problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
This ultimately doesn’t say too much though. You can't really look at a bunch of women's clothing, check for ones that have pockets, see how well they're doing and then draw any conclusions about whether the lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven or not. It is possible for women's clothing with pockets to sell well and for the lack of pockets in women's clothing to still be demand-driven.
To put forward a simplistic example let's say that 15% of women would want pockets, and that the remainder don't. Let's say that a slightly smaller percentage of women would be willing to pay extra for pockets due to the additional cost of sewing on functional pockets (note that pockets are a pain in the ass; even the non-functional ones are if they have flaps and bindings and the rest, but the functional pockets take a lot more time even than that). If ~13% of women's pants have functional pockets, and the remainder do not, clothing with pockets will still sell well even when the relative lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven, since the supply of that good is appropriately scaled to its demand.
Unfortunately I am not aware of any economic studies on this, likely because the topic is trivial and the answer is obvious. Most of the literature I am able to find on it is ideologically-infused sociology without even the slightest hint of rigour. All I can say is that personally, as a dude, I actually don't like pockets, it doesn’t feel particularly secure and I often carry a sling bag along with me in non-professional circumstances where it would be more socially acceptable for me to do so. I assume that the incentive to just use purses is greater when you want to carry makeup and other items (the women I know pack a ton of stuff in their purses; I'm honestly not sure what half of it is for).
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning these skills authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little instruction on the techniques used seem to be available online. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. To a lesser extent it's the case for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) isn't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other super important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world. Of course there are plenty of resources on Renaissance painting you can read yourself, but still; one would imagine it would feature more in curricula given its importance to Western art. The situation for other less-known skills are far worse.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these skills are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice no longer covers them. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?
I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.
It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.
They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's superficially charming but is often shown to be a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.
Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.
I was indeed offering a hypothetical (mostly based on my limited knowledge of OP's situation and the fact he has described himself as a "depressed shrink"), but I half agree and half disagree with what you've written here.
As for anhedonia I have no answer. It's a term I learned on reddit, meaning at first I assumed it was just a pretend word meant to be a catchall excuse for not getting out of fucking bed. I'm not unwilling to believe it is a real thing, but I would suspect finding the root cause of this and sorting it out should be any one individual's main goal in life if he finds himself suffering from it for any length of time. Of course for the anhedonic there is always the convenient excuse: They simply don't have motivation to do anything. I cannot imagine a household where anyone would accept or tolerate this without taking some action to sort it.
Speaking as someone who veered closer to suicide at one point than I usually care to admit and who has also seen claims of poor mental health used as a way to excuse one's failures and a means of aggressively manipulating others (mostly by women who in retrospect exhibited many traits of BPD), I'm of two minds about this. Often it can be beneficial to adopt the mindset of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop whining" and it helps induce a positive feedback loop wherein doing more productive things in turn improves your mood and consequently motivation, but there is a point beyond which it will actually make things worse; beyond a certain level of despair some external assistance can be necessary. Of course it's always a problem that should be solved, it should never be left to fester, but I find maturity is knowing the appropriate context in which one should deploy these two strategies.
Not enough time is a flimsy excuse. There is nearly always enough time for anything that matters. We carve out time for what is important to us. We do what we have to or need to do before we do what we want to do.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "anything that matters" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and doesn't really tell you what you should prioritise, since that is a value judgement that's heavily dependent on the individual. There is a lot of grey area in between "what you need to do" and "what you want to do". Yes if you're an extremely unhealthy weight, losing that weight should be a major priority. On the other hand, if you're within a healthy range perhaps reading books, learning things, etc may actually give you more utility than losing that extra weight and getting swole, depending on what you personally value.
Of course if you're just choosing between these two options you can likely do both to some extent. But tradeoffs inherently have to be made, and inevitably you will not have enough time for something. There are legitimate situations and preference rankings which result in goals like "exercising more" being put on the back burner.
problem_redditor
8d ago
From how it’s presented I assume it is a 5-point scale, with the median value of 3 revised downwards to zero.
problem_redditor
8d ago
Not OP, but I imagine there are two reasons why not: Time and anhedonia.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
Echopraxia was quite the mess. There were things I enjoyed about it, but it lacked a lot of narrative direction and also contained a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense at all just because the story had to happen.
I think in general Watts' short stories work better than his novels, since short stories lend themselves to the exploration of a single conceptual thread which is his clear strong point. With the exception of Blindsight and perhaps the Freeze-Frame Revolution I think things tend to fall apart when Watts is left to craft an extended narrative - there are often a whole lot of unrelated ideas not relevant to the story and there's a general lack of narrative cohesion. The lack of character depth also tends to become far more clear when he has more words to waste on them. Though, you don't really read Watts for his spellbinding characters.
I enjoyed the book so much I read it four times. Not that there aren't quibbles to be had with some of its storytelling, but the concepts and overall narrative are strong enough to overcome its deficits.
something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste
Vehemently disagree with this in particular. In theory Lovecraft would be something I'd enjoy, but I get pretty tired of his penchant for showing the reader incomprehensible unexplained creatures, then stressing endlessly how easily our world could be ended by them - IMO, that is trivially easy to achieve if no burden whatsoever is placed on the writer to explain anything or make it make sense. The challenge with this kind of fiction in my opinion is to introduce a concept inherently clever or terrifying enough to maintain that sense of starkness, alienness and cosmic horror even when the mystery box is opened fully. I get so tired of aliens where the entire point of their existence is to be alien for the sake of being alien - it's easy to write godmade horrors if you're just optimising for weirdness and incomprehensibility, it's not easy to write them if you're simultaneously trying to make them comprehensible and plausible while retaining the dread. The horror in cosmic horror comes from it feeling real enough such that the audience would actually entertain it as a possibility.
Blindsight's cosmic horrors are maybe the only ones in fiction that feel truly alien and scary to me. Most of the others I've encountered are basically souped-up elves with even less plausibility.
Thanks for the detailed advice. At the moment I have six different possible plans featuring separate parts of China, all of which are still open to very heavy revision:
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Beijing - Datong - Pingyao - Linfen - Xi'an;
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Xi'an - Tianshui - Zhangye - Jiayuguan - Dunhuang (so basically travelling the length of the Hexi Corridor);
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Suzhou - Tongli - Hangzhou - Hongcun - Wuyuan (as a jumping off base for Sanqingshan);
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Chongqing - Chengdu - Leshan - Langzhong - Guangyuan - Xi'an;
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Xiamen - Quanzhou - Tulou - Chaozhou - Kaiping - Macau; and
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Kunming - Dali - Shaxi - Lijiang - Shangri-La.
I'm interested primarily in history + some natural sights (preferably without too many tourists!). Feel free to comment on some of these destinations if you've visited. But I realise that's a lot of items, way too much to individually work through, so I'll only ask questions about the destinations you've specifically mentioned.
Chongqing is definitely a place I'm highly interested in, not just because of the outright strangeness of the city itself but also the Dazu rock carvings outside of it. There are five main locations (Baodingshan, Beishan, Nanshan, Shimenshan and Shizhuanshan) and there's also yet another lesser known complex of rock carvings called the Anyue grottoes relatively close by. I've been wondering if the site is interesting enough to justify spending a night in Dazu just so I can explore all the grottoes at a leisurely pace, or if a day trip from Chongqing to see the main two sites of Baodingshan and Beishan would be a better use of my time. From Chongqing it is about 1.5 hours each way, which is making me wonder just how rushed a day trip would be just using public transport.
With regards to Chongqing itself, what are the main places you would recommend? I know of the famous Hongyadong and Kuixing Building, as well as Shibati, Xiahaoli and the Shancheng footpath. There's some historical/cultural sites such as the Huguang Guild Hall, Luohan Temple and Laojun Cave, which I will certainly visit if I go to Chongqing (Erfo Temple in Hechuan seems to be an easy day trip out too). I also hear about lots of old bomb shelters built during the city's short stint as a wartime capital, which have been converted into public spaces and libraries and restaurants and galleries. Is there anything else I've missed?
Kaifeng is an unexpected recommendation because I haven't heard anybody else speaking about it as a destination in spite of its historical importance (perhaps on the Chinese internet they are). What would you say are the best things to visit in that city? I broadly know about Daxiangguo Temple, Yanqing Taoist Temple, Shanshangan Assembly Hall, Kaibao Si Pagoda, Po Pagoda, Dongda Mosque and so on but they don't seem like enough to fill out an entire week. Would be interested to hear about your itinerary when you were there.
Guizhou's mountain villages are interesting and I've been looking at them for a while but haven't been able to fully narrow down what I want to see. Happy to hear your personal recommendations for the province. Something I keep hearing about a number of these villages (I hear it a lot about the Xijiang Miao Village) is that they're overly Disneylandified and set up for tourists? If possible I'd like to avoid that. Langde, Nanhua and Basha Miao Villages as well as Zhaoxing Dong and Dali Dong Village are some of the ones I'm interested in, I'm wondering if staying in one of those villages for a night is worth it. Fanjingshan is another big destination I am interested in.
Finally, how far north would you say I could go in December before the cold starts to get intolerable? Shanxi province has a lot of ancient Tang and Liao architecture and that makes it very attractive to me, but it's also very far north in China. Just trying to see how much my scope is limited by the climate.
Hope this isn’t too much, feel free to respond to as much or as little as you want.
These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.
It's just not typical for pad thai. Pad thai uses Thai chili flakes, which are dried chilies that have been roasted for a more smoky flavour and pounded into flakes. Fresh chill is just a bit too sharp and won't mesh so well with the overall flavour profile of the dish.
That being said, it's really not the worst thing you could do to the dish if you can't find flakes and I wouldn't point it out had he not made so many mistakes.
This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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puts ginger in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Thanks! Xi'an features in two or three of my itineraries - I've heard good things about it from most everyone, so I'll try to prioritise the plans which pass through the city.
A nitpick, but after having done some really deep digging I would actually say China has the richest historical sites of all of Asia, even if much of it is terribly marketed to international tourists (the Cultural Revolution was bad, but there's so much history in China that it's impossible to Thanos-snap most of it away in a relatively short period, and other countries in Asia have also had somewhat analogous periods of cultural destruction like the Meiji Restoration).
I'll definitely agree that most of the really big Tier-1s like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are historical deserts, but that's in part because these cities got big relatively recently; they're nowhere near the core of historical Chinese civilisation. Shanghai was a small agricultural community for most of Chinese history and only really came into its own in the 1930s, and Shenzhen barely even existed until 1979. Most megacities in China are relatively history-poor, but that's in part because there wasn't that much history there to protect in the first place - the cities that are global hubs in China today are, for the most part, not the cities that were historically important. OTOH many of the older cities like Beijing, Chengde, Xi'an, Suzhou, Luoyang etc seem to have way more historical sites than your modal Asian city, not less. And Pingyao looks insane. I do plan to incorporate a lot of areas outside of the cities into my itinerary though.
Weather doesn't really matter that much to me, though -20 is pushing it a little bit and I'm mostly going to China to see history and culture (Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are very attractive in that regard). I've heard of the Harbin Ice Festival before; have you gone yourself and would you recommend it?
So I'm planning a trip to China this December. It's a gigantic place with a lot of history and I find myself a bit paralysed with indecision as to where I should go, I've drawn up about five or six different plans in multiple different parts of the country and can't choose between them.
I'm not sure how many people on this forum have actually visited China at all (there's at least one I guess), but anybody here have any recommendations to share? Any parts of the country in particular stand out to you?
For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you.
There are baseline universal evolved principles of morality, but there's variation in the relative importance people place on any given moral precept and the specifics are far less universal than you seem to think (lying and deception in isolation is universally considered bad, but pretty much everybody considers this forgivable under certain circumstances and their ideas for when it is justified differ). Oftentimes there are tradeoffs between different moral principles (e.g. prioritising the individual's freedom vs. ensuring that a society is stable and ordered) and different people have different ideas of which moral precept should be prioritised.
To offer up a particularly extreme example that relates to driving I visited Vietnam in April and honestly that entire culture's take on how to drive was very close to "create chaos and accidents around you". The road was absolute anarchy, and the amount of aggressiveness Vietnamese drivers (particularly car drivers) exhibited was beyond anything else I'd ever seen. It is just normal and accepted that drivers will not stop around pedestrian crossings even when pedestrians are crossing. I am not exaggerating when I say there were times I thought I was going to die crossing the road. Vietnamese are just built different, IMO.
BTW are you the one who wrote summaries of your travels to different countries in the CW thread a while back? Really enjoyed that post. I remember you got a lot of shit for your less-than-positive review of Japan - the internet seems to have a penchant for hyping it up and treating it as this unassailable paragon of human development but actually after having heard the anecdotes of a family member who traveled to Japan last year and looking at their photos I'm inclined to agree with you (it's a cliche that Japan has been in the 90s ever since the 70s, but it's also true). I think I share your opinion of France as kind of depressing too in many places - even Paris was shockingly polluted and chaotic, and lacked much of the charm it's so famous for.
Your sense of suspicion at all these competing narratives reminds me of my own experiences, though perhaps my upbringing was even more atypical. I grew up in Malaysia and came into contact with many parts of the culture there, but was raised by parents who'd spent time in Britain and who homeschooled me in a very different environment than most other people would ever experience. I knew people who were staunchly Christian and prayed often to the Lord, de facto Taoists who actively made offerings to spirits and arranged their homes in line with feng shui geomantic principles, staunch atheists that somehow still clung to hints of superstition here and there, and so on. When I was sixteen, I moved to Australia (where I now live) and interacted with yet another cultural milieu.
A consequence of this strange muddled background is that I notice I don't really feel kinship with any way of thinking and virtually never identify with any major group or subculture, so there's this persistent tendency for me to feel like an alien wherever I go. I travel for fun a lot and come into contact with a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds, and it often seems like the way they mentally structure and interpret the world are completely incongruent with each other.
Anyway, reality (at least from our perspective) isn't so much an elephant as it is a Necker cube. There are two possible 3d interpretations of this cube, but we can't see both views at once since the interpretations are so diametrically opposed to each other that it's impossible to maintain both orientations in our minds at once. Yes, there is the problem of the Elephant, where different people come across different information about the world and draw different conclusions about it on that basis, but even when everyone agrees on the fundamental factual points of contention there is inevitably going to be subjectivity in how one puts them together and fits them into an internal narrative of the world.
Oftentimes we don't have direct access to seemingly simple things like cause and effect (insert quote about how all science is actually just correlation here) and even the same data points can lead to wildly different understandings of the world depending on the system interpreting them. At this point we can model quantum phenomena very well but what it actually implies is untestable and completely beyond us. So much of what we know about reality lies on the surface of a black box. We don't and perhaps will never have direct access to many aspects of how things work, and until that happens I suspect it will be like the Necker cube: analysing a 3d object through the lens of a 2d plane, and debating how it's actually oriented. There is a capital-T Truth out there, but whether that's accessible to us or not is another question.
That's before we can even get into things like moral outlook, which... well that's a crapshoot. Hume's is-ought problem still remains intractable today. I seriously doubt an AGI would be able to synthesise many aspects of worldview together as a result; there will always be big Unknowns (in more domains than people think, IMO) where all we can do is gesticulate at an answer.
Well, I've lived in both equatorial Malaysia and subtropical/temperate Australia. Despite growing up around the equator I could never stand the heat and mugginess; my preference is 15-18C, clear skies with some clouds, light breeze. The shoulder seasons in Australia are actually ideal for this.
Personally, I enjoy climates where it doesn't rain often either. Rain is annoying, it stops up infrastructure and makes everything slushy. Petrichor smells like shit too.
Okay are you conducting some sort of social experiment where you gradually push the limits of what is considered acceptable in the Fun Thread before people start objecting en masse? Because if you were, I'd believe it. The topics of these legal cases have escalated dramatically week after week.
This is way more off-putting than anything in the CW thread IMO.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days?
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time, there's barely even anything to counter: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
I need to rant about timesheets. I have lost so much sleep because of them, and they have done a great job in completely destroying my self esteem and imposing an unnecessary amount of mental load.
For those of you not in the know, here's a rundown of how internal budgeting in public accounting usually works: A fixed fee is quoted on the engagement letter to the client, which is ostensibly supposed to be based on the amount of time the job took during previous years. As a public accountant you have an internal hourly rate, and when you fill out your timesheet the hours you've taken on a job get multiplied by that rate. The resulting amount is called a WIP, and that is compared against the bill to see if the job was over or under budget. The percentage of hours spent that are actually billed is called "realisation".
In theory it's just meant to be a measure of the actual amount of time it takes to perform the task so people know if they're pricing properly, and if there is out-of-scope work the additional billing will be estimated based on the extra time recorded in the timesheet. In practice? It gets used as a measure of individual efficiency and will impact judgements of employee performance - which doesn't make much sense considering that employees do not get paid overtime in public accounting but are getting punished for booking their overtime because opportunity cost. To make this even more comically sadistic, you're expected to book a specific number of hours per week, and there's also yet another metric that gets used to evaluate employees: utilisation, which is the percentage of time that you actually spent doing productive work - so you can't book a lot of your work hours to admin and get away with it. The budgets, along with the utilisation requirements, often results in there being an incentive to work huge amounts of overtime and book only the normal hours (eating hours) so both realisation and utilisation can look peachy. Often these targets get put on the managers and that pressure trickles down to employees.
A new employee that doesn't really play the timesheet game will often end up with sizeable writeoffs on many of their jobs. I have a mere 1.5 years of experience in tax proper (note most tax accountants did not, in fact, study a whole lot of tax and are usually picking it all up on the job), and I can say the work that reaches you can be highly heterogenous. There's a lot of self-learning involved and a lot of time spent just doing that. In addition, you are also juggling a lot of clients and handling a good amount of client communications to the point you are expected to hound them repeatedly to respond to requests for information or to sign the tax returns you've provided them like idiot children, which means you're being split between many different tasks and you lose a lot of time because this task-switching imposes a serious mental load.
If you're confused on a technical topic you're expected to ask questions, but people are often busy enough that the answer you get is never very helpful. If you half-ass jobs due to the lack of guidance you receive, you'll receive snarky review points in your workpaper, and if you attempt to make your jobs highly technically accurate (something I did), that takes time and requires a large amount of unpaid overtime from you - but you will get penalised for it if you actually record it. Another aspect that makes this even worse is that tax and accounting software used in many firms is hilariously finicky and takes a while to sort out, which inflates actual time spent even further - but higher-ups tend to be distanced enough from such preparation that they underestimate how much time troubleshooting it actually takes. Oh also sometimes you can be within budget but underutilised through no fault of your own because the firm just does not have enough work at a certain point in the year, and be criticised for not doing enough.
In other words, timekeeping in many public accounting firms is a lose/lose/lose situation. Charge your hours and go over budget? Managers complain about blowing the budget and being inefficient. Charge your hours and come in under budget? Managers complain that your utilisation has gone to shit. Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value. You're not supposed to eat time, but you're supposed to come in under budget and if you don't you will be called in and given review points. Great. I had a complaint just yesterday which included the fact that my total productive hours were higher than expected for the year and I was blowing budgets on jobs - which means the obvious solution is not to book any of these hours spent doing work. In my view it shouldn't matter as long as you bill enough per month - the actual billings don't change regardless of what you decide to put on the timesheet, and neither does your pay, but they treat their ridiculous metrics as Divinely Ordained Truth. Nobody will acknowledge how stupid this entire system is, and will expect you to play along.
God the culture sucks. Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is. I'm seriously considering updating my resume, applying for a couple of jobs - in industry, not public - and handing in my two weeks notice as soon as I have another offer.
Crystal Society by Raelifin/Max Harms is one of the only ones with an interesting concept that has come out of an actual EY or EY-adjacent community, though the quality drops off hugely after the first half of the first book to be honest. Its first half is extremely good though - its POV character is an amoral unaligned AI attempting to break out of an AI-box, and it's very gripping. I did DNF the book regardless since quality decreases steadily after the AI achieves its escape.
For general hard sci-fi that actually fits the ratfic category, I would recommend Peter Watts - Blindsight (probably my favourite book ever with my favourite aliens ever) and Greg Egan - Permutation City as good recommendations that won't fail you. Maybe check out some of their short stories as well - I really like Peter Watts' The Island, as well as Greg Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful.
Classic hyperagency/hypoagency. Men need to adapt to fit society (or they are failures who need to be mocked for their fragility), whereas society needs to adapt to fit women (or else it's failing women and victimising them). This double standard probably existed somewhere in human psychology beforehand, but feminists malignantly prey on and reinforce it all the time.
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