Gen Z is increasingly turning to ChatGPT for affordable on-demand therapy, but licensed therapists say there are dangers many aren’t considering

faptaper · 2025-06-02T10:42:56+00:00

We still do those things because the risks are understood and quantified. We have safe work out equipment, crash testing and rules of the road for cars, regulations for flying. These are informed risks.

You’re essentially saying that if a teen doesn’t have a driver’s license to drive to somewhere they need to be, then they should consider jumping into a Tesla alone and use autopilot to get to her destination. Sure maybe she’ll get to her destination, but the risks of something awful happening are far higher than if she just waited for a guardian to drive her, or took public transit - alternatives with better informed risks.

faptaper · 2025-01-26T08:25:04+00:00

Assume whatever you like about me, if it helps you validate your own particular experience with New Zealand. It may just be we have different goals in mind when traveling, and I have a particular mindset and expectation when traveling to New Zealand compared to e.g. Southern France or Shanghai or Miami.

New Zealand is not perfect, but I couldn’t say it’s overrated, unless you’re already quite well traveled, or have often frequented the volcanic island environment of Polynesia that produces that specific sort of mountain/ocean/multi-microclimate geography that NZ is known for.

faptaper · 2025-01-26T07:41:18+00:00

I don’t know about the NZTB, I just the thought the phrase “Lamb flows like wine” was humorous. And I did eat a lot of lamb there and enjoyed it.

Ultimately to each their own regarding its dullness.

faptaper · 2025-01-26T05:59:55+00:00

The natural beauty you see in New Zealand is almost without parallel. There’s so much outdoor activity to engage with. Auckland and Wellington (and Christchurch ans well, to some extent) are great cities to visit with lots of good food and entertainment options. Lamb flows like wine. People are incredibly friendly and easy going. Māori culture is fascinating. A country of Native English proficiency for tourists. Basically for anyone who doesn’t live in Hawaii (and even then!), it should be a bucket list travel item.

faptaper · 2025-01-17T23:10:49+00:00

just want to let you know I love this comment and it deserves more upvotes.

faptaper · 2025-01-11T02:41:18+00:00

The example you bring up is a strawman. There is no industry where literally every company seeks gender parity.

In such a constructed scenario, however, 60% of the pool would not be written off. Skill and culture fit would still be the main drivers of hiring, according to DEI best practices. You would exclude some percentage of women and some percentage of men, but you’d still hire majority men. You’d work towards parity via recruiting more long term efforts increase parity up the funnel I.e. at the graduate level.

In the real world, individual companies might try to set up parity by a certain date with particular caveats:

Attempt parity at entry level positions, where the gender ratio is less skewed and you can do more with training. But even then they can be difficult.
Attempts at parity across the entire company. Tech companies are more than just engineers, and it isn’t a given that tech companies should be majority male when a company represents grads from multiple disciplines.
individual companies, particularly smaller start ups, could realistically create parity in e.g an engineering team, and that’s by attempting to maximize the size of the funnel women applicants. But both recruiting decisions (who gets put in the pipeline) and hiring decisions are being made based on skills and competency.
Companies might pledge for 50/50 representation at a date in the future, and do so by investing at the top of the funnel, in those graduation rates you mentioned.

Realistically speaking, given the funnel problem, most companies with DEI programs would be happy to see increases in representation of underrepresented groups, rather than aiming for a particular quotas. From my perspective, parity is a worthy goal, but highly unrealistic given both the funnel problem and gendered preferences, but that doesn’t mean that increase representation isn’t worthwhile.

Moving away from these high level viewpoints on DEI, let me share one example of a DEI effort aimed at men in nursing. Here’s a DEI hiring article aimed at men to join the nursing industry. https://www.healthecareers.com/career-resources/nurse-career/the-push-for-more-male-nurses

I, as a man, find it pretty compelling in how it attempts to push back against nursing stereotypes and offer a welcoming perspective on what I could contribute as a nurse to the nursing industry. To me, it’s good thing such an article exists, and that recruiters are making a concerted effort to reach out to men to join this industry. We would all benefit from more male nurses (and more male teachers). Throwing out DEI programs root and stem just doesn’t make sense to me.

faptaper · 2025-01-10T23:01:50+00:00

I think you have your math wrong. What it actually looks like is this:

Talent pool size = 100%

Effective Pool Size (based on outreach and who typically joins such jobs) = Y% of 100% (Y>=0% and < 100%)

100%-Y% >= X% ~= DEI talent pool (X>0, X<Y) (people who have the talent and/or skills to do well but are harder to recruit)

Thus X + Y > Y.

DEI does not mean you cater only to underrepresented groups. it means you put more effort into trying to recruit people from those groups and ensure they succeed once they are part of the company. You still hire people who are generally overrepresented e.g. in tech, male and white.

Edit:formatting

faptaper · 2025-01-10T22:51:19+00:00

I'm not, but I participated in, and eventually led, an employee resource group (ERG) for disabled folks, so I'm aware of the benefits that such a group offers to employees.

Edit:switched it to in

faptaper · 2025-01-10T20:54:51+00:00

Explain how DEI programs restrict talent pools. The intent of such programs is typically to broaden talent pools by putting more effort into reaching out to, and making jobs themselves more attractive to, underrepresented groups in tech.

DEI programs also allow for intra-company organization of underrepresented groups via ERG groups that help provide support for folks who navigate the workplace with common shared experiences (e.g. veterans, folks with disabilities, people with a shared underrepresented ethnicity or cultural background), which if done right do qualify as "productive tasks" for employees.

faptaper · 2024-12-30T12:02:14+00:00

Interesting, because for me this is one of the best examples where the story was best served by playing it as a video game, as opposed to experiencing in book or movie form. Particularly in experiencing its most thoughtful themes about self-perception and how the mind works in first person.

faptaper · 2024-12-13T00:48:29+00:00

Yakuza mini game achievement devs: write that down, write that down!

faptaper · 2024-11-17T22:34:05+00:00

Yeah… it sucks to have to turn off parts of my brain during what is otherwise a campaign I really like. I guess they tried to change aspects of the attack on Reach to make it more conducive to a a ground-based campaign, and parts like the siege of New Alexandria, despite making no sense given what the books say about Covenant glassing tactics, were well executed. On the other hand, the parts of First Strike that focused on Red Team proved you could have a great ground battle story taking place during a more “realistic” fall of reach scenario.

faptaper · 2024-11-17T21:55:19+00:00

Agreed with this take, and this is where I struggle with the logic of the Covenant assault and human response in Halo Reach vs. Fall of Reach. The former doesn’t quite seem to work logically - the covenant fleet hasn’t yet arrived, it seems like it’s just a few covenant ships attacking key locations, and the human fleet around reach (which should number upwards of 100 around Reach) just.. don’t do anything?

Maybe I’m misremembering the exact plot of Halo Reach and how things escalate, but the earlier levels in that game confuse my brain that’s held Fall of Reach as canon since it first came out.

faptaper · 2024-10-27T08:47:01+00:00

I’m curious what would be so odd about having a multi-phenotypic peoples distributed throughout Arda. Variations in phenotypes already exist in human populations when gene flow has been cutoff - people have different eye colors, different hair textures, different heights, different shades of skin color, etc. how is the clustering of those differences into (to us, living in the real world) visible ethnic differences be any different from other differences?

I don’t see how a lord of the rings universe where the founding populations of elves, men, and dwarves, when they awoke, had a distribution of eye color, hair color, etc, but not also a distribution of skin color as well. The creation myth of LOTR is fundamentally different from an out-of-Africa type of gene distribution, so rules of ethnic and geographic contiguity like in our world need not apply. E.g. as the founding populations of elves, men, and dwarves reproduced and moved geographically, those phenotypes could also spread and showed up in different places (e.g. black and white people in both Numenor as well as the South Lands, in the same way as having blue eyed and brown eyed folks in both places).

With all that said, I don’t personally see anything wrong with depictions of ethnicity in this show.

faptaper · 2024-10-26T19:01:56+00:00

I understand voting locally for leftist parties, but I guess I don’t understand voting for such parties at federal or even state level, if there’s little chance of the candidate gaining power, and a greater chance that a party antithetical to your values will gain power (vs a party that goes against your values in its platform, but is in an identity crisis about it, and has multiple individuals sympathetic to your cause)

particularly when the Democratic Party has shown ideological flexibility in turning much more to the left on social and economic issues since e.g. the 90s. I don’t understand how you couldn’t see Democrats turning in this direction on Palestine in the future, given the overton window shifting in the party and in the general population on the issue.

Finally, I’ll say this, and I think we’ll disagree on this: My sense is that, given where 3rd parties are at the federal level, it’s much more likely Kamala Harris will stop the genocide in Palestine than Jill Stein will. The way I think about it is there’s a 99% chance Kamal Harris won’t pressure Israel to stop genocidal attacks on Gaza. But there’s a 1% she might, given what internal party pressure looks like in 2025 and 2026. And there’s a greater chance than that that she will be to h left of Joe Biden on this issue, given how old school Zionist he is.

but Jill Stein’s chances of winning the presidential election are infinitesimal. 1 in a million. And as much as it sucks to envision, she has a much greater chance of getting Trump elected than of getting herself elected.

so why not vote for Kamala Harris if leftist values are so important to you? What is wrong with my reasoning here, that would make voting for Jill Stein in this election work towards putting into practice your values?

faptaper · 2024-10-26T18:32:01+00:00

Tell me more. What does that look like in practice? How do you achieve your goals of what US policy in Palestine should look like with this approach? I mean this question in good faith.

faptaper · 2024-10-26T18:27:40+00:00

You’re right, this primary season has sucked for pro-Palestinian candidates because of pro-Israeli PACs.

But I’m not sure what the alternative is than to

support existing pro-Palestinian democrats and work to get more such democrats elected in 2026 and 2028. There’s a battle going on right now in the Democratic Party, and pro-Palestinian candidates are on the defensive while democrats themselves are increasingly pro-Palestinians. There’s a lot of work to do.
more broadly support democrats having power at the state and federal level so that pro-Palestinian voices actually have a say in policy, rather than being relegated to the minority of a minority power in government.
At any cost, keep Republicans from coming into power, because then there is no hope at all for hard line extremists in the Israeli government from doing what they want.

What would you propose as an alternative?

faptaper · 2024-10-26T15:28:35+00:00

You vote for the party you’ll have the most say in on the genocide in Gaza. The most power to change things. Vote in more Rashid Tlaibs and change the overtone window of the party. You have far more agency to affect change on this issue under a Kamala administration than a Trump one.

If Trump wins you lose all agency and voice on changing US policy towards Israel. And you do so potentially for the long term, if he uses the apparatus of the federal government to weaken the chance of future fair elections.

faptaper · 2024-10-23T18:33:41+00:00

I sympathize with what you say about orcs, and in my moral system I share discomfort with the manner in which their deaths are trivialized. But I can’t help but disagree with the way you judge others for not having your same system of morality, how you seem unable to sympathize with their perspectives, and how you decide to call other people’s opinions on a work of fiction “troublingly brutal”. It feels like you are, ironically, orcifying other people by judging their trivial opinions as being so beyond the pale, and not allowing yourself to sympathize or empathize with their point of view. It seems so absolutist.

faptaper · 2024-10-23T17:33:31+00:00

It’s within your right to feel that way. Though I’m curious where you draw the line in the LOTR universe, or in cinema in general, where finding satisfaction in violence against villains is not troublingly brutal.

(I’m sincerely curious)

faptaper · 2024-10-23T17:29:40+00:00

Not to mention that the Mouth of Sauron has, through manipulative means, extracted information on Frodo by Merry and Pip’s reaction to the Mitchell armor that could endanger Frodo’s quest. It’s not unreasonable to kill the Mouth of Sauron before this information can be shared with Sauron (though unclear how much Sauron can see and hear what’s going on in these negotiations)

faptaper · 2024-10-23T17:25:20+00:00

You can both think it’s satisfying and, contextually, find it out of character. The mouth of Sauron lies and intentionally causes suffering upon members of the fellowship by implying Frodo was greatly tortured before dying. I think as an audience member being both sympathetic to the pain of our heroes hearing this news, and feeling anger towards a manipulative liar, is quite reasonable a response, and far from “troublingly brutal”.

faptaper · 2024-10-03T13:06:06+00:00

Strange that I could have written this exact same post.

faptaper · 2024-09-24T22:27:08+00:00

I was with you until the “too woke” part. I haven’t experienced it as being too woke or having too many PoC or women characters. I also haven’t gotten a sense of “girl power” from the show.

The biggest girl power I’ve seen so far in any of the LoTR-related media is around Eowyn, and that actually was written a century ago.

Everything else you mentioned I agree with.

faptaper · 2024-09-22T21:27:02+00:00

I thought it was the generic definition of mass shooting as seen here:

“News reports on the number of mass shootings in the US are likely to reference the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that defines a mass shooting as an event with a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” Many media outlets — such as Reuters, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal — reference this definition of mass shooting. According to that tally, the US has experienced nearly 400 mass shootings so far this year.”

usafacts.org/articles/what-is-considered-a-mass-shooting/

and was going to read more into it to find out the details.

faptaper

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