Your best bet is to find activities that you enjoy that you can do on a regular basis in an environment where you’ll be around other people who also participate regularly. Sign up for a class, join a sports team, volunteer somewhere, find a local meetup group, or even just become a regular at a bar.

Making new friends definitely gets harder as we get older because people are busy and just don’t have the same opportunities to casually yet regularly interact with strangers any more. As kids, most people repeatedly engaged with the same group of people on a daily or weekly basis due to school, sports, etc., and the familiarity that came with that made it relatively effortless to develop some friendships.

Even when I totally hit it off with people I’ve just met and we exchange contact details, I’ve rarely ever intentionally hung out with them again. The new friendships that I’ve formed as an adult were either with a friend of a friend or with people I happened to cross paths with many times before we ever intentionally made plans together. It’s those repeated, low stakes interactions that have been most successful at forming new friendships.

Agreed, just trying to point out that if the laid off employees were corporate, not retail, the $15/hr assumption is probably pretty low. If retail, those could be spread across the country, and $15/hr is probably pretty generous. Starbucks HQ is in the city of Seattle, which has an even higher minimum wage than the state (I think $20.76/hour now?).

Was it baristas that were laid off or office workers? Minimum wage for their corporate headquarters is a bit over $20/hour, and I’d suspect very few corporate employees are making only minimum wage.

I remember reading something a while ago that said the rubber backed mats should never go in the dryer, and while I forget the exact reason, it wasn’t just because the dryer damages the mat. Searching online, it looks like the rubber can also damage the dryer and poses an increased fire risk.

A bit of a random question: on a single user instance, if you subscribe to a community, then later unsubscribe from it, would that community still show up in your All feed?

If it makes you feel any better, the handle looks a bit short to be intended for a toilet. It’s probably intended for cleaning bottles.