dexa_scantron

dexa_scantron , 2 days ago

There are plenty of women who live like this now. It's a cultural thing, not a timeline thing. I had a roommate in college who would wake up before dawn to do her makeup so nobody would see her without it.

(Also high society women certainly didn't make their own breakfasts... well, ever, but especially not hundreds of years ago)

dexa_scantron , 6 days ago

Hello [First name]

If you're in a more casual industry/company, or

Hello [Dr/Mr/Ms Lastname]

If you're in a more formal situation and know their salutation, or

Hello [Full Name]

If you're in a more formal situation and you don't. It's ok to be less formal in email than in a written letter.

dexa_scantron , 6 days ago

https://lettersofnote.com/2010/08/05/the-tiger-oil-memos/

DO YOUR JOBS AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!
(Signed)
EDWARD MIKE DAVIS

dexa_scantron , 1 month ago

Hypothetical question posed to women: would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man? Many women said "bear". Many men took that personally.

dexa_scantron , 1 month ago

Pretty much Jack Shaftoe's storyline in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle

dexa_scantron , 1 month ago

Sooo much more. The Baroque Cycle is like Cryptonomicon squared.

dexa_scantron , 1 month ago

This is a plot point in The Accidental Time Machine: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21608.The_Accidental_Time_Machine; the main character

spoiler

jumps forward into the future a bunch of times, longer jumps each time, and hits a time where the human population is almost gone, and they're like "yeah, the fucking time travelers keep showing up and bringing old diseases":::

dexa_scantron , 1 month ago

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

You should think about reading the Declaration of Independence sometime:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

dexa_scantron , 2 months ago

We're using them. The problem is they aren't replacing fossil fuels. Instead of a polluting coal plant, you have a polluting coal plant and a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines that were manufactured, transported, built from mined substances. It's better than building another coal plant, but it's not solving climate change. Power demand grows to use the available supply.

dexa_scantron , 2 months ago

Cross stitch is a type of embroidery.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

If you're that much astronomically richer than everyone else, how could you possibly be comfortable with it? How do you convince yourself that you deserve it? You either genuinely try to do something good, or you convince yourself that you're just Better Than The Poors because of some innate attribute. I don't think there's another option.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

I don't think that his plans for Mars are good for anyone but himself. Creating a small privately owned Mars colony is more likely to increase problems like climate change and inequality than reduce them. If it were Nasa or another government agency, we could argue that technological advances from the attempt would benefit everyone, like they did in the space race, but this won't even do that. Best case, it makes him even richer. Worst case, it pumps a lot of carbon into the atmosphere and wastes a bunch of resources for no benefit.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

Looks like a ~'31 Rolls Royce Phantom? Somewhere around 29/30/31/32, after that the styling was different.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

That is not how you use a spinning wheel; it's not even close. This is the equivalent of a painting showing someone using a computer by clicking the mouse with their foot, typing on an upside - down keyboard that isn't plugged in, and with no monitor.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

Living with privilege is a lot more comfortable if you pretend you don't have it. There's an ancient Greek virtue, Aidos, which is the knowledge when you're richer than the people around you that you don't really deserve it, and the shame and humility that result from that knowledge. None of those feelings are pleasant; easier to pretend that the world is fair and you earned everything you have.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

Another example: all sound recording and amplification technology was developed to make white men sound good. So all audio equipment makes masculine voices sound better than feminine ones.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

I bought this and am reading The Lost Cause now, and it's really good! An actually hopeful near future that deals with climate collapse with open eyes.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

Thanks for posting this! I didn't know about it and was just about to buy The Lost Cause.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago

I switched to standing-only at work about 10 years ago and it's been great, except for a 2-year stretch where the cleaners in the building I worked in would somehow find a free desk chair and push it under my desk every. single. night. So every morning when I got to work there'd be an office chair sitting on my standing mat and I'd have to find somewhere to put it. I tried moving it far away, finding a chairless desk on the other side of the building, but somehow they kept finding me a chair I didn't want and rolling it onto my mat. Eventually I got a little guest stool and would pull that over onto my mat when I left, and that worked as a decoy chair and kept them from adding a chair. Maybe this comic was about them.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago

Because some scammer told them they could fire people if they did.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago

It's also implicit bias, though. Health care providers have to make assessments of their patients constantly: does this person need more pain meds? Can we discharge them? Do they need surgery or just physical therapy? And implicit bias (for example the very well-known bias that Black women can 'handle' more physical pain than white women because they're 'tougher') will be one factor in these thousands of constant little decisions. If you looked at any one decision you probably couldn't find fault with it, but they add up over time and if you look at the data you'll find statistical trends. Black women are more commonly recommended to have C-sections than white women, all other factors being equal. That's not because individual doctors hate Black women, but it's because unconscious biases affect their decision making, and because race is considered as a risk factor for certain treatment decisions.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago

Let's say it's normal to keep someone on pain meds for 4 to 8 days after surgery. Each day, you assess the patient and check a number of factors to determine when to stop pain meds, like: how much pain do they say they're in? How much do they wince when they walk? How comfortable do they seem? Do they seem distracted when talking to you? Etc. Each of those assessments is subjective, and therefore can be influenced by biases you don't even realize you have. Over a year, maybe that means you stop pain meds on the 5th day, on average, for Black patients, and on the 6th day for white patients. You're not really withholding pain meds from any one patient. Each patient probably doesn't really notice the difference. But over time, that slight difference compounds and adds up to poorer quality of care for one group.

This is why it's so important to measure things like this subjectively, and look for and fix the reasons they're happening. It's very hard, probably impossible, to fix these issues by just assuming that well-meaning people will be able to be completely unaffected by bias. And sometimes people overcorrect: managers in tech are less likely to give Black employees critical feedback, for example, because they don't want to be racist, and that behavior harms Black employees by not giving them opportunities to correct behavior that's holding them back from advancement. Again, tiny behaviors that compound at scale.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago

I was working in my college's computer lab in '97/'98 and this was old then. The freshmen kept falling for it every year!