I'm a Mess

(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)

[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.

This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.

There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.

As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?

It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California. NOTHING is universal.

This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.

It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.

And this is actually true; there are scientific articles comparing the cultural contexts for communication! It’s really neat.

So in (most parts of) America, we equate indirectness with politeness. “Excuse me, would it be possible for you to perhaps pass me that salt, if you don’t mind?” The more roundabout you are, the more we consider that a signal of social courtesy.

In Poland, not only is indirectness viewed as rudely wasting the listener’s time, but directness is viewed as communicating intimacy and friendliness. “Give me the salt.”

Amazon and its competitors rose to prominence via creating products that were so cheap and convenient that people gave in, they gave us a store where everything could be gotten in one place and with free two day shipping that was surely worth the then low subscription cost.

Now we're seeing brick and mortar stores as well as smaller online distributors shutter. We're also seeing Amazon hike up the prices of items and subscriptions because they know they're the only option for a lot of people now-- they've cut out the competition. This is how a lot of the big tech CEOs post dot com boom ensured their power.

Sam Altman and his peers are the next generation of that, and in the tradition of American innovation, their goal has always been to take what came before them and build it to new extremes.

So if Amazon's goal is to create a service that is cheap and easy to the point you stop going to the store (and then monetizing off your dependence once said store is gone), and Chatgpt is selling you intelligence...

I'm not saying this to be mean, but one of the major things Amazon did was put all the items you could want in one place, which also had the side effects of making it so a lot more people were further disconnected from the realities of the supply chain and just flat out didn't know where in real life they could get many of the specialty items they were looking for at their fair market prices.

Chatgpt similar disconnects you from the sources information is gathered from and robs you of the chance to approach their answers with a critical eye-- the consequences of which will extend past these AI engines because when you don't go to the websites you get answers from, you lose crucial opportunities to take in the information surrounding what you're looking for and begin to consider what you think a reputable source looks like and what your definition of normal looks like.

It essentially sets you up to fail, and hinders your skills in whatever areas you use it for because Sam Altman and his associates want you to become reliant on these ais and choose them over the alternatives so that you will be willing to pay more for them and see them as essential.

It's in their best interest for you to think less and seek instant gratification more for their ultimate bottom line, and as this post exemplifies, it's working.

The questions we ask AI are growing larger and larger to the point where essential life skills have been ceded to this soulless grasp for our wallets.

When Amazon first began to receive criticism for their practices and was accused of undercutting the competition, Jeff Bezos tried to say that they weren't focused on the competition but the customers and focused on what Amazon was doing that the competition wasn't capable of doing-- this is because Amazon wasn't focused on outdoing competitors but rather whole industries and changing consumer behavior. As a result, a sizeable portion of Americans will now learn that shopping online for things like fabric and books should be the new normal and, you know, there's only one place to go for that now if you're a casual consumer who doesn't live and breathe those communities.

Similarly, ais aren't so much competing against each other right now. That's not their competition. eBay was never a true threat to Amazon, the ease of going to a store and leaving with an item in your hands in an hour or less was.

Ai's largest competitor is your mind and what it's capable of doing.

When Stockholm’s Traffic Office conducted a general assessment of street traffic in the Swedish capital in 2001, it came to the shocking conclusion that two-thirds of all trees in the city center were dead or dying.

City authorities agreed that an urgent response was needed to nurse these leafy urban ecosystem pillars back to health.

Enter Björn Embrén, Stockholm’s first “tree officer.”

Under his leadership, various technologies and materials were tested in an attempt to create a more suitable living space for trees in the urban environment.

“I knew that they could grow if the circumstances were right,” says Embrén, a former professional gardener.

“It’s like putting a plastic bag over your head and tightening it over your neck,” says Embrén. “That’s what happened to the trees in Stockholm. They were dying.”

Eventually, inspired by railroad embankments — which require only a small amount of organic matter for healthy trees to grow — Embrén concocted what was to become known as the “Stockholm tree pit” model.

By 2002, Embrén had drawn up designs. And by 2003, they were already building.

The design involves digging a pit and constructing a frame underground around the tree’s roots, and then filling said pit with a mixture of soil and stone, sometimes including biochar, to both aerate and fertilize the soil. These permeable layers are very strong and physically adaptable but also allow stormwater to flow in, meaning the trees are provided with sufficient air and water naturally. They also allow rainwater to be soaked up — a necessity amid more extreme weather brought on by climate change.

Washing machines have filters to catch large debris; you should check these periodically and remove anything stuck in them. If you don't, it affects the machine's efficiency and eventually can lead to the filter getting clogged and flooding your laundry space.

Washing machines also need to be cleaned from time to time, generally by running them on hot with nothing in them except cleaning chemicals (you can buy washing machine cleaner, or google it for various diy solutions that probably involve vinegar or bleach). If you don't they'll start growing mold, and then all your stuff will come out of the wash smelling bad.

Dishwashers also generally have filters to catch large chunks of food and whatnot. Boy howdy can they smell bad if you don't ever check them.

There are dishwasher disinfectants as well, or you can do things with vinegar; either way, it'll prevent mold buildup and also hopefully rinse away buildup from soaps and whatnot.

If you have a reusable water bottle, wash it weekly. Otherwise you're probably drinking mold, the effects of which can be widely variable but almost always bad.

It's worth noting that there are some extraordinary people in the world who have been quietly doing the work for decades, and they should be celebrated with all the fervor that we denounce the villains. I first read about Harrison twenty-odd years ago, when he'd already been doing this for about fifty years, and this is one of those guys whose life can, indeed, be summed up by his headline.

James Harrison saved millions of lives. Millions. Not with anything flashy or dramatic, not with profound speeches or brilliant strategy or any of the things we insist are the ways to impact the world. He simply kept himself as healthy as possible so that every few weeks he could go and sit quietly in a room and give away a fundamental part of himself — quite literally his lifeblood — to people he'd never meet, for no pay and no expectation of acknowledgement. (He was, it should be said, acknowledged quite a lot per this article, but that's beside the point.)

FUCKING GETS YOU

all marine biology,

watch the video!