Author: Olivia

It wasn't a fancy restaurant, it was the kind of restaurant that doesn't have table service, you order at the counter and you wait for your food at your table (they'll yell out your order and you go pick it up). There's no station for you to put your dirty dishes/ bowls or plates so the workers still need to do some clean up. I went there today to have lunch with my daughter, there was just one dude there working. It took him about 15 min before he could take my order, he kept apologizing, but he looked really busy, I told him I'm not in a hurry and he can take his time. In the mean time, while he's cooking, he was also answering phone calls, taking orders on the phone, accepting doordash or Uber Eats, and greeting incoming customers. At some point there were too many people…

As you probably know, France is currently living an historic event. If you’re out of the loop, on Monday, after the use of article 49.3 of the French constitution, allowing the government to put its responsibility on the table in exchange for passing a law without a vote in the Assemblée Nationale, a “motion de censure” was voted. This basically is a question for the elected : “The government engaged its responsibility and forced the adoption of the law : do you want fire it for this ?”. We were only 9 votes away from the Yes, which is actually pretty incredible given that on more than a hundred of use of the 49.3, only ONE “motion de censure” was adopted, and the circumstances in that case were really particular. The rejection of the “motion de censure” caused an uproar all over the country, and all unions called for a…

I had a thought last night, it was innocuous at first but the more I chewed on it the more it seemed to weigh on me. There's a decisive shift In attitude, predominantly amongst young people, myself included, regarding the sanctity of banks and financial institutions. More specifically a growing distrust of them, having lived through recessions with contentious bailouts, the growing awareness of salacious greed within global finance/government, and other factors withholding prosperity and opportunity from folks, it seems more and more people become inclined to damage the system wherever they can. The most recent example of this I've seen making the rounds is the naritive of the ignorant youth, unversed in the lessons of The Great Depression, lashing out against banks by withdrawing their accounts and inadvertently walking us into a Bank Run. “Young folks haven't learned from history” it's said, and to those people who keep echoing…

I've been working for this company for 2.5 years now. My official title is “research associate”, it used to be “data collector”. To best describe what I do, is I go to various stores for a client (usually that stores competitor, but not always) and collect prices of specific items. Each “job” is a little different and takes different times and what have you. We get paid piece rate. Sometimes we get a flat rate of $10-12/job, sometimes it's 1¢ per scan. It varies. We get “paid” for gas and driving; $12/hr after the first 30 min in a trip and (at last check) 63¢/mi after the first 30 mi in a trip. But there are some jobs that they eliminated the hourly driving pay for in the last year. They also eliminated a lot of work on us in general last year, which caused my pays to drop dramatically…

I've kinda lost hope that anything will change for the better if a literal pandemic wasn't able tn radicalize people. Everything just went back to normal but even worse.

So I think I need to lay out some background here: My fiancé, (30f) and I (34m), live in the US in a relatively low COL area. We both have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety but up until recently, we both have been able to keep jobs and function reasonably well for most of our lives. Both of us have college degrees and decent earning potential. We live together and split rent and utilities. Life has been really hard on us the past three years or so with the pandemic and family and work issues. A couple years ago we were both so burned out by our jobs and life that we both essentially gave up our full-time workloads and wages in favor of more flexible part-time work options for mental health reasons. She worked in healthcare and was being overworked like crazy during the pandemic, so she switched…