(via michaelblume)
3 weeks ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #shitposting · 165 notes · source: conservativewomantoday · .permalink
me when i see a cat: CAT! cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat
Fun fact: when I see cute animals, I forget English and automatically revert to my native Hungarian. I don’t know what bystanders make of me, reciting guttural gibberish to rabbits.
But the real question is, what are you SAYING to the rabbits? Is it ‘RABBIT! rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit bunny bunny bunny awww cute bunnyyyyy’?
Well, I usually say the Hungarian equivalent of ‘bun bun bun lil bun look at your tiny spoon-shaped ears awww bun brave little lawnmower bun’, but sometimes I say ‘hey rabbits, my sister’s gonna go to med school’ because I think everyone should know.
I live in Japan, and I always revert to English to talk to small animals, and I was cooing at this tiny little fluff machine of a puppy in baby english like “hello you’re so cute such a cute hello hello yess you’re good” and the 70 year old Japanese lady that was walking him started to *translate the baby talk english into Japanese* for her pup. She wanted to be sure he understood it too.
Not only do I tend to revert to Finnish when talking to cats, my brain has also, due to some peculiar circumstances (mostly related to the fact that I live with a sm0l fuzzy cat and call J a cat too), been conditioned to consider anything sufficiently cute a “cat”. Dog? Nope, my brain outputs “cat” before I realize what I’m doing. Person? Yeah, my brain is going to call any sufficiently pretty person a “cat” too unless I pay conscious attention to this.
So basically if you observe me making inexplicable gibberish noises at something, it means I like whatever I’m making those noises at and find it cute.
(via michaelblume)
3 weeks ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 235,714 notes · source: creap · .permalink
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!” –the Slytherin primary motto
(via metagorgon)
3 weeks ago · tagged #it me #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 51 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
Monty Hall, except Omega replaced the car with a million dollars if it predicts you won’t switch doors
then you open the door and BOOM it’s a fuckin’ trolley
Omega Hall Trolley Problem
Before the Problem begins, Omega uses godlike predictive power to find out whether you are a Switcher or a Stayer.
Omega presents you with three doors.
Two of the doors, if picked, will cause a trolley is to run over five people.
Behind the third door, there is another trolley.
-If Omega predicted you are a Switcher, it will run over ten people.
-If Omega predicted you are a Stayer, it will run over one person.Having picked a door, Omega now reveals that one of the doors you didn’t pick would have been a Five-Person door.
Should you switch or stay?
this is horrible and I love it
(via shieldfoss)
3 weeks ago · tagged #shitposting · 70 notes · source: sigmaleph · .permalink
Yeah, Google, if the fucking youtube app had a paid feature to play things in the background, that would be great. :|
…is this sarcasm…? I cannot tell
This is why I’m poking youtube-dl and stuff until I can just download videos and watch them in VLC. (I’ve successfully gotten youtube-dl to work – but to make it work EASILY…)
Because. Like. BLEEP THAT.
My own server that remotely “watches" youtube videos, downloads them, streams them to my custom app…
And once youtube adds requirements that the desktop browser version must be in focus etc., this setup just pretends to be in focus and acts like a human. And if youtube adds captchas before people can watch it, then I consider it success and the mothafukan corp busted.
(via thetransintransgenic)
3 weeks ago · tagged #baby leet #outside.is_a?(CyberpunkDystopia) = true · 15 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
50-Year Study Finds Spanking Doesn't Work
(sacramento.cbslocal.com)
SHOCKER!! Turns out that small and vulnerable children being physically attacked by the large and strong adults they most love and trust in this world has negative effects. Who knew?
also, thanks to @thedoomreport for this link
I’m adding onto this by providing the PDF of the actual study (thanks to still being able to access the journal post-graduation) and uploaded it to google docs here
So if you want the exact source, it is there (and without paying a dime and you can download it as well!!
Stop hitting kids.
This is a really interesting piece of research. Cursory inspection of the source looks favorable to me; I can’t see any obvious problems with study design or unjustified conclusions. I’d be curious to hear if anyone sees things worth criticizing about it, but so far I don’t. (It is worth noting that the term ‘50-year study’ in the headline is misleading: this wasn’t a 50-year longitudinal study, it was a meta-analysis of 50 years of other studies.)
What the study found, in sum: there were no significant long-term benefits to spanking; the only factor on which it produced positive effects was short-term compliance. That’s not really news as far as the state of the field; few studies have found long-term beneficial effects associated with light corporal punishment, and when they do those effects are minor. What’s more novel is that this establishes a strong correlation between spanking and bad long-term outcomes in terms of criminality, aggression, mental illness, etc. We’ve known for awhile now that child abuse and heavy corporal punishment (anything involving an implement, e.g.) is strongly correlated with problems later in life, but to date studies on light corporal punishment, considered individually, have been more equivocal. Across the meta-analysis, however, it’s pretty clear that there’s a strong correlation between spanking and negative outcomes. It’s not as strong as with heavy punishment, but it’s not much weaker (effect size of .25 and .38, respectively). In other words, we’re likely looking at a fairly linear relationship between severity of punishment and severity of long-term negative outcomes.
The causal relationship is somewhat more difficult to ascertain: the authors leave open the possibility that the causal relationship could be reversed, i.e. children with the most long-term issues get the most spanking, which doesn’t have a substantial effect one way or the other on those issues. The authors give several good statistical reasons to see spanking > mental/social problems as the substantially more likely causal sequence, but acknowledge that none of them constitute definitive proof. Still, all in all this evidence makes a pretty solid case for avoiding even light corporal punishment in disciplining children.
(via metagorgon)
3 weeks ago · tagged #abuse cw · 16,973 notes · source: eltigrechico · .permalink
Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.
Millennial Tantalus has been promised that his unpaid internship will become a paid position as soon as the company has space for him. Every week he sees their new job posting. Every week he asks his boss if he can have a real job. The boss shrugs apologetically and says he’ll just have to make do with being paid in experience a little longer. He goes back and keeps working, over and over again, forever, and he never reaches the fruits of his labors.
Millennial Persephone can’t get a job without a degree, but because she had to take out loans to pay for college, she must spend 1/3 of her life working just to pay them off.
Millennial Cassandra’s title is Social Media Coordinator, she was hired to be the expert, but every time she tries to explain the problems in her company’s social media decisionmaking, the managers don’t listen…and end up hiring expensive PR flacks to repair the damage to their reputation when things blow up exactly as she predicted.
Millennial Medusa uses multiple shades of primer and opaque foundation to cover the scars snaking across her face, hiding the bruises, aligning the asymmetry in her broken nose and jaw. Red matte on the lips, green shimmer on the lids. Flawless liner on the first try. She’s had lots and lots of practice. She films her transformation in secret for all to see and learn, and again, men are turned to anonymous stone faces screaming in horror. “Liar!” “Witch!” “Take her swimming on the first date!” These words do not discourage her. These words are a challenge. GlamGorgonXx posts another video.
Millennial Prometheus uploads another PDF to his site. He’s lost track of the printing and edition of this textbook. He knows they just rearranged some of chapters then charge 150 dollars per copy, and the professor wrote the book himself. the ZIP fills uploads successfully, and he starts uploading the next one. He isn’t afraid of the potential lawsuit. knowledge shouldn’t held out of reach like this.
Millennial Arachne spends every dime and every minute she can spare with her yarn. Weaving, knitting, crochet, she does them all. Everywhere she goes, she takes her yarn and hook or needles or even a small loom with her so she can keep working in her downtime. Everyone who sees her work adores her work; she can make yarn do anything but deal cards. But when she tries to sell her work - at the price of materials plus a dollar per hour of labor - everyone says “yeah, it’s great, but you charge too much, you need to bring your prices down a little” and walks off to buy the exact same thing with a trendy designer label sewn on for twice as much. The next day, they come around and ask her if she’d be willing to knit them a scarf or a baby blanket or crochet a toy dog for their child’s birthday. In exchange? “I’ll invite you to the party. You can have cake.”
(via thetransintransgenic)
3 weeks ago · 27,662 notes · source: gertrudefrankenstein · .permalink
"Uber is having a hard time finding enough people with cars willing to work for them.
To solve that problem, the company has raised $1 billion to start Xchange Leasing, a sub-prime lender with the sole purpose of getting poor people into new cars so they can drive for the ride-hailing service.
If you’ve got a license and are willing to drive, Uber will hook you up with a new car, no matter how bad your credit. To make sure you make your payments, though, Uber will automatically deduct them weekly from what you earn as a driver. If you don’t drive enough, or you fail to make your lease payment, Xchange has folks to take the car back.
As for the terms, well, here’s what Mark Williams, a lecturer at Boston University’s business school told Bloomberg News: "The terms, the way they’re proposed, are predatory and are very much driven toward profiting off drivers.“
"
Uber is in the sub-prime auto business - Houston Chronicle (via shinyandloud)
i’m so happy i’ve deleted my account with this shitty company which also doesn’t care about sexual assault or ppl’s money
(via starbelliedking)
———————————————————————
I have a lot of patients who miss most of their appointments because they don’t have cars, and can’t afford them because they don’t have a job. Half the time they can’t get a job because they don’t have a car, and the other half it’s because they have kids, or don’t have a degree, or have a record, or whatever. These people are trapped and nobody has anything to say to them except “Haha, go starve to death”
Whenever they ask for a loan, the bank turns them down because their credit isn’t good enough, which makes sense because these people are poor and usually maxed out on their credit card bills.
Uber is offering leases that give them a car and a job all at once. The terms of the lease say that they need to put down a $250 deposit, and if working for Uber doesn’t work out for them, they can give them back the car and lose the deposit. If you work for Uber a reasonable amount, you’ll be able to pay off the car and make money to afford things like food and housing. I don’t know if Uber’s terms are the best, but they come bundled and easy for people who don’t have the resources to comparison-shop and coordinate a bunch of different actors.
What I find shocking about this is that the only way anybody can think of to help poor people is to wait for it to be convenient to Uber to do so. Uber is like the only functional part of our society right now. Banks, governments, other businesses, etc, say “leave these people to die”, and Uber is actually coming up with win-win solutions.
And so of course everybody hates them and wants to destroy them, and probably they’ll succeed. They’ll just say “It’s ‘exploitative’ because if you don’t pay the lease, they take the car back”, and everyone will ban them for being mean. Okay. Good luck finding someone willing to offer a non-exploitative loan then. This is why there are no good routes out of poverty anymore.
(via slatestarscratchpad)
From the Bloomberg article linked by the Houston Chronicle article:
“””Two weeks after he picked up the car, Uber deactivated his driver account for no specific reason, he said. Durham is now struggling to make payments. Every month, he calls Uber to pay over the phone. If he keeps the lease to the end of its term, he’d end up paying Uber about $31,200. To buy the car, he’d need to pay Uber another $6,000 to cover the car’s residual value, he says. The fair purchase price of the car, according to Kelley Blue Book, is $16,419.”””
Bloomberg claims that for the article they interviewed 6 people who did the lending program. Including the above, they talked about two people who it failed hard for. They talked about one person who it is succeeding for – that person was referred to them by Uber.
Uber has shown itself REPEATEDLY to be incredibly irresponsible, exploitative, and manipulative – so forgive me if I am suspicious that a solution that they propose, manage, and control literally almost everything it is possible to control in the situation might not be a “win-win”.
I might be able to be convinced that this specific maneuver of theirs is not exploitative, but it’ll require a much stronger argument than just “well, people need something roughly shaped like this”.
Like I agree this is shaped like something that people need – but Uber is the WRONG corporation to be anywhere NEAR this.
(via thetransintransgenic)
Of course, what this situation warrants is for others to start offering better terms than Uber to steal their worker-customers from them. And obviously the change of all the pointless public sector spending on ~*~programs~*~ that don’t actually do jack shit for the people they claim to be helping, into an universal impartial incorruptible basic income that would render those exploitable subprime people a bit more prime and a bit less exploitable to begin with.
(via thetransintransgenic)
3 weeks ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 2,054 notes · source: houstonchronicle.com · .permalink
ideal career: lesbian trophy wife
ideal career: power lesbian with fifty trophy wives all safe and happy
…and gay with each other, I presume?
(via metagorgon)
3 weeks ago · tagged #shitposting · 27,004 notes · source: dangerousdykes · .permalink
That specific type of badbrains: a survey
@socialjusticemunchkin recently wrote:
as I suspect, there might be a specific type of badbrains that psychiatry hasn’t managed to pin down from symptoms but which has a distinct-ish etiology because “trans woman with autism, adhd, depression and/or anxiety” seems to be a very strong type
As someone who kind of fits the profile for all four illnesses but doesn’t fit any of them very neatly, and has kind of bounced around between diagnoses and ineffective treatments, this is a very appealing idea. And I know a fair number of people, many but definitely not all of them trans women, who have very similar symptoms to mine. If there were information available about this type (which seems to be very common among the rationalist diaspora), it could be very useful to the people who fall under it, but as far as I can tell there hasn’t been anything written about it.
So let’s crowdsource this! This kind of informal Tumblr survey won’t approach anything like real scientific data, but might give us a better picture of what it looks like and possibly even how it can be effectively managed. But again: Not real science! I don’t even know for sure that this is a real thing, and this survey is not going to prove that it is. This is more like a slightly scaled-up version of when you talk to a friend about common experiences with mental illness.
Who can participate: Anyone, really. Despite the quote, you absolutely do not have to be a trans woman to answer the survey. You also don’t need to be mentally ill. If you have have a significant number of traits associated with at least two of autism, ADHD, depression and anxiety, you might be an example of the thing I’m trying to understand. If you have a significant number of traits associated with just one, you’re probably not, but your data will still be useful as a point of comparison. If you don’t have a significant number of traits associated with any of the four, your answers probably won’t be especially useful to the main goals of the survey, but you’re still completely welcome to answer the questions.
All questions are optional. Many of the questions are very personal and if you answer everything in full the survey is potentially pretty long. I would much rather have a partial response than no response.
Submitting your answers: You can answer by reblogging or by filling out the Google survey here.
Thanks to @paradigm-adrift, @sigmaleph, @shkreli-for-president, and @mhd-hbd for feedback and suggestions!
0. Consent questions. (These are separate questions, so you can answer yes to some and no to others. Some of these scenarios won’t materialize; what I end up doing with the responses depends on how many I get and how people answer the consent questions.)
Are you okay with:
your response being used as part of the dataset?
your response being reblogged?
being quoted with attribution?
being quoted without attribution?
your response being included in a document of responses with attribution?
your response being included in a document of responses without attribution?1. Select all that apply:
Autism
a. I’ve been professionally diagnosed.
b. I’ve self-diagnosed.
c. I’ve seriously considered whether I have it.
d. I definitely don’t have it.
ADHD
a. I’ve been professionally diagnosed.
b. I’ve self-diagnosed.
c. I’ve seriously considered whether I have it.
d. I definitely don’t have it.
Depression
a. I’ve been professionally diagnosed.
b. I’ve self-diagnosed.
c. I’ve seriously considered whether I have it.
d. I definitely don’t have it.
Anxiety
a. I’ve been professionally diagnosed.
b. I’ve self-diagnosed.
c. I’ve seriously considered whether I have it.
d. I definitely don’t have it.2. Do you have any mental illnesses not included in that list? Which ones? (Self-diagnosed illnesses count for this question.)
3. What symptoms do you have that are associated with autism, ADHD, depression or anxiety? What symptoms associated with them don’t you have? (The DSM diagnostic criteria for all four are included under the cut, for reference. One way to answer this question is just to use the diagnostic criteria as a checklist, and indicate what you do and don’t have. But a few sentences explaining the ways in which the labels do and don’t fit would also be fine.)
4. What treatments (medication, therapy, etc.) have been effective for you in managing symptoms you didn’t want? How did they help? What treatments didn’t work?
5. Were there any lifestyle changes that you found useful?
6. Gender and assigned sex at birth. (If you feel the need to answer dishonestly to avoid outing yourself, that’s fine. Also remember that all questions are optional.)
7. Career / field of study.
8. Major personal interests. (Think like OkCupid’s “I spend a lot of time thinking about” except with less pressure to look like a normal person.)
9. Religious upbringing and current religious beliefs
10. Any other weird things about your brain that you feel like sharing. (For example, atypical patterns of romantic/sexual attraction, kinks, being otherkin, being multiple. But this is intentionally open-ended.)
(this is the end of the survey; below the cut are diagnostic criteria)
Sent a response on the form. Also, if you see this, I’d recommend you to note your sexual orientation in the answers because there’s reason to suspect that this thing is strongly associated with gynephilia (straight men/lesbians) and rare if not nonexistent with exclusive androphiles (gay men/straight women)
3 weeks ago · tagged #just one word: plastics · 42 notes · source: unknought · .permalink