The key to eating healthy is to find healthy foods that are reasonably inexpensive that you can eat as is, or cook simply and quickly with minimal chance of ruining it.

For drinks, water first and foremost, with maybe milk/juice occasionally.

For breakfast, toast/bagel and fruit, or maybe a granola, yogurt, and frozen berry parfait

For lunch, something like pretzels, mixed nuts/raisins (the hidden gem in any healthy diet), cheese and an apple/grapes.

Both of these meals are quick, healthy and require no cooking. The trick is dinner.

What I recommend is having a three piece meal, a carb so your not hungry, and then a vegetables and a protein for nutrition, all cooked separately.

For carb, pasta is fine, rice is better, but best would be an ancient grain like quinoa or farro, which nutritionally blow them out of the water.

For veggies, sweet potatoes and sauted spinach are nutrition kings, but anything is good.

Finally, steer clear of red meat for the most part for your protein. Beans, chicken, turkey and wild caught fish are your friends.

An absolutely killer meal is something like quinoa (boiled), sweet potato (sliced and boiled or baked whole), spinach (sautéd first), and turkey (sautéd second)

Nutritional, filling, two pots, one pan, about 20 minutes total, and the only thing you need to watch is the pan, and spinach/turkey don’t burn fast anyway.

But the most important thing is what you don’t buy. Most people, including me, have poor impulse control when we’re hungry. So go shopping full, and then don’t buy yourself anything unhealthy, because you will eat it later.

Vainly struggle

Against ill intent

Until we recede

Into oblivion

deleted by creator

If you like your hair on the shorter side, hair clippers.

I’ve been cutting my hair for a long time now, and have probably saved thousands from skipping barbers, as well as been able to cut my hair exactly as I like it, and far more frequently/conveniently.

But you need to understand, they feel the same way about you.

When you ignore them and never engage on every topic (Edited for clarity), they think you are giving them the silent treatment, which is also associated with children

Give you the mature ones you can learn from, you say. Have you engaged those people? People will be more likely to teach you if they like you, and they’ll be more likely to like you if you talk to them.

I’m not saying you’re wrong that it shouldn’t be this way, and I am agreeing with you that a position of like lab/rad tech with less colleagues might be more fitting to your personality.

But I am saying expecting people to care about you, understand you and treat you well, while you make no effort to do the same, is completely naive and hypocritical.

You say small talk is “irrelevant” to your job, but since you lost that job for not doing it, and it sounds like not for the first time, it is, by definition, extremely relevant.

“I felt they weren’t listening to me.” That is how, by your own admission, you made them feel for 8 weeks. To turn your question around, why should they listen to you?

I understand how you feel. I never understood natural small talk in school, and like you I was ostracized for it.

But the difference is I recognized how important it was to have allies in any environment, and the only way you get them is via socializing.

So I tried, I suffered, I learned and I got better. And that I did that again, and again, and again.

Have you made that effort? You already said you haven’t.

But this episode clearly hurt you, and it’s happened in the past, so don’t you think it’s time to learn?

Einstein once said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

Have you accepted that if you don’t change, these things will happen, again and again, for the rest of your life? If not, you are insane.

You say they are thin skinned, but to a few external observers, this long post also feels that way. Either don’t change and accept the known consequences of your actions without complaint, or adapt.

Of course it’s difficult. But people do difficult things every day. Think of it as a challenge. In addition to asking “do we give sodium bicarbonate by metabolic acidosis or alkalosis?”, also ask “so, have any plans for the weekend?”. And remember both answers, and ask them how whatever they talked about on Monday.

These conversations don’t have to take long, but just engaging for a minute or two will drastically change people’s perceptions of you. Which, considering those people can fire you, is extremely relevant.

Ultimately, your complaint is they don’t care about you. But you admit to not caring about them or their problems either, so I don’t understand why you’d expect a different outcome.

Thankfully there’s now an easy way to maximize your return/risk ratio: Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Before ETFs you had two options: choose individual stocks and risk choosing wrong, or pay a financial consultant outrageous fees to do it for you.

ETFs allows you to track the market, which over time only goes up, minimizing your risk. They also (usually) charge very low fees, which increases your returns.

If you are interested in US equities, VOO, which tracks the S&P 500, has a gross expense ratio (ie how much you pay them) of .03%. Considering how 20 years ago you might have paid a financial advisor 3%, it’s literally 100th of the cost. QQQM, which tracks the NASDAQ has a GER of .15%, is also good.

As an Italian, you might also be interested in an EWI, which tracks Italian stock performance, and has actually done pretty well the last year. However it has GER of .50%, so you’ll be paying a bit more. I’m not sure if you have access to different products there, so might be something to look in to. European stocks have done pretty well of late, so you may also want to look into ETFs for other countries (DAX for Germany, EWP for Spain, EWQ for France, etc). Finally you may want to consider emerging markets, like EMXC for China.

Again you may have access to different products, I’m not sure how that works, but basically any ETF which tracks a developed or high growth emerging market country would be good to add to your portfolio, and you should prioritize those with low GER to maximize your returns.

Lastly, I would STRONGLY encourage you to not even look into things like options, futures, shorting etc. Your focus as a retail investor should be to maximize your return to risk ratio.

If the market dips 10%, and you’ve put in 10k, it’s sad to see 1k “go away” but if you wait a few more days/weeks/months and just not sell and realize that loss, it has literally always bounces back (unlike an individual company), and you suffer no negative effects.

But futures, options and shorts, while potentially more rewarding, have outcomes where you can get really fucked, have to pay everything you have and more, and be left with nothing. It’s just not worth it IMO.

What if we had to torture and murder you to solve global warming? Would that be ok?

Honestly this was true for large parts of USAs history, but that hasn’t been the case for a while now.

In truth our democrat and republicans reps have almost no similar voting history, they vote the opposite of each other on almost every issue.

Below is a good visualization of what I mean. You can see that from the 50’s to the 80’s, there was really quite a bit of voting overlap by the parties, so during that period, you’d be right, both parties could be consider the same or similar.

But for the last 30 years or so, democrats and republicans have had very little overlap on what they vote in favor for. It’s party line votes on almost everything.

So how people can say “both parties are the same”, when they vote the opposite on almost everything is beyond me.

And that’s not even taking into account executive actions, like for example for the last 50 years or so every democrat president has provided contraceptives as part of foreign aid, and every republican has not.

We may not have options in terms of political parties to choose from, which I agree is bad, but saying both parties are the same is to be willfully blind.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/

What data do you have to say neither of those options are relevant?

“Mid-priced homes are becoming more popular with investors, making up 32% of investor purchases in the fourth quarter, a record high. Low-priced homes are still most popular with investors, making up 37% of purchases.”

Low cost homes, exactly the ones in rural/historically low income area you described, are the most purchased category of residential real estate.

Also, the downtowns of those areas, which are almost all single story commercial/retail, are exactly the places most in need of walkable, dense development I’m describing, especially if there’s a housing shortage and most of the surrounding areas already have built up residential developments.

So both of those options are actually more relevant for your example then the US as a whole.

https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q4-2021/

You seem to attribute the housing affordability crisis the last few years to WFH-ers, but isn’t it more fair to say that there are multiple other factors contributing to it?

Not just the post COVID appreciation for housing, but things like historically high percentage of investor owned homes (including corporate and foreign buyers), and historically low building rates compared to projected need, to name a few.

So then the question becomes, which of these should we focus on? For me, that means what gives you the most positives, and least negatives.

Let’s look at three options:

1. Banning corporate and foreign non-occupying homeowners from owning American residential real estate
2. Rezoning low density areas (particularly single story commercial/retail in smaller cities and towns’ downtowns) into vertical dense mixed use residential and commercial/retail development
3. Ending work from home

1 and 2 accomplish our primary goal of reducing home prices across the country, both by increasing supply (1 would too, since those investors would need to sell, increasing supply), and 1 would also reduce demand. 3 does not, because any price reductions in rural areas will be offset by higher rates in urban one

2 also gives us positive secondary benefit of encouraging walkable cities, which leads to health improvements, less traffic, and reduced climate impact. 1 would also increase business investment, encouraging long term growth, if the “money printer” option of buying US residential properties and collecting rent is not available.

3 gives us no positive secondary benefits, and since it does essentially the opposite of 2 in terms of walkability, it also is the only one with a high negative cost.

So pretty clearly that idea is the worst one for solving housing affordability. So why support it when their are other much better options available to accomplish your goal?

So I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not trans, so I can’t speak to that specifically. And if that perspective is what’s important to you, feel free to ignore.

But the main thing to remember is that they are not hating you because you are trans.

They hate you because they are hateful people, and will use whatever justification they can to avoid treating everyone well.

First it was black people, then Latin people, then gay people, etc.

They will always pick a group, big enough for them to be aware of but small enough they feel can be bullied without consequence.

And unfortunately right now, trans people are that group. But looking at the above list should also give you hope, because they tried to dehumanize all of those groups, and they lost every. Single. Time.

So just remember that ultimately if your not hurting anyone, then you are not doing anything wrong, and feel free to tell anyone that tells you otherwise to go fuck themselves. For being trans, or anything else.

Remember MLK’s quote, that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I knew someone that did something similar for the same reason, though it was conversations about his future with his mom that he was trying to avoid.

Something that helped with him is to go outside, NOT to interact with people, but just to go on hikes or walk, where you can keep your headphones in and not say a word to someone else, but just to get outside your room, which even though it’s a refuge, can also start to feel like a prison.

Honestly you interact with people much more indoors than outdoors, so viewing a walk as a form of peaceful solitude can be great for getting fresh air and exercise, and you’ll notice you get much less judgement from your roommates if your going outside. You’ll also notice your mental health will probably improve as well.

Those are also some of my favorites, the only reason I didn’t recommend is because I didn’t consider it to be quite the same genre, but agree they are excellent!

They are also in the same universe, as foundation makes a few references to that series, which are also fun to catch.

Two obvious suggestions are Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series, and Issac Asimov’s “Foundation” series.

Both are sci-fi classics (Dune is still the best selling sci-fi book of all time I believe) and are space operas of a massive scope.

They are also some of my personal favorites.

So the balance you have to get right is between respecting their experience and defending your right to make the final decision.

Asking them, “what are your thoughts on how to handle this situation”, and if the idea sounds good implementing it immediately, will go a long way to showing them you’re not going to insist on your way in every situation, which is the main cause of animosity, especially when the other person is more experienced.

But just by showing you’ll consider their ideas, you should expect some people to push to have you accept every idea they have, which can occur more often when they think they should be in your place anyway.

When that happens, it’s important to clarify that while you want to get everyone’s input, the final decision rests with you, and once you make it, you expect everyone to carry it out. And though constructive feedback on how to improve the process is always welcome, critiquing it simply because it is not their idea is not.

If you say that to them, looking them in the eyes with a calm but determined voice and expression, they’ll understand you’re a boss that wants input but will remain independent, which is the type of boss people respect.

In this sense it’s not much different from managing any team, except you should be more willing to seek out their input because they truly do have more experience.

One more thing that’s extremely important. When you make a decision, especially when it’s one where you chose between competing ideas or you went with your own, always explain the rationale for your decision. If your explanation makes sense and is honest, they’ll understand you were truly choosing what you thought was the best decision, and not just picking the one from your favorite person (including yourself).

Nothing diminishes respect more than showing favoritism, especially if they think you benefited from it to get your position.

I think part of it is early adopters of any new, not-yet-mainstream technology are more open to differences, after all, we’re all doing something different.

Also, when you’re an early part of something, you want it to be the best that it can be, whereas when you are part of this massive corporate social network you don’t feel that same responsibility.