The rant thread.

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Re: The rant thread.

Postby jbobsully11 » Fri Sep 20, 2019 5:57 am

Observation: Any job interview that starts with filling out a paper application with a space for me to put what high school I attended hasn't generally gone well.

Actually, that's not totally true. But I had an interview at a factory that needs a line mechanic, and after filling out the aforementioned paperwork, I talked to three people, one of whom was fixated on my lack of professional experience in things that were only tangentially related to the job. Apparently, even though he (presumably) had seen my resume and they pay less than what an entry-level mechanic can expect to make elsewhere, he was hoping for more experience. Even the other two people were wondering what his problem was.

*shrug*
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby IamNotCreepy » Mon Sep 23, 2019 1:25 pm

So I just got back from a week of vacation in Mexico, and while it was mostly good, there are some things that pissed me off:

Spoiler: show
First, the flight. We were scheduled to fly out of Jacksonville, have about a 2-3 hour layover in Ft. Lauderdale, and then fly in to Cancun before taking a private transport to Playa Del Carmen, where we were staying.

Well, somehow there were too many planes scheduled at the airport, so they were delaying our flight. We had plenty of time between flights, so this wasn't a big deal. Except, they kept delaying it to the point where we had to make alternate arrangements.

The airlines' solution was to rent us a taxi to drive us 2-and-a-half hours to Orlando and then fly from there to Cancun. The problem? The taxis don't have car seats, which we needed for my daughter. So we had to drive back to our car and bring our own car seat, which we then had to take with us for the rest of the vacation.

Fortunately, we got the gate at the Orlando flight about 10 minutes before boarding -- just enough time to scarf down some truly terrible chicken wraps from the shop.

Spoiler: show
We stayed at an all-inclusive resort, which we picked in part because it had a kids club where we could drop my daughter off so we could relax.

It turns out the kids club had a really stupid rule that they did not tell us about ahead of time that seriously spoiled things: every hour, we had to physically go down to the kids club and check in on our daughter. This meant that we could only have about 45 minutes of uninterrupted time before having to go down and back up.

If she expressed interest in leaving the kids club, they would call us in the room and make us come down and get her. Uh, bitch, I don't care if she wants to come up, the whole point if for you to watch her.

Worse, one time after picking her up, we asked my daughter why she wanted to leave, and she just shrugged. She hadn't told them she wanted to leave, they asked her if she wanted us to pick her up, which of course she said she wanted.

Spoiler: show
We've all heard the horror stories of going to a foreign country and getting sick, so I made sure to only drink bottled water, but I still got afflicted with Montezuma's Revenge.

I had an intense 24 hours or so of near-constant diarrhea, plus fever/chills. I got mostly better, but it's been over a week and I am still having diarrhea.

My wife caught a much milder version a few days after I did. My daughter, fortunately, was completely spared.


ETA: I forgot one. This one is kind of funny, but at the time it was super frustrating.

Spoiler: show
The day after the worst of being ill, we went to this really cool eco-tourist theme park called Xcaret. It has animals, places to swim, etc.

The bad part is, it's kind of a maze. They have these useful colored lines you can follow to the main attractions, but the signs are confusing, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory.

We were following the white line through the butterfly garden when I felt the onset of stomach problems. I left my wife and daughter behind, and went forward to the end of the attraction. Unfortunately, the butterfly garden leads directly to the aviary, which did not have a bathroom.

I had to rush through the aviary, which was a shame, because they had a lot of really cool birds. It was a huge, winding path that had a lot of ups and downs, and I practically had to run through it. I got to the end of the aviary, and I asked the nearest employee where the bathroom was.

She told me to follow the white line and take a left. I did just that, but I ended up in a giant open area with no apparent bathroom. I wandered around looking for one. I found a sign for the bathroom in the opposite direction, so I followed it, but couldn't find it, so I asked someone else, who pointed me in the opposite direction of the sign, back where I came from.

By this time, I was afraid I was going to lose my wife and daughter in the maze, so I backtracked to the aviary to find them, and we went together looking for one. We wandered around some more before deciding to follow the white line to another part of the park.

This ended up bringing us through some Mayan ruins, and I had no idea how long this would be, so I rushed ahead. I eventually happened upon a restaurant in the park that had a bathroom. It took me nearly an hour from when I first had to go before I found a bathroom.

After I finished, I tried backtracking, but I couldn't find my wife. We didn't have cell service, and the wifi was spotty, so I spent about another 30 minutes wandering around the park before I found her.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Sep 24, 2019 3:38 am

Last Friday, I wrote:Observation: Any job interview that starts with filling out a paper application with a space for me to put what high school I attended hasn't generally gone well.

Plot twist: I got an e-mail from the HR rep today, and she wants me to come in late on Thursday for another interview. I asked if she could make it earlier, but she said she wants me to meet the second shift manager. So if they hire me, I might not have to work with the bucket o’ cheer from last time anyway.
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Crimson847 wrote:In other words, transgender-friendly privacy laws don't molest people, people molest people.

(Presumably, the only way to stop a bad guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law is a good guy with a transgender-friendly privacy law, and thus transgender-friendly privacy law rights need to be enshrined in the Constitution as well)
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby cmsellers » Tue Sep 24, 2019 4:30 am

I've sort of been resigned to my job search being shit. On the other hand, I've realized something about the Austin Public Library that really pisses me off.

Look, I've resigned myself to the fact that Austin is really big into ebooks and audiobooks, which means a lot of current books I want to read, they got in ebook and/or audiobook and figured "good enough." (I don't currently have a working eink ereader and don't like reading on LED screens, I don't do audiobooks, and I refuse to contribute to DRM, which means no ebooks even if I had an ereader.) I've resigned myself to the fact that Texas loves underfunding public services and isn't big on literacy and so, unlike Massachusetts, you can't request a book from any library in the state. But now I've realized: they don't seem to have any books published before the late nineties.

It took me awhile to figure this out, because Austin has plenty of older books. However these are almost always editions republished in the 21st century. I know that older books get read less often, and I get that libraries like to prune out old books to make space for new ones. But...

I come from Western Massachusetts, the whole of which has fewer people than the city of Austin, spread across dozens of municipalities. I could usually find what I was looking for (and when I couldn't, I could nearly always get it from another system elsewhere in Massachusetts, which, again, Texas doesn't do) because libraries have kept books dating back to the nineteenth century. I'm not exaggerating: I've actually checked out nineteenth century books from the Forbes Library, and early twentieth-century books from several others.

In Western Mass, with all of these tiny library systems, you have more physical facilities per person, more staff per person, and more of the popular books per person. You'd think that Austin would, by the benefit of economy of scale, be able to keep more older books, but somehow, they have almost none.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby Pedgerow » Tue Oct 01, 2019 12:33 am

Are any of you maniacs the sort of unhelpful motherfuckers who recommend having a shower to someone who has just been rained on? I hate those people. It is the most useless advice imaginable, on a par even with the classic, "Have you tried not having this problem that you have?" I hate rain. I really, really hate being rained on, but I also hate the controlling abuse of the weather making you carry an umbrella with you everywhere you go, just in case it rains. No other meteorological phenomenon forces you to carry luggage all day just in case it shows up. "I hope you weren't planning on having both your hands free," says the weather, "because I might rain today!"

So I very rarely carry an umbrella. This adds to me hating the rain, as I go about my life in an English city that is well-known for being rainy and miserable, even by English standards, because I get wet. And unlike being hot, or cold, or exposed to thunder or anything else, if you get rained on, you reach your destination and you're still bloody wet. No opening a window to cool down, no switching the heating on to warm up - wet ye were, and wet ye shall remain.

And in the midst of this environmental emotional abuse, this bullying from the heavens themselves, you get these complete fucking numpties who hear that you got wet and say, "Ah, you should have a shower." Why? How is that any use at all? I've just been out in the rain! I am, in some of these cases, utterly pissed through! I look like one of those clumps of pubes you dig out of the shower drain when it's blocked, and here comes the wise oracle to suggest I have a shower for some baffling reason! What the hell is wrong with you? The air itself has turned against me to soak me to the skin. I quite unironically never want to see water again at this point. It's like I've got rabies. How on Earth can getting wet again resolve my issue?

Hey, asshole: I just dug myself out on an avalanche. I've got hypothermia. Better grab a few fistfuls of ice cubes! I've just been stabbed in the face. But luckily, I will fix this by shaving! An explosion burnt my eyebrows off; guess it's time for a haircut! Doing these things wouldn't even fix a problem that wasn't insultingly similar to the solution you are suggesting, and if I made any of those recommendations, you would rightly dismiss me as a simpleton. In extreme cases, I could even be arrested for making such risibly imbecilic suggestions. Best case scenario, I'd get weird looks from everyone as they back away. And yet, when these smirking dingbats so helpfully suggest I wash myself to fix the fact that I've just been attacked by ambient water, they seem to genuinely think they're doing me a favour. They can't even believe that their catastrophic fucking idiocy hadn't occurred to me already. It's like I'm a fool for not being brainy enough to fix my outrage with a moronically ironic non sequitur. Eat shit, you absolute dildos. Fuck you.

But on a more positive note, it is now October, so I guess I could theoretically start wearing a jumper, rather than relying on sheer incandescent rage to keep me warm. No central heating till November, though. Those are the rules.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby JamishT » Tue Oct 01, 2019 3:09 am

My cousin once took a shower in the rain, and he ended up with a broken toe after falling off his roof. So yeah, I don't mix showers and rain, no siree!
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby Marcuse » Tue Oct 01, 2019 7:58 pm

I think it's more that a shower is hot, and rain is cold. Maybe it's just me but when I'm rained on I end up either shivering and cold, or sweating from humidity. A shower either warms me up or cleans me, both of which make me feel way better than being soaked through with extremely cold rain. Also showering implies one will remove and presumably change one's clothes.

So more like "you have hypothermia? Try a hot bath".
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby CarrieVS » Tue Oct 01, 2019 8:15 pm

Marcuse wrote:I think it's more that a shower is hot, and rain is cold. Maybe it's just me but when I'm rained on I end up either shivering and cold, or sweating from humidity. A shower either warms me up or cleans me, both of which make me feel way better than being soaked through with extremely cold rain. Also showering implies one will remove and presumably change one's clothes.

So more like "you have hypothermia? Try a hot bath".


Don't try a hot bath if you have severe hypothermia though. If you're cold but still able to physically function then it's usually ok.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue Oct 01, 2019 11:32 pm

Marcuse. Try a naked woman. I highly recommend it.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby cmsellers » Wed Oct 09, 2019 3:09 pm

I don't really read Nextdoor, but I do get the digests and sometimes read the snippets. It's pretty much all people complaining about suspicious dark people, petty crime, and lost dogs. Today, I saw one snippet that really pissed me off, though.

Wanted to post something I found regarding CodeNEXT. It’s worth researching and speaking up! I personally love love East AUSTIN and would like to see it’s culture/vibe/ neighborhood feel preserved as much as possible.. If we don’t want high rises next door to us, more traffic, no parking we need to...

So, first of all, East Austin's culture/vibe is already being destroyed. A developer is systematically buying up all the cute little three bedroom ranch houses, subdividing the lots, and putting an ugly-ass 6-7 bedroom McMansion on each new, smaller lot. I would much rather have well-designed high-rises than that.

Secondly, the relatively lax zoning laws in Texas are why Austin is still relatively affordable compared to coastal cities and Denver, but it's rapidly approaching those cities in price. CodeNEXT was an attempt to loosen Austin's zoning laws to keep those price increases in check.

Thirdly, CodeNEXT is entirely dead, and has been for years, all thanks to NIMBYs like this asshole.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Oct 09, 2019 7:49 pm

My dentist's office in August: You must pay in full before we will bother to schedule an appointment for you.

Me, that day: Pays in full to get appointment scheduled.

My dentist's office 24 hours before appointment: We have a conflict and can you come in next Tuesday?

Me: No, my son is having surgery that day. I made this appointment two months ago, what is going on?

My dentist's office: *puts me on hold for 5 minutes* Okay how a month from now?

Me: Well. You already took my money so I guess I'll suffer for another month.

The Search For A Dentist That Is A Better Provider Than They Are A Capitalist continues.....

This is only the second time this has happened and this will be my second visit. I think I see a pattern forming.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby Absentia » Wed Oct 09, 2019 8:57 pm

iMURDAu wrote:My dentist's office in August: You must pay in full before we will bother to schedule an appointment for you.

Me, that day: Pays in full to get appointment scheduled.

My dentist's office 24 hours before appointment: We have a conflict and can you come in next Tuesday?

Me: No, my son is having surgery that day. I made this appointment two months ago, what is going on?

My dentist's office: *puts me on hold for 5 minutes* Okay how a month from now?

Me: Well. You already took my money so I guess I'll suffer for another month.

The Search For A Dentist That Is A Better Provider Than They Are A Capitalist continues.....

This is only the second time this has happened and this will be my second visit. I think I see a pattern forming.


I wouldn't go back there again. I put up with getting my appointments unreasonably shunted around because I go to a student practice and it's cheap, and they certainly don't have the temerity to demand full payment in advance before they tell me to wait another month.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby cmsellers » Wed Oct 09, 2019 9:26 pm

I went to a medical school for my implant and crown, and of maybe a dozen appointments, one or two were rescheduled. I have also never had a dentist demand payment in advance no matter where I've gone. I second what Absentia said: this is not normal; seek out another provider.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby cmsellers » Fri Oct 25, 2019 11:38 pm

Thought about making a CASS thread on this, but I'd hope that pretty much everybody on TCS would agree with me on this, and if they didn't, I don't really want to argue it.

So, Sam Harris is making the "black people are dumber because science" argument. (The article is about Steven Pinker, but Harris's quote is at the bottom.) This upsets me for two reasons. First of all, I thought we put this argument rest in the nineties, when The Bell Curve made it and was roundly debunked. And secondly, I thought Sam Harris was smarter than this.

The Bell Curve's argument relied on twin studies )where adoptions occur in very similar socioeconomic backgrounds, ie, exactly where you'd expect to see minimal impact of environment) plus the argument to personal incredulity, which is a fucking logical fallacy. Sam Harris seems to make the same argument to personal incredulity the Bell Curve's authors did, though he doesn't state it explicitly, but charitably, his argument seems to be "there's so much diversity in humans that you'd expect some cognitive differences because of genetic drift."

There's at least four problems with this argument.

1. Genetic drift only makes sense as a hypothesis when you have small, reproductively isolated populations, with observable differences, which you can't account for any other way. Since most human populations have neither been small nor reproductively isolated, genetic drift is extremely unlikely as an explanation even if we were sure that there were racial differences in cognitive ability.

2. Even if you had small, isolated populations where you would expect genetic drift suggesting that you would therefore expect genetic drift on any particular trait makes no sense unless you expect that trait to have little to no impact on fitness otherwise. In humans, we seem to select for a consistent level of intelligence. Too high and you risk autism, depression, and other sorts of neuroses, too low, and well, to quote the Austin Lounge Lizards: "Life is hard, but life is hardest when you're dumb."

3. IQ tests measure something consistent. Within cultures, it seems to be a pretty good approximation of intelligence. Across cultures, including comparing, say rural Texas to upper Manhattan or 2010s Boston to 1970s Boston, it ends up being a terrible measure of intelligence. Despite many, many attempts to make culturally-neutral IQ tests, even the best still appear to be culturally loaded. And I've taken part in enough studies to know that IQ tests which ask things like "what city is associated with Carl Sandberg?" are still very popular.

4. Even if we could develop an IQ test which was consistent across cultures, and we then found that yes, black people are dumber on average, it doesn't prove that difference is genetic. Poorer people have a range of environmental factors you would expect to impact performance, including nutrition, parental involvement, parental education, and a general sense of security.

Goddamn, I'm pissed right now.
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Re: The rant thread.

Postby CarrieVS » Fri Oct 25, 2019 11:58 pm

cmsellers wrote:twin studies (where adoptions occur in very similar socioeconomic backgrounds)


I thought twin studies were normally about comparing identical and fraternal twins, the point being that they're brought up together in the same family at the same time, and you aim to see whether there's a difference in the variability between the two types of twins.
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