I have two superficially-contradictory views on parenting older kids:

1. No matter how good a parent you are, your kid may have really big problems. (Obviously parents can also be the cause of really big problems.) But not everything is the parents' fault or within their control.

2. It's not as hard as people say to be on basically good terms with your tween or teenager. Your kid can have major problems, or not, and you can still have a good relationship with them.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I do blame the parent a bit when they absolutely can't get along with their teenager. Not the presence or absence of big problems in the teenager's life, but whether or not you can still connect with your kid, more often than not.

I'm sure there are exceptions that prove the rule, where the teen is taking their anger out on their parent and just miserable to get along with, through no fault of the parent. But I'm watching a lot of parents raise their teenagers and more-or-less everyone kinda seems to like each other. It's not a foregone conclusion that your teenager is Doug from The State.

This musing brought to you by an Atlantic article that I couldn't actually read due to being paywalled, about the pain felt by parents who are estranged from their grown children, and my immediate thought is, "I bet they were dicks to their kids."

(I can already tell I'm being brash and impulsive. There could be all sorts of taking-sides-during-divorces and other drama that teenagers get roped into, where a parent isn't at fault. But sometimes, parents are jerks!)

This is dumb, but short: a quiz where you have to pick the hue of major social media outlets. I got 5 out of 8 when I first took it, on my ipad. (When I just retook it on a computer, I noticed that you can test out each color by scrolling over the choices. I did much worse than when I just went on instinct, the first time.)

So anyway: are you all still on Twitter? Is the experience getting noticeably worse? Is it My-Spacing into oblivion? (Myspacing? Mispacing? Deteriorating.)

Unrelatedly, I put a Nestle's comercial under the jump. I vividly remember this commercial from the 80s. It is so absurdly dramatic.

It's funny: every generation wants to express yearning and passion and vulnerability. And it's good to express these things. These are universal and powerful parts of being human.

But each generation also wants their expression to be novel and capture how their experience is more raw and hard than the old squares of yesteryear. And that's the part that invariably ages like milk. The line between raw, powerful passion and fodder for mockery is just so porous and flimsy.

(I'm not saying a Nestle's commercial is a sincere expression of yearning and passion, but they're certainly capitalizing on the tropes of the day.)

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From /antiwork on Reddit:

I'm a united stated postal service mail carrier. New rules in place regarding pay has caused my pay to decrease by about 25% starting next Saturday.

My pay is going from roughly $65,000 to $47,000.

...

It would be hard to explain to a non-postal worker.

The USPS and the Rural Union disagreed about how to get paid for mail volume. It went into arbitration. An arbitrator chose a new, complicated algorithm based way of determining volume. That algorithm goes into affect this week. People are losing thousands of dollars off their wages and the Postal Service won't release the math behind the algorithm.

And from the comments:

USPS rural routes get paid by route evaluation, not hourly. It can be confusing to understand if you don't work at the post office, but basically if your route is evaluated at 9 hours, you get paid for 9 hours every day whether you work 6 or 12 hours.

It's been about 4 years since the last route evaluations (or "count").

During the count, USPS counts steps to different areas of the post office (the points from our case (where we organize the mail for each route) to where to grab our mail/ packages, throw back mail, where we go to load up in our trucks, ect) & the amount of mail/ packages we have for a week or two.

Our mail (magazines/ letters) count has been going down every year. Package count has gone up.

Bc the mail count has been going down, it'll affect the pay we get for the route evaluation. The package amount increasing doesn't seem to make up for it, due to the post offices system of evaluating.

So, due to how the routes are getting evaluated this year, and the new system of how the evaluation is occurring, that's how OP is getting a pay cut doing the exact same work. The post office decided their current route takes less time to do since the last count (probably bc the mail itself is much less than we used to get), when in reality, due to the increase in packages, it most likely takes more time to do.

My route takes 2+ extra hours a day to do since the last evaluation, but since we haven't had an evaluation in about 4 years, I'm still getting paid the same. Haven't heard about the new evaluation of my route yet, as this years count just ended.

I tried my best to explain, so hopefully this isn't too confusing for non postal workers.

Snarkout writes: Great piece from NBC freak-beat reporter Brandy Zadrozny about Tiffany Dover, the nurse in Knoxville, TN, who passed out on camera right after getting her COVID shot in late 2020. Dover was fine, but the hospital she worked at told her not to talk about it on TV or social media, which led the lunatic brigade to declare that a) she was dead and b) an _extremely bad_ -- rapping CEO-level bad -- "we support front-line nurses" video the hospital put out clearly featured her friend and coworker as a body double. Lots of craziness, and when Zadrozny reported on it earlier she couldn't make contact with Dover. Zadrozny was at the time like, "Well, this does sound kind of weird, which is embarrassing, but I promise you she's alive!" Dover is in fact alive, has left her job working at the hospital with the most inept PR department this side of Harlan Crow, and tells Zadrozny her story.

Heebie's take: Holy moly, is this ever.

JFC we need some mechanism for addressing this kind of crowd-sourced abuse.

J, Robot sends in this and this pair of depressing pieces. Basically, this couple hired a midwife to deliver their baby at home. After the baby is born, they have their doctor's check-up. The test results show that the baby is jaundiced, so the baby needs phototherapy. The parents use the midwife's light machine instead of the hospital one. In one sense, the debate hinges on whether the midwife's machine is medically suitable for this situation or not.

But either way, the way it was handled is fucking atrocious: the doctor alerted CPS who went and took the newborn. The newborn is still in CPS foster care, and will be a month old by the time a hearing comes around.

I cannot stress enough how massively abusive and underfunded the Texas foster care system is. Judges keep ordering Texas to reform the foster care system, and Texas keeps winking back at the judges and saying, "Oh right! You want us to reform it. Got it." Using it in this situation - a freaking newborn baby who needs to bond with its mother - is depraved.

FURTHERMORE. Texas generally casts large leeway towards letting parents do whatever they want. This kind of heavy-handed response is totally inconsistent with the latitude given to other parents.

Maybe it's because this nice couple is black. Who can say.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe fifty eight