I would def. see a professional and talk to them about the situation - feeling miserable all of the time isn't going to make anything better.

Just as somebody who is quite a lot older and survived college, a *lot* of people go through what you're going through - perhaps it's something you'll have to struggle with permanently, and perhaps it's only temporary, a lot of people who go to university end up feeling completely overwhelmed and thus shut down unable to make decisions or act in any meaningful way. It's a big and scary change - especially looking into the post-academic future. That alone is enough to terrify plenty of people and I don't fault them for it.

The only advice I can offer beyond the top suggestion of checking out your counseling options, is just try to avoid making any hasty decisions for the next few months. I saw a lot of people in situations similar to yours do all sorts of strange things to try to escape their situation, from joining the army randomly, moving to the mountains in India, to just sitting in their dorm and refusing to go to class for an entire semester and slaughtering their GPA and academic record while paying for the privilege to do so. It might get you out of an uncomfortable situation, but it won't fix the underlying problem.

I *might* be willing to play again but it would have to be with the right bunch.

Down to play med.

Scheduling concerns: There will never come a time when I'm available to play before 9:30 Eastern. I also may periodically be unable to show up on given week nights, but will know 2-3 weeks in advance. I'd prefer to be a little lighter on the scrim schedule - but I wouldn't protest with more.

I cast a bunch, and don't expect that to not continue, so if things are going well I may try to work out a scenario where I can dip to do that.

Can pay whatever fees.

If you try to add me and can't let me know here and I'll make space.

Audio input jacks get loose over time OR the contact is dirty (which can happen certainly).

I'd give it a good blast of air back there and see if that doesn't help it - since you're getting distortion due to loss of contact.

I don't know if you're using on-board sound or a sound-card, but there *might* be a way to get into the jack itself and tighten it up manually - which is usually all that happens to bad audio-jacks, they've just gone loosey-goosey. Sometimes however the pins that secure it, or some bit of metal on the inside will break. If you want to get really fancy you can try soldering a new jack into place using any old 3.5mm audio jack you have and plugging it in. But that might be fairly complex if you've got metal casings to get through or its hard to work around the area (GPU in the way etc). One of the very most annoying things is that LOTS of new boards (particularly laptops) use an incredibly high number of pins to attach components like that - I assume specifically to dissuade the typical consumer from attempting to repair it themselves because each pin has to be melted and removed and then replaced.

If you try blowing the thing out and that doesn't fix it, and you're afraid to dig around inside the audio jack - you can get sound cards that fit in most profile desktop cases for like 30$ and that'll just be your new headphone jack lol. You will also possibly get better sound quality.

You could also buy a stereo to USB adapter for like 5$ and just plug your headset into USB. My only warning here is that you will need to be EXCEEDINGLY gentle with such a device as every single one I've used as crapped out in pretty short order (I am clumsy).

I spent the whole post-game, after it became clear we pry weren't getting to see the last match, resisting the temptation to scream "HOW ARE WE EVER GOING TO COMPETE WITH OVERWATCH WHEN THIS SHIT KEEPS HAPPENING GUYS!?" but I managed to hold it in until 5 seconds after we went to music, much to the dismay of everyone in the casting mumble it seems.

Also it was cornpop's birthday so he got a real nice present.

Don't be too put out by this - if you applied for an upper level position and you don't have any experience with that kind of thing - then it was kind of a long shot anyways. If you can get your foot in the door and show them what you can do and make some friends you'll end up where you wanted to be anyways in short order.

I remember when I was 18 I needed a new job because the place I had been working (the landfill) had a rule that every full-time employee required a CDL (Commercial Driver's License). I had 0 interest in getting a CDL or going through and paying for the courses to acquire one. This also applied to any adult doing the kind of work I was - in short my position was specifically designed for high school students to occupy because they knew they didn't have to pay you much and you wouldn't care about ever being promoted (CDL required). So, I had to go job hunting.

I walked into Papa John's and the owner's wife was working, and she was apparently really impressed by me and offered me a management position right then and there. So, I came in to do the day 0 interview/training, thinking I was a God. It was her husband, and he was deeply concerned that I had no pizza experience at all, nor had I ever been a manager before. So, I didn't get the job, and they offered me a delivery position instead. I refused it because I frankly have 0 sense of direction and GPS wasn't a thing yet, so it was a nonstarter.

I ended up getting a job at a factory. They initially said I would be doing very light work (painting stuff), but when somebody's son begged to not work the floor, I got switched to his spot on the 3rd shift production line instead, and I honestly really loved that job and stayed there for 6 1/2 years, all through college and 2 1/2 years after. I'd still be there if it hadn't maimed me lol.

My current job (Director of Educational outreach, Archivist, and Assistant to the Collection) came about purely because I was trying to get back into working after 7 years recovering from injuries received at the factory (some minor surgery was required a few times, and a rather intense physical therapy routine was developed that eventually got me back up and operating - but it took forever) so I went off for graduate school, and volunteered at my local museum a few hours a week to see if I could make it. It just so happened, that 3 people all ended up not working there/for the county in short order around Christmas time. One older guy retired, 1 lady was fired, and another quit as a result of the retirement and firing of her friends. So, since I was doing a more or less not terrible job volunteering and had demonstrated my aptitude they offered me all 3 positions in one with appropriate pay and benefits for having 3 jobs. So, it all worked out great *and* so far my body is holding up lol. I even have 3 offices - but I feel kind of like I'm slowly moving into the museum - they have 1 gig internet though so... That's not all bad lol.

The moral of the story is - don't get discouraged - something good will come around, especially if you're persistent, as soon as you show a few people what you can do - things should work out :D

Lots of good suggestions here - as somebody who now has to *give* the interview - I look for the person to ask *me* questions after I'm done talking to them. It demonstrates to me that they've put some thought into life with said job and care. Here are a few things you could ask about if the interviewer doesn't tell you or if the application didn't say outright:

- How fluid is your work - will you be doing similar tasks everyday or will you be asked to do lots of different things?
- How do sick days work/are handled - do you need a doctor's note, and how soon do you need to call in?
- Is it possible to swap time with other employees if scheduling concerns arise?
- How consistent will your scheduling be?
- How often are people in your position promoted up the chain?
- How easy is it to transfer your work to another geographic location (this one is really good if it's known that you're a student - because at some point you may move away due to graduation/going to a new school and it looks nice that you want to stay with them)?
- When do you start getting your employee discount, do you get one, and how much is it?

Don't ask all of these obviously, pick 1-2 that are most important to you. Generally, if I say "now do you have any questions?" and they say nothing, my first thought is that they really haven't put a lot of thought into the position.

Since it's a store, it may also be a good idea to ask them what the most popular items are - especially if you're working in sales - make it seem like you intend to learn all there is to know about said items.

The thing that clearly demonstrates that Japanese internment was purely racism and served no actual purpose other than to destroy the lives of a racial minority - is that the territorial governor of Hawaii (Hawaii then not being a state) REFUSED to participate in internment. Note also that a huge proportion of the population of Hawaii at that time was made up of Japanese immigrants. They did ship some Japanese persons to California to be interned, but it was because they were found to be in contact with the Japanese government (IE had actually done something threatening). But the territory/state with the highest population of Japanese persons, which had *actually* been attacked by the Japanese, did not intern the vast majority of its Japanese citizens, and they presented no threat/did nothing unusual.

Also spacecadet you have to look at the context of WW2.

The Japanese had ABSOLUTELY no way to land troops in California - their merchant marine could never have supported such a tremendous undertaking, not to mention that the entirety of the US Navy could quickly make their way to the Pacific if need be through the Panama (Sal's) canal. Not to mention that majority of the Japanese army was engaged elsewhere - they were still fighting a very much active, very costly war, in China, they were still garrisoning Manchukuo's massive border with the USSR, and they also invaded Singapore and the Philippines shortly after Pearl Harbor (almost at the same time really), as well as garrisoning Vietnam (which was actively resisting them as the Vietnamese do). There simply aren't enough Japanese people in the world to then also execute an invasion on the continental US, nor did they have enough long-range merchant ships to support such an imaginary invasion - and the US was very much aware of this.

In fact their original "pie in the sky" plan was to knock out the Chinese (get a peace deal with them of some kind) and then invade the USSR along with Hitler - but the Sino-Japanese war was absorbing too much of their army so that was deemed impossible - so they went for picking up lightly defended islands instead and relying on the navy and air forces to win enough big victories to convince the US and UK to simply leave them alone, which they also failed to do.

So you're saying the US has never imprisoned a political dissident? It's rare but it does happen - capitalist nations throughout the world still do and have regularly done so. As an American, this is a rather unique and strange thing we do here to not imprison political dissidents on the regular. We have a very strong tradition of not doing so - and likely never would unless society just completely collapsed and something very ugly came out of it. Whereas in say, Russia, where political arrests were the norm, and still are, they really don't think of it as a big deal. It has a lot more to do with the political traditions in a society - and what is acceptable to them - and a lot less to do with ideology outside of that fact.

The only reason we're not eating copious amounts of rat feces is because our society has already *gone* through that - read up on the Spanish American war sometime, or Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" - while it's melodramatic, it does give you a pretty good idea of what Americans were eating at one time. China is still a developing economy, and *most* developing economies will encounter this problem. Whereas, for example, in Russia, the health standards for food are actually far higher than they are in the US - this is also the case throughout Europe. It's got a lot less to do with Communism and a lot more to do with the economic development of the country itself and how limited public resources are allocated.

I'm pointing out, that capitalism utilizes corporal state power to reproduce itself - this is the norm. Just as in feudal societies the rights and privileges of every "estate" were limited so as to ensure the nobility maintained their hold on economic power, so too is our society constructed to ensure that capitalists are not bothered - and they use force to do so. So, it's not something abnormal if a socialist state uses force to protect its interests in the same vein - it just looks different.

In the future, you won't need to do a system restore.

Here is what you do.

1. Boot in safe mode.
2. Run the free edition of malware bytes. Let it do its thing and follow its instructions
3. Run super anti-spyware and follow its directions.

That should knock out just about anything. If you have an anti-virus program then you can use that at some point as well. Then you don't have to worry about when your restore points are made.

Also, if you're going to pirate things, make sure you're pirating them from a reputable source, and that you scan ALL of the files before clicking on any .exe file, and make sure you carefully read each part of the installation, oftentimes most malware hides within the opening menus and there's a box you need to untick - that's good advice in general since MANY even reputable programs, attempt to hook you into installing unwanted software by hoping you'll just click through the installation menus.

It's hardly a "glaring" problem of a communist economic system - *all* economic systems erect a state edifice to ensure the continuity of that particular system. Try to violate a contract sometime, or sell stuff out of your trunk in a wal-mart parking lot, or produce something that has a patent on it - just to name a few. However, these sorts of laws are treated as natural courses of affairs and so their authoritarian character is ignored.

The USA's incarceration rate is presently higher than the USSR at the height of the GULAG system - so it's nothing peculiar to Communism. Nations which utilize prison labor extensively will continue to do so no matter what sort of government they're using - hence why Russia still has prison labor complexes. .

Also in the US we utilize prison labor heavily and have since time immemorial - as do many other "capitalist" nations :/ At my job I have the power to call in trustees from the jail to provide menial labor at any time (they will be paid 50 cents an hour). I refuse to do this and as such have gotten some pretty good workouts in lol.

"Competing equally" with capitalist nations is a tall order - since most Communist nations start out *way* behind the curve. Despite their economy (GDP) growing over 1,4000% in the first 20 years of the the Soviet Union, their GDP was still only 1/2 that of the USA's for example. Not to mention the state of things in Russia now (they're 12th - Mexico is about to catch them) lol. Russia, and the USSR's deep dark secret was that they were essentially a petro-state, their economic wellbeing was, and still is, entirely dependent upon oil prices.

Russia was semi-fuedal, China was a complete disaster - most of their industrial regions were destroyed by the Japanese in WW2, and then what was left in the following civil war, Vietnam endured over 20 years of war, and North Korea had more bombs dropped on it than all the ordinance dropped in WW2 by all belligerents combined - no building over 2 stories was left standing, Cuba was a US export and tourism based economy, and the embargo completely cut them off from that, they've spent the last 50 years trying to scrape enough money together to do anything at all - and made some pretty good progress in some areas lol. So they've all had a pretty big hill to climb.

RIP

Do you maybe have a transcript instead of a 39 meg forever long audio recording. At least then it would be fun to peruse - I enjoy people who generally don't have a very good understanding of Marx critiquing him lol.

I've never found a Party that I really fit into, so some people would really disagree with my saying this lol, but yes, I do consider myself a Communist.

@jduff No, marx was 100% a Communist I mean it doesn't get more obvious than this:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto I mean he named the book the Communist Manifesto.

It doesn't get much more Communist than that.

Also the "Stalin Kill kertrillions of people" thing is completely not factual. The only historians that even acknowledge those claims base their evidence on CIA "documents" that nobody has really ever seen that were obtained through second hand channels that were anti-Soviet to begin with.

The Soviet Union itself (Khrushchev), and later Russia itself (Yeltsin) - which doesn't/didn't have *that* much skin in the game to protect somebody like Stalin, never put the number over 2 million. We'll likely never know the exact number - but the absolutely stupendous claims of Robert Conquest and Co. are just simply impossible unless every living Soviet woman later popped out 8+ kids. That's not to say I, in anyway, agree with that process - but the USSR, and its history, is *extremely* complicated. It's likely that similar things (perhaps on a greater or lesser scale) would've occurred regardless of the government or who was in charge of it. You don't have a society where mass killings are possible just pop out of thin air or because of the will of a singular person.

I should also note it would've been far worse with Trotsky - since he essentially envisioned turning the USSR into a giant armed camp subject to military discipline.