charlesf
3d ago
People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation
Something I was discussing previous on a different board, and that is a larger issue beyond this event, is that the majority of people have effectively 0 experience making important, possibley life or death decisions, when their body is absolutely flooded with adrenaline. In our prehistorical past, this prepared us for violence. This response is, in the modern day, often an evolutionary trap. My father was a career NCO in the USMC and he occasionally spoke about training people to manage, and if possible prevent, adrenal responses to the events around them. Even people that are aware of the issue, who've had training and exposure to stimuli to try to assuage it, still don't ever really know what their response is going to be when it happens. The fight/flight/freeze response really doesn't understand modern society very well.
charlesf
3d ago
A decent % of gay men aren't into the party scene at all and want the same sort of long term relationships that hetro men and women generally have.
As a statistician, gay men are pretty much the only demo that are honest-ish on surveys about sex and relationships. It makes comparison data even more alarming to look at if you aren't ready for it. While on average a gay man in the US has about 7x more unique partners than a straight man, there are a large fraction of gay men that aren't actually into the casual sex/hook up gay culture at all really, or aren't attactive enough to participate even if they want to. If you only look at the numbers of the top 25% or people that have had more than 4 lifetime partners, its starts looking like someone made a calculation error. Epidemiological data in college comparing gay men to straight men and all women was how I learned what an axis break was as a freshman.
edit vv - yes, only self identified are considered gay. the other group are 'men who have sex with men' (MSM) a unique demo that is somehow often 100% straight. researchers generally focus on behavior and not labels/identity here as the MSM demo esentially cannot be intereacted with in a cooperative way if treat them like they are "gay".
charlesf
3d ago
It'll be 26 years in a couple of months, I've been there for 24. It still my most used website, but I can't imagine a new user would get much out of it. We've all known each for a couple of decades now and its a lot of very old inside humor. One thing I really do enjoy is that most Goons are over 40 now and a lot of us are in some fairly important roles in society, particularly tech. I've had connections on SA help me out with things I'd never have known someone IRL who could. People in gov't, upper management of FANG companies, etc. Its like the Internet Freemasons. I can join pretty much any semi-popular online videogame and there will be a Goon group waiting to teach you the game and give you stuff to get started.
I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.
... and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.
Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.
I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).
*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.
https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person
https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person
charlesf
20d ago
-There isn't nothing.
-Don't make the cars behind you have to slow down. This starts with knowing there are cars behind you in the first place. This extends to far more than traffic.
charlesf
24d ago
I've found often that two people can sometimes agree strongly on, to use a turn of phrase, the diagnosis while differing quite a bit on the course of treatment, as it were. It can be refreshing to be around someone that sees the world the same way you do, even if their idea of what should be done about it is questionable.
charlesf
24d ago
My experience has been that people in Spain react pretty well to being addressed in (competent) Spanish by visitors. In fact this has been my experience in every Spanish speaking country. Especially since English isn't anywhere near as common in Spain (and Italy) as Germany or the Nordics (I suspect France as well, but they'll never admit it). Depending on how you learned Spanish, you might want to brush up on some of the word useage and phrases common to European Spanish. I've found the Madrileños fairly easy to understand once you get used to the seseo. You can watch Spanish news broadcasts to get an idea. Other parts of Spain I've not done as well understanding them, mostly Andalucia, despite it being my favorite part. Most educated Andalucians can switch to Castillian without issue though.
charlesf
1mo ago
I lot of the men I know personally that are Readers pirate a great deal of books. I generally do for anything that isn't a new release by an author I support, in which case I buy a copy on release, then read the pirated copy anyway as its often more convenient to do so (and I can copy text out of the pirated file to search on the web with, Kindle makes you manually retype anything you want to search from the book). Books files are very small. I have an old external drive in my desk with about 90,000 books on it, including p much the entire cannon of western classics and all popular fiction published before about 2014 or so.
charlesf
1mo ago
No one involved in this cares specifically that women read more books, though its almost certain that they do. The important fact is that they buy more books. The difference is subtle but important. All these lists and awards etc are just marketing aimed at their currently primary demo. That it also lets them denegrate and ignore male authors is just a happy coincidence that fits the zeitgeist. How convenient. I've read thousands of books in my life, fiction and non, and I don't think I've ever once been influenced by any form of advertising or marketing or 'buzz' of any sort over a book. For me this is an area of the economy that is blessedly free of this scourge, and at least for the books that men are still buying this is still true. I'd be fine if male authors were officially barred from all best-of-lists and book awards as I consider them to be negative influence on the space as a whole. Like forbidding my favorite male actors from appearing on reality tv or political ads. Que horror.
charlesf
1mo ago
Not exactly, but I have known multiple conservative athiests, a few of whom were vegetarians, not vegan. They all tended to be odd in other ways as well.
charlesf
1mo ago
Part-time wiki editor, I know enough to quickly identify and avoid problem areas and stick mostly to dry, non-CW stuff. That being said, always check the Talk page, including its archives. It can sometimes be hard to locate the links to the archives if the one of the pages "guardians" is especially good with the system and knows how to obscure them. This is generally done by archving a Talk page that is no where close to the size that would actually require it to keep the page tidy, in order to push inconvenient comments and topics off the "front" talk page and bury it behind hard to find links. If you know what the URL format for archived pages it though you can just manually edit the URL. I've found a few articles where this is the only way to see them too. The reason to do this is two fold, first you have to establish if a page has 'guardians': personally motivated editors with a dog in the fight who use their familiarity with the processes and rules of wikipedia to maintain a partisan/biased presentation in the main article and crush anyone who tries to correct their deceptions. Its usually only one person but can be a team on some higher profile articles (the Mao article is a good example of a team of guardians). Once you have confirmed that a page is camped out by a "power-editor", the next step is see what they are hiding. Page reverts, suspicious locking, agressive archiving, high levels of vitriol to basic questions about the article are all good signs. Its very hard to actually delete things forever on wikipedia, so they have to hide and obscure the history of the article as best they can. See what they are hiding to see what is missing from the article. Once you get fluent with reading Talk pages and version histories, its one of the more entertaining parts of wikipedia imo, though it does real harm to the quality of their obstensible 'mission'.
Are any of you pathologically secretive? Very, to an extent that has done obvious harm to my life and relationships.
have problems with feeling excessive amounts of shame? Not in the least. I'm not sure I actually experience shame, in addition to a number of normal human reactions/experiences.
I tried to expand on these points in more detail, but the aforementioned secrecy is preventing it. Its a constant priority since childhood to conceal my presence and actions from others. I'm also incapable of trusting other people at anything beyond the most superficial level so avoiding them entirely is much easier than constantly having to independently investigate and verify every little thing they say or do. This also includes hiding any traces of existence that I can: moving quietly, not distrubing the world arround me, drawing no attention to myself or my actions. I'm only capable of relaxing when I know with confidence I'm alone and can't be ambushed suddenly. So paranoia I guess, not shame.
All of this being said I'm incredibly happy and live what I consider a very privledged life. I'm almost 50 and have been with my wife for 30 years. She's helped a lot in ways she doesn't fully understand. I WFH and live in a very rural area (closest city of any meaningful size is about 2.5 hours away.) I can go multiple days in a row only ever encountering my wife. She sometimes expresses she wishes she could do more things for me like what some people call acts of service? I think. Like household chores. I won't let her (or anyone) do my laundry, prepare my food, or really any of the day to day tasks of being alive. I do all the shopping, bank/finance stuff etc. I make more than enough that she doesn't have to work so this tends to leave her with not much to do. She has her own issues that make it very hard for her to maintain regimented employment and in on SSI. Once a week she makes dinner for us both, though I have to watch the entire process or I can't eat it. We sleep in the same bed (her's) most nights but I do have to maintain a separate bedroom/office for when I'm overwhelmed by her presence, maybe 1-3 times a month. I'm fine with her entering this room but she knows not to touch anything and she understands if I move something from outside this room to inside of it to leave it alone. I'm very fortunate that I've a lifestyle that accomodates my issues and especially for my wife. Its worth mentioning she has her own mental health issues just as impactful as mine but of a significantly different nature. Our disorders "fit" together very nicely and its something we both noticed right away.
I am perfectly capable of going out and navigating society, interacting with people etc. Its not social anxiety at all. In fact I don't really expereience any forms of anxiety very much. Its more of a positive compulsion if that makes sense, not motivated by fear or anxiety. I can and do manage to be around and interacting with people just fine, but I prefer formal relationships with clear expectations of the workplace or similar situations. I can't interact with society just fine to achieve my goals, I simply consider solitude superior in almost every way, and just easier to live my life. People cause way more problems than they solve.
Unstructured socializing has 0 appeal and if I manage to make an attempt I usually bail out and go home pretty fast.
charlesf
1mo ago
Concurring with this. Every time I've ever encountered a QR code in an email its been a printout image that was scanned/copied to an email and sent out. At the other end of this spectrum are web links in printed materials, with instructions to click here, with the typo red-squiggle line included on the printout.
charlesf
1mo ago
The colleagues I've spoken with and I are generally pretty hostile to any processes that require a phone (like two step authentication)
Two factor identification is one of the best security features that most "normies" will interact with and should never be discouraged. For many people their current smart phone is the most secure electronic device they've ever possesed, assuming they maintain physical possesion of it, and this will be true of their next phone as well. I've worked with fraud vicitms who've combined lost millions of dollars that could have been prevented by simple 2FA on their bank and work accounts, in addition to their Amazon, Apple etc accounts. Many businesses have had enough of 'voluntary' 2FA and have begun to enforce it. People that don't have smart phones can even get a call to a land line where a robot speaks the 2FA code to them. There is a lot to dislike about the crappy techno future we've seemed to wind up in, using your phone to 2FA actively protects you from much of it rather than being part of it.
charlesf
2mo ago
I think if you have the sort of communication environment where your partner (I'm assuming a women, and that you the reader are a man) feels comfortable enough to tell you anything/everything, this will eventually come up, generally in the first year or so. I'm probably not a great person to answer this as I've been with my wife since we were teenagers, about 30 years now.
It did come up with her way back then; we'd both had a handful of less-then-serious highschool relationships, neither were virgins. I'd had a lot more actual sex than she had despite my count of unique partners only being 1 higher as I was pretty active with my HS girlfriends and she actually struggled to get her HS boyfriends to actually have sex with her. I grew up in a large metro and she grew up on a farm in a rural part of the same state probably had a lot to do with the different experiences. If she'd gone to my HS she'd probably have been more experienced than me simply due to more opportunity.
I get the impression that our (romantic) lifestyle is likely pretty unpopular on this board, so the only additional detail I'll add is that we've both slept with way more people after getting married than before, usually the same people, always together.
charlesf
2mo ago
When Amazon realized about 13 years ago that they wouldn't be able to dodge state level sales taxes much longer, they did a whiplash inducing 180 on lobbying and started advocating for a strong detection and enforcement system to make sure that all merchants were unable to avoid the state taxes and launched a new dept. to handle the taxes of merchants who suddenly have to charge sales tax and have no infrastructure for it. Not only are they better positioned to handle the changes, but they also profit off the competition paying them to assuage the impacts of said changes.
charlesf
2mo ago
My sister in law is a nurse, not a doctor, but she has a lot of experience in surgery and trauma lvl 1/ER stuff. She's worked mostly in rural/super-rural/underserved areas for many years now, taking generally 6 month contracts all over the US. Wherever is paying the most she generally takes, with 2-3 months off in between, sometimes longer. Her kids are grown and she's single, no pets; we watch her place for her while she's out. Apparently there are some gov't programs that help fund this, I don't know all the details. She says she makes 4x-6x more doing this than if she just took a ER nurse job at the local hospital, and if they don't have surgeries or ER cases she spends a lot of the time not doing much work at all.
charlesf
2mo ago
Its not just this, its not just Priests/Churches. All institutions, unless there are powerful forces working constantly to counter it, will eventually be run and organized for the convenience and status of the people who have power within it, and not whatever 'mission' the institution ostensibly was created for. Hospitals are a great example of this.
charlesf
2mo ago
I think they should just be honest. Record the records, slap an * on it and explain in the notes. Assuming strong evidence; I've no idea what a sufficient level of suspicion would be to noteworthy though.
I’ve been thinking about a very similar topic to this one recently; the actual % of frauds in cheaters in every field, not just sports.
A man near me made a career in a certain field, climbing the ranks until he got to the top of the local version of this institution. It’s a public profession, and he was briefly in the news, so I want to stay vague to not compound his problems. His profession requires a 4 year degree and some professional certs, and advancing up the ranks generally demanded a masters, then a doctorate at the top. Not always, some get away with a master’s, but most of the people in the role around the nation have one. Turns out he didn’t actually have a phd, or a masters. He just self-studied the material while pretending to be in a program for the amount of time it would have normally taken. He’d worked in the doctorate level roll for over a decade before someone hired a PI to investigate the guy for some reason, and it all fell apart.
It seems like it was a lot easier to fake it in the past, before the internet. There were also fewer examples to make people suspicious. I wonder just how many people have to one extent or another “faked it”: PEDs in sports, fake degrees, fake job histories/references etc. Fake martial arts history or military claims were one of the first ones to really get exposed by the internet. I know more than one person who financed the launch of their successful, life-defining business with the profits of criminal enterprise, usually selling drugs. Is this even the same category? There’s also the currently hot trend of getting real advanced degrees and positions using fake (or plagiarized) scholarship.
Who knows how many skeletons are out there in how many closets. I think we are alive in a particularly fruitful time for discovering these stories.
charlesf
3mo ago
I went to a Catholic high school and took a class on the different varieties of Christianity, both historical and modern, both extinct and existent. Jehovah's Witnesses we used as the example for a modern, existent, non-trinitarian division of Christianity. We learned about some older, extinct ones too like Arianism. While the LDS church does also seem to fit the non-trinitarian definition, they weren't generally lumped in with the JWs. The class was taught by a Jesuit, who despite being a member of the Catholic clergy did make an effort to teach the material objectively, with clear times in class where we could discuss what we thought of these different groups and he would also as his personal opinions at times, always in conformity to Catholic understanding. He tended to divide the 'wrong' Christians into two broad groups: those who have misinterpreted genuine scripture (he put the JWs in this group) and those who have elaborated, extended, and expanded what they think counts as scripture to an extent that they aren't really Christians at all anymore if you examine them in depth at all. He put the LDS church in this group (as well as Islam). He actually mused on the similarities between Mormons and Muslims more than once. His take as to why they were alike was that both groups (early Mormons and 6th century Arabs) had received the proper scripture, both descend from historically Christian populations, but found the New Testament unsatisfying to their egos and elaborated falsely upon the legit scriptures b/c they needed a way to make their group the main characters in the story of God, implying their motivations were both childish and selfish, and a deliberate rejection of grace. He was fun when you could get him going.
charlesf
3mo ago
I feel similarly when I find an article that is supposed to be about a subject I'm interested in, only to be presented with an article that is about the author, with the ostensible 'subject' as the backdrop for a largely biographical story. I'm fine with autobiographies if they are explicitly that, but an article that is supposed to be about, say the history of telephone technology, is in fact about the authors trip to a telephone museum, or the crazy encounter she had while researching the subject.
charlesf
3mo ago
I use a fair amount of cash as I make regular purchases that give a discount for it (or more accurately charge a fee for using a card of some sort, but its presented as a cash discount to placate the public.) I've not seen the old bills in a long time. My sister is a district manager for a bank chain and she says the machines they use to intake cash would sort those for return to the treasury for disposal a decade ago.
edit - ive got about 500 in 20s on me now and the oldest one is from 2021.
The story of the establishment of the Space Force before Trump was ever involved is long and fascinating. The key proponent that actually got it done was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Raymond . The short version is that there had been elements within the USAF, NASA, and congress that have been arguing for a separate military branch for outerspace operations since the 60s. The space stuff actually started in the Army, though it transistioned to the Air Force by the 60s. In the early 80s they finally made a separate Space Command org within the USAF, but this is when the case for a separate force really started to gain momentum, though it would be a long time with an abortive attempt until it actually happened. The argument hasn't really changed in nature at all over time, just relevence, as the circumstances have changed around that Air Force: the subject matter expertise, experience, and career paths for the space related operations has become too complex and specialized to remain in the USAF, just like the Air Force itself emerged from the Army for largely similar reasons. General Raymond spoke many times about his own path through the ranks, mirrored by many of his peers, where he'd be productivly commanding a org within the Space Command of the USAF, get promoted and transferred out of SC back to the general aviation Air Force, and everything he was working on back in Space Command fell apart. Yanking the COs and NCOs back and forth, in and out of Space Command produced worse officers/nco performance in both orgs, chaotic career paths, and hastened retirements of COs to fled to the private sector to continue to follow their passion for space. Essentially that we would be unable to field a competent space command as long as the career people with the expertise could be yanked out of the org at any time without recourse. The Air Force had been promising increased autonomy and specialization to the existing space command, stating they'd stop jerking the career people around and allow them to specialize but never made any real moves to implement it. I think, in my very amateur observations since then, these arguments have been borne out by the record of the USSF, which is operating quite effectively according to everything I've seen and read, especially compared to the other branches. (particularly the Navy which is a mess).
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