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While I totally agree with you, this meme isn’t referring to college text books. It’s referring to school supplies and clothes for elementary school children.

The vast majority of public schools in the US are severely underfunded and don’t have enough supplies like markers, disinfectant, crayons, pencils, etc to provide kids and teachers don’t make very much money, yet they often come out of pocket to buy supplies. What has happened as a result, is parents have to purchase many of these supplies to send to school with their kids for the whole classroom to have the items they need. I have three kids in kindergarten and second grade. Their school supply lists were about $150 each. With creative shopping for sales, we managed to get everything about $150 cheaper than listed. We are waiting for the tax-free weekend to buy clothes for all of them.

Gotta love the good ol’ US of A and it’s hatred of the poors.

Yup. Ours had some really expensive hobby items in addition to the books and book accessories. They had a rock tumbler kit one year I remember wanting really bad. My grandparents ended up getting me one for Christmas. I recall a telescope one year as well.

One of the more mischievous kids in my third grade class was the son of the high school chem teacher. He purchased a chemistry set at the book fair that year. He and another kid took it into the bathroom by the cafeteria and drank a few “experiments” from the kit in the box. They both got violently sick and an ambulance came. I’m really glad I stuck with my Box Car Children collection and Calvin and Hobbes book mark that year.

Indeed. It has a lot to do with that and about a dozen other things. Degree. Job field. Connections. Experience. Personality.

I have a general comms degree and an MA in digital media. These degrees and my job field are extremely broad, so I have experience in loads of different things. As such, I can apply for any job from digital marketing to public relations to a press officer and have a shot of at least getting an interview. I’ve never had a shortage of knowing people in my industry who would be willing to write me a letter of recommendation or give me a referral where they work. I’ve gotten one of my colleagues hired at two separate places that I have been a manager.

But to add on to that, I interview well and have a very relaxed and jovial personality. I work well with others and make friends easily. I can’t count how many times there have been interoffice issues where an independent consultant had to come in and mediate or get to the bottom of an HR problem and it would turn out that I’m one of the only people in a division that not a single person had a conflict with.

Dumping Twitter, to start. We’ve been able to finally get our client to try some new things using IG reels and YT shorts. We’ve also been able to grab their ear about Reddit, Lemmy, and Mastodon. While they’re not fully onboard yet with federated platforms, they’re interested, which is a huge step. We’ve also been pitching more proactive content and getting more support on strategy shifts to have a more conversational back-and-forth with the client’s audience. They used to prefer to get people off open comments and into private DMs. We have been pushing them to be more transparent and human with their direct engagement.

I’d argue the opposite. People have been fed up with the mainstream platforms for a long time now. Now that we know how social media grew grassroots terrorism and that the platforms allowed it for ad clicks, I’d say it’s a good time to pivot away from the traditional models of the last 15-20 years, move away from the Facebooks and Twitters, and try something new.

Professionally, I lead a team of digital artists and oversee digital marketing efforts for a government client. The chaos and burning out of Twitter and Reddit has been a great time for my team as we’ve finally been given the latitude to do new work and build new strategies instead of just doing the same bullshit over and over. I’ve started enjoying work again and my team has been energized because everyday there’s something new to overcome. And because the social media ecosystem is so turbulent, it’s actually removing the pressure from us because our client understands that we are operating in new territory. Essentially, we are being allowed to fail in the pursuit of innovation.

I’m pumped to be a part of this evolving shift. There’s so much potential. Also, I’m selfishly enjoying watching these fucking assholes like Musk flail and burn through billions of dollars as a result of their hubris.