micro

Someone needs to shut the royal brothers & their wives up.

This is hilarious [www.instagram.com](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CnFMtxOufq-/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=)

Yesterday a structural engineer came to our house to analyze our walls and give recommendations on what walls we can steely remove, where our load bearing walls and beams are and all. He was an Iranian guy who took his time to study our house in great detail, apologizing multiple times because he was slow and stuttered (and i was like why are you apologizing for any of this?!), and went to great lengths to explain a ton of stuff to us. Compare that with an American (white) engineer who we had contacted 2 months back – the guy wanted pictures via email, wanted to charge *per* wall and kept canceling or postponing on us all the time until we lost all interest.

We are getting a lot of work done in house and that means consistently we have people in house for quotes for one thing or another – and consistently one thing stands out. People or color consistently show up, treat you with respect and take time to discuss all options. And consistently my experience with white contractors has been to curb their first impulse to show me how smart they are and how dumb I am. Literally every single one of them has a playbook – first make you feel you don’t know anything; then bash all competitors and small guys on how they don’t any jobs well (it’s always a underhand spite at Mexicans); and then talk about million things that have no connection to original ask. And invariably after tolerating them, they either never come back with a quote or just keep dilly dallying.

For my money these days I look at contractors and if they feel like they are people of color or immigrants I call them – coz I know what to expect and most of them are honest folks who don’t BS.

Immigrants. We get the job done!

Watching Jurassic park world dominion on prime and they gave up any remaining 2 ounces of sense these movies made didn’t they? Entertaining though lol.

After destroying a throw pillow this morning, mother fucker gave us a puppy face that said *Oh you mean thats not what these pillows are for? mujhe tho pata hi nahi tha!* look. After destruction and making a mess, mahashay has decided to nap. I swear I want to be a golden retriever in my next life!

The biggest problem with Zelle embedded into banking app is there is no way to properly track it in Personal Capital. They all show up as transfer out. Handymen, general contractors etc they have all moved to Venmo/Zelle – it would be useful to track it over the year to know how much we are putting in the house lol.

Every new covid variant is somehow X% more transmissible than the parent variant. At this point I have completely lost track of how tranmissible original variant was. Makes it feel like it was actually hard to get covid and humans fucked up anyway.

So the kid and I just had a heated debate. Comes back from school and exclaims one of her classmates wore *Dont support Israeli businesses* T-shirt in the class, and she found that super **racist**. I countered that perhaps we should be blaming the parents and not her as much, and whether it was *really* racist? I ask her what if she wore *Dont support Amazon business* t-shirt, would it be considered racist? No, she said, but calling out *Israeli* business is. I say, well, do you think maybe its just an political opinion her parents have forced on her? Like t-shirt doesnt say *Dont support Israelis*, it specifically calls out *businsesses*. She didnt budge and argued there are no jew kids wearing *Dont support Palestenian businesses* in class.

I am proud of her for engaging in the debate and holding her ground! For the record, I do find t-shirt quite racist but I can see how it can simply be defended as political opinion. I blame the parents whole heartedly and not her. I do not think elementary school is a place for such t-shirts and grandstanding. I am hoping their class teacher has conveyed the sensitivity to parents who i am sure are likely to ignore and do their own thing.

Reminder that it’s been only 3 days since the new work year has begun and already a string of layoffs announced by big and small companies. Q1 2023 is going to be a bloodbath particularly in tech. Hope everyone in tech had a good holiday coz next quarter is looking very rough.

Yet another low iq republican parent in fairfax county [complaining about delayed national award notice](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/29/thomas-jefferson-high-national-merit/) at TJHSST. The governer and AG have latched on and now investigations galore on the school. Just another way republicans want to destroy every fabric of America, but keep peddling them.

TJHSST is consistently amongst the top 3 high schools in the *country*. *country*. Getting into TJ is darn tough. Students at this school [build satellites that launched](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-county-students-build-first-satellite-sent-to-space/2013/11/19/015db0ea-508f-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html). These students have NO problem getting into a good universities. Sure, quota system makes it hard for all students to get into MIT/Stanford, and yes I also know families that have had hard time with students unable to get into elite colleges inspite of TJ, but they are still fucking better off than 99.9% of students out there.

And oh, getting into TJ is so tough that a majority of students as expected are asians (including Indians) with their tiger moms & dads who start prepping their students from 6th grade on how to get into TJ. Fairfax county is super affluent, so the actual real geniuses who make it to the school are probably just 5% of students. The rest 95% are people with lots of disposable income with motivated kids who worked hard with tons of prep resources available to them. Please don’t complain your kids won’t be fine. They will do just fine.