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One of the things which I think should be most shocking to people who have no experience with Homeless shelters is how often they have policies which *actively make it harder for their residents to find or keep a job*.

What happens if you have a strict curfew but the bus back from your new job only comes once every hour? Better hope you don't leave work even five minutes late, otherwise you ain't getting to sleep indoors tonight! Hope that doesn't impair you at work tomorrow!

Also, better not try to get any swing or night shift work!

This is so obviously stupid and counterproductive that I think those of us who have never had first-hand knowledge of being homeless can't imagine that this kind of stuff is *normal* in American shelters.

Like legitimately they seem designed to keep people homeless.

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Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.

And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.

This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.

And I got an A.

The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.

Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.

But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.

I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.

Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.

The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.

ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.

Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.

However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.

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What's distressing, but also important to understand, about JK Rowling hitting the "Denying trans people were targeted in the Holocaust" point is that it's kind of the last stop before she just goes full alt-right weirdo.

Joanne is denying the Holocaust (if a group was targeted, denying they were targeted is Holocaust denial) and that's going to lead to pushback from historians and experts. But Joanne is too deep in to believe what anyone who disagrees with her says, so she's just going to dismiss what those historians and experts tell her. And once she's disbelieving them about that one thing, well it's just a tiny step to start disbelieving them about other things.

This isn't by accident either, transphobic circles are swarming with far right agitators, ready to use hatred of trans people as an in to recruit people into their causes. They have handbooks for this sort of thing and they are, unfortunately, good at it. I suspect Joanne will be spouting coded versions of Great Replacement stuff by the end of the summer.

This is not a plea to try and pull Joanne out. She's too deep in, and even if she wasn't, she's already demonstrated an inability to examine her own prejudices, an unwillingness to hear criticism and a weakness to flattery. She is perfect recruitment bait for people who know what they're doing, and my impression is she's surrounded herself with people like that.

No, this is to understand two things: First is to use her as an example, to understand how a well meaning liberal can chase their own prejudices down a very dark rabbit hole. We are none of us immune to propaganda and even if we can't change what's happened to her, we can at least use it to protect ourselves.

And second is to understand that one of the main reasons you can't pull Joanne out of the transphobic pipeline is cause she is the pipeline now. She is the transphobic banner bearer now, she is funneling money and attention to these groups, she is their most famous celebrity and she is helping recruit people. Being able to show people how far she's gone, how deep into the right wing rabbit hole she's going, is important to help other people who still think she just "Had some concerns" know where her path leads.

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has anyone written about autism and layers of locution meanings. like. i only have a little bit of understanding of this but i really dont think "autistic people take things literally" cuts it or is accurate a lot of the time but "autistic people tend to understand locutionary meanings rather than illocutionary meanings" seems to immediately explain a lot more

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I wish kinky sex ed wasn't so stigmatized even among left-leaning "sex positive" circles. Everyone's all "uwu I'm a sub I'll do anything you ask" okay mommy wants you to read The New Bottoming Book so you learn how to sub without hurting yourself since your sex ed up to this point is porn and your ex boyfriend Jared who liked to choke you incorrectly

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We need to go back to using sailing ships full time like immediately. Yes it would take longer to get places but the Aesthetic is unmatched

Like there is nothing sexier hthan this

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My secret is that my wife was in an extremely bad period in her life when she entered into a contest for knitting supplies. She loved knitting as a teenager and wanted to get back into it as an adult, but felt like we couldn't afford it. She wouldn't buy anything, and wouldn't let me get anything for her because it would be "a waste of money." So when she got an email from a knitting newsletter she followed talking about the contest, she entered and won third place - a little basic kit that got her excited to start and started pulling her out of her dark place.

This is when you go "aha. You cheeky devil. Did you cheat slmehow? Is that your secret?" But no. My secret is, I faked it all. I created a fake knitting blog, and sent it to her as "something I found." I ran it for a few months talking about made up craft projects with photos off the internet and things. Then I faked the contest, sold some of my possessions to buy the "prize" and let her win. Six months later I stopped posting and she didn't even notice. She still talks about that prize she won as turning her life around, and she'll never know I invented the whole thing.

Now this is some real lover shit!!!

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I seem to remember they also made it so Herodotus was very skeptical of the supernatural, which from my (granted rather limited) understanding of him was not the case. The game almost treated it like the ancient Greek intellectuals would have viewed their myths with the same perspective we do today, this is particularly odd given the fact that many of those myths are actually true in the world of Assassin's Creed

My brother and his friend are playing assassins creed odyssey in the family room and unfortunately for them I Know Things About Ancient Greece.

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Entry level jobs haven't existed since the 2008 crash. 90% of hiring managers won't hire recent graduates. A quarter of job listings are ghost jobs. Companies hire part time so that they don't have to give benefits. Federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009. The True Unemployment Rate is 25%. Master's are the new bachelor's. For most the job search takes over a year. 75% of resumes are never. actually seen by the hiring team.

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Y'all have misused the word "empathy" so thoroughly and pervasively that now the world is full of people who full-on believe they have the power to read minds based on their unquestioned gut reactions to a stranger's tone of voice or facial expressions

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i actually need to know people's thoughts on this because at least in my experience the answer to this has drastically changed since i was on tumblr in the 2010s and its driving me fucking insane

*im talking about fandom takes specifically. not someone being horribly evil about a real-life issue or or blatantly factually incorrect. literally just harmless fandom disagreements or differing interpretations of a text/character/etc.

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A CRITIQUE OF POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AND THE DSM

Bonnie Burstow

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I love it when a salesperson with a lot of expertise tells you something and you can just tell there's like a hour long rant hidden behind the words.