theevenprime

[theevenprime]

The Best Revenge

Scheduled post: over a decade ago, before I ever met her, my abuser was awarded funding for ongoing medical expenses and insurance premiums in a court case. That funding runs out the day this post is published. And unless she's somehow become a functioning, productive member of society in the interim, there is no chance she will be able to afford the complex cocktail of a-dozen-plus exotic prescriptions that she uses to pretend she isn't three personality disorders in a trenchcoat.

Almost always, the best revenge is living your own life well. Every once in a while, it's also about remembering how the people whose self-destruct AOE attack you've been caught in will continue to be completely incapable of living their own lives. Most days, it's enough to look back and breathe a sigh of relief that you've made it. Sometimes, it helps to take note of who won't.

[theevenprime]

It was played multiple times in the trailer, and the trailers were everywhere for weeks. I've seen that scene more times than any scene from any movie I've actually watched.

That's a big part of why it sticks in memory.

One of the ways I constantly visualize myself dying is a giant log falling off a truck straight into the car I’m in, exactly like in a scene from one of the Final Destination movies. Anyway the other day I was going to get a burger and there was some gardener’s pickup truck in front of me which had a bunch of tiny unsecured logs piled up in the back with the tailgate down, which made me laugh because of how much it resembled a harmless mini version of what’s in my imagination. Then I noticed the unsecured chainsaw.

[theevenprime]

Everyone so far is wrong.

Give money to a poor person, and it's spent several times over as it changes hands, and the person receives basic necessities.

Give money to a rich person, and it's spent several times over as it changes hands, and the person receives some future claim, usually partial ownership in an enterprise, sometimes municipal bonds.

These multiplicative effects can ricochet differently through different segments of the economy, and different goals will suggest different courses of action. Fiscal policy to improve housing outcomes will look different than fiscal policy to improve employment, or inflation, or basic research.

But money in investment accounts is not gold buried beneath the floorboards. Investing money is spending it.

[theevenprime]

"We are the daughters of the witches u couldn't burn" is how you say "we're really fucking annoying" in #girlboss.

something something we are the daughters of the witches u couldnt burn but also we’re really fucking annoying #girlboss

[theevenprime]

This is exactly the aesthetic sexual dimorphism of Minnesotan Millennials.

what if vampires are like mosquitoes and only the ladies drink blood

[theevenprime]

Help.

I have a job interview with a CEO named Fortunato. You bastards have ruined me. How will I make it through an entire dinner without making a single wine cellar joke. How, I ask you!?

[theevenprime]

15% is standard, and it always has been, but it's polite to round up to an even multiple of $1, or $5/$10 for large bills. It has always been thus. I will die on this hill.

That said, I will absolutely go to a restaurant that has 20% higher prices if it disallows tipping. Tipping culture Delenda Est.

I've had an eyebrow up about attempts to push American tipping norms from 15% to 18% but I'm willing to accept that labor inputs constitute a bigger share of the total input pie now and should be compensated accordingly

[theevenprime]

Richard Best twitching in his grave.

After WW2, the US wrote Japan's new Constitution, including a provision about how they weren't allowed to have military forces.

These days, they have a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (totally not an army), a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (totally not a navy), and a Japan Air Self-Defense Force (totally not an air force).

But their Constitution is, to this day, still interpreted as banning aircraft carriers.

Anyway, meet the Izumo-class multi-purpose destroyer (a military boat which carries aircraft) (not an aircraft carrier).

The entire Wikipedia article is gold, but some choice excerpts:

The ship carries up to 28 aircraft

(B-but not in, like, an aircraft carrier way, b-baka.)

"has raised eyebrows in China and elsewhere because it bears a strong resemblance to a conventional aircraft carrier"

It's like that scene in The Emperor's New Clothes where the kid shouts "that's an aircraft carrier!" and the emperor's advisor says "no, Emperor, it's a multi-purpose destroyer which happens to carry aircraft; it just looks like an aircraft carrier to stupid people."

"there may be no runway available for the US aircraft in an emergency. I cannot say that the US F-35B should never be placed on an [JMSDF] escort vessel." (Japan's Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya)

"What if our esteemed allies, the US, somehow got into an emergency in which they need a place to land their F-35B's? Oh, by 100% pure coincidence, we just happen to have these boats, which totally aren't aircraft carriers, but could support having F-35B's land on them! In fact, let's do some upgrades to make it easier for F-35B's land on them, for this specific situation and no other reason."

"(Please ignore the leaked military documents saying it was always planned to be an aircraft carrier.)"

[theevenprime]

Very little energy is lost. At those weight scales, the difficulty is extending the leg, not bearing the weight. And the friction of the bottom caterpillar against the ground is high enough that there isn't much inconvenience to being inched along on top of.

@onenicebugperday can you explain this?

[theevenprime]

Plan:

Place a mole on Staff.

Have them enable tipping for Staff account.

Because Tumblr has no QE staff or policies, enter a large negative number and watch the money get deposited in your account.

Profit!

I've been gone almost a week and never knew that this was added

[theevenprime]

Heyting is somehow able to make cogent points while still being so completely un-self-aware that they believe the different sections of the gre are necessarily calibrated to be equally difficult, despite the entire conversation--the crux of the argument--being incompatible conceptions of "difficulty" across fields.

The initial point was "more people score perfectly on the math portion than on the other sections," which, as I pointed out, doesn't suggest that math is an easier field, whatsoever. Maybe the math gre is easier than the other sections. Maybe they're similar, but because there's less luck, correctness across questions within test-takers is more highly correlated.

But none of that does anything to diminish the initial complaint about advancement in the humanities academe being a lot of politicking and zero-sum political games. This isn't to say that history, as a field of study, is "harder" than physics. What would that mean? It does make the allegation that success in the academic field will, in the absence of rigor, be achieved through a lot of luck and manoeuvering that taints a lot of the output, which ends up being bullshit.

But even if the gre chart above had anything to do with anything, it's still not a persuasive chart from simple selection bias alone. The smartest physics students have tech firms, hedge funds, and consulting gigs clamoring over them. The smartest philosophy students could probably get many of the same interviews, but aren't as aggressively recruited, unless things have changed quite a bit in the last ten years. I would absolutely expect the segment of Philosophy concentrators who take the gre to be selected differently than the, e.g., CS folks.

But even if that's not the case, even if the conversation we were having was "who's smarter," and even if GRE scores were a solid metric for that, and even if there weren't selection bias there, well, they seem pretty interleaved between the two categories. So it's still an unimpressive chart to use.

I really don't know what they were thinking. If I had to guess, I guess they were thinking [unbridled rage at dipshit evo for trolling them], which, like, fair enough, I would too. But that shouldn't mean they get a pass on making a bad argument.

I don’t much care for the term “mansplaining” but making a statement about your academic field, having a guy [eta: apparently maybe nb? breaking gender barriers for brand new genders ig] tell you that you are an embarrassment to so much as discuss it, telling them you know more about it, and then getting this

in response is um. Yeah wtf

[theevenprime]

What they invariably mean is "O2 sat is not reduced, because people instinctively compensate by breathing harder when something obstructs their breathing." The reasonable version of this claim is "under normal circumstances, this compensatory effect is automatic and sufficient." But the claim as it's usually promulgated, (and no one tell my very medical family I said this), is horsefeathers.

[theevenprime]

This is just Species. Or Under The Skin. Or Jennifer's Body. The industry has no compunction about that genre if they think it'll sell.

self referential/self aware horror is trying to stretch out its shelf life because the industry is afraid of the next step in the logical progression of appealing to modern horror audiences: what if there was a crazy monster coming for you and you tried to suck it off

[theevenprime]

With anemones like that, who needs fiends?

This is apparently a major villain from Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger, her name is Goche Ru Medou and she is an evil doctor whose motif is supposed to be a sea anemone (she does not look like a sea anemone)

[theevenprime]

To pull it back from whatever the fuck she-who-should-spend-more-time-observing-and-less-time-embarrassing-herself is trying to say, and returning to heyting's initial thought, a cluster of high scores is exactly what you'd expect if there were some underlying understanding being measured. Remember that binomial distributions are found in the scores of coin-flipping contests. "The test set up to examine math is based on understanding which you may or may not have, the test set up to examine vocab is more influenced by the randomness of the words you're exposed to" is exactly what the reported curves suggest.

its common wisdom among some ppl that math/stem skills are objectively harder than verbal/hum skills and i think an interesting empirical counterpoint to this is that high-achieving testers consistently do worse on the verbal sections than the math sections of the gre/sat—to the point that a perfect score on the math section of the gre puts you only in the 96th(!!) percentile while you have to lose at least five or so points in the verbal to exit the 99th

hardly the be all and end all of this “debate“ but it does sit poorly with some popular narratives

[theevenprime]

So, Star Trek?

big fan of the genre that’s just “what if there was a fucked up city”

[theevenprime]

Yes. Return to German physics. Enough of this--wait, what?!

I think there are still a few people around (like perhaps @athingbynatureprodigal ) that don't think we need to start ripping this stuff out with defunding, combined with modernization of civil rights employment law (to weaken the undemonstrated racially scientific assumptions present in e.g. the 4/5ths rule).

Nuclear reactors do not grade on a curve.

It's one thing if people argue about whether a nuclear power plant is or should be built on Native American land. That's a political question to be answered by politicians.

It's quite another to argue that standards need to be lowered for the field of nuclear engineering (given the current state of the talent development pipeline), or that it's 'white science' (what "epistemic racism" and similar jargon will likely boil down to).

Most likely there hasn't been much impact yet, but this sort of thing involves getting people to agree to some statement and then exploiting that for leverage later. There is no point in waiting for this to become an actually serious problem where standards have been lowered for reactor operators.