My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.

STARK: “wow, your intellect is stunning. I look forward to seeing what you’ll be able to accomplish in the next few years”

CAMERA PANS

GRETA THUNBERG SMILES

The number of times I shout “your car is supposed to be smarter than that!” As a Tesla does something like, without signaling, whips around me and into oncoming traffic to pass a stopped city bus is staggering.

A coworker of mine was recently bragging about their new electric mustang and its zero to sixty time. “Have you ever gone zero to sixty?” was my only response. Of all the facts and figures, 0-60 has you to be one of the least important when buying a car.

Though many wear red, the Ace I managed for a few years had black vests. With the exception of a few large groups (like Westlake), each Ace is independently owned and part of the Ace co-op, but get to make their own choices about things like uniform, sales, and stock.

I intentionally said blue vest because while an Ace employee (in whatever color vest/apron their store chooses) would take the time to explain why you can’t have the thing you think you need, a guy in a blue vest (if you can even find one) is likely to say “oh, I guess we’re out. Maybe we can order it for you online…” before wandering off.

People hanging Christmas lights do the whole house and when they go to plug it in, they realize they have the female end by the outlet, not the male end. “Fuck, I’m not gonna redo the entire process” the idiot thinks to himself, I’ll just get a male/male adapter.

It’s not sold because as soon as you plug in the side to the house, the other ends become live, and touching them means “big ouch”.

“That’s okay, I’ll just plug the end into the lights, and then into the house, problem solved” the idiot thinks.

Except the far end of the lights has a male adapter and that end is still live. Plus, anyone who doesn’t know about your deadly modification is in danger of hurting themselves because they don’t realize the hazard.

There are exceedingly niche applications where these cords are used, but those applications only come up for trained electricians who know how to make one of these cords, and use them responsibly. If you’re asking the minimum wage guy in the blue vest, this sign is for you.

I used to know a hardware store that sold guns in the 80s. Guy bought one, walked down the block, robbed a bank with it, and died in ensuing police shootout. Store stopped selling guns after that.

Competition is the answer, though. The problem is companies ended up competing the wrong way. If I could watch “The Office” on any streaming platform, suddenly they’re all in competition to create a better platform (quicker loads, different pricing models, integration with different devices, etc). By limiting shows to only certain platforms, sure, you’re creating an easy way to differentiate between platforms, but you’re letting the competition stagnate as you just create cable TV with extra steps: minimal choice, minimal ease of use, minimal cost upside.

I assume he means “processed acai, also known as acai na tigela”.

Unless acai is a different fruit entirely.

I was having this same conversation the other day. Have you ever seen that picture where different people involved in the creation of the video game Kirby draw the title character? Two look really good, and the rest are awkward blobs that only look like Kirby because of the power of suggestion.

Anyway, I genuinely think a team of Tesla employees (independent of Musk) were talking about building a truck, and all took turns drawing something while pulling together numbers before the pitch to Musk. As a joke, the design team mocked up the worst sketch in 3D, and Musk accidentally saw the design in the Slack chat history and demanded it.

Either that, or some sort of “have your kid draw the next Tesla” employee contest, and the design teams modeled the funniest ones as actual cars for the company newsletter. Like those companies that’ll turn your kid’s drawings into real life stuffed toys.

If we’re adding somewhat related concepts OP might find interesting, I’ve always thought these were neat: grammatically correct sentences your brain doesn’t process the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

For a service like Twitter, where user numbers define value, using it is 100% supporting it. Again, the metaphor falls apart because suggesting they can’t use other options suggests they might die, which is painfully untrue for the vast majority of Twitter users (literally no user in a developed country relies on Twitter for life/death information in a way other sources can’t provide).

Oh, shit, well as long as they got to the restaurant before the Nazi bought it, I guess there’s no harm in continuing to support it. Especially if they don’t have the technical knowledge to… Stop using a website?

This metaphor falls down when you realize the table is in a restaurant owned by a Nazi, and the table by the window makes the restaurant look really popular.

Refusing to concede the table is literally adding value to the Nazi owned table, and giving others cover to say “no we also hate Nazis; we’re just here because that table looks cool” which furthers the problem.

I wonder who makes the mainframes used at NSA domestic spying server farms, or who run the computing for predator drone targeting systems. “Not profitable to be vocal in support of antisemitism” hardly means “currently on the moral high ground”…

Also, have you used sheets? Hot shit compared to the fucking powerhouse that excel is.

There was a rubric for qualified scores. Software X power user? +8%. Experience in position Y? +1% per year. Bachelor’s degree in the following fields? +20% The premise was "make everything internally clear and we can internally promote, set career progressions and encourage people to remain loyal. This was a huge company that tried to absolve themselves of any accusation of racism/misogyny/ageism by saying “no, we apply the exact metric to everyone”.

I didn’t personally rewrite my job description. I was able to demonstrate other programs and processes were able to achieve the same/better results, and would do so quicker/cheaper/more easily. This was really easy because the job was stuck in the past. Shit like “I can upload a csv to import this data” was basically witchcraft, as the current description called for typing thousands of lines by hand (and rewarded this experience with +2% qualification for every year of data entry experience). Suddenly the two week long job that required ten years of experience was done in thirty minutes.

I convinced them the -35% hit I took on my qualifications because I’d never used done ancient software could be swapped out with a +40% qualification in excel, for example, so my supervisor rewrote the job to include these advancements.

Started a job in July I was 60% qualified for. By December I had made enough changes to the job description (by adding things I was able to do that prior people couldn’t), my manager decided to reclassify my job. New title, new description, new salary pay band. Manager hands me an envelope with my new title, description, and rate of pay. I say "thanks, but we just created a job that I’m 95% qualified for. I expect to be in the 95% qualified section of the new pay band, but this rate is for the 60% qualified. We go back and forth for three months. With 1 hour notice he calls me into a phone meeting with his boss where I can state my case for a proper raise to reflect my new duties.

Big boss says “we don’t negotiate raises, you were hired at 60% qualified, you’ll stay there, and get 1-3% raises annually based on merit. If you want a raise, find another job.” I did.

Last I heard my job was filled by one of my subordinates who was maybe 30% qualified. The good news is the job was kind of a joke, so I’m glad one of my old reports was getting a huge raise to do essentially her same job, because even my boss didn’t understand the changes I made, and they were instantly forgotten when I left.

I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?

“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.

I’ll answer for me, and 70% of Americans:

1. It was the only plan offered by my employer. Vision and dental insurance are typically optional extras, but medical is mandatory. Some jobs provide a choice between one or two different insurances, or a good/better/best plan. My wife (who is on a different plan than me, because she works elsewhere and neither of our jobs covers family members at a reasonable discount) selected the “better” option because she takes a few prescriptions and it works out to be cheaper long term.
2. N/A (but the answer is the affordable care act)
3. Insurance providers have a website where you can search for “in network doctors” by specialty. When I joined my current network, there were exactly two primary care doctors within 20 minutes of my home. Vision (which is separate insurance, generally) is often much easier to find. Dental (which again is separate insurance, often) is usually even harder to find a provider, in my experience. At my last job I could pay $200/month for insurance accepted by a dentist in my town, or $12/mo for dental insurance where the nearest dentist was over two hours away.
4. I would prefer the entire system was scrapped and replaced with government healthcare at low to no cost, including prescriptions, dental, vision, and mental health.