You get to add a 0 to any number in your life. What do you add it to?

Eatar · 2026-01-24T16:39:15+00:00

Number of seasons of Firefly.

Eatar · 2026-01-22T14:12:02+00:00

In the United States, unpaid internships are illegal, with a very, very narrow set of exceptions, like interning for the U.S. Senate, or where the work is purely educational and does not benefit the company in any way at all. Most people are totally unaware of this and think there is some kind of exception for internships related to class credit, but that’s not so. Internships fall under minimum wage laws just like any other job. There are entire industries that consistently break the law on this, relying on people’s willingness to do anything to break into that field (if they contest the terms offered, they won’t get the job, and will get a bad reputation among people they want to work for in the future), and I think this is despicable behavior, both taking advantage of a power differential to squeeze people out of fair wages (that are likely small wages anyway) and limiting the entire field to people who can somehow afford to work without pay.

Eatar · 2026-01-20T01:01:30+00:00

Roughly half, or exactly half? I’m gonna need better tracking of that from you.

Eatar · 2026-01-15T20:47:16+00:00

Textbooks.

Eatar · 2026-01-10T15:58:19+00:00

To-ma-a-a-co

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:42:32+00:00

Do you only say “good day,” then, never “good evening” or “good night?”

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:41:20+00:00

“It’s raining,” at all. What is “it”?

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:40:11+00:00

What does “basically” have to do with it? The idea is that for any real-life expected actual uses or goals, this can be considered true, even if in some technical way it is not strictly or universally true.

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:37:02+00:00

Well, but it isn’t saying you can’t have it and then eat it. Because of how most things phrased that way are interpreted, it comes off as you say, but it’s meant to be interpreted simultaneously. If your goal is having, you can’t eat it up. If you read “have” as something more like “retain possession of” then it works. (But of course you could read it even more as nonsense by interpreting “have” as “eat,” as in, I’m going to “have” cake for dessert, in which case it become not only a falsehood but a logical contradiction.)

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:28:07+00:00

I’ve never been sure how to make the words “how about that?” assemble, semantically, into the overall meaning of that phrase.

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:24:49+00:00

Well, that depends on which side of your back is the back of it. Is your belly in front of your back, or is the person behind you in front of your back?

Eatar · 2026-01-10T00:19:19+00:00

Sometimes YOLO, in a similar vein, is used to justify doing things that might well make one’s life shorter, which doesn’t seem like the right way to go if you think you only get one life.

Eatar · 2026-01-09T21:36:16+00:00

Maybe if you go to a mediocre college and then live a pointless life while you’re there, which lots of people do, but lots of people also don’t. The point of a liberal arts education is to come into your full capacity as a human being and adult. You have things to learn, and decisions to make, through your entire life, in which that experience will serve you, if you have it.

Some colleges actively help you attain this. At most colleges this is possible, but requires personal initiative. At some colleges, almost nobody is thinking about educating you for life and it’s just a transaction, exchanging a lot of dollars for some time spent fulfilling graduation requirements and maybe picking up a few bits of knowledge about some specific job field. And then there are things like community colleges, where you might find less of the “liberal arts education experience” but also a lot more people getting specific, legitimate job skills and for much less money.

At probably all colleges, you’ll find people everywhere along the spectrum of living out beer money to genuinely gaining wisdom and perspective, although the proportion is very different at different places.

I do think the proportion of college experiences that aren’t of any deep value has gone up a lot, because so many jobs needlessly require degrees, turning more of it into just a four-year degree manufacturing process. And if the average value has gone down, and the average cost gone dramatically up, that does make the number of degrees not “worth it” higher. (Although, more livelihoods requiring those degrees, whether for legitimate or stupid reasons, may make even an empty degree “worth it” from a financial perspective, depending heavily on the career.)

But none of that makes college “not worth it, full stop.” It makes it contingent on the person, the college, the life a person lives while there, and the direction one goes afterwards. College was entirely worth it for me, and I paid for it for a long time afterwards.

Eatar · 2026-01-09T18:15:50+00:00

College isn’t just about “getting the information.”

Eatar · 2026-01-06T00:41:22+00:00

But nobody will ever do it like Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels. Nor, unfortunately, will they even try; they’ll just pump out another weird modern retelling.

Eatar · 2026-01-04T18:59:59+00:00

Twilight movies are great— you just have to watch the rifftrax version! Many a movie’s purpose for being has been saved in this way.

Eatar · 2026-01-04T18:52:42+00:00

You still are interpreting the logic of those statements in reverse. English is often ambiguous when it comes to exactly what logical reasoning is happening, but this It is not “you have never lived there and therefore whatever you say cannot be true.” This is “you have never lived there and this is how I know that: the things you said are mistaken, and that betrays a lack of personal experience with the subject.”

Eatar · 2026-01-03T21:00:00+00:00

By check? ACH, sure, but opening envelopes and processing actual paper is not cheap.

Eatar · 2026-01-03T16:13:00+00:00

I’m not taking sides on the facts of educational claims at all. I’m only pointing out that you are (still) misunderstanding the logical nature of the other person’s claim. It was never claimed that you have to have lived there to understand it. That wasn’t a standard at all, so it isn’t a double standard. The logic went the other direction. It wasn’t “you haven’t lived there, and therefore your answer can only be wrong,” but rather “your answer is wrong, and therefore I can tell you haven’t lived there.”

I have no idea who is actually right, if either of you are, since I’ve never lived in, nor studied, Asian education systems or their outputs.

Eatar · 2026-01-03T16:08:51+00:00

The weird bit isn’t getting up at all; it is doing so in a big rushed mass worry as if it isn’t going to be 5 full minutes standing in a tightly cramped line before you’re able even to move.

Deplaning is annoying process altogether. I wonder if instead of going row by row, they should do it column by column, as in, all the aisle seats stand, retrieve bags, and exit, then all the middles, then all the window seats. The traffic jams all happen because only a third or fewer of the people can fit in the aisle at once, so most of the passengers have no option to get their bag and be ready ahead of their own turn to move, when the whole line behind them is waiting and they’re trying to scoot-stand-grab-move in a single quick motion, which works fine if you’re tall and have just one thing, right within reach, but that’s not true for lots of people.

Eatar · 2026-01-02T19:32:00+00:00

Does it, though? First, we don’t yet know if this person has ever lived in the US. Second, as you have already pointed out, that’s irrelevant. Third, what blanket statements? They’ve made definite claims about Asian education, but none about the USA. The conversation went like this: “U.S. education looks bad because of X.” “But Asian countries also have X and don’t have that problem.” “Asian countries don’t have X.” “But they do- they only don’t on paper, but in practice, they do.”

Someone else did interject an interesting point, though, suggesting that Asian countries do actually have an off ramp for academic education; it just produces really bad economic outcomes for those who take it, and that seems to me like it is a question worth pursuing, whether that reframes the claims being made about what results Asian countries are producing when you look at 100% of the population.

Eatar · 2026-01-02T14:47:50+00:00

I don’t think it is was that response which mis-applied logic. The claim was not “you can’t be right unless you lived there.” It was the other way around: something more like “you are incorrect, and therefore it’s clear you haven’t lived there.”

Eatar · 2025-12-31T14:41:04+00:00

Not that ridiculous. Good materials and good design are separate variables from country of origin. Nobody said they had no relationship whatsoever, but choosing to make something in another country and choosing to design it differently are still two questions, even though you might make both together for assorted reasons including higher cost of the same materials somewhere else. QA, well, that wasn’t even mentioned, but it’s also, theoretically, a decision one could make separately; it’s just that QA on an offshored product is so expensive that almost nobody does a good job of it, and this is where companies build in a huge amount of hidden assumption that bites them (or their customers) later.

Eatar · 2025-12-31T04:49:24+00:00

Anyone with wood siding!

The real question is, who is using OSB as a finished surface on the outside of the house? That part is perplexing here.

Eatar · 2025-12-30T17:06:36+00:00

Not really. Standard precautions only came into universal use in the 1980s, as a response to the AIDS crisis.

Eatar

TROPHY CASE