It’s about time the government did something about indoor air quality. It’s a huge factor in the spread of COVID and respiratory illnesses and has a number of relatively straightforward fixes.

Just wanted to make sure it was abundantly clear that that wasn’t my opinion!

Sadly, you’re right. They don’t want demographics to vote that would threaten their ability to hold onto power.

Heaven forbid women vote! /s

“These findings are now final…,” Penn said in a statement, noting the five-member hearing board’s determination that Wax “violated the university’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”

Wax’s conduct, according to Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

So years of breaking the rules and already having received a caution from the dean and effectively all she gets a slap on the wrist - a year off at half pay. She should have been fired.

This is definitely not satire.

Right… cue follow-up posts when the city fines them for operating a business without a licence.

The best case is when I am (1) well-rested, (2) not hungry or thirsty and (3) not already agitated/close to being overwhelmed going into it. Socialising definitely drains me, though, and I have gotten better at recognising when I need a break before it becomes critical. That way I can politely excuse myself (if it’s a social function, usually I have a plan in advance to go outside or away from people for a bit to recover).

Unfortunately it’s just reality that some people are energised by that type of conversation or social interaction, whilst for others it is exhausting. Energy management is the key thing for those of us who find it draining. Interoception is sometimes impeded for individuals on the spectrum, so if it’s hard to identify or keep track of how are you going (and hence whether it is time to politely exit the conversation), there are exercises one can find online to help improve interoception.

It takes practice, but a good approach is not to go beyond a few sentences on a topic at a time. Give them a chance to change the direction of the conversation (which will happen if they are not interested) or ask follow-up questions (typically indicates that they are interested, although sometimes it may just be that they are being polite, in which case you’ll usually only get one or two before the other person moves on to something else). As one of the other comments says, it’s a dialogue, not a monologue - most of the time the other person isn’t engaging to get information from you but to connect with you (and yeah, that can be a really nebulous concept at times!). It’s really easy to infodump but most people don’t have the context or depth of knowledge to follow a deep dive on a subject.

Autism is not a deal-breaker. My spouse has ADHD and I have ASD. Granted, each of our neurotypes causes the other some frustration, but both are also factors in why we were attracted to each other in the first place.

Neurodivergent individuals often select for each other in partners and there are a lot of similar patterns in my extended family (to use your phrasing, they’re all a bit “off”!). None of the relationship failures have been as a result of neurotype and most are still married, with the failures due to the same problems that NT couples deal with - poor communication, emotional immaturity, refusal to learn and grow, etc.

The key thing is to be yourself. If she likes you, you want her to like you for you, not the facade that so many of us have to wear to survive in the NT world.

And if she ghosts you, that’s not a failure on your part. It says more about her than you - you took the risk and put yourself out there. If she doesn’t show, perhaps she is insecure and afraid of telling you she’s changed her mind, or perhaps something happened to prevent her from being there (since you mention films, this is a common trope too). Just be kind to yourself.

This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.

Hell no. Do not give machines the ability to lie. We already have enough trouble with people using technology to deceive without it choosing to be deceptive on its own.

We work in protoduction.

Oh, that’s painful.

100% cotton.

I find wool to be incredibly itchy and hate the coarse texture of jeans.

I’m not even American and I’m keen to see what the debate will be like. I seriously doubt Trump has enough self-control to stop himself lashing out at Harris, let alone the presence of mind to listen to his advisers!

Fair call. Both major parties need to lift their game!

Question time has always been a spectacle demonstrating just how badly our elected officials can behave and I’m glad someone is calling it out. Of course, it should come as no surprise as to which party is the worst:

Figures provided by the Speaker’s office show there have been 198 ejections during the 47th parliament as of Tuesday 20 August. Of those, a Guardian Australia analysis shows 161 have been Coalition members, 36 Labor and one from the Greens.

ABC News segment on the theme remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoEHf21KgFk

Well, they didn’t want to be part of society, so they shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t get to participate…

If you’re happy with OpenDNS logging your traffic, you could set the router to use them as the DNS server (assuming your network is DHCP and your father-in-law’s devices just use whatever DNS server your router says). As long as one of your devices keeps OpenDNS updated with your IP (the one provided by your ISP), then you can look through the traffic to see what is being accessed (and even enabling category content blocking if you wish). Of course, if your father-in-law is IT savvy, he’ll just manually set the DNS server on his devices.