Christian @ christian @lemmy.ml

I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative o

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5 yr. ago

The welcoming greetings I would receive whenever I would arrive back home were literally the most reliably happy part of every day.

I agree, but I think Hillary does, and it would be a personal embarrassment to her.

Wow you wrote a lot of nonsense.

I'm reading what you're writing as saying IQ tests should not be taken seriously but it also sounds like you're disagreeing with me for writing that I think IQ tests are a garbage concept that someone would be inclined to buy into if they're overly insecure and want a shortcut to claim that they're "smart". What did I write that you actually disagree with?

I was replying to a comment wondering how people can take them seriously and I was trying to imagine what could lead a person to entirely avoid looking at the very obvious reasons why iq tests should not be treated seriously. It feels like you're condescending to me while holding the same opinion I have.

My intuition is that "smart" is a vague word that means a lot of things, but almost all of those interpretations are generally seen as a positive and respectable. The idea of being respected is inherently appealing, so if we entirely conflate the colloquial meanings with a very specific meaning that can be measured accurately on a linear scale, well then you can just show people your good number and take a shortcut to being revered without having to actually behave in an observably respectable way in front of other people.

A person taking an iq test has experience with claims of being smart being met with skepticism, so the next idea is that a third party would help clear up that misunderstanding. They're not paying to be told they're smart, they're paying for the certificate from a third party to back them up.

My guess is that overlooking the obvious issues is more about desperation than anything else. No one calls someone intelligent to convey that they can score high on a specific test that measures nothing meaningful. It also should be very natural to ask whether other people might find reason to doubt the value of a certificate. Not doing any investigation into these thoughts is pretty fucking stupid, but stupid to the point where I think there has to be a certain level of desperation to not see them at all.

Yeah, I think over ten years we only had ours actually pose for us twice.

I went camping with my family, was probably seven or eight years old. There was a sign right next to our camping spot to notify people about something not to do, who knows what the message was in reality but I like to imagine it as "do not bend this sign backwards to use it to catapult rocks you find laying around nearby".

Anyway, while my parents were preoccupied with setting up our tent, my makeshift catapult hit me right by the eye. Thankfully it did not actually injure my eye itself, just huge cuts both above and below the eye, but I had a pretty good talent for screaming at that age regardless of which part of my body was hurting. I remember after an hour or something my parents kept pushing that all the other campers were going to think I was being abused, and then we packed up and left our week-long camping trip a couple hours after arriving.

Yaoling is spectacular. Monster taming RPG (think pokemon) with autobattle mechanics.

We had a tiny basement and a small single room upstaira, both were mostly used as storage (and laundry for the basement). Our boy would spend most of his time hanging out with us, but sometimes he would go upstairs or downstairs just to yell his lungs out. Even though he was typically very affectionate, if I came to check on him he'd act kind of aggravated and run off, like you're not supposed to be here, gimme my space. Okay little man. I really don't know what that was about.

One night I was drifting off and my wife woke me saying "Did you hear that?" I said "No, what was it?" and she said "it souded like he screamed upstairs" and being a loving husband and cat dad I said "he always screams" and fell right back asleep. The next morning he had a mild limp so yeah, he fell off the rail edge partway down the stairs. I'm glad he healed up quick because this story would be a lot less funny to me.

A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It waa a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he was somehow correct and it wouldn't restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent at all. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.

I don't doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset with him when that happened is wrong.

The decision was made at the end of October last year, so still very fresh and still very painful. Legally still married for a few more months.

I watched her spirit die in slow-motion from my health issues making me unable to meaningfully contribute and turning her into a caretaker while being the breadwinner. It wasn't one single thing with my health, it was a series of one issue setting off new issues, and after a long enough time of that you stop feeling optimistic that getting through your current problem will be the end, and emotionally the new ones hit harder. I know this sounds bad on her, but she tried so hard for so very long. I knew it was killing her, it was killing me watching what she was going through. It wasn't her fault for giving up, and anyone who watched what I did would understand that.

I've moved back in with my parents as a man in his late thirties. I wish I had had the courage to make that decision myself a year ago rather than forcing her to decide to give up. I kept trying to have faith that if I just kept pushing I could get back to a better place and fix everything. My parents are a nine-hour drive away, with my mom having severe cat allergies, so moving out also meant abandoning my best friends, and obviously my human friends too.

Counseling helps a lot but I feel like twice a week is still nowhere close to enough. And of course, almost every single problem I'm going through has health insurance fighting tooth and nail to not treat and I feel limited in my emotional ability to be constantly fighting on all of that.

I also had a really good relationship with my parents before but I am absurdly sensitive to the weight I'm putting on them right now, which I think is a trauma reaction. They are doing everything they can for me and I just totally withdraw and don't feel like myself at all around them now. They want the best for me but right now I do not have the emotional strength to make any requests of them, no matter how light.

This mostly turned into venting, but given the thread topic it's probably expected. I don't really want suggestions for actions to take because right now I'm still too dead inside to follow through on anything.

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I'd have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I'm eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you're doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can't play with getting her accustomed again, I've got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn't get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don't care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn't move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I'm about to cry just from writing this.

I think we can all agree that Trump should respond to this baseless libel by unsealing every inch of dirt he has on Elon.

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn't aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It's especially weird because I don't think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I'm not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there's a huge incentive to risking injury.

He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I'd give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with "Proud New Dad" and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said "no" and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently "it's 1 minus the null set". I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A "null set" is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using "the" here implies there's just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That's whatever. But we're not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we're not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he's given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it's would be one thing if we're early on and he'll discover he's in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they'll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.

It's borderline inspirational. It almost makes me want to make a linkedin account just to riff on this for every mundane aspect of my life. I mean I don't have anything as impressive as a top-25 spot on a Clash of Clans leaderboard, but just because I can't compete with this guy doesn't mean I'm unhirable.

First draft for a pitch:

Hey hiring managers, have you ever had to deal with ungrateful employees who incessantly whine about needing "sick time" for imaginary problems like "food poisoning"? We've all been there. What you need is a guy who is still in sepsis recovery and can barely function day to day to help them realize how good they have it.

Due to supply-and-demand, you should be ready to make a highly competitive offer. Hourly wages are acceptable with overtime pay over forty hours, and under the agreement that I will be on-the-clock for every hour which I spend recovering from sepsis, which is all of them.

People without empathy shouldn't have the right to lead people (politics, work, ...).

The inclusion of the phrase "have the right to" is what changes this statement from sensible to nonsense. We'd need a way to declare who has that right, and I cannot imagine any idea of an empathy certification board that is not horrifically dystopian.

I'm not convinced, could you share your evidence?