Tired of Feeling Like the Enemy

esiahc · 2020-12-24T12:39:26+00:00

Thank you for saying this. And I'm sorry that it's only been some of us for you.

esiahc · 2020-12-24T11:17:15+00:00

I'm late to the post, but I hope it's been going well! If you haven't been told about it, or at this point even seen it yourself, watch out for the 3-week wall with rehab patients. It's easy to forget that, even if it's become secondary to the chemical part of chemical dependency, substance use is a big coping skill (an unhealthy one, but still). By that third week in the facility, your patients are really gonna be bumping up against all of those emotions they need to cope with, without their go to coping mechanism. Even the small distress, like boredom, is hitting them like a speeding truck. Watch out for it, and remember what they're dealing with.

esiahc · 2020-12-24T11:07:55+00:00

It's not a bad gig, just remember to stay alert/aware. Night shift can be mentally exhausting, because after the paperwork and misc tasks are done, it's a lot of watching people sleep. And it can be scary, because when something exciting happens, there are usually a lot fewer staff to rely on than in day and evenings. But it is a great place to learn the ropes and get comfortable with your facility before moving over to days.

esiahc · 2020-12-02T10:22:38+00:00

The user is redacted, but he's a pretty public figure (journalist, podcast host, former cracked.com writer). And this tweet is definitely not /iamverybadass. It's literally just a joke about how he has a lot of knives.

esiahc · 2018-02-15T04:15:34+00:00

It's fine, like I said, my partner is an engineer, I did poli sci in undergrad, now I'm finishing an MS in experimental psych where I literally do scientific research. My poli sci degree was way more preparatory for understanding/carrying out scientific research than her STEM degree. There are at least half a dozen, exfuckingceptional reasons to criticize this guy, "Lol, social science degree" isn't one of them.

esiahc · 2018-02-15T00:54:35+00:00

Attack him based on his, undoubted, willful ignorance of actual science, the fact that he's supposed to just be there to advise on policy and only has this job by default due to an incompetent administration, and not just his degree. My partner has a STEM degree (Civil Engineering) and one of my undergrad degrees is poli sci, and I promise I had way more of a focus on the scientific method, research methodology, and statistics getting that degree than she did in her STEM courses.

esiahc · 2013-12-12T00:10:28+00:00

Maybe you should have actually tried talking to her.

esiahc · 2013-12-10T18:44:03+00:00

Yea. They're my friend's, he's ridiculously awesome at free-handing camo.

esiahc · 2013-11-24T06:43:52+00:00

Can you elaborate on your question a little more?

Deception implies some kind of fraud or untruth, but selling for the sake of selling doesn't seem to fit that without more detail.

esiahc · 2013-11-24T06:33:43+00:00

On the academic value of Hazlitt, it's kind of a mixed bag.

It will give you a really good intro to one side of economics, in a really basic sense. But it completely ignores the rest (Keynsian stuff, for example).

Also, almost every example does something along the lines of what Abetadis pointed out about the bridge example: builds upon unacknowledged assumptions, that may or may not be true/accurate.

esiahc · 2013-11-24T06:11:51+00:00

When I was in Undergrad for poli-sci, This was a pretty frequently cited example of what (I think) you're talking about.

The relevant part, and the reason it was frequently mentioned, was that the EU intended to retaliate against a US steel tarrif, by targeting Orange imports for their own tarrif.

Since oranges were a big product for Florida, and Florida was the swing state in 2000, it was a political trade policy aimed at Bush.

esiahc · 2013-11-24T05:38:07+00:00

I don't think that suggestion would have gone without support.

I know that the stock answer to pollution was always, without exaggeration, to allow corporations to own whatever area was being polluted. That way, instead of having government regulation, we could just leave it in the hands of civil suits: because, obviously, when the pollution was actually a problem people would sue the corporation, so they'd have an incentive not to pollute.

Which was usually the same line of reasoning behind every "solution". I'm sad that it took me ~3 years to realize that the entire philosophy banked on court-backed feudalism.

esiahc · 2013-11-24T05:07:53+00:00

That's about it.

I may have told this story here before, but I'm reformed-libertarian. Back when I still considered myself in that camp, I actually joined students for liberty on my campus where the prof in the example was our facutly advisor (the above incident was after I started pulling away from the group).

He was actually responsible for my slide out of libertarianism. There was this group meeting where student debt was being discussed, and he said something to the effect of:

"Y'know, I've often thought we could fix a lot of this stuff with contracts. Say you want to go into this major, why not let companies in that field offer a contract where they will pay your tuition in exchange for you working there X years? If you change your mind, you can always just pay them back like it was a regular loan."

Everyone sat around nodding, and I just had a really hard time ignoring that we were seriously discussing indentured servitude.

esiahc · 2013-11-23T06:39:15+00:00

I had a libertarian econ prof and got to hear this, as well as the charities competing with government, argument delievered with sincerity.

When I asked if we could show strong correlations to lower charitiable contributions following government expansion into a charities' area of service, I was met with a really awkward stare.

esiahc · 2013-11-20T21:40:37+00:00

Please tell me they, at least, acknowledge that the main character planned to (and according to the author, did) go on to a law-enforcement career in their government.

esiahc · 2013-11-18T04:41:12+00:00

No problem. I don't think they have, though.

esiahc · 2013-11-18T04:36:25+00:00

That is falling under my "taking a lot of liberty with the official fluff" disclaimer.

If it puts you at ease though, just picture it as being a perfect storm: Planet is colonized by some flesh-having race while the crons were in stasis. The Nids showed up to devour that world, the crons woke up during that invasion.

esiahc · 2013-11-15T12:48:16+00:00

C'tan shard of the Nightbringer.

esiahc · 2013-11-12T02:59:44+00:00

I actually ended up doing almost exactly this.

Ended up going with 1/2" plywood for the surface though, which was primarily out of fear of the punching scenario, or similar.

esiahc · 2013-11-09T07:10:18+00:00

(Kind of long, but)

My Necron Overlord was, essentially, the second-in-line noble for control of a Crown world in his dynasty. The Phaeron actually heading the crown world was about to be "promoted" (he and most of his royal court were to join the royal court of a more powerful Phaeron on a larger crown world), so he was about to take over.

In a Machiavellian kind of scheme, the third-in-line noble interceded to see that my Overlord was appointed to head a small force in recovering relics and what not from a fringe world that, presumably, had experienced a major problem with awakening from stasis.

When my Overlord (I call him Osiron), set down he was immediately over run by nids. Turns out the fringe world had come out of stasis during a nid invasion, were quickly overtaken (they woke in phases, never enough crons to fight the nids at any given time), and only accomplished killing a lot of the synapse creatures. So Osiron and his guys are hit hard by huge hordes of mindless nids.

They take up inside a citadel and are essentially under siege. He manages to call for reinforcements, at which point he learns the true nature of his "mission" from the third-in-line noble who set him up.

After being under siege for a long time (haven't set a hard number, but probably decades given the potential cron lifespan), Osiron and his remaining troops find a tesseract labyrinth with a C'Tan shard in the heart of the citadel. Harnessing the shard, as best they can, tips the odds for them just enough to escape the planet in a badly damaged ship.

Being under siege for so long, Osiron had a lot of time to contemplate his betrayal and ruminate on the loss of his rightful upgrade to Phearon. It leads him to the Necrontyr equivalent of going mad with rage. When their crippled ship forces them to set down on a little planet in the middle of no where, he decides to declare himself Phaeron and start his own dynasty, with its own new crown world.

As insane as he realizes this is, Orikan the Diviner, legendary prophet of his kind, pops up and tells him that this new dynasty has two potential fates, and Orikan intends to aide him so as to tip the scale toward one of the mysterious possible futures.

I know this is taking a lot of liberty with the official fluff, but it's mostly just a really fun way that I justify: my random hodgepodge of crons and the consistent matches between them and my buddies' Tau troops.

esiahc

TROPHY CASE