ironica.bsky.social

John Scalzi @scalzi.com [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 16:42 UTC

One of the hardest and smartest things I ever learned was to accept I could be wrong. I'm still not batting 1.000 on it, but I'm better at it than I used to be.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 23:25 UTC

How many cops does it take to arrest an unarmed college protester? To quote John Connor: "Uh, all of 'em, I think." (Photo from ktvu.com)

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 06:54 UTC

It's only really private if no one else sees it. And it's only encrypted from end to end... Once it gets to the endpoint anything can happen. And apparently something did. You wouldn't be seeing it if it were private. And the point stands... Does anyone think cops are trying to save lives?

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 06:04 UTC

My mom (technically Silent not Boomer but anyway) went to therapy. I think it was just so she could say someone else backed her up on her crazy narcissistic bullshit tho.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 06:03 UTC

Since the original is "shut your pie hole," and it means shut your mouth, which is the hole you put pie in... Which hole do you think people put Ferengi in?

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 05:56 UTC

Ok, I thought "social media" were internet-based platforms where people shared text, images, etc with their friends or the public, but I won't quibble. But you're comparing people trying to save lives with people who have a track record of killing people for no damned reason. Not the same.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 05:07 UTC

Doctors are trying to*save* lives. And they're not taking pics and sharing them on social media... Or if they are, they're getting fired for HIPAA violations.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 31, 2024 at 04:47 UTC

If you're able to forget that that dead body is a person who will likely be mourned deeply by their family, and so taking the picture and posting it in the first place is an awful thing to do... Even if it weren't on the taxpayer's dime.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 23:32 UTC

What does it mean that the Windows Task Manager keeps crashing? O.o

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 15:30 UTC

Sign says "No boarding Track 1 on this Platform" so why do all the benches face Track 1?

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 02:26 UTC

But some of those people are a national government that gets billions of military support from the US every year, and some are people fighting to have clean water in their homes (that are being taken from them). Semantics are all well and good when you're safe on the other side of an ocean.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 00:19 UTC

There aren't 4 weeks in a month though. Every month is *at least* 4 weeks long, but most are 4.43 weeks long and many are 4.29 weeks long. A year is "12 months" but a month isn't a fixed unit of time, and a year isn't a whole number of weeks. So yeah, teaching small children is a bit more involved.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 00:14 UTC

Nope, that isn't a good word problem, at least for this age. (1) They're still on whole numbers; (2) they're working with operations that are one single-digit and one two-digit #; (3) it requires info they don't have and that isn't even straightforward (which month? When does the pay period start?)

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 30, 2024 at 00:11 UTC

You are willfully ignoring the charge of antisemitism. Calling it antisemitism is casting the actions of a government head as a religious exercise. Is killing Palestinians just something Jews do to be Jews? Or something horrific that one can be held accountable for?

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:52 UTC

But only if you understand how to relate the two numbers to each other. It's easy for us all now as adults (I mean, a lot of us) but no, the average fourth grader doesn't just automatically know there are about four weeks in a month.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:50 UTC

Things in real life rarely are. I mean, at least they gave February a multiple of 7 days. Even our calendar doesn't bother to make a year a multiple of a week :-P And kids who started school since about 2008 don't hate word problems like we do. Better curriculum.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:45 UTC

Nope, pro-birth would require them to support prenatal and perinatal care. They don't. :-/

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:45 UTC

Nope. It's not. You have to solve that to find the right answer, but first you have to know that you get the right question by dividing the days in the period by the days in a week. It's not the same thing. Trust me, I've met too many adults who don't really know how to do this.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:42 UTC

They didn't say it was "bad", they said it was antisemitism. Israel is a state, not a religion. Netanyahu is a murderer, not a rabbi. ...But you only come to that conclusion if you think slaughtering Palestinians is a crime against humanity. And you have to start with them being humans for that.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:35 UTC

They're anti-woman. If they were pro-pregnancy, they'd fund prenatal care.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:34 UTC

I dream of a day when we restructure our system for providing safety and security around something other than a club that recruits bullies who can't get better jobs.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:32 UTC

I guess if you forget that these folks walk around with guns and the right to deprive you of your liberty

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:29 UTC

Wait, you mean John Scalzi grew a tail from being covered in frosting? Facebook is gonna love this!

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:26 UTC

What do you mean? That's exactly what word problems have always been about. My generation (X) despised and dreaded them, and our ability to apply math in real-world situations sucks. For Z and Alpha, this is *most* of their math, and they are learning better than we did.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 23:25 UTC

Then it's important to identify students who need additional support, since our educational system aims to produce people with high English fluency. The fact is, what's hard is not 42÷7; what's hard is taking actual situations and formulating the right question to get the answer you need.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 19:21 UTC

I mean, I would like to see anti-trans assholes waste millions on getting on the ballot and then suffer humiliating defeat from all the voters in the Bay area and SoCal with the eyes of the nation on them, but this is good too.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 19:16 UTC

I mean, sure, we all know that February isn't going to have 42 days until the leap-leap-leap-LEAP year in 4444, but it's still a somewhat sensical problem for finding out if the kid knows how to formulate the right equation and solve it.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 19:14 UTC

That's exactly the point of the question... Can you formulate the right equation to determine the answer. They're not asking what 42/7 is, they're asking how to do the operation for finding out how many weeks in a month.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 29, 2024 at 02:50 UTC

If something is "out of whack", does that mean it has departed from whack, or that it has depleted its whack?

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:37 UTC

There are egregious examples out there, sure. But I've also seen ones that made small mistakes that humans also make all the time, like not knowing the difference between City of LA, Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Metrolink. Stuff that can just reinforce bad info.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:34 UTC

If this trend spells the end of chat bots instead of customer support, I will celebrate it. I can read the help docs too you know. I don't need a machine to display them one line at a time (looking at you, PayPal).

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:24 UTC

...I told her to go work with this guy to learn how bodies really work. So there you go, it can happen.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:23 UTC

"because they're dangerous when you have a herniated disc. They can shear the bulge right off and then you have a much worse problem." And then I realized the Ortho surgeon he referred me to (also fantastic) was married to the other DC in his practice. I asked the Ortho and he said yeah...

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

There are a LOT of charlatans out there... But I've met a couple good ones. My best PT ever was also a DC. I didn't even know until my third appointment when I happened to notice it on his card. I asked him why he hadn't used any chiro techniques on me and he said....

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:18 UTC

I always check labdoor.com to see if it has reviewed the supp I need, and then get a brand that scores high.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:16 UTC

Because they are for-profit companies and those things sell.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:15 UTC

My favorite is beds. I spent $75 to fix my Sleep Number mattress and another few hundred on a good memory foam mattress topper so that I could get out of bed without crippling back pain, but that can't even come out of my FSA. (I can afford it but so many can't.)

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 16:13 UTC

They just got a degree from Dartmouth too. How about doing this at, say, Compton High School? Then he doesn't even need to make them give to charity.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 26, 2024 at 15:58 UTC

"Well then he's lost. How will we get him back where he belongs?"

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 22, 2024 at 21:31 UTC

Flew LAX > MSY and back a couple weeks ago. Wait at LAX TSA was negligible. At MSY, it was 50 minutes between joining the line and putting my shoes back on.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 22, 2024 at 21:28 UTC

And then when there are innovations that might actually improve transit, they get misapplied badly so they can't be distinguished from the chaff (I happen to think Microtransit is a great alternative to barely-there hourly bus service, just not a replacement for *real* bus service)

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 22, 2024 at 21:25 UTC

...and the thousands I exploited or stole from along the way.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 22, 2024 at 21:23 UTC

See, the key difference is in the phrase "prisoners vote". In the US, most incarcerated people lose the franchise, in some states permanently (even after they've served their sentence and are even done with parole).

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 22, 2024 at 21:18 UTC

...who also made a deal with Nestle so they could hide their baby-killing asses behind the Starbucks brand in Europe. But I will totally use their toilets when on road trips.

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 21, 2024 at 14:06 UTC

I was ok until you got to fresh pet. We almost never buy packaged dog food but when we do that's our emergency supply option. (Mostly we get a pet mix from a local butcher.)

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@ironica.bsky.social [ View ] May 21, 2024 at 06:17 UTC

She's won two f***ing Oscars. And she's TWENTY-TWO.

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