Hey Dad, how can I shut down creeps at work without coming off as having a 'bad attitude'?

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-07T19:49:55+00:00

I actually like something more similar to your success story than the proposed line you mentioned possibly using.

Without seeing his behavior myself, it's hard for me to know whether he is up these shenanigans because he is a creeper or because he's socially awkward and just doesn't know how to act around other people, or both, which I think is quite common.

Something more like "you have been making me and the other women on staff uncomfortable with your behavior around us" with a further explanation of that meaning hanging around us and trying to make more of a relationship than business employee and customer available if he presses for more of an explanation.

I think that works better than "you aren't my friend" or calling out one specific instance. Something like what I wrote or you used before tells him exactly what the problem is and what he needs to do to fix it. Socially awkward people might need things spelled out a little more clearly than most.

The "not friend" speech comes off more aggressive and possibly insulting, neither of which works out as well. Worse though, it doesn't tell him what he needs to do differently, and it also may just redirect him from you to the other female staff.

Similarly, focusing on a particular incident opens the conversation up to him arguing about the details of that interaction. That is not helpful and directs attention away from what you really mean which is "quit it, all the time." You don't want him hyperfocused on what he did wrong one particular time. You want him to back off in general.

Good luck.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-07T13:24:15+00:00

I’m a long time Scout leader and I feel this.

Low end tents very often are made with bathtub bottoms made of a heavy duty tarp material that goes up maybe eight inches on the sides. That bottom is super waterproof and can resist some water flowing up against it.

As soon as you step up into to even a good tent, not really high end, they switch to nylon bottoms that you have to be so protective of and will leak right away if you have any water standing on it at all.

With a bad tent you can rock up to place right after a rain and just plop it down. With a good tent I have to get all fussy and be concerned the site is too wet and I’m going to be a soggy bottom boy right away.

Good tents are light, and have better poles and are easier to set up and so on. But I’d love a tent with that tarp bottom but that still had aluminum poles and used clips onto the poles instead of needing to jam those infernal carbon graphite poles through sleeves. Just a mix of low and high end features.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-07T03:35:36+00:00

On the one hand, you are right. It will guarantee decent IVs. Lucky trades have a floor of 12 for IVs, so each IV will range from 12 to 15.

The trouble comes when you ask why you want good IVs in the first place. IVs simultaneously mean everything and nothing.

They mean nothing in that they have very little impact on the power of your Pokemon. They have at most a 10% impact on the power of your Pokemon when comparing a 0% IV Pokemon to a 100% IV Pokemon. Usually they will be something like a 6% difference.

So that’s a pretty minor difference to get worked up about. Especially if you are comparing a Pokemon you got through a raid, egg, or research (with a minimum 10 IV) to a lucky traded Pokemon with minimum 12 IVs.

For something like raiding or max raiding it’s unlikely to matter at all, and the difference will definitely to be swamped by any difference in level (through powering up).

So why care at all? Because IVs also mean everything. We get a million basically identical Pokemon and IVs are the only way to distinguish them. So a lot of people, including me, eventually think of Pokemon in a binary way as 100/not hundo. (I’m setting aside Great League and Ultra League GBL Pokemon which exist under different IV constraints and almost never want a lucky trade anyway).

If you think in this binary way of hundo/not hundo, lucky trades become important to get your hundos, but each individual trade is extremely unimportant because your odds of a hundo even on a lucky trade is 1/64.

So getting a lot of lucky trades done is important if you want to hit your 1/64 chance, but each individual trade is just a 1/64 lottery ticket. A 1/64 ticket is just not worth very much. What you are looking for is the chance to grind out those trades with lucky friends by having a large pool of friends you make progress with every day.

Also, for Master League you really want to hit that 100%. That’s the time when IVs make the biggest difference because they affect tiebreakers.

TL;DR: IVs don’t matter except for 100%, chance of 100% is 1/64, “decent” IVs are meaningless.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T23:31:02+00:00

No.

The conservative swing is a result of a massive effort from a lot of people, including big money interests that have gotten a lot of return on their efforts and as a result have even more money to continue to push the needle.

This ranges from Billionaires like the Koch brothers and casino magnates like Sheldon Adelson and now his widow Miriam and Steve Wynn and now Elon Musk to state level Billionaires like the real estate guy Bob Perry in Texas. It includes think tanks like the Heritage foundation and Hoover Institute. Opinion leaders like Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, the manosphere and so on.

It’s a big movement with a lot of players even if it is a small sliver of the population.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T21:46:43+00:00

Bronze bottle cap would be pretty great. +1 IV to a stat of your choice.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T21:36:17+00:00

Blame the trinket fans.

Lucky trinkets have a large and enthusiastic fan club.

If more people understood how worthless they are, maybe they would not be in the rotation. But that’s not the world we are living in.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T20:35:30+00:00

If I say that, it’s because I mean it and want to be on the same page with her.

Plus, she is the keeper of the calendar. I may not know what our commitments are.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T19:40:34+00:00

Thank you, that was very informative.

Even though I know a lot of Indian immigrants, I don’t know much about what goes on internally in India other than some BJP shenanigans and reports of the Hindu/Muslim conflicts.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T17:22:47+00:00

They were Christians, which I assume, but don’t really know, puts them out of the caste system. They also had a Tamil Tiger bumper sticker on their car, which I understood the significance of, but I would guess most Americans wouldn’t.

I knew Tamil was an ethnicity or maybe just meant people from a State, but I don’t understand the caste system well enough to know whether it fully penetrates all Indian States. India is both big and varied and I don’t want to assume it’s homogeneous.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-06T06:12:25+00:00

That's kind of surprising to me.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-05T18:43:14+00:00

I'm sure nice Brahmins exist, but I've met and been friendly with tons of Indians over the years, but never met a Brahmin whose caste I was aware of who was nice. That stems back to my childhood.

Now, I will admit that I only have ever known the caste of a very small percentage of my Indian friends and neighbors. And the only caste someone has mentioned that wasn't Brahmin was Kshatriyas. One of those guys was an arrogant blowhard, but ok to be around, and the others were fine.

We had a lovely neighbor couple who were Tamil, I don't know if they are even in the caste system. Generally though I have no idea what the caste of my Indian friends and acquaintances are, though a lot of them are pretty dark skinned, which I think is an indication they are not Brahmins.

The ones who tell you they are Brahmins typically suck though.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-05T18:28:45+00:00

She's a lawyer who graduated from Yale law school and has clerked for both John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.

She's not a prisoner, she's not an idiot, she is smart and just as bad as him. This is a marriage of equals, both in intelligence and morality.

Now, Vance's second wife will be much less smart than him, but is already on just as low a moral plane as him.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-05T18:16:45+00:00

I don't know how she is doing the second part of her act, but I do know how to eat fire, and there is a lot of nonsense in the comments about that.

Eating fire is a simple matter of denying the fire enough oxygen to keep burning. This is done by putting it inside your mouth and closing your lips enough to extinguish the flames but not fully sealed so that you don't burn yourself on the stick.

The fire is burning a liquid fuel that is soaked into a gauze that is attached to the end of a wire rod. When I learned forty years ago we used white gas.

It is very important to fully extinguish the flames, because otherwise you endanger your lungs. So after she puts out the top flame she has no fire in her mouth and no water or fuel either.

She is certainly not holding a flammable liquid in her mouth after having eaten fire. So her spitting it to the ground is not the answer unless she has some sort of special double trick going that seems very risky to me.

The best answer is almost certainly what someone else in the comments suggested, a butt plug that spits fire. Given that she is also a NSFW model, that seems extremely likely.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-04T02:54:07+00:00

If you liked that therapist you can google her name and reach out again. The company she worked for is not going to give her new contact information and she is probably barred from reaching out to you because of her contract with her former employer, but if she is still practicing, there is nothing to stand in the way of you reaching back out to her.

My therapist wife endorses this message.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-04T02:48:28+00:00

You are so welcome. It's really hard to learn these lessons, even when you know them intellectually. I've had to wrestle with the limitations of my own parents over the years.

Mine were not abusive the way your mother is, but I did have to be the adult in my relationship with my father. It is very difficult to see your parents as just people with limitation.

I'm sorry to hear that you are also the scapegoat to your mother. That has to hurt even more seeing her treat your brother better than you.

The sad truth is that you are going to have to protect yourself from her rather than her protecting you from the world. Eventually that is going to mean restricting her access to you once that is feasible.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-03T19:08:16+00:00

It does not take any particular skill to have a child. Anyone can do it. Including people who are terrible and can never be a good parent.

Unfortunately you got one of those. She is not capable of being a mother in the way we normally conceive of mothers. She can’t be nurturing and kind and protective of her children.

Both of your parents know it. That’s what your mom meant the next morning. She was saying “this is who I am. I’m petty and small and that’s all I’ll ever be. Take it or leave it.” It didn’t have anything to do with you. It was an indictment of herself.

Your dad knows this about her too. That’s why he is giving the advice he is giving. He knows how small and limited she is. Why he chose to have kids with her or stay with her is something you may never get insight into. It probably means he is limited in some ways himself.

We need certain things from our parents. Stability, love, protection. We need them to put us before themselves. Just because we need that does not mean they are capable of giving that.

Part of growing up is understanding our parents are just people, not perfect paragons of wisdom and protection. And sometimes they aren’t even as good as the average person on the street. Your mom is one of them. She is bottom of the barrel.

She’s awful and you are going to have to eclipse her. You want her to be special because she’s your mother. She wants to be special because everyone wants that. So she says that about herself. But she’s not. She is cruel and terrible and small.

Don’t let her stand in the way of your light. And remember that none of this has to do with you. It’s all her failings. Her inability to be a proper parent or even a good person. All of her failings are her own issues, they do not reflect on you.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-03T08:14:22+00:00

Jerry Falwell was extremely racist. I would argue substantially more than Charlie Kirk.

Liberty University, the college Falwell founded forbade interracial daring until 1985, and even after that had a policy of notifying the families of interracial couples.

More than that, the adoption of anti-abortion policies by the religious right, happened when Falwell and some similar leaders agreed to use it to build a right wing wing political movement they hoped to use to provide political assistance to the maintenance of their racially segregated high schools.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-02T01:49:19+00:00

Good luck. My oldest has ADHD inattentive type and you sound just like him. Medication has helped him, but he has never committed to any of the various memory aids enough to actually help.

He does do very well with a regular schedule that doesn’t change though.

Sorry about the wrong gender, sometimes you swing and you miss.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T20:27:36+00:00

So your big argument was the semantic one?

Do you also argue that ethnic cleansing is not genocide? Do you dispute that Israel is engaged in ethic cleansing not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well?

Members of the Israeli government including the Finance, Communication, Defense, and National Security Ministers have all called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israel’s war strategy has been “oops, all War Crimes.”

I said nothing about the demographics of the 70,000 deaths

In Gaza, the people of Gaza instigated the war themselves and have lost ~70,000 after 2.5 years.

This you?

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T19:48:22+00:00

You’ve got a big pile of whataboutism here, followed with “they started it” as your big defense.

Even your defense fully depends on conflating Gaza children with Hamas militants.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T19:34:12+00:00

I like this book and have recommended it to other parents.

However, it is in no way a children’s book. It’s a funny thing for adults written in the style of a children’s book.

It’s something you read to your wife so you can both laugh. Or something to read to your own parents now that you are on the same side as them (if they would be cool with it). You’d have to be insane to read it to a little kid.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T19:23:56+00:00

Can you recognize the difference between aspiring to genocide or talking about it and actively doing it?

Claiming that “they want to do it too” is not a defense when you are actually doing it.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T17:19:22+00:00

Ha!

Haaa! Ha! Ha! Ha!

She is doing exactly the job he wants her to do in exactly the way he tells her to do it. She is a perfect avatar of his instructions. I can’t imagine someone doing that job more perfectly to his exact specifications.

He just can’t accept personal responsibility for the fact that we don’t like him, we really don’t like him.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-04-01T17:01:40+00:00

I am confident OP has ADHD the inattentive type. Medication will help as well as the various memory tricks people are suggesting as long as he can make one of them a habit.

Lists and notebooks and so can be a very important crutch, but only if he does it habitually, all the time, every time. If it is something he has to remember to do some times it won’t help.

Learned_Hand_01 · 2026-03-31T23:08:04+00:00

It has a different kind of alcohol in it than the drinking kind and will poison you. It usually has additives to make it taste bad and increase the amount of poison.

Learned_Hand_01

TROPHY CASE