that cats of all sizes behave very similarly. Cheetahs are probably the least similar to the other cats.

If you’ve had pet cats and gotten to know their behavior, it’s remarkable how familiar the behavior of big cats can be.

I sincerely doubt anyone at that zoo didn’t suffer a severe emotional loss that day. That was an awful situation, and while I do think the zoo has the blame it is not because of their decision that day. For the employees, the death of an animal at a zoo can easily cause grief akin to the death of a family member or pet, depending on how closely they worked with the animal.

Once that child was in the enclosure they really didn’t have time to try out different options that may have aggravated Harambe. Any option, including the lethal one, presented a risk to the child. They chose the option they thought gave the best chance to save the child.

Where the zoo has blame is the design of the habitat such that a child could just crawl in. I know they’ve learned from their terrible mistake and changed the design, but they really should have known better in 2016.

Someone posed a very ill-formed question that results in no winners. “Would you rather find yourself in the woods with a bear or a man?”

The argument is almost designed to make men feel discriminated against and women feel like men don’t listen to them. There’s just enough room for everyone to bring in their own assumptions about the situation to justify their position, so everyone else feels defensive.

The only winner is the bear.

Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to get back on Lemmy until now. Bit of a now-or-never situation. The housing market is absolutely bonkers where I live (maybe where you live too, from your username). We had both made big leaps in salary recently that put the monthly payment in the barely-doable range, and her parents had some fixed funds available to help with the down payment.

Both the gift money and our salaries were going to be outpaced by the housing market if we waited, and interest rates were already on the post-COVID rise. I don’t think it was a terrible financial decision in the long run, because at least now we’re building equity and the house value will rise with the market. But until we sell (which we won’t be able to afford to for a long time), those assets aren’t liquid, so our month-to-month finances are a lot tighter than when we were renting. Which makes the repair work from the dipshit former owners hurt a lot more since it’s gonna take a long time to recover from big financial hits.

My wife and I were able to buy a ridiculously priced starter home only because we had the privilege of her parents being able to help with the down payment. We had to move farther away from work than where we were renting just to be able to even consider homes.

Our mortgage is twice what our rent was, and we only gained about ~100 sq ft of interior space. Plus a whole host of problems because the previous owners were jackasses who DIYed everything and did it all wrong.

I love this totally sincere reply to a completely insincere joke. I would love to visit New Zealand for a lot of reasons.