Pronouns: They/Them

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Coming from someone who worked tech support for some time: There are lots of people with no grasp of basic computing concepts working office jobs in which they sit at a computer all day. Some even highly educated and specialized. lawyers, managers, marketing consultants, insurance salespeople… young and old. They can use Word, and Outlook, and Chrome, and phone apps, but the concept of a file or folder, or utilizing files and folders to organize information, are alien to some. Doesn’t help that some (especially mobile) OS’s do a lot to obscure that layer from people, and people can often get by with rigid workflows or by calling tech support a lot. Not judging them. Well at least the ones who were nice to me. I don’t know how to change my oil. I mean none of the people I’m thinking of did either. But I don’t know how to do whatever lawyer managers do all day(meetings?). I realize there is some self selection in who calls tech support every day, so having worked tech support might have skewed my perception of the average office worker.


  • Satisfactory is a fairly good example of it (and also a game I am obsessed with). Games differentiate areas with biomes often, but the position of biomes often follows no climate logic. Having a rainforest and high desert and boreal forest, each maybe 1km x 1km within a 5x5 km area, with stark borders between them would be utterly bizarre on earth. Satisfactory does it’s part to hide this by having such a maze like layout, broken up by the steep karst landscape, with no clear line of sight across the whole map most of the time, but a lot of games just let that be something we suspend our disbelief for in order to have more variety in the game. Satisfactory also can do some hand waving of it through the implication that it’s some sort of alien garden world as well, and might be ecologically influenced by an entity which may be pursuing variety (that said I haven’t gathered all the mercer spheres, that’s just the vibe I get fairly early in the game). The bizarreness is reduced by not having a taiga or frozen desert in that same 5km x 5km region, something some games will include so they can have a snowy place as well.



  • I was gonna answer that most animals don’t live as long and reproduce faster than humans (so populations survive despite increased cancer risk), but when I looked into it I found a deep rabbit hole. In the case of wolves, I’m sure plenty died early on, because the populations present appear to have some genetic immune adaptations that protect them from cancer. I know other species (like frogs) have dark skin because the melenin increased the survival rate of the darker frogs at the time of the accident. So that is to say probably a lot of wildlife died, and that natural selection lead to some critters that are pretty resistant to radiation.


  • I don’t think that’s the actual etymology. From what I can find it was an onomonpia about the sounds turkeys make, and a word for gunk. The second part of it is pronounced differently from the racial epiphet (with a more middle vowel like book rather than a forward vowel like boot), and which I understand to be a separate word with a separate origin. I avoid that one due to its spelling and nearness to the slur, but in a compound word it’s less likely to be misunderstood. The original use case of the word by the person who supposedly coined it was for needless verbosity. I could see some English speakers retroactively egg corning it and using it as a pun, or maybe it has an older origin than is recorded or the coiner was dishonest, but I can’t find an example or evidence of that having happened. If you have an example or personal experience it being used like you describe I’d definitely be interested. It’s also possible that I am misconstruing your claim to be one of etymology when it isn’t.








  • I use Chatgpt 3.5 both personally and at work for tip of the tongue questions, especially when I can’t think of a word. Sometimes as a starting point when I have trouble finding the answer to a question in Google. It can sometimes find an old movie that I vaguely remember based on my very poor descriptions too.

    For example: “what is the word for a sample of a species which is used to define the species” - tip of the tongue, holotype. “What is the block size for LTO-9 tape” - wasn’t getting a clear answer from forums and IBM documentation is kind of behind a wall, needed Chatgpt to realize there was no single block size for tape.

    It’s excellent for difficult to search things that can be quickly verified once you have an answer (important step, as it will give you garbage rather than say it doesn’t know something).



  • Do you know how much work it is to live unhoused? How uncomfortable and dehumanizing? If you are completely without shelter, how it is after it rains, or the air is choked with smoke during fire season?

    It seems like you have just one explanation for everything here. When there’s a problem, it’s because of some moral failing that has to be punished. The publication you reference is telling.

    Your attitude toward both Roma and unhoused is an outside look in, entirely through the lens of criminality. There is no understanding there. You are missing the big picture, the why behind all of the things people do.

    If you really want to scam people, you start an LLC and live comfortably off of other people’s work, like, you know, rich people do.


  • You are completely divorced from the reality on the ground.

    A good chunk of the unhoused (at least where I live, US CA) have jobs, it’s just not enough for rent or they can’t find a place because of poor credit, which means the places available are even more expensive. Rent has increased faster than median income, and way faster than low income.

    Most unhoused are there temporarily. Anything nice they have may be from before they got into their present situation. And what are they supposed to do? Pawn off their cell phone for pennies on the dollar?

    The explosion in number of unhoused people is not just a bunch of people happening to have some sort of moral failure all at once. The simpler explanation is that our economy and society is failing. And what do we expect to see as resources are hoarded by the powerful at exponentially increasing rates? Where do those resources come from?

    Also self report on your attitude toward Roma people.