Annual raise time: "Your performance was great, but we gave you a low review because if we rated you appropriately we'd have to give you a raise, and investors want us to cut costs."

Ok that may be accurate and necessary feedback but let me go a bit deeper.

I think we all know women place a lot of importance on when it's time to meet her friends. I'll say this is where I typically run into problems, especially with white girls (I date all races, but white girls are obviously the majority of people and I tend to have the most in common with them). But why? If things were going great with her when we're by ourselves, why is there suddenly a new problem that makes no sense popping up as soon as I meet her friends, like every single time?

Even deeper, and you can tell this has been driving me crazy, people tend to have somewhat different personalities around their friends. The degree to which this happens varies a lot by person. For example, my personality doesn't really change much around friends, but around family I can be quite different - much more reserved. But I've noticed girls in particular do the opposite with friends - they seem to feel the need to play up how great their life is. This has been talked about in the media as "instagram vs reality". I'm not an instagram-worthy guy. I mean I'm fit, I can take good selfies and pull off the kinda attractive nerd look, but that doesn't mean she thinks she looks good with my arm around her.

I'm going to guess you'll say something happened with the friends, but that's never been the case - I get along with her friends just fine and even in one case after the relationship failed I've been semi-brought into the friend group. But I also feel like typically everyone else's boyfriends at parties just come off as fitting in better than my dorky darkish-skinned ass. It could also be low sample size/anecdotal, which I'll concede which is why I was asking if other people had similar experiences.

But to me, it also feels like it's kinda obvious that this is a thing, even if I don't see others talking about it in these same terms. It's like everyone acknowledges all the ingredients (putting up appearances, racial status hierarchies, fears of social alienation), just not how they mix together.

That doesn't mean verified anymore, it means she paid Elon for special treatment.

I think about 90% of these posts that are images of random people's social media posts are just people not getting jokes

"We're near the public school."
"Which one???"

The problem is in parks everyone is too spread out to talk to strangers. There needs to be a park with a bar to bring everyone together.

Everyone thinks Newton is smart until they read his cure for the plague

If you have a retirement account, it's probably in some sort of stocks. Be aware of what those are. Consider including some non-American index funds that are not particularly tech heavy. S&P index funds are significantly exposed to AI-related tech companies, and their usual safety is currently questionable.

I give through my employer which matches donations. You should look into whether that's available since it'll double the amount.

Decentralized truth is essential to human freedom. It's not enough to just run wikipedia as a bare bones site, they need to be able to adapt to the times and maybe even fund new projects with the same goals. For people who actually care about the future, it's hard to think of a better use of the money.

FLAKENSTEINS

I'm still guessing.

You can kinda guess the world is real because of the CAP theorem. Hear me out.

1. The CAP theorem says a computing system cannot perfectly have all 3 of: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance (division of some parts of a distributed system from another). We'll assume this is true and somewhat dubiously assume this applies to any simulated universe
2. Availability is a necessity. A simulated universe that suddenly starts lagging or buffering would mean the jig would be up pretty quickly. You'd probably want a distributed system that can spin up new computing instances instantly, but that brings up issues with partitioning....
3. But lack of partition tolerance would make it pretty obvious that the universe is fake, because some parts of it would be inaccessible. So can't sacrifice that.
4. Therefore, the only thing left is consistency. A simulated universe would need some kind of inconsistency. In a web site, this might mean content is available to users in some areas but not others. In a simulated universe, we'd expect people in some areas to have a different experience of objective reality than others. But there's no evidence of this ever happening, unless you wanna go down some Mandela effect rabbit hole.
5. That leaves us with the conclusion that the universe is not a computing system at all, but rather a thing in itself. It doesn't need to stay consistent because it is consistent fundamentally.
6. Also, let's just ignore relativistic speed limits and quantum mechanics entirely.

So I get to be an unemployed Chinese woman with high financial needs. I don't see this ending well.