• 2 Posts
  • 137 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle







  • Atlas Shrugged changed my political beliefs entirely when I read it as a teenager. Real life experience and empathy changed it back again a few years later, thankfully. It’s tough when you’re young, recognizing that the world is flawed and searching for something that might be an answer.

    It’s not quite the same because I was never any kind of ardent “pro-nuke” activist, but the movie Threads took me from a position of resigned ambivalence regarding the existence of nuclear weapons to a strong believer in global disarmament. If anyone is neutral on the topic of nuclear weapons, I’d suggest they give it a watch.



  • There is a social cost to abandoning your shopping cart; it’s just not borne by the abandoner. Carts left in the parking lot can block parking spots or damage cars if moved by wind or gravity. Additionally, if no one returns their cart, there will be none available at the storefront for use by the next customer. That’s part of the “test” as I understand it - there’s no one grading you individually on whether you fulfill your communal responsibility to return the cart, but that doesn’t mean there’s no impact from your failure to do so.

    Feels like we might be talking past each other or conceptualizing the shopping cart theory differently?


  • I like a cover letter. Not to get my ass kissed, but so I can see you draw the lines between your work experience and the job posting. My field is niche enough that there are few applicants with directly related experience, but there are many ways to gain the basic skills required. I can make all sorts of inferences based on a resume, but I don’t want to guess when choosing who to interview. Just tell me how you match up and what you think you’ll bring to the table. This helps me separate people who are applying for any job they can vs those who know (at least kind of) what they’re getting into.





  • I’ve hired (low) dozens of people in public sector environments, and neither myself nor anyone on my hiring panels has ever cared if we receive a post-interview thank you. Maybe private sector is different, but I’d just as soon not have you clog up my inbox with thanks or make a post-interview pitch about your skills/excitement.

    If you say thanks in the room, we’re square. Likewise, I always thank people for their interest and time in the role.





  • Apply the So What principle: So what if I, as a private citizen, make a judgement about people who work for a government office? What’s the practical impact for this oh-so-unfairly-maligned hypothetical person you constructed? Nothing.

    Now, what’s the practical impact when a government agency denies due process to people when it unlawfully detains them? Oh, yeah, that does seem like a real and substantive impact, doesn’t it?

    I haven’t denied anyone’s rights to their life or their liberty, so you can take your false equivalency and shove it.



  • You should probably just stop watching, no? Consolidating Forsaken, killing off less important POVs to trim from a large cast that Jordan could only barely manage across 14 books and 4 million words - these are things that fundamentally make sense to do when you have, at most, 64 hours to adapt 4.4 million words.

    To be clear, season 1 and 2 changes really irked me, but at the end of season 3 I am starting to feel like they’re making something that will approximate Wheel of Time in vibe and characterization. It’s not the 1:1 series of my dreams (imagine something animated in the style of Avatar: The Last Airbender!), but I think they’ve come around to doing a reasonably good job given the restrictions of time. Rand is Rand, Mat is Mat, etc.

    If you aren’t willing to just go with it, why torture yourself?