Mezzie

It depends on the municipality.

Usually, local laws are enacted by a city council with members elected to represent different areas of a municipality (and potentially some at-large seats). Legislation can come from a number of places: lobbying efforts (for example, there's a current effort for municipalities to ban data center development), citizen groups, specially formed committees (my city just had one to create and propose city charter revisions), or yes, occasionally the council members themselves. Typically, there are open council meetings where citizens can discuss their opinions.

In addition, some rules/regulations/taxes are directly put to a vote of the city/town population, and some regulations can be put in place by administrative departments in a locality. (Similar to things like EPA regulations on the federal level).

The specific implementations vary in accordance to municipal charters and how specific states handle the incorporation of local governments.

I have no idea how it works for non USA countries.

I at one point took the FS exam and planned to go into the FS (and therefore know the process, how career progression works, and know people who did end up joining). I know how the US system works, but not anyone else's.

Ambassadors to developed nations are typically political appointees, so yeah, they tend to suck. (Versus ambassadors to other nations, which tend to have worked their way up in the Foreign Service).

I do think context is important and I appreciate this response acknowledging it.

Other context: I live in Michigan, and there are actually Muslim majority towns and cities here - I don't live in one, but I do travel to/through those areas and where I live does have a Muslim population and there's nothing unusual to me about seeing a hijabi/visibly Muslim people out and about, so I'm coming from the point of view of those populations establishing places where they are the majority. And they've also used the power they've accrued on the local level to display hostility towards queer people. It's not a theoretical I'm making up in my head to enrage myself.

Specifically, I spent time in Jordan, which is a country that has a wide variety of people and people practicing Islam in different ways, so I'm definitely not under the illusion that all Muslims are the same or are extremists.

I definitely agree that we should question how and why something or someone makes us uncomfortable, and I agree that the first step should be interrogating our feelings and determining if they have a basis or if they're just knee-jerk displeasure towards change or something different. I have actually sat with these feelings for a while specifically because they're so taboo in left leaning spaces, and all I have heard is similar to what you say: That I'm bigoted, don't understand, etc. That's one reason I actually did go out of my way to learn and understand more: I wanted to interpret that criticism in good faith, and I agreed that I should know more before judging.

I have major theological and moral objections to central parts of all 3 of the Abrahamic faiths, even outside of the 'do you believe in God?' question.

Another piece of context is that I'm a 38 year old lesbian woman and I grew up in an environment where conservative religious movements were actively and openly hostile to me. I remember reading articles when I was 6 years old about how damaged and sinful I was, I remember the reactions to Matthew Shepard, etc. If anything, I've grown more comfortable with religious expression over time: when I was younger, I viewed any open display of religious faith as signaling that person was dangerous to me. I've also spent most of my life hating that I'm a lesbian and wanting, desperately, to be at least bisexual so I could be normal. I still struggle with this.

The question of larger society is one reason why I feel uneasy about the situation: I think the most likely path towards assimilation/acceptance for the Muslim community is doubling down on the conservatism and becoming allies with the Christian right. The fact that the Muslim community is full of people who think that my life should involve me being married to a man and unable to say no to sex/being raped repeatedly fills me with horror and makes it very hard to want more of them in my area. That's why I'm pro-assimilation: it's self-preservation.

If Muslims want to live in America and wear hijab, pray five times a day, observe Ramadan, etc. I don't care, but I draw the line at ideologies that perpetuate sexism and homophobia. (And again, I don't want fundie Christian immigrants or fundie Jewish immigrants either, and a white conservative Muslim family isn't any more acceptable to me.)

To me, when I see families/groups that are openly displaying conservative Muslim values, they are openly saying they don't want me in their society and if they had a choice, they'd get rid of me. Why wouldn't that make me uncomfortable? If you went out and about and saw people wearing 'castrate all men' shirts or a symbol that represented 'all men can be made to like cock if you ram it up their ass while they scream until you break them down', you would be comfortable with that? With those people existing in your city?

If you want me to live a life where I'm sexually assaulted regularly to please your God, I'm entitled to view that as a threat. If you openly express affiliation with that, I'm entitled to consider you hostile to me and not want to 'get to know you'.

I gave the example I gave specifically: I'm well aware of the history of the head scarf, and the difference between a hijab and a niqab (as well as between the different forms of dress - I know the difference between an abaya, a chador, etc.) I also specified it is specifically when I run across families/groups where the women and men are dressed very differently: I don't feel that way when I encounter groups where men are in thobes and women are in abayas + hijab or niqab. I don't feel this way when there are outward signals that the woman is wearing the hijab primarily for cultural reasons, such as when she's keeping company with women who don't cover or when it's blended with an acceptance of Western culture.

I really dislike the idea that my discomfort has to come from ignorance. It doesn't. I've actually spent time in the Middle East (and yes, I wore a hijab). I am aware that the idea that the niqab is compulsory is not held by the majority of Muslims and it's a particularly conservative reading to consider it compulsory. I'm also aware that some women choose to be niqabi, which is why if it's one or two in a group it doesn't bother me - that's indicative of it being a choice, and if the niqabi is accompanied by hijabis or uncovered women it signals that she accepts variance in interpretation. When it's every single one, though, that tells me that it's likely that group of people has conservative Muslim views.

In terms of listening to people, I've also listened to ex-Muslims and queer people from Muslim backgrounds. I've found a lot of 'sit down and listen to X group' presents you with the most privileged takes from that group: You want me to listen to the Western revert, not the women from Afghanistan.

And again, I do feel uncomfortable with white people/people of my own ethnicity who outwardly display signs of belonging to fundamentalist/conservative religious groups. I don't like fundamentalist Christians, super Orthodox Jews, etc. I'm judging them by the same standards I judge anyone else. If anything, giving them a pass feels rather like the racial version of benevolent sexism.

I was referring to the choice on where to live. Unless they're refugees, immigrants make a choice about living in their new country and they have the option to leave/go back to a place where the culture agrees with them. I can't leave.

religion still is the strongest power dynamic in every society.

Strongly disagree. I'd put class and sex up there alongside religion, personally. Those are strong power dynamics that exist even in societies where everyone is of the same religion/ethnic group.

I don't say anything to any of these people and I do live with the discomfort, but my point is to say that in this situation someone is going to be uncomfortable. It's either going to be me, knowing that they think I shouldn't exist, or them, feeling like they can't express themselves. There is also another lens for looking at this, which is freedom of speech. They have the right to express their beliefs (non-verbally) that I'm a degenerate who's going to burn in hell, and I have the right to express my belief that their beliefs are extremely off-putting and I'd rather not be around them.

I think one issue with thinking this way is that who is stronger and who is weaker isn't always so easy to suss out, particularly on the margins.

To give an example from my own life/experience, I'm an American and Canadian woman, but I'm also a disabled lesbian. I feel uncomfortable when I go places (e.g. Ikea) and see Muslim families where the men are dressed in Western clothing and the women are niqabis, because it's an outward signal to me that they follow an interpretation of religion that is sexist and homophobic and are likely to be hostile to my existing.

There can be power overlap between the weakest members of the stronger community and the strongest members of the weaker community.

For the record, I don't have those feelings around all people of Middle Eastern descent or people who are visibly Muslim but not displaying an adherence to a particularly conservative interpretation of their religion (e.g. a hijabi in Western clothes or a group where some of the women are hijabis/niqabis and others aren't). I do have those feelings around white people who similarly display such conservative religious leanings (Amish, Haridem, etc.). It's purely ideological, not ethnic or racial.

The thing is, as a native, I don't have a choice to be here, whereas immigrants do. So why am I assumed to be the 'stronger' one, and why should ethnicity and religion override any other power dynamic?

This is true of most tools, it's just that we generally consider the skills simple.

I'm very bad at using power drills.

Headphones also give an 'excuse'. Some men become really pissy and unstable if they think you're ignoring them, but if you have visible headphones, then you have the excuse of not hearing them.

One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown.

The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.

I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.

I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.

So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.

I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.

I live my life with no slack and no way to get any.

I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.

God, I miss off-topic rules and their enforcement...

Nerd-dom in women is also only judged if we don't adhere to the social requirements of womanhood. You can be as obsessive as you want as long as you're bubbly, socially adept, and take care to look pretty. Our interests aren't considered a necessary component to our identity culturally in the same way men's are.

Perhaps the proper counterpart of the "nerd" among women is engaged in very different, more traditional crafts or intellectual interests which aren't highlighted as "nerdy" by mainstream culture.

This is it.

Nerdy women are in fiber arts, fandom (especially generative fandom), etc. Nerdy women definitely exist, they just tend to take their penchant for nerd/obsessive/systems thinking to more 'appropriately female' areas. (For example, things like indie perfume houses, or my obsession with the mechanics of bra manufacturing and fitting). They also tend to pick apart relationships instead of objects: This is why female fandom is so dominated by tropes and boxes to shove characters into. They like the organization and clean categories just like male nerds do, they just apply them to different domains.

They also usually have a different but related stereotype. We're pathetic shut in cat ladies instead of pimply nerds. It's also not usually considered a problem until we hit ~25 (or whatever age the culture at the time considers a woman ready for motherhood) since a shy, obsessive, escapist woman who doesn't want to engage with people can make a fine wife/gf. Most of the grief is directed at us for not caring about our appearance enough more than anything else.

This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway.

I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.

There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.

Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.

The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.

This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.

Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.

And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.

This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.

(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)

I'd agree that's it a component, but not a necessary one?

One of the strongest senses of liminality I've experienced has been being in a middle school at 9 PM when almost nobody else was in the building. I was a poll worker and we were wrapping up for the evening, so there were only 4 of us there. Doing things like walking to the bathroom through the empty school felt very strange, because I was surrounded by evidence of people using this space and yet there were none there.

A different place I felt that way was when I lived in Flint, MI. I'd walk to work early in the morning, and I'd pass the Flint Institute of Arts, which was at the time one of the few places in the city with any money, so they had a very well maintained and manicured outdoor space (evidence of people), but I never saw anyone.

On the other hand, airports and hotels are classic liminal and they're usually peopled.

My guess would be hunting and also the possible presence of a firearm in certain situations acting as a deterrent as well as a potential social equalizer.

When you're a physically vulnerable person and there are zero firearms in a community (and it's known there are zero), then there's no physical deterrent to attacking you. Of course in theory there are social consequences, but if you're in a society that includes things like alcohol or other substances, teenagers/people with poorly developed senses of long term consequences, or mental illnesses, then the thought 'oh shit, she/he might be strapped' might do more than 'you might go to jail'.

Undead? Shambling along with the body of its former, living self?

One of the things that I liked about the old, text-based internet was the anonymity it provided. I particularly liked being able to engage in discussions about things that interested me without being sexualized, since nobody needed to know I was a teenage girl. No creepy messages, no looks up and down, no having to figure out ways to turn someone twice my age down without worrying if they'd react dangerously, no having to leave because someone more integral to the group was a creep and nobody would accept it if I spoke up, no worrying about my small statue making me a target for physical intimidation, etc.

(Now I am old, so it's different.)

It was very freeing to be able to talk about my interests (e.g. space, web development, and video game modding) without being subjected to the bullshit that people brought to the table if they saw me.

We've basically accepted the premise as a culture that exploiting adults is fine. Exploitation is so heavily baked into our culture that pushing back on it would cause too much upset.

If you're below 18, you deserve protection. Above 18? Good luck, babe.

I think one of the unintended consequences of age verification is going to be a whole host of unprepared 18 year olds getting full access to social media and getting absolutely one-shot by it. Think credit card sign ups on college campuses or predatory car dealerships near boot camps. There are going to be a lot more 18 year old boys gambling away their student loans and 18 year old girls signing up for OF, but it'll be fine, because they're 18! Not to mention they're going to be scam targets on the level of the elderly. And if you're exploited/scammed as an adult, it's your own fault.

Age verification/restriction without an educational component of some sort is just creating a future cohort of extremely vulnerable young adults for companies and bad actors to sink their teeth into.

Fortunately, there is flexibility on the 1 day a week in the office for me, so if I'm having a really bad day, I don't have to go. I've had full WFH in the past and it's worked well for me. I've also ended interviews when I'm told the job is 3+ days in office.

I know a lot of people with disabilities that can work if we're WFH, but the requirements of full RTO would push us out of the workplace. I can do 1-2 days, but more than that would end up being very difficult. I can borrow energy/slam caffeine/take an extra Adderall on office days and then just recover the next day or go to bed as soon as I get home, but doing that 5 days a week isn't going to work.

I understand where the RTO advocates are coming from. I do find those 3/4 days a month in the office to be helpful for context building, and there are a lot of jobs that do benefit from that in person collaboration.

My job is primarily supporting people across several countries with a side of system maintenance. There's not really any point to me being in the office more than I am. In fact, being able to work effectively remotely is a key skill for doing this job.

Dress codes definitely exist, even if they're usually not stated.

I'm a woman. I also have MS. A lot of people with MS, myself included, experience something called the 'MS Hug', which is spasticity, pain, and tenderness in your ribcage muscles.

Wearing a bra for 9 hours a day ensures that I'm in a shit ton of pain. A full time RTO job would mean being in pain constantly so that other people aren't offended by my body. Right now I'm hybrid with one day a week in and I just load up on painkillers and muscle relaxers for that day, but even then I can only do so much because you can't just down 8mg of tizanidine and then drive home.

You wouldn't know any of this by looking at me.

This is so true.

And even when there is a well laid out information design, it often is laid out from the wrong point of view. Elegant information design should create a pattern subconsciously enabling people to build a mental model of the tool they're using without realizing they're doing it. But software whose information design works wonderfully from the point of view of a SDE is not going to be approachable to the average user. There are so many tools I've used where I can very clearly see the reasoning behind the decisions and the design and use it well and also be aware I could never explain how they work to the average person.

In theory, it's because we're going to be better at steering an LLM in some ways. A lot of the friction and hold up in building comes in the communication between people/departments/organization. If you eliminate that by holding the knowledge in one person/department, you see an efficiency gain.

What they're not saying is that they think we're more valuable because they think we'll be cheaper. They think they can have us do 2 jobs and pay us for 1: probably less than a decent SDE made in 2019.

Personally, I think it's likely to be a shitshow and backfire if that's how companies decide to try to go that route (especially the largest ones). First, if we wanted to be devs, we would be (like you). Most people with the knack for programming and thinking in systems know they have that knack, and if they haven't jumped ship to SDE before now, there's a reason. I could definitely hack a junior SDE role, skill wise, but I don't want to. Second, finding people like us is difficult. The hiring process (which is becoming more and more Gilliamesque by the day) is really bad at identifying us. There aren't credentials, and this sort of work tends to reside in the gaps, as you identified. It's harder for it to show up on a resume. Hiring is optimizing for exact matches and experience, and that's the opposite of how this skill set actually functions. I've found these skills are best developed by being placed in a room where you know very little about what's going on and forcing you to develop heuristics and approaches over time for getting that context. Thirdly, I can't speak for you, but I've developed this perspective over decades and if people want it, they're going to pay appropriately. If they think I'm going to do any of this at my current salary level, they're deranged. And lastly, while most people in our position might roll our eyes at some techie discussions and culture, we do fundamentally like techies/devs and we tend towards placing a greater value on things like relationships than a pure SDE does. (Just speaking in generalities). So 'is willing to replace and/or toss out a category of people I like and respect' is a hint to us to start out assuming this is a hostile negotiation. (Whereas SDEs as a cohort over the last 20 years extended a lot of goodwill at first). We're far more likely to work somewhere, get enough domain knowledge, and then bounce to start our own thing, especially since as a population we're more likely to have devs who will work with us as non-technical founders. Someone who's decent at marketing/sales/the stupid 'people stuff', understands a domain, and understands when a proper dev tells them what is and isn't possible and can even help with some of the most boring, rote parts of the technical side if needed/in crunch is an excellent non-technical founder, and as a group we're also more likely to have access to the technical connections that we'd need if we wanted to build something beyond our ability.

I agree, and I want to add that 'better' doesn't necessarily mean 'creates more robust, elegant, resilient software'. Better means from a business perspective. If we (I'm one of the people you're discussing) end up cheaper or more fungible, for example, we still might be worth hiring from a business perspective even if the code we create is shit.

I've also seen an assumption that you've made here that I think is worth drawing attention to and questioning: that the tech-savvy non-developers are starting from zero or near zero when it comes to programming and software development. Right now, that's probably mostly true, but I'm not sure that will continue to be the case. I'm not a developer (depending on how fuzzy we want the boundaries around the idea to be, anyway). I do understand the building blocks of programming languages (e.g. I can answer all the questions fragmede posed in a sister comment), the trade-offs between rolling your own and using existing libraries, the need to evaluate tools, frameworks, and languages to determine which is best for your use case, why version control matters, why access rights matter, why backups and a test environment are necessary, why it matters to write code another human can read, etc.

Do I understand as much as an active working developer? Absolutely not and I'd never claim to, but I'm far from starting at zero.

The reason for this is that I was raised by programmers. There are far, far more programmers and general tech nerds now than there were in 1988 (when I was born). Which means that in 10-20 years, there are going to be a lot more children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and so on of developers, and a lot of them are not going to be starting at zero. For pretty much of all computing history, there's been a substantial opportunity cost to developing a deep understanding of coding and software development: either a person has to be so into the domain that they devote a lot of their waking hours to it (usually in adolescence or young adulthood, when that trade off closes the most doors and makes developing certain other time intensive skills difficult), or they have to obtain a CS degree, which means not getting a different kind of degree and often incurring significant front-loaded financial costs. The opportunity cost for people born into programming or tech families is much lower. You can start younger and spread out the hours needed to learn across a greater amount of years, you can acquire knowledge in less time-intensive ways and while practicing other skills (e.g. my cousins also have 'software brain' and we could all hang out and develop those skills while also developing in person social skills), and you have a built in network of experienced people who want to help you + that can give you extremely individualized, personalized attention.

If what you suggest comes to pass, I think that one of the greatest threats to SDE as a career is going to be your own children and grandchildren.

I'm this person, and I do find AI to be quite helpful, though I'm mostly just playing around at this point.

I'm the daughter and granddaughter of programmers, and I learned the basics of how to code as a kid. I'm good at it and have a knack for it, but I didn't want to do it for 8+ hours a day and then spend my nights on it as well, so I didn't pursue it as a career. I did an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, which has been really helpful for having an intuitive sense for what 'language as data' can accomplish and for a strong understanding of the difference between language as data and language as meaning. I studied formal logic systems. Then I did a graduate degree in Library Science and worked in libraries for a decade and a half.

I can organize and define systems very well, and I'm trained in how to wheedle information people don't consciously know out of them without them knowing I'm doing it. I've spent enough time around actual devs to understand where my limitations are and when to loop in someone who knows more to check my work, and when it's important for the work to be super accurate versus when I can learn by fucking around. (Front end and design? Fuck around! Database structure? Fuck around but with an exceptionally robust backup system kept outside of the AI tools' purview + don't fuck around in prod. Storing credentials and people's information? Ask someone.)

The problem companies are going to have is I'm very disinclined to work for them doing this, particularly if they want us because they think we're going to be cheaper. Most people who are in this category a.) could be devs and opted not to, and there's a reason for that and/or b.) are the children, cousins, etc. of programmers. We're not stupid: we know we're just as disposable as they're trying to make devs.

I did have to do a lot of advocating/educating back when I was younger and too poor for insurance. It was good practice for when I was diagnosed with MS, though.

Now I usually look for practices that work with keratoconus patients. They usually have practice with strange prescriptions and unusual contact fittings.

Yeah, I've wanted ICL for years, but I could never afford it out of pocket, and all insurance considers vision correction aesthetic. Which is freaking stupid: There's a huge difference between me and someone who's a -2.

I might be able to stretch it now, but I'm coming up on my presbyopia years, so I'm not sure it's worth the money if I'm only going to get a few years of stability.

At this point, I'm hoping I take after my mother and get some really early cataracts because then I can just pay for the lens and the insertion/replacement will be covered.

If you can afford it, I would go for it, though. Personally, even for people who are candidates for PRK, LASIK, etc. I think ICL is still worth considering because it has some benefits. Less risk of dry eye and the ability to change the lens if your prescription changes. Longer recovery period, though.

Yeah, the only people I've heard of with worse vision than me are those with some sort of associated eye condition (e.g. kerataconus).

For the most part, it's...fine. Insurance has no idea what to do with me and that's frustrating, though. Somehow, I have eyes this bad without any associated pathology, and companies don't understand that the needs that such severe myopia presents on its own. I wear custom made RGPs; they can custom make softs but they're horrific (or at least they were 13 years ago when I gave up on them).

Isn't it hilarious every time you go to a new eye doctor? It's actually really cute: I like watching them get all giddy. They get so excited when they can't use the machines (a lot of them will only go up to a -15) and have to measure my RX manually. You can just see how they're like 'oh my God, I learned about this in school!'

I have to choose each year between paying for (main) glasses or contacts, so I usually opt for contacts and that means my glasses are a few years old. When I wear them at night, I definitely see double. Hate it.

I'm a -20, so small differences really magnify.

I don't have cataracts, but my prescription is so severe and I'm getting to an age where there's an RX difference between near, medium, and far sight, and I just wanted to commiserate. It is annoying to have to have multiple pairs of glasses, and remember where you put them, and do you have the right ones for this, etc.