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2 yr. ago

  • I've seen this happen so many times and it's always so embarrassing. There's a lovely template that you can slap onto an article that says something along the lines of "this article appears to have been edited by someone with a close association with the subject." It's truly a marvel in how close it skates towards saying, "the subject of this bio didn't like parts of what people were saying, so they edited it to suit themselves" without saying exactly that. It's subtly brutal.

    Fortunately for the feelings of people who edit their own wiki bios, I suspect that they probably don't feel the sense of shame that I would if I were in that position.

  • You know, I never even wondered that until you mentioned it. Maybe I'll check it out because now I'm irrationally curious! I bet it's pretty nice!

    (/s)

  • Issue 1 would have fundamentally changed how citizens can interact with our constitution by making voter initiatives almost impossible to pass.

    Honestly - I think it was about both, but the November ballot initiative was absolutely the catalyst. Why else would lawmakers call an August election (something recently abolished), out of a seemingly new concern about ballot initiatives? A power grab was absolutely the goal, but there's a reason they tried for it now.

  • Yes, and I do fault them for that, but only to an extent. Wedge issues are a valuable commodity, aren't they? Republicans certainly kept banging on that pro-life drum (which supposedly no one really wanted and y'all were just yelling about to keep the rubes on board?) The flip side of that was that you all looked like extremists. (But Roe is dead and buried, so I guess you're doing Nazis now. We all sort of hope that's cosplay as well, but... look at Roe. Someone might start to suspect you're serious.)

    I guess there is such a thing as a slippery slope.

    In any case, "you had 50 years to make a law about it" seems like a silly argument if the right in question is protected by the constitution. Every SC nominee in recent memory has testified to that specific question under oath.

    And what sort of law are we talking about here? It's far easier to restrict a right than it is to affirm it. It honestly makes no sense practically or politically. The only way to attack that right was through a challenge to Roe, so that was how things went down. They had to overturn Roe. Took half a century. I guess that's something.

  • That's a good find. Unfortunately for that chief, he seems to have a talent for lighting his problems on fire instead of burying them. What could have been a quiet little small town scandal blew up to become national news. Good work, chief!

    And the greatest irony to me is that the newspaper reported on NONE of this. OK, they did cover the story where Karin went off the rails and aired her own dirty laundry at the town council meeting, but it's not like that was any sort of secret.

  • I've seen this argument elsewhere and it seems (pardon me) like patent horseshit.

    Why is this a state's right? What makes a uterus in Delaware different than an uterus in Nebraska? I'm a woman and an American citizen. Everyone keeps telling me that I live in a first-world nation. This makes no sense. "Oh sorry. You live in a first world nation, but you picked the neighborhood of Ohio."

    And let's be realistic - I can afford to travel to anywhere that local, precious state laws where I live are irrelevant.

    The idea of state autonomy made sense in some way in the America that existed before telephones. Emergency decisions might need to be made and horses are slow. But let's be honest for just a moment. The whole idea of federation was a hard sell to the slave states and invested powers. These were a mixture of landowners and merchant classes who had been running things locally in their colonies. They didn't want to give up control, and who could blame them? Meanwhile, the young country needed to have everyone on board for some sort of federation if post-colonial America was going to survive. States rights were a compromise. We've been choking on it for 200+ years.

    As a country we should have evolved past this many years ago. But we haven't. The biggest disruption to our American system was the Civil War. States rights again. Yeah, so we have that to look back upon but never really seem to reckon with it. The last time I heard anyone significantly whine about infringement of "states rights" was with regard to chattel slavery.

  • In addition to getting onto the top of the fridge, mine learned to get into kitchen cabinets. I'd come downstairs in the morning and find her just casually oozing out of the cabinet we keep cups and plates in. "my butt was maybe on all your stuff just now. oh hai. got catfood?"

    I love them. Some still have secret hiding spots in our house.

  • Oh shit. Well that re-ignites my conspiracy mindedness. When I saw that it was an isolated road near a quarry I thought that maybe carelessness could have explained the blocked road. ("meh - fix the mess later. no one will be bothered")

    But if the quarry owner almost certainly blocked the road and is also the new owner? Yikes.

  • I had one who could jump to the top of the fridge from a dead standstill. (About 6 feet [2m] vertical). First time I saw her up there I assumed she used the counter as an intermediate step. Nope. It was like she just turned off gravity for a moment.

    When we found her she was a kitten who had gotten trapped in our garage. Half feral and scared. I swear she was doing 9 foot parkour jumps along the walls when she saw us.

    She's 14 now so she's slowed down a bit, but she has no issues with a human-chest-high jump.

    Cats are neat.

  • The idea that Jews collectively killed Jesus is nothing new.

    https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-killed-jesus/

    And it's still around. Survey from 2004 linked below shows that about a quarter of Americans held that belief and that it had increased since the late nineties. Hell, I think it was a theme in Jesus Christ Superstar.

    https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2004/04/02/belief-that-jews-were-responsible-for-christs-death-increases/

    I guess someone could be ignorant of all this, but whenever someone brings up who "killed Jesus" they're usually not trying to make some vague point via an innocent analogy. In other words, if someone comes out talking about one of the foundational ideas behind European/American anti-Semitism, I'm going to make some assumptions.

    But who knows. Maybe those hoofbeats mean I'm about to be overrun by a herd of zebras.

  • Is this a reference to something that makes no sense in reality?

  • Mine still thinks he fits into a shoe.

    Kittenhood was a good time. He could crawl into a sneaker, curl up, and enjoy 360 degrees of pure human foot stink. Now he can only fit his head inside, which is a bit of a tragedy but he still gets to enjoy the odor.

  • I'm of the same opinion. It's a shame that she (like her mother before her) can't live in the wild, and I hope they can find a humane home for her in captivity. Meanwhile, I hope she fucks more of our human shit up while she's still free.

  • I'll sum up this hard truth with an analogy: "You must be this tall to ride this rollercoaster" has nothing to do with punishing short kids. It prevents injury to short kids.

    The thing is, letting kids with sub-par K-12 education into higher ed isn't doing them any favors. It sets them up for potentially devastating failure. Many of them will be so far behind that they'll fail within the first year. It's not that they're not smart, or they're not hard workers. They simply lack the foundation that their peers already have. They'll need remedial coursework before they can even try to re-take the standard curriculum. Or they may be able to limp through some basic classes before failing a year later.

    Imagine that scenario for all the kids in an entire state.

    And to continue your point - you're right that poor kids are punished. They're punished all across the US, but it has nothing to do with whether they're admitted to university. It's because their K-12 schools are funded by local property taxes. Rich districts get good schools with better teachers, and access to better materials and opportunities. Poor districts have few resources, more (on average) parental apathy towards education, and poorer outcomes. Even the top ranked kids from poor schools may struggle when they reach college.

    Florida is trying to expand that disadvantage to an entire state. The fact that out of state admission officers will look at a HS degree from Florida the same way they'd look at one from a homeschooled kid isn't a suggestion or a proposal. It's a fact.

  • The name means just "lobster in/on a roll" - with roll meaning " a small bread" rather than the act of rolling something. This does look delicious, but it is also somewhat atypical of the dish as I know it. The bread looks underdone and untoasted and the lobster is just sort of sitting on top, weirdly. Typically, the lobster is loaded into a slice in the roll and there is much more of it. Paradoxically, you can eat a proper lobster roll without a knife and fork, but this one seems to demand that you use utensils.

    A google image search will demonstrate more clearly, but I could describe it as "an unholy amount of lobster salad in a hotdog bun."

    Also - worth noting: you can make a lobster roll with the shellfish dressed with either butter or mayonnaise/lemon. Differences are regional and although it causes mostly good natured fights, I think both are nice. This one appears to be of the butter variety.

  • You need to install one or more cat containment units. Our favorites are the 9x11 inch, soft grey boxes with 4 inch flexible sides. (Cardboard boxes also work, but my managers prefer the soft and flexible feel of the store bought merch).

    The delicate cat diplomatic situation in my office meant that I could only use two traps at once, but it looks like you could manage three without any additional treat-ies in place.

    They fit, they sit, and they quickly fall asleep. No more keyboard interference. No more reminders that it's only 3 hours until feeding time. No more worrying about whether you need to report them to HR when they demand you "touch my butt now."

  • oh-god-oh-god-oh-god.... FRAMES. I had forgotten all about that shit show. It seemed to bring out the Bigendians and Littleendians in everyone. So much screaming. Frames, man.

  • I'm technically non-tech, but have a bachelors degree in a hard science. I say technically because I did learn a bit of programming and other skills because I'm of a certain age and also you sort of have to if you want to make your work life not suck.

    If I can create an automation that can do something that would normally take me days or weeks? Hells yes. (+1 if it's a fun challenge and +2 if I can transfer a time-saving tool to my co-workers).

    But it looks like magic (scary magic) if you don't have that background/skill set.

    And... long story short... I now work in a science-adjacent job but I've also gained the reputation as a "computer hacker" at my workplace. I appreciate how funny that is because I'm nothing of the sort! The thing is: a colleague once - in all seriousness - reported me to IT for these "hacking exploits" that I was committing. With VBA for Excel. Fortunately, IT laughed their asses off when they heard that one and I've retained my job.

    • to be fair, it was a prank that I ran on her and my other colleague.
  • At some point, the question becomes: was the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?

    I don't mind training someone if they're not 100% up to speed but they also need to be capable of learning and retaining things. A lot of that means that you need a foundation based on education and on the job learning. In other words, I'm not going to teach foundational shit that you should have picked up in high school.

    One memorable example: we had one applicant who claimed a high degree of competence and related experience - and although I had some doubts during the interview I was realistic about the job market and our chances of finding someone who was a perfect match. She was personable, seemed smart, and had worked in the industry. How hard would it be to train her? If she could manage to pick up even the most basic parts of the workload it would be win to hire her.

    A short list of what we learned

    • no bachelor's degree (our manager was livid when she found out about that one)
    • no understanding of basic science (like, "temperature is not measured as a percentage" basic science)
    • a week into the job, asked when she was going to "start doing X," even though the job description was "you're going to be doing Y and Z." To be fair (?), the words describing X and Y were fairly similar and you might mistake one for the other if you had a poor grasp on either of them.

    I'm going to gloss over a lot of irrelevant (but horrifying) detail here. We did have one memorable conversation where she said, "I'm so glad I applied for this job even though I wasn't qualified. You never know where you can get by trying!"

    Where she eventually got was fired, but that took some time and the damage she did is still legendary. Part of that legacy of raging incompetence is that we fact-check resumes in ways that we previously did not. But the great irony is that she probably had no idea of just how unqualified she actually was. Again, the question becomes: is the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?