Lots of advice here but I haven’t seen anyone mention coding boot camps. There are free ones like FreeCodeCamp or lots of paid options. You can do these to learn or validate what you have been taught.

My company hires associate-level software engineers directly out of college programs and boot camps. They don’t expect people from these to know everything; you may not have ever even used the language that you will be expected to code in! But by completing a program you’re showing you understand the logic of programming and that is applicable knowledge.

Look for entry-level jobs and you’ll be fine. Even better, look for companies that intentionally hire from programs like yours. They’re more likely to have internal programs to help teach new-to-career folks.

I recently finished reading The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan. It’s from 2019 and so depressing with how much has happened since then that’s not accounted for, but it was interesting insight into how people like that can accumulate a following. It might help answer your question.

My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.

This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.

Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.

What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.

I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.

As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:

• rheumatism means inflammation
• -oid means like a thing
• arth- comes from joints
• -itis means inflammation

So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”

My older sister had a boyfriend move in with her shortly after she moved out of my parents’ house. From the first time I met him I had bad vibes.

Fast forward maybe a year or so they were renting a house and adopted a dog together. His “job” was motorcycle racing, so my sister basically just covered all costs. When they broke up, they aligned on who would get what with parents as mediators. He kept the dog, she kept the TV, etc.

He moved out while she was at work and took the TV, but he forgot all his motorcycle gear in one of the closets. So he had to come back with his tail between his legs to get that after stealing from her. She got the dog back at that point.

General scumbag. My intuition had no reason but was right!