Random and Potentially Interesting Thoughts

here are a few other "secret" dashboards:

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"Trending"

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

My grandfather died with a box stuffed full of pieces of string too short to save (properly labeled as "pieces of string too short to save"). Grandma's second husband could never bring himself to spend the extravagant amount of money it would cost to buy instant coffee granules.

"Oh, that's not PTSD, it's just habits they picked up in the great depression and can't let go of."

Can be done in low light.

Can be done lying down flat.

No mess, ie paint or small beads that could get lost in a bed.

Can be done in intervals of 5-10 minutes - easy to put down and pick back up without messing it up.

Does not require a lot of arm movement - can be done with just hands, with upper arms and elbows at rest.

All necessary items can fit in a fairly small pouch, like a pencil case or toiletry bag, to remain self contained and take up minimal space.

Setup and takedown takes a couple minutes max.

Learning curve is cognitively gentle, ie no complex knitting math type thing.

For now I'll just clarify - lying flat on back or side. If I could lie on my stomach that would open up a lot of options because it would be much easier to look down at something I'm doing in front of me with my hands.

I've picked just one to start with. I want to try everything! But I am now too old and sensible to indulge that impulse. I'll start with one, and if that becomes habit or doesn't work out I'll try something else.

Not gonna say which one yet, because I think there's some truth in the concept that talking about something you're gonna do in advance can sap the motivation to actually do it, by prematurely triggering the internal reward signals.

Please, tip your wait staff. Here in Texas food service workers only make about $2.85/hour

Yes I know it sucks

Yes I know this country doesn’t pay its workers fairly

Your morals and ethics on the situation don’t pay the light bill or put food on the table

If you're not sure whether to tip or not, a good rule of thumb is that if you're paying at the END, tips are expected. (The other way to tell is if there's a visible tip jar, tips are appreciated but not expected.) And this isn't just "expected" as in "it's polite" - I mean that establishments are LEGALLY ALLOWED to pay waitstaff WELL under minimum wage because it's assumed that the employee will make up the difference in tips. This is also why US waitstaff are (usually) SO FUCKING ATTENTIVE - they want you to have a positive experience so that you'll hopefully tip them at least adequately, if not well.

Now, as for how to calculate the tip! 12-15% gratuity is a good range, but you don't really have to do much math to figure that out. See, there's gonna be a sales tax on your bill, right? That's usually somewhere around 7~8%. The way I was taught was "double the tax and round up." Though usually I just round up the tax to the next dollar, double that, and then round the total up again to the next dollar (unless the waiter was shitty, then I round both down).

- say outloud that you want to do differently but are stuck

- count from 5 to zero with the express objective of starting when you get to zero

- tell someone about the thing you want to do and get them to ask about it and how it’s going

- ask someone about doing THE THING “with them” while they do their own thing (with them can be in the same room, while on the phone together, in the same written discussion…)

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

gatekeeping is so effective because it allows the people in charge of it to frame it as a passive and natural force. "ah well, you just don't meet our criteria because of some technicalities, it's not that we are screening specifically for Your Kind Of Person, you understand, it's just that all the requirements coincidentally happen to produce a result where Your Kind Of Person is unable to enter our walled city :) so i think you'll see that we are not discriminating!"

i think a LOT less people understand how much gatekeeping impacts their lives than are impacted by gatekeeping. if you were ever prevented from participating in something bc of your inability to meet technical requirements for reasons outside of your control, that is gatekeeoing. if you ever decided to not even fucking try because you understood that the walled city wasn't for People Like You, that is the natural and intended outcome of gatekeeping.

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”