Celeste Morrigan

Wow. So, when? Since our, uh, rookie season. Since your rookie season? No, it's not true. Since before that. Not helpful.

a business will let every person in it die a terrible death if it makes the business profit. A household will spend it’s last dollar to keep the people in it safe and healthy.

A household will use money as a resource to add value to the lives of the people in the household. A business will use people as a resource to add monetary value to the business

So right now, Musk is claiming to be going through government records to find fraud, waste, and abuse. Obviously that's not true because he's got a team of less than a dozen people, many of them have little to no actual experience (not being old enough to have actually had any), and the experience his team does have has nothing to do with actually tracing complex finances. What experience this team does have is in programming, or at least in software, so you'd expect that they might, at the very least, be okay at that.

Yesterday, Musk claimed that he'd found massive fraud in Social Security with payments going to 150 year old people. That sounds pretty bad right? Why did he claim that? Well, in examining the Social Security databases, they found a bunch of people listed with birthdays in 1875. Proof positive!

Yeah, except not so much. If you look more closely at those records, not only is every single birthday in 1875, but every single birthday is on the same date; May 20th, 1875. That's an oddly specific cluster isn't it?

If you work in software, you know there are a bunch of standards out there, and one of those standards is called ISO-8601. According to ISO-8601 standard, if there are issues with a date, your software should return a date of May 20th, 1875 because it's a date that just about no computer system would actually use. In other words, it uses an obviously wrong date because that way you know instantly that you have a problem, and it uses a specific date because then you can easily search for that specific date and see all of your bad data at once to make it easier to fix.

If Musk and his team were actually good or even minimally competent programmers, they might not be familiar with ISO-8601 specifically (there are a metric crap-ton of ISO standards and I doubt any rational human being is familiar with more than a few of them), but they'd see a cluster of strangely specific bad data and immediately check if it was part of an error standard before doing anything else. In this case it's not just that his (likely barely of age) programmer didn't spot this, no one else on his team, including him, did either.

Gahhh this is my favorite scene. 🥰 The way Gong Ryong is looking at Eve, it’s like he’s blushing on the inside which is why he feels HOT when actually his temperature is completely fine.

It was the most didactic author I've found to explain why women's clothes are made the way they are made...

lindt is being sued in a class action in the united states because they are one of MANY brands of chocolate that tested high for heavy metals. and this is despite lindt claiming their chocolate is "expertly crafted with the finest ingredients". no recall was issued after the tests came out. lead and cadmium can fuck the body over BAD.

lindt's genius defense is that they are going to stop saying the whole thing about being expertly crafted with the finest ingredients, so nobody can complain about the heavy metals in their chocolate anymore! and that makes it okay. source: trust me bro

(now please drop the lawsuit thanks)

consumer reports test results of a bunch of different chocolate brands <- original report being referenced

This holiday season, if you know someone who likes house plants,

DON'T

get them a houseplant. DO NOT.

instead, get them a NICE, MEDIUM-LARGE, AESTHETIC, BOTTOM-DRAINING, INDOOR

POT.

that is what they want. that is what they dream of. ok? thats what will be most useful and appreciated. in fact, if you can, get them a CUTE MATCHING SET. OF POTS!!!! NOT PLANTS, POTS!!!!!!!!

they may be more excited initially about the plant. that is true. but a pot is a gift that they will go home and use to upsize one of their already beloved houseplants, and every time they look at it they will remember how much they appreciate you.

HOUSEPLANT:

- they already have so many

- needs to be watered

- takes up window space

- comes in a pot thats already too small, needs to be upsized, costing money

- can die

AESTHETIC POT

- lets them care for an existing plant they own

- they will be grateful every time they see it in their home

- does not take up window space not already occupied by a plant