Chevy S-10. I think a 1999? Around that anyway.

Still miss that little truck. The clutch had two positions - on and off. It was a pain to drive but once I learned on it I could drive anything.

I still drive stick today.

I was wondering how far I’d have to scroll to find a The Good Place reference. Thank you for your contribution.

This is probably the “right” answer if you are morally bothered by your job but not able to just quit. That and continuing to look for something else in the meantime.

Congratulations! I hope your new job is rewarding and long lasting!

This is so real. I generally find my job morally commendable (I work in emergency management) but even working around disasters there’s improvements to be made (ugh, the recovery process! Definitely entrenched in a very biased, racist, system!) There is no morally perfect job you can land that avoids those deeper systemic issues.

As a government worker, I will say there’s a lot more than just teaching that’s morally filling work. A ton of government jobs are directly tied to keeping the public safe. Food inspectors, doctors, researchers, firefighters, even grant writers. It’s not all cops and politicians.

After college I worked a project management job for a while before going to grad school. I didn’t find it morally questionable, but I definitely found myself feeling like I was just working to make some rich guy richer. It didn’t help that the rich guy(s) (the owner and his son in law who was out CEO) worked in the same building. So I went back to school. Got my master’s. Ended up doing some contract work for the same company afterwards. Never felt more stuck in my life. Hated it. Did more grad school and when the contract work dried up I got asked to come work for another company but I still hated the bs corporate vibe, so instead I went from billing $80/hr to making $15/hr as a 911 dispatcher. Graduated and stayed in that field. I’m an emergency management professional now and while it’s not a lucrative field (thankfully I don’t want kids) I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work and I feel like my job matters.

Long story short, you choose what to prioritize in life. For some people making sure you/your family is well cared for will matter more than what you’re doing or who you’re doing it for. For others, you’ll take a pay cut to feel like the work itself matters or that you’re making a positive impact. Everyone has to balance what’s important to them.

OP, If morally aligning with your job matters to you, you’ll ultimately land somewhere you can stomach at least, because you won’t stop trying until you get there. Don’t blame yourself for having to do other work along the way to keep yourself fed and able to enjoy the ride there.

For some people it’s take that job or starve. It’s nice that you live somewhere that gives you options but for a lot of people the only places hiring are morally questionable.

Sort of. I’m a gov worker (non fed) and mine is a joke. 1% of salary per year of service. Not very significant. The old scheme was 2.5, I think, and before that it was 30 years to full salary. I still work with people on that old one, and they’re about at the full 30. In a generation it’s gone from a nice retirement to being more like a supplement. We do pay into SS now though so I guess that’s meant to replace it.

Hahaha I grew up in a very conservative house in the South. Most of what I said before college was embarrassing.

I’m better now.

I’m a childfree woman. I am being sterilized in less than 2 weeks. I have a very very long list of reasons I don’t want kids. I won’t bore anyone by typing them out.

What I find most interesting in this thread is how people have so much of an option on other people’s choices still. It’s 2025, can we just let each other live?

No, it is not immoral to have kids. The world has always been messed up and it will continue to be until we all die out. Maybe that will happen in the next generation, maybe it won’t happen for another 50 generations. We cannot know either way.

No, it is not immoral to not have kids. You do not have a responsibility to continue your bloodline or some nonsense. You can still be invested in the future even if you don’t personally have kids.

I wish everyone had put their gender in their replies though. As a general rule, I often see more childfree women than men. I think this is because women are often put in that caregiver role earlier than men and they see how hard it is. Also women have to do the pregnancy/birth part and that seems awful. Men think of the time they’ll have to teach and play with their kids, women imagine having to cook a nutritious meal every night or get called negligent. Of course that’s not always the dynamic but you have to acknowledge it swings that way.

My dad was in the Navy (submariner) in the 80s and he loves that movie. He told me they didn’t do the thing with the string like they do in the movie … Instead they strung it up when they were at depth and took bets on when it would break on the way back up.

You couldn’t pay me enough to be that far underwater.

I find this is also a great way to decide if you even need it. I have a tab on my phone for stuff to buy. It collects so much crap I eventually deleted because the desire was fleeting.

I keep a paper list of large ticket items that I actually need so I can save up for them over time. I spend a lot of that time while saving shopping for the best option. I saved a lot while furnishing my house by buying secondhand because I had weeks and weeks to shop around.

Sometimes adding things to my online cart is enough of a thrill that I don’t even think about the fact I didn’t check out until the website sends me a coupon lol. Then I deleted it anyway because if I didn’t go through with it then I don’t really need it!

This is so so true. I cancelled prime ages ago so I don’t get fast shipping at all, and I only get free shipping if I spend over $35. Even in the cases where I decide it’s worth buying the thing on Amazon, I’ve got to wait to need more than $35 worth of stuff. Surprise surprise most of it just gets deleted out of the cart anyway.

That being said, I have only been able to find filters for my vacuum on Amazon (some no name brand I bought off there a few years ago) so they’ll still get some money out of me, but most stuff I can just ignore now. Next vacuum will be a big brand name so I can avoid that, but it will be a while before there’s a next vacuum, hopefully. Because in my mind it’s more ethical to keep using the old one as long as it works even if some more $ goes to Amazon vs buying a whole new item I don’t actually need yet.

The missing reason is that you should just buy less anyway and if you avoid Amazon it is slightly harder to just buy stuff.

That being said, if you need it cheap, quick, and you cannot source it locally, just buy it on Amazon. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You are not guilty of a moral crime by using them when the need exists.

They go so far over budget because of lawsuits, usually. Vogtle was announced in like 2011 and didn’t even get to break ground until 2017, then got caught up in even more lawsuits, if I recall correctly. And while conventional nuclear plants will probably always have huge upfront costs that take 30 years to offset, SMRs are darn close to a full reality and those will be a lot cheaper, and will get cheaper over time, like solar panels did.

There’s a plant in Phoenix Arizona that uses city wastewater to cool the reactors, so they can hold up to hot dry climates just fine if designed to do so. (Fun side fact, the plant has to clean the rad waste out of the water before they use it - the rad waste from medical procedures that get into wastewater would be enough to exceed their allowance of acceptable release).

I’ll give you the waste issue, but it’s 100% a matter of politics. You’re going to have to convince a state to take it on and none of them will. But on-site cask storage isn’t the worst option. It’s worked for a long time. There’s also a lot of research going into other stuff we might be able to do with it. (In fact, waste isn’t an issue in France because they already recycle it; the US doesn’t because some of the recycled materials could be used to build bombs).

By footprint (in terms of land and waste) nuclear is the best option still. It’s still the most stable output (save perhaps geothermal, but you can’t do that everywhere) One day we might have batteries good enough to make that less of an issue but right now it’s probably not a good idea to abandon nuclear.

(to be) polygoned- meaning to have your phone go off with an amber alert or an emergency alert. (The act of setting off the phones is called polygonning). Very niche to what I do, but I use it all the time.

Oh yeah, that’s where it started. My dad loved it and he’d put it on when I was younger and I’d start sawing logs.

This is true: I have seen the first half hour of every Dune… But I ALWAYS pass out around that point.