scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 4 weeks ago:
While we’re making soup, let’s base the entire temperature scale on water, too.
- Comment on How Trump is Following Hitler's Playbook | Robert Reich 1 month ago:
Having witnessed and survived an actual coup attempt, I’d humbly ask you not to rob those words of all meaning.
Bush started actual wars.
- Comment on How Trump is Following Hitler's Playbook | Robert Reich 1 month ago:
I’m old enough to have heard all of this exact same shit about GW Bush.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
Unenforced is a little different than unenforceable.
Society is unfortunately still functioning where I live.
- Comment on Asking a girl out for comic book store date? 1 month ago:
I once plucked up my courage to ask a girl if she would like to go see a particular show with me the following night. She said “I would, but I am already doing something tomorrow.”
I was totally unprepared for this answer and just heard “no.” She was probably a little surprised to be asked out suddenly, and didn’t take the initiative to suggest another day.
We didn’t go out. That was that. Huge mistake by me. So my advice is: be open to complications in her answer. And listen closely. If she says “I have plans.” that’s a polite decline. If she literally says “I would like to go, but I have plans,” that’s quite different.
It’s hard to hear the differences and react smoothly if you’re nervous about asking, like I was. Best of luck!
- Comment on How can a person be very sad, irritated or angry and still not show it on their face ? 1 month ago:
I am highly expressive and have little filter. I think my upbringing allowed this or even encouraged it. The meta message in every movie I ever watched as a kid was “if you just look deep inside yourself and bring out the essence of what’s there, you can do / win / be anything!” I’m also male, and my family laughed a lot and yelled a lot and angered easily and forgave easily. As a result, I’m quite outspoken and some find me bombastic or overbearing.
It’s quite hard to put this genie back in the bottle once you’re an adult. If you’re like this and wondering how other people contain it, the likelihood is that they have been conditioned to contain it their entire lives. In some cases longer than that: In Chinese culture, for example, no one has is permitted to be emotionally demonstrative and this has been the norm for thousands of years. It could even have been selected for genetically: outspoken peasant executed, expressive daughters disowned.
I will say this though. As you grow older your vision and hearing get worse and your feelings become less sensitive. I can hold a hot object that my kids can’t even touch with one finger. Emotionally, it’s a bit the same. Reactions come slower, and are not as strong. And the muscles in the face don’t react as much, and the heart is less inclined to engage in a full flameout over something trivial. So it gets easier.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
If you have no bicycle safe routes then sadly you should not be biking. Taking it onto the sidewalk not only endangers you in all the ways described in this thread, it also endangers pedestrians. Someone said they wouldn’t care about getting hit by a car coming out of a driveway, because that’s slower than a car on the street. Fine. But if I step out from my the huge bush my neighbor keeps on the boundary of our driveways, onto the sidewalk, and you crash your bike into me I’m going to feed it to you.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
Years ago I worked at a bike repair camp in Burning Man. We got people’s bikes working again by the hundreds. The occasional dickbag would try to bring his gas powered scooter or whatever in and we’d send them packing. I remember one guy was like “I’ll just borrow your tools and do it myself” and he got thrown out.
- Comment on What can we do when something is too vast to provide representative examples for? 1 month ago:
I think you’re talking to some people who, in bad faith, are demanding “proof” when they need to learn how to acknowledge “evidence.” Someone with a fixed attitude will keep moving goalposts and cherry picking outliers until the cows come home, and you need to be able to say: your bias is overwhelming in the gymnastics you perform to avoid the clear evidence. The process of science most often doesn’t produce black and white results. Anti-vaxxers are gonna anti-vax and you can’t “persuade” them.
That said, if you can’t provide 7-8 stories with female protagonists, which are very popular, you’re not even trying. His Dark Materials. Moana. The Fault in Our Stars. The Fablehaven series. Frozen. The Force Awakens. Silo. Mulan. Legend of Korra and the Kyoshi novels. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Star Trek Voyager. Anne of Green Gables. Watchmen (2019 series). Jane Eyre. Pippi Longstocking. Little House on the Prairie. …
If you’re really talking to someone who says “there are no stories with…” then here’s enough to easily force them to change their position to “there are far less stories with…” and at that point they would in fact be correct.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
There are lot of such toys on the market. They are electric. But they don’t resemble bikes in any way. I get the idea that they are mistaken for e-bikes when people ride them on our mixed use trails which are clearly marked for pedestrians and bikes only, not motor vehicles. People think anything electric is allowed. They are driving shit the same weight as a 125cc motorcycle in between pedestrians. And guess what? These vehicles go really fast so they are more dangerous than anything else on the trail, and they don’t mix into traffic well. The fools riding them are constantly weaving through passing everyone so that can GO FAST! WANNA GO FAST!
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
My city has amazing bike infrastructure: mixed use trails with no cars, bike lanes on all streets, tunnels and bridges over major thoroughfares (really it’s pretty insanely good and yes it’s in the US of fucking A).
People still ride on the sidewalks like morons. They ride the wrong direction in the bike lanes.
Bike infrastructure is essential but also not totally sufficient. You need a significant enough number of people using them that there is a culture for it and tribal sharing of knowledge around it.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
You are less safe for this. You think otherwise, but you’re wrong. Sidewalk. Side. Walk.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
I own an ebike and I use it on the mixed use trails in my city. Mostly I have it because I often pull my kids on a trailer bike and we have hills in town.
I fear that my riding on these trails will soon be banned because people are out there driving stupidly fast on big knobby-tired motorcycles masquerading as “e-bikes.”
There are tons of Karens pushing strollers on these trails and any election now they’re going to ban my bike.
- Comment on Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. 1 month ago:
I hate cyclists that masquerade as pedestrians. It’s less safe for them and it’s less safe for everyone. Get your ass out into traffic and learn to take up some space. Ride defensively. Get yourself a rear view mirror. Pick the most bike friendly route. For fucks sake.
- Comment on Do you ever think that maybe all VPN services are actually secretly owned/funded by governments and that they are only giving you a false illusion of privacy? 2 months ago:
Why is “governments” the boogeyman that comes to mind? Scammers and thieves would have much more interest in your everyday consumer internet usage.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 3 months ago:
Yes many extenuating circumstances. Sadly she’s still open to attack since she hasn’t put any points on the board.
I understand you’re saying that this performance crap is made up so they can save money, and I agree.
But a sales position that has never closed a sale doesn’t make a good poster child for this cause of fighting back against bad performance ratings. Fact is she has not created value.
If her employment included a contract that guaranteed she could complete her ramp period, she’d have some footing.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 3 months ago:
This is why severance gets offered. It’s a contract that you agree to and henceforth you can’t really fight. And employees would frankly rather take the pay than immediately lose income and then start investing time in a lawsuit against a much better resourced organization, which could take years and may not result in anything. Most companies know how to navigate the laws. Few ordinary people know how to sue over them and win.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 3 months ago:
It is actually such a shitty job and while good people may find themselves in it, only bad people stay in it for long. If you’re a great person and just spend your time bringing sunshine to employees then you were rolled in luck before you went into the fryer.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 3 months ago:
Yep HR actually stands for Human Risks.
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 3 months ago:
My one question going in was whether this was a Sales role. It’s hard to overstate how volatile a career in sales can be. You are your numbers and your income can swing around wildly. Maybe you can control your own performance but the viability of the products is out of your control and the targets set for you to be evaluated against are outside your control too. Companies use Sales to grow, not to subsist, so the second budgets are tight and a company shifts into survival mode, you’re the first to go. Culture is also volatile and high pressure, competitive, etc. I know a sales guy who closed a multi hundred thousand dollar enterprise software deal and was missing just one signature for weeks and could not reach the guy. He travelled internationally and camped out in the building lobby for multiple days until he saw him and ran up and got him to sign.
It’s hard. You can do really well but it’s hard. She’s pretty vulnerable not having actually closed anything, ever, yet. No one actually cares at the end of the quarter if you “have great meetings.”
- Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis? 3 months ago:
Yes there’s a long list of country flags and currency symbols and other shit in there too but lets not pretend like adding all that crap changed the fact that these are commonly used for expression. Does a cup of coffee have an emotion? Actually it kinda can, yeah, in the right situation. Let’s not even get into what people make of eggplants and popcorn tubs.
- Comment on Matpat is leaving Game Theory 3 months ago:
Wow wow! Well, my regrets to those who are losing a beloved video host. I can imagine how that feels.
- Comment on Matpat is leaving Game Theory 3 months ago:
Wow that’s a pretty big channel that I’d never heard of before.
- Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis? 4 months ago:
Of course this isn’t comparable - hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.
But the post is funny and it hints at something important. Expressions to co vey emotion are incredibly important to human beings. It’s a language that our bodies are physically built for: our faces are far more changeable and expressive than other animals, and this supported the social bonds and cooperation that put us on top of the world. I’m not saying that across all cultures, one given facial expression means the same thing, but certainly all cultures have a vivid, silent language of facial expressions that is so deeply rooted, we barely think about it.
- Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis? 4 months ago:
And what was “that one thing” for the Egyptians?
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
Yep 100%. It actually encourages me that they work so hard to keep people from uniting. It means they’re afraid of it.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
Would that require actually meeting up with people? I think I’ll just post messages of despair on the Internet! /s
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
I have also found that piracy can scratch my shopping itch without spending any money.
There are other things too. It’ll sound weird but I got into the composting hobby (see: /r/composting ) and for a while I was crazy about getting as much organic material as I could. I’d rake my neighbors leaves, get coffee grounds from cafes, and dumpster dive for cardboard. I’d come home with a good haul and feel that satisfaction of acquiring something. And I was getting exercise and helping the environment in the process. Like I said, weird, but if you get creative you can find ways to have fun without spending money.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
Think of it as a protest then. When they’re charging stupid prices for beef, say “hell no” and eat lentils for a time. It’s all in the attitude. It’s honestly good for us to cut back a bit. If spending money is one’s main way to feel joy then something is wrong to begin with. Time to read a good library book or take more walks for joy. And most of us could stand to eat a little less beef anyway.
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
This is good advice. And I think it helps to think of it as a protest. None of us wants to deprive ourselves, but if they’re charging stupid prices for beef then give them the middle finger and eat lentils for a time. It can be an empowering experience instead of a shameful one if it’s intentional and you can get your whole family bought into the concept.