Green Great Dragons

sometimes the resource in question functions well in one city but has zero to offer anyone in any other location, for whatever reason, and very very often, when you DO find a real organization or lead or opportunity, they will have incredibly limited hours of operation, are not taking new clients and wont tell you when they are taking new clients, and/or have other means-testing that is simply infeasible to complete. i think on average i have to spend 1-10 hours on this timewasting shit to find one good lead for any sort of actual material result, and i am living in a DEEP blue liberal democrat metropolitan area.

we should all keep this in mind when we see fundraising posts on this website for people who are asking for food, medicine, or transportation money. the kneejerk response is to wonder why they simply havent gone to the foodbank. well, as a regular foodbank-goer who lives within walking distance of a food bank, let me tell you. it takes days to recover from a single trip there, and days to prepare for the next trip, due to all of the above. they only let you go once per week, so you have to carry as much as you possibly can back home, and you arent allowed to make multiple trips, and they wont let you take enough of anything other than dry beans to last more than a week anyway. so you cant make multiple trips per week, but you also cant stock up adequately to avoid running out of stuff like dairy and fruit in a couple days. if i was SLIGHTLY more disabled, or had kids, or had a normal job with normal job hours, it would be entirely impossible to go at all.

i could just lie to them and go multiple times a week anyway, and this would qualify as "welfare fraud". when you see accusations of "welfare fraud", keep this in mind also.

if you personally want to post a list of these resources, it behooves you to note for each one in you list whether you have personally used the resource or not, WHEN you did so, WHAT the result was, and WHERE you are located. if you cant vouch for it, go ahead and post the lead anyway, but say so. try to help people triage their list of leads

there's exactly one hundred eyes on Nikignik in this picture and I almost lost my mind keeping track of their number

Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.

Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.

From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.

To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".

The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.

Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?

Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.

Rereading the scene where they talk to Redell in the Auckland prison, Stratt shows such distain for Redell and how his negligence killed 7 people. She doesn’t let him make excuses and try and worm his way out of it. To her, he as the leader of the project has a responsibility toward those people and he failed, and in doing so killed them.

Every other action she takes has purpose. Every death that may be caused by those actions is counterbalanced by thousands of lives it saves. She can live with those decisions, because she knows they had to be made.

The lab explosion never should have happened. It was a mistake on the part of the quartermaster, but if there were additional safety protocols in place, it is a mistake that likely could have been prevented. I don’t think there’s any way that Stratt feels anything other than personally responsible for it.

She was negligent in her duty to ensure the safety of everyone working under her and the project itself, and because of that 14 people died. 14 people who did not need to die, whose deaths did nothing to save humanity.

Not only that, but the events catalysed the need to send the one person she’d let get closer to her to his death.

The rule of thumb is that you can call everyone a friend unless otherwise corrected. Think of this declaration of friendship not as a definite marker of where your relationship is (because one doesn't exist), but a way of communicating that you would like to keep being on amicable terms with this person.

There aren't guidelines for what makes one a friend so it's as much guesswork on the other person's part as it is yours. More likely than not (if they either want to be friends with you or already think they are friends with you), they will not correct you if you call them a friend. People usually don't feel weirded out by it, if they're not particularly pedantic, because it's just a word. As long as it's not accompanied by a drastic change of behaviour to solidify this new friendship status, you're good. (Like, you can probably drop "my friend, (barista)" or "my friend, (owner of corner store)" in casual conversation and they probably won't think you're ready to watch a movie with them.)

On the flip side if someone calls you a friend, and you think you aren't there yet BUT you will like to keep being on good terms with this person, don't correct them. Their declaration of friendship is their olive branch and even if you're not ready to take it, don't snip it away. Just smile and nod or something.

If we need someone to do a job, that job is a role in the community and deserves not just a salary but cultural respect for the role.

"high" ambition jobs are all jobs that involve domineering and controlling others. "low" ambition jobs are all jobs that involve service to others. Have you noticed? Because I have noticed.

is actually more needed

than controlling them.