made of stars

It's like watching friends who you've seen be silly and have deep talks work jobs to the point of stress where they are incoherent and respond to messages like legit 6 days later and not in a rude way but genuinely they don't have the mental capacity to do shit anymore

Working jobs and paying bills shouldn't take everything out of people to the extent it really does

Do not let them erase this. Do not let them tell you he meant "my heart goes out for you."

This man is the grandson of a Canadian Nazi sympathizer who moved to South Africa BECAUSE he thought the apartheid was just the coolest.

He has a gaggle of kids specifically because he believes his genes are superior and need to be spread to improve humanity.

He has thrown his support behind the neonazi party in Germany and the far right party in the UK, not to mention how far he's wormed up the ass of the Republican party.

He threw two sieg heil salutes back to back at the inauguration of the president of the United States and is trying to scrub the evidence off the internet.

CBC made a good documentary on adult ADHD and part of it really caught me off guard because i swear they repeated verbatim my life story for the past 3 years

full programme here:

My ADHD manifested in piles of homework left undone until the last possible minute, while I stared at them, thinking; “I want to get these done. I understand the theory. It would take 10 minutes. I want to start, why can’t I start?” 

My ADHD manifested in fantastic reading comprehension - nigh impenetrable focus on interesting topics the first time I’m reading about them. 

My ADHD manifested in a complete inability to focus on reviews or re-reads, mind skittering sideways and away whenever anything was boring or repetitive. I sat down to study, my books open, my eyes on the text, and my brain clawing its way out the back of my head to focus on something else - anything else. Focus, focus! [No.]

My ADHD manifested in Articulating wings half-finished but still beautiful, in beautiful lineart and half-hearted coloring. In stories written passionately for days until I forgot it existed and never returned. In projects started and forgotten and started and forgotten a thousand times until my bins of project supplies piled up and my bank account shriveled down. No, it will be different this time - I LOVE this new thing. This new thing is my world, my destiny, my Everything. I CREATE and CREATE and CREATE and never FINISH. 

My ADHD manifested in confusion and surprise as time slithered away, hours passing like minutes and minutes seeming endless by contrast. An inability to gauge how much time had passed, was left, a task would take. An inability to hold dates in my head, because time didn’t feel consistent or even real.

Here's some of the talking points and why they're bullshit:

'10 million votes don't just disappear!' -> Joe Biden's 81 million votes were a statistical outlier, sparked by the recent experience of the Trump presidency. The democrats failed to maintain that sense of urgency, but Harris still got more votes than Hillary Clinton, more than Obama and more than any previous democratic candidate. These numbers are not weird at all.

'The Republicans tried to infiltrate election- and vote counting organizations!' -> yeah, they did, and yet hundreds of independent legal observers didn't see anything go wrong enough to raise any alarms. Independent exit polls are also very consistently similar to the counted votes. Tons of international organizations specialized in this stuff observed the election and didn't see a reason to raise the alarm.

'But I know a dozen democrats whose mail-in votes were not counted!' -> In any election a certain number of votes are registered as invalid because something was wrong with the ballot. In a country the size of the US, that translates to many thousands of votes. The internet allows these people to find each other, creating the false impression that a suspiciously large group of voted was not valid.

'Musk used Star Link to mess with electronic voting!' -> Electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet and dozens of independent media have already debunked this myth. It is absolutely impossible to use Star Link to fake election results.

'There is voter disenfranchisement!' -> This is true. This has always been true, for every election. It's an issue worth talking about but it's not a special secret conspiracy that's unique to this election.

I worked as an election judge across multiple polling locations and election types in my state from 2018-2023 (presidential primary and general elections, midterms, and special elections like for the school board etc.)

US elections are extremely secure. There are so many safeguards in place. Everything is double and triple counted.

The number of ballots electronically counted by the box are checked against the number of physical ballots at the end of the night, and also the receipt papers that individuals exchange for their ballot. All three of these counts MUST MATCH. Sometimes you're off by 1 number and it means everyone stops and triple counts these papers until you find the error (human error, it's been 16 hours and two pieces of thin receipt paper were stuck together and the second person to recount finds it and everyone cheers because thank fuck, it means no one dropped anything on the floor anywhere.)

There are eyes everywhere and there's a deliberate mix of poll workers across political parties/affiliations. It's simply not possible to alter even 1 ballot at 1 polling place, much less thousands.

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?”

Some brief notes on the correct kinds of “LYING”:

Always use “I” expressions, instead of “we”:

eg “I created a solution to a recurring problem by doing [x].”, even if it was really you and two others in a group

If you LED the group (or did project-management), you can say, “I led a team to create a solution to a recurring problem by doing [x].”

This is because employers like to know that YOU can do, and they also value team-leadership. If you say “we”, they may stop you and ask what You did specifically. You can avoid this by just saying “I”.

Someone asks if you have experience in a program (like excel):

If you feel confident using it:  “Yes, I am very proficient.”

If you have used it a few times, and could at least google what to do next: “Yes, I have good experience.”

If you don’t have any experience: “I have used it before. I generally pick up programs very fast, and I’m a quick learner.”

Mistakes (some interviewers may ask about a time you made a mistake, or a weakness of yours):

Good answers are those with solutions.

Bad answer examples:  “Sometimes I don’t catch mistakes before sending things.”  OR  “I don’t like working with other people”

Good answer examples:  “I had a problem catching typos, so I implemented steps that force me to check my work.”  OR  “I prefer to do things on my own so I know it’s done right, but I’m working on trusting my teammates to take on pieces as well.”

Someone asks if you’ve ever led a team / managed a project:

Try to say YES to this question (even if it is a lie)

If you have, say yes, and say how many people were on the team. 

If you haven’t, but you played a large role in a group of people, say yes, and talk about your primary role on the team. 

If you haven’t, but you worked solo on something that needed input from other people, say yes, and say what the project was about. 

Additional:

Misc Rules

You can ask people to repeat interview questions

You can write down interview questions while they’re asking (write the basics of the question down for yourself, like the top things you have to answer). People will wait for you to finish writing, you don’t have to answer Immediately.

Try to keep your answer to questions somewhere between 30 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds. You don’t have to time it, but if you find that your answers are taking 3 minutes, you might lose interest.

Have a list of projects / bragging points to talk about in advance

Try to make sure they at least answer the core question asked, don’t just bring up a completely unrelated topic

Example: if you are really excited to talk about a program you wrote, and someone asks about balancing projects, you can say you are good at AUTOMATION, and an example is this program you wrote

“Do you have any questions for us?” (A question asked at the end of most interviews.)

“What has been your favorite part of working at [company]?”

“What’s been your favorite project to work on?”

People like talking about themselves

Thank you emails

Some employers care if you send them a thank you “letter” (email). Sometime by the end of the day (you can do it right after the interview if you think you’ll forget), send a thank you email like this (you can look up other templates, or ask a friend for help):

Subject Line:  Thank You

“Hi [interviewer name], It was great speaking with you. Hearing more about the role, as well as what you said about [their answer to a question you asked them] has made me even more excited for this opportunity. Thank you for your time today, [Your Name]

If you are getting a federally-backed mortgage through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, your positive rental history DOES COUNT.

The other candidate hasn't accomplished a tangible thing in his life. But he's entertaining and loud and sucks all the oxygen from the room. He makes a lot of noise and you don't have to think about anything he just gets attention.

One thing about this that I can share with you is that I, as a 13 year old boy, read Atlas Shrugged. I read it as someone very committed to the ideology, who wanted to believe it, who wanted to like it, and there are two things I can share with you about that book from that time period.

The writing is terrible. It has the slowest, most boring, most pretentious prose you could possibly imagine. Calling it glacial would be a compliment. It makes glaciers look like Formula 1. There is no description for the pacing outside of hellish torments. It is like being condemned to watch a dog with an itchy ass wear the Himmalayas away only by scooching. It is like counting the grains of sand on a beach while Alexa reads off random phone numbers. It is like dipping saltines into lukewarm tapwater while listening to white noise in a beige room with no doors. It is like wearing a blindfold and being told to guess what a man is painting by sound alone, but there is no man, there is only a dog licking cold vaseline off a window. Forever. It is all of those things and more.

There is a multipage rant about how affairs are Good and Rational that is so insanely desparate that even middle-school-autist me thought she must have been having an affair while she wrote this. And then I googled it, and the answer was yes, she was. She called her philosophy Objectivism, because she believed, like everyone else in the world, that her ideas and motivations were Pure and Rational and Ojectively Correct, but I still find the name accurate, because it was really written with one Objective in mind, and that was finding a way to never admit that Ayn Rand had ever made a mistake in her life.

I was going to rant more about this but I kind of lost my train of thought. The book fucking sucks. It was propaganda of such remarkably low caliber that it actually helped me move out of those circles. Every time someone talked about liking the book, I'd reply with something along the lines of "Yeah, I especially loved the part where she destroyed the post modernists by unequivocally condemning affairs", and if they agreed with me, they would have lost my respect forever, and if they looked very embarrassed, I could at least acknowledge that they had a soul, albeit small and malformed. I had dozens of people claim that they read the book, and only three or four actually passed the test.