Poll needs an option for “it depends on the context”

ok i’m curious

Self-portrait

Oh okay, I see what you mean - thank you for the input.

if you're seeking out interview advice, you don't just want to be an Acceptable Candidate, you want to win.

This is a good distillation of what I hate so much about trying to get a job.

As I understand it, basically the only way to live and have a decent standard of living in the U.S. (i.e. having my own room to live in) is to get a long-term, full-time job. But in order to get one of those, I have to compete against a bunch of other people and win. I have to convince an employer that I'm not only an okay person to do whatever they need done, but the best person out of all their options.

And I don't have any reason to expect myself to win anything, and I don't want to have to! I'm not a competitive person by nature! I live in the New York City area; for any given task, I'm sure there are hundreds of impressive college grads who can do it with more motivation and ambition than I can. I'm just some guy with anxiety and executive functioning issues that can slow me down with a lot of tasks. If I'm being honest, I think there are jobs that I would do fine in, but I don't find it likely that I personally would be the best applicant for any of them. So I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do.

(And winning implies beating the opponents, that someone else is losing, but I don't want to beat the other unemployed / underemployed people. I want everyone to be able to be alive and have access to food and housing!)

It's weird to me how, in job applications, you're supposed to contextualize all your prior life experiences as being things that helped you develop skills for the job you're applying for now. Like, it's seen as bad if you had a gap in employment, but if you did have one, you're supposed to say you did productive things during that time that helped you develop relevant skills. Apparently you're supposed to go through your whole life always thinking about how you can better serve your hypothetical future employer. It reminds me of "I'm saving myself for my future spouse", but like, for a corporation

Is Apple the Trader Joe's of computers?

inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

I'm currently reading the YA sci-fi book Catfishing on Catnet, which is really good, and feels a bit prescient because it was published in 2019, takes place in what seems to be the not-too-distant future, and prominently features AI. And there's a plot point that the main character goes to a school where sex education classes are taught by a robot, and some characters discuss hacking the robot to change its pre-programmed question responses and make them more informative and inclusive

Which is genuinely an interesting story concept, but I have found that I cannot read the phrase "sex ed robot" without thinking of the Whitest Kids U Know sketch "Sex Robot"

I had a dream that I was traveling through Europe on a train with overnight compartments, with some other people (who I think were sort of a mix of real people I know and fictional characters - I can't pin down exactly who they were now). The train was stopping in some major cities so that passengers could get off, see the sights for a bit, then get back on before the train left for the next leg of the journey.

I think, in the dream, the train started somewhere in southern France, then went through northern Italy, then specifically stopped in Budapest, Hungary. I knew the ultimate destination would be Amsterdam, Netherlands, and I was planning to fly back to the U.S. from there.

I think I realized in the dream that this route didn't totally make sense in terms of making a straight journey; we were going east before turning back and going west. But I think in the dream I pictured it as a sort of rounded half-circle shape. After waking up, I was curious and looked on Google Maps, and realized that Hungary is actually further east than I had remembered, so the train journey in the dream would actually look like more of a sharp > shape.

But I do clearly remember Budapest being a stop partway through the journey and Amsterdam being the ultimate destination, so (when awake) I felt the urge to look if there's a different starting city that would make this imagined train journey make sense. Thessaloniki, Greece, looked like it was in about the right spot, and is a city that I've read a little bit about before and think sounds interesting. So I plugged it in on Google Maps, and indeed, many of the routes for a transit journey from Thessaloniki to Amsterdam will indeed take you through Budapest! (Although it looks like a lot of this would take place on buses, rather than trains.) So now I kind of want to do this trip in real life

In terms of what inspired this dream: a couple days ago I heard the song "Budapest" by George Ezra for the first time in a while. And I think my mom mentioned recently that she thinks it would be cool for me to visit Amsterdam sometime, which I've been to once before with my parents when I was 16 (I have an uncle who lives there with his partner). So I think both of those cities were in my consciousness. I'm also in the NUMTOT Facebook group so I often see content about how most of Europe has a functional rail network, unlike the U.S., and thus the concept of traveling a long distance by train was also in my consciousness

I think we should have brutal arguments on the Wikipedia talk page for "Apple" about which variety of apple gets featured in the infobox image. Kind of like the arguments they've apparently had about the image on "Human"

In addition to the four YA books I have read with the plot point "a main character is dealing with guilt from contributing in some way to the death of their parent or love interest in a car crash"--

I have now read two YA books with the plot point "a main character runs away from the home they live at with their legal guardians and impulsively gets on a bus or train to another state in order to try to find their mom, who has not been in contact with them. But when they see their mom, they learn that she is unable to act as a parent to them due to having a mental illness and/or drug addiction, and it turns out their legal guardians loved them all along"

(Feel free to DM if you want titles. Almost all of these are pretty major spoilers for the books in question)

From Google search suggestions, I get the impression that a substantial contingent of people think that "wiki" is an abbreviation for Wikipedia

A little over two years later, I just took it again and now I'm at 193/196!

This time I remembered Comoros, Sierra Leone, and Samoa, but somehow still forgot Fiji, and also forgot St. Vincent this time

This is entirely a brag, I won't pretend it isn't, but I just took this quiz for the first time in a while and I can still get 191/196 countries. To be fair, I was an international and global studies minor in college. And I uses the "show missing countries" option which makes it easier

The 5 I forgot, if anyone's curious, are Comoros, Sierra Leone, Antigua and Barbuda, Fiji, and Samoa

It's weird to me how, in job applications, you're supposed to contextualize all your prior life experiences as being things that helped you develop skills for the job you're applying for now. Like, it's seen as bad if you had a gap in employment, but if you did have one, you're supposed to say you did productive things during that time that helped you develop relevant skills. Apparently you're supposed to go through your whole life always thinking about how you can better serve your hypothetical future employer. It reminds me of "I'm saving myself for my future spouse", but like, for a corporation

Also, I know this is a humorous shitpost, but I think some people argue that the hippies' freewheeling spirit did take over the world to an extent, if you compare American society and culture in the '50s to what it's like in recent decades

The only reason the hippies' freewheeling spirit failed to take over the world was they lacked an iron willed dictator to fuse them into a single obedient collective

My impression from Scott Alexander was that Ken Kesey approached this for a while, but then (in Scott's phrase) "lost the Mandate of Heaven"

The only reason the hippies' freewheeling spirit failed to take over the world was they lacked an iron willed dictator to fuse them into a single obedient collective

I think, in many ways, I felt more capable and like an adult when I was 22 than I do now at 28. And that worries me