lennivelkant

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

I appreciate that you took the time to supply the nuances I omitted. While there is value in a positive framing, it's important to acknowledge potential struggles as well. We can't effectively tackle issues if we're not aware of them.

In any case, while I'm not qualified to help you with your difficulties, I hope you find - or have found - a way to work on overcoming them. Dealing with insecurities, from my own experience, can be a tough process, further amplified by setbacks and a lack of perceived progress. But if you persevere, even if you might not feel that you have improved much, you may find yourself looking back at a time when it was worse and, by contrast, see the progress you've made. May that hope, that your future self will look back and be proud of your hard work, give you the strength to keep going.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I'm worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

I considered that option too, but opted to go with the more positive guess. I'm not qualified either way, I just wanted to say something nice.

Well, you sound like a team player. You place the common good (fun together) higher than individual ambitions (or maybe place your own worth very low, I can't tell from one sentence, but the outcome is the same).

Saying deliberately sounds like it's not just a thing that you find yourself doing again and again, but a conscious choice. That suggests there was a choice to make; that the option of playing a self-centered character was something you were actively aware of, but were sufficiently repulsed by it to make a point of being better than those people.

I think you're a nice person, empathetic, while not so entirely innocent as to not even consider the possibility, still principled and caring enough to actively defy it.

I think you're a net good for this world.

Butterfly gang

In my experience, the shelf helps avoid having water splash your nethers, which happens to me more often than leaving streaks, so I prefer it over having my urine splash back up at me.

...then you use the brush to clean them? Is that a big deal?

What else can you do on the gallows but laugh?

I'm in your boat often enough. Sometimes a post assumes familiarity with a context and it may be hard to figure out the intent or sincerity without that familiarity.

Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.

If it's real, I'm confident he had some competent assistant hire a competent crew for that photo-op. I'm guessing a competent PR consultant suggested a good photo-op in the first place, hit the right buttons to appeal to his wannabe cool image.

If it's fake, some competent developer created a good tool, fed with competently selected data to create a rather convincing image.

What I'm trying to say is that there most certainly were several competent people involved in the making of this picture.

Just not the subject.