Re: or most elevated?
 

No way. 1995. 6-foot water bong. I was the highest person ever.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Don't forget we have independent state legislatures coming down the pike. So if he gets face planted he will have people who say "Fraud -- let's put in Trumpie." The question is whether the military follows him and rises up to quell the riots.

But who knows, maybe he falls down a set of stairs or something. Is that irony or coincidence?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Not new, but still wild.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Opposing counsel 59 yo dead of pulmonary embolism. Guess what he just had for the third time a week before this

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Six month old got his first covid vaccination today!! He's also probably had it, has had my breastmilk when I had it, has had my breastmilk when I got the second booster, was in utero when I got the first booster. I THINK he's as good as he can be in terms of immunity.

Okay everyone in my office
 

Is at a super spreader conference ouT of town tomorrow.

Do I scan in, then go for a long run around Manhattan or do I not even bother to go in. Tomorrow seems like a great day to do Williamsburg bridge to LIC, Astoria and then back to Manhattan.

I have to leave the house because my wife has a virtual event.

ETA -- whoops edited that typo.

Re: Okay everyone in my office
 

Before Covid I would show face at a conference then sneak out for a run, so yes. But how is it out of town if you’re running in the city?

Re: Okay everyone in my office
 

Since 2020, Icky doesn't do conferences. This one is in South Carolina. I am in New York.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Life’s terminal. Get on with it, or get mentally ill with paranoia.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Twitter Is Not Reality

Why aren’t there PSAs stating that sprayed across every medium every hour?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I was paranoid before the pandemic.

I don't take a bath with the toaster and I do not do superspreader events unless they are once-in-a-lifetime and matter to me. Work events where I can hear people talk about how great they are, nah I'm good.

Re: Okay everyone in my office
 

I wound up doing your route, over to the West Side then up the West Side Greenway.

Kind of shorter than I predicted but mostly unbroken until I got to the 60s and had to start heading toward Grand Central.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I totally support using Covid to skip work events. I’d rather have my teeth drilled then go to a conference full of lawyers.

But I’ve been to concerts. I’ve been to tons of parties. I’m vaxxed, boosted, and life’s too fucking short to sit around worrying about this anymore. If I die tomorrow, I have been far luckier in life than I ever deserved. And dying of an embolism actually isn’t a bad way to go. It’s lights out. Alternatively, I soldier on into my dotage (or not) waiting for the inevitable nasty cancers that haunt the family.

I don’t wanna know I’m going. Bring it out of the blue. If a virally induced embolism, fine.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Coronavirus likes this.

Not for this guy. He was hospitalized for a bit. Not sure how long.

Where I run I run into coyotes and occasionally bobcats. I am convinced that getting eaten in a bottom of a ditch is in my future, with hawks and vultures picking up the scraps. Painful but nice to be remembered as zero waste icky.

Re: Okay everyone in my office
 

I had tried to run the whole island perimeter. Not one day, but in chunks. Below the UN the East River is great until you get way downtown, then you get put out on streets. Above the UN it is weird, like there is a river path for a bit then you get kicked into streets for a bit. I don’t get why that isn’t complete?

West side is generally all good until just above the bridge where you get kicked into streets. I don’t get that at all because the northernmost part is that park with the Cloisters. Why can’t the bike path merge into that?

I have done the whole perimeter other than 155th to 121st on the east side. Someday.

Re: Okay everyone in my office
 

East side is wrecked. I run from Houston, north to 20th then back at 23rd then it stops further north. Below Houston it is under construction above the Manhattan Bridge. And there are spots it is under construction north of 42nd I just do not know where.

The West side is nice. I am going to try going further up the West side next time. But the GWB is as far north as I will go.

But the bridges into Brooklyn, Queens and back are good. You get hills and plenty of distance, you just have to watch out for maniac ebikes and scooters in the pedestrian lanes.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Sebastian’s empty suburban-boho fatalism is as easy to slip on as a fake VU concert t-shirt from Urban Outfitters, and it might play well at a Main Line cocktail party, but we’ll see how cavalier he is if he gets confronted with concrete evidence of his finite mortality.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Like Yossarian, my plan is to live forever, or die trying.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

What do we say to the god of death?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I told you the coronavirus likes this.

And oh wait, this you?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It was such a relief when they finally had shots for kids.

ETA: The kids hatred of shots did not exactly agree.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The pandemic is over. Biden said so.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I have been. Bizarrely, during a routine examination, they found something inside my head that's incredibly rare. I just went thru a second screening a couple months back to make sure it isn't growing. It's the kind of thing that, if it were bad, or if it goes bad, I have a serious problem.

Those tests are fucking scary. But I've eaten a lot of psychedelics, which I think confers a circumspect view on mortality. And like I said, I don't desire or plan to leave anytime soon, but I've been pretty lucky (we all have if one considers our odds of being in such nice lives vs the other billions of people on the planet), so I think it'd be extremely poor taste to complain.

Doesn't mean I wouldn't complain. But it'd be bad form.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Chauncey Gardiner.

He's stumbled, gaffed, and limped half-senile into success. The goofy bastard just passed a bill siccing the tax police on the American public, doing nothing to curb inflation, and declared it a victory. Our credulous public shrugged and got back to watching the Real Housewives. "Chance of audit torture being visited on gig workers and small biz just increased 500%? The bill actually probably increased inflation? Whatevs. I'm old and like the idea my drugs might be cheaper now because Medicare can negotiate with Big Pharma!"

And while Joe tries to shake hands with people who aren't on the dais, mutters through word salads and imitates John Hurt's Chancellor Sutliffe from V for Vendetta on the steps on Independence Hall, his greatest campaigner is out there ensuring the Ds win all the Senate races.

When the red wave turns out to be a pink piss puddle, there'll be one jackass to blame. And we all know who it is. From backing Oz to Hershel Walker to those wingnuts in AZ, NV, and WI, Orange 45 worked harder to get Ds elected in Senate races than any other person in the country.

And if gas prices continue to fall into November, there's a thin chance Chauncey may even hold the House.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Hope all is well.

I am team "Control everything you possibly can" because there's enough fucked up shit out there beyond our control. I deal with it every day occupationally.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No one wanted to curb inflation. The great resignation happened because people saw multimillion 401ks coupled with death from going to the office and said "fuck that noise." How else to get them back to work other than stomping the 401k values with some well-timed spending and rate increases.

Housing is next. But not too much so that people riot.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thanks. Given its size and bilateral presentation, odds are very much in my favor (if it were bad already, I'd have been done long ago... the concern is making sure it doesn't do something bad going forward).

I've been trying to control so much for so long I'm honestly getting tired. I stumbled back into mushroom use last year and recalled the part of my personality I'd known as a younger person. I totally get your point and I can't argue with the logic in the least. Controlling what one can makes sense. And Covid is probably one of those things worth controlling. But the rest of it? Well, I think it's time at this age to start saying "I don't care" to a lot of smaller items I've been controlling.

With age I think people having a lot of "programs running in the background" that take up mental bandwidth. They seemed important years ago so you just keep running them. Maybe it's holding onto relationships or affiliations that aren't worth it. Maybe its following certain routines that you're not sure why you follow anymore. Maybe it's just laddering shit in terms of serious importance. Putting the neuroses of stressing about details back at the bottom run where it belongs. Forgetting that irritating voice that's always carping, "the devil is in the details." He is. And that's the problem.

Time. Time is fucking important. Connecting with people. That's important. Being in the moment. Fuck, that's the most important of all.

I'm tired of being told to worry about this, worry about that. I'm tired of having people making me worried. So much of it is Just Bullshit. This is important, that's important. Must do this, must do that.

How about no? How about I'm going to say most of it is not important. It's detritus, clogging my bandwidth. I'm opening the Task Manager in my head and shutting down a whole lotta these fucking programs.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't think they're getting them back to the office as they'd like. Hybrid is here to stay.

I think Covid created a reawakening - a realization of the shortness and fragility of life - that's hard to stifle.

The old men and their old ways were being questioned before Covid. We all know this system of fake capitalism doesn't work. Covid didn't break it. It merely forced us to test whether we could operate differently. And yes, we very much can - and more productively.

The "Dammit, we'll have the status quo back!" club sounds desperate, and they should be. Some workers will be fired in this sorta-recession we're going to have. But many more will not be fired. Instead of shedding workers which are hard to come by, firms will shed more office space. And they'll seek to attract talent cheaply by offering flexibility.

The old men in corner offices and the REITs exposed heavily to office space who've been talking up how the office is going to come back, and how a recession is going to force workers back under thumb are shooting themselves in the foot. They're fucking themselves, but just don't see it yet. Because they can't. Because these spoiled, narrow minded rentier capitalists can't think outside the rules of the only world they know.

They think things can't change, that their recently developed laws of economics are laws of physics, falling to miss what David Graeber stated in the Utopia of Rules:

"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."

Mother Nature just slammed us with a pandemic. And these arrogant old men think their systems are so resilient that they'll just shrug it off and things will be as they were before. Sorry, but if men can make the world run differently, Mother Nature can sure as shit do so. And no reference to Adam Smith's or Riccardo's laws on supply, demand, labor flexibility, etc. is going to convince millions of people who knew they were getting fucked before the pandemic to buy back into the architecture that had been fucking them.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Very sorry to hear that. Hang in there.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thank you. I think I’ll be fine and just have to bite my nails now and again. As I noted, nothing malignant appears on both sides, even if slightly larger on one and not on other.

But being scared is a gift. And while I might sound like a silly hippie, if you’ve the ability, and it is increasing in popularity, eat the psychedelics. Even if an atheist to his/her core, one can’t help but be reminded of our individual insignificance, and this feeling you’re pulled along in something way bigger than you and definitely beyond your control.

I’m hoping the post-Covid changes in our values as societies are as sticky as they seem. If we blow this crisis as an opportunity to change, we’re really terminal.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Damn. I hope it remains as it is. Scary shit. I'm still breastfeeding, so I'll have to observe from the sidelines. I'm glad you have a good outlet.

I'm also hoping this new status quo sticks around for awhile.

I find it amusing in a fuck-you-assholes-for-being-such-assholes sort of way that the same people who are bitching about people "not wanting to work" are also pissed at people coming across the border who probably would be more than happy to take any job that was offered.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't see this new status quo abating. Pre-Covid, we believed that things could not significantly change. This always seemed, to the astute among us, a largely untrue but nevertheless deeply internalized narrative. Things couldn't change radically. We would not shift from capitalism to collectivism overnight. But to a significant extent beyond just the margins, things could be modified. Things like hustle culture, consumerism, and keeping up with the Joneses could be jettisoned. They could be shown to be counterproductive, inefficient, and significant sources of unhappiness and lack of meaning in people's lives.

We could become reacquainted with the notion that time is the most important resource.

Consider commuting by run of the mill office workers. They drive or train into a city, unhappily, burning fossil fuels, where they then occupy cubicles next to each other in open space offices, doing that which they could do from anywhere. The whole time, their empty homes are consuming energy to heat and cool, and the building they are in is doing the same, needlessly doubling a fossil footprint. Their productivity is sapped by the commute, which adds an hour or more to the day, and the exercise of getting dressed in a silly corporate casual uniform. Their wages are eaten into with the cost of parking and/or transportation.

This exercise benefits no one. And yet it persisted because, well, real estate departments in companies had always carried commercial office space, and so assumed they always would. And people had been coming to big buildings in cities for decades, and so it was assumed that would always continue because people just do what's been done before and, despite many industries allowing WFH (insurers have long done it), most just did what came before and didn't think about it.

Don't rock the boat, just go through the motions. File in with the herd and assume, assume, assume, this is Just How Things Are Always Done.

This buildup of stagnant behaviors is tolerable because no one can imagine a situation in which things are different. We get caught in systems that seem so ingrained, so essential, and so complex, that modifying them in any significant regard is an impossible task.

It is. Unless you're a pandemic. If you're a pandemic, it's very easy to shine a light on every inefficiency and counterproductive element of a society, culture, and the economic system underpinning them. Covid was a klieg light. In an instant, all that was superfluous and wasteful was segregated from all that wasn't.

Once priorities have been reshuffled so radically, I don't see any way of returning to 2019. Hence the desperation in the voices of those who insist on resuming what came before exactly how it was before.

The reality is, things were broken, very badly, before. And we all knew it, but the task of sabotaging the systems that rendered most of society unhappy seemed impossible. They were too strong.

But not too strong for a pandemic.

Where does it go from here? Beyond my pay grade. Best guess would be we see a hybrid future, where some of the elements of the world pre-2020 mix with some of the elements of the post-Covid world, which is still not fully formed.

ETA: But what's most important, what I think is the biggest mind-altering aspect of Covid, is the recognition that the Protestant Work Ethic is a scam. It's a lie. And it's always been a lie. A lie as pernicious as the Catholic Church's lie that by staying poor but giving them money and dutifully pumping out huge families of poor Catholics who'll do the same, one gets into Heaven. Life is not to work. The hardest hustler is not worth of some special respect. Success isn't sacrificing more hours than anyone else to get $$$$$ but finding the balance at which you sacrifice just enough hours to retain a life while acquiring $, $$, $$$, or $$$$ you need to live in a manner you deem comfortable. It's agreeing to come in where you want to come in across the finish line of the rat race. In this regard, the Millennials are wiser than us. Maybe that's why Boomers hate them so much.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Very sorry to hear this. Wishing you strength and good humor.

We are all very lucky and, even when wrestling with the dude with the sickle, it's good to remember how lucky we are. And to take advantage of our luck by getting medical care available to far too few.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Dissent.

When I had my first bout with cancer, I was treated with a drug cocktail that included two drugs a client and close friend had been involved in developing, one of which I'd helped him with. His work helped save my life. It gave me new perspective on the good I could do even as a lawyer.

On the second bout, one of my side effects (mouth and throat sores - a colleague with similar problems recently died of them, literally chocked to death when their throat closed) was greatly helped by a product developed by another friend, who we've since helped connect with a contingent fee lawyer for help with a very unexciting but important collection matter (their distributor screwed them - it threatened their ability to continue). I realized my health depended in part on the quality of work of an otherwise lowly collections litigator.

Work can be a very fulfilling part of life if we let it, and keep the money issues from getting in the way.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Hope everything is okay man.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No, it was the last guy who repeated BS he heard on tv that people inexplicably took seriously.

This one just gets in trouble with his mouth.

You really need to be more selective in your news sources and/or more skeptical of silly right wing talking points.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Folks do realize that if gig workers are being caught up in an audit, what's likely at stake is whether they should have more of their FICA payments covered and get some other tax benefits from being characterized as an employee rather than a contractor?

The target in gig worker audits isn't the gig workers.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I agree. Work can be fulfilling.

https://c.tenor.com/c06MF_LjQIAAAAAd...e-my-money.gif

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

In my entire career the clients who should have won mostly don’t and the ones who maybe shouldn’t mostly do. But yes the $$$$$!

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Wait, you lose cases?