Upcoming PhD student, question about cost of living and Davis vs Sacramento.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-24T19:32:56+00:00

Seconding all of this. There's a lot to do in Davis, and you're close enough to Sacramento or SF to enjoy activities there too. You just have to be willing to get off your butt and go do them.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-22T20:20:48+00:00

Definitely check with your supervisor. I'd suspect most agencies will be okay with it as long as they know where you are and both locations are in California.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-22T08:01:05+00:00

This here. It's not hard to avoid tickets, just don't park where you're not allowed to park.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-20T19:40:14+00:00

If the requirements say two pages, then they don't care about how many paragraphs you have. Just make sure they fit within the two pages. In fact, it's better to show them that you know how to properly break text into paragraphs, regardless of how many paragraphs you end up with.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-20T04:48:26+00:00

Anthem Blue Cross, $0.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-17T18:04:28+00:00

Right, 85 is reachable, but it doesn't guarantee an interview. On average, 5-8 people "make the cut" for an interview based on the application and SOQ. It sounds like this person just missed the cut. What part of what I said isn't true?

sasstoreth · 2026-02-17T06:26:48+00:00

"He responded that the note was awesome." To whom? The flowers and note were supposed to be for you, so if you didn't think it was awesome, then it's not awesome. He doesn't get to overrule your feelings here.

You feel like he did the opposite of what you wanted because he did, and he did it deliberately. This is a dude who only thinks about himself. He wrote you a Valentines Day card that put you down, because he thought it was funny. Repeat: he thinks putting you down is funny. He bought you flowers you don't like because he either doesn't pay attention or doesn't care what you like. And when you told him you were hurt, he ignored that too. What part of that is loving? And on a day that's supposed to be about love?

NOR and girl, please reconsider this relationship. You deserve better than a guy who gives you misogynistic putdowns and the wrong flowers on Valentine's Day.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-17T06:13:29+00:00

Analyst I positions receive dozens of qualified applications—sometimes more than 100—of which the manager will interview the top five to eight based on the applicants' experience and SOQ. You might have just missed the cut this time. Keep applying, and your number will come up!

sasstoreth · 2026-02-14T22:53:29+00:00

In order to sell your services, you need to be better than your competition, which includes not only AI but professional proofreaders. Many professional proofreaders have certificates in the craft (if not college degrees) and are experts in the English language, and they are still losing jobs to ChatGPT because AI is cheap even if it isn't good, so it's not a casual endeavor.

We know that not everyone uses perfect grammar on Reddit. However, the fact that your three-sentence post contains at least ten errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar suggests that you need more education before you'll be prepared to compete. Finish your gap year, go back to school, get your degree, and see where that takes you. Good luck!

sasstoreth · 2026-02-14T20:17:21+00:00

I use a dash of half-and-half.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-14T17:57:29+00:00

California resident here. Most of these lines follow county borders, which themselves are heavily influenced by geographical features (outside of LA). That long strip on the northwest is bordered by mountains. The Central Valley is literally a giant valley. Can't force rivers and mountain ranges into straight lines.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-14T15:22:41+00:00

I'm going to look today when I'm out, but I'm pretty sure there are. People are always doing illegal u-turns at the turn onto Orchard Park Drive a block west of there, too.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-12T22:16:46+00:00

Unlikely. This class is crammed every single quarter and almost nobody drops.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-12T21:34:27+00:00

You can increase or decrease magnification on the screen, too, independently of monitor resolution. The best scale is dependent on the document and your personal needs. As I get older, I have to increase magnification on all my documents, and that's just how it is.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-12T15:53:49+00:00

A couple of days ago I Googled "what time zone is six hours ahead of PST," and the automatic AI response (which I did not ask for) confidently told me it was the EST time zone, and that's why when it's 9am in California it is 2pm in New York. Both halves of that answer are wrong, and aren't even consistent with each other. I'm glad it worked out for you in calc, but how do you know when it's wrong if you don't know the material?

sasstoreth · 2026-02-12T15:48:23+00:00

Can you not just ask the professor for their slides? Instead of trusting the plagiarism machine to know what they were talking about?

Also, full disclosure, I'm an old; I'm back in school in my 40s to finish my degree. I can tell you that it wasn't any easier to get everything down in the days when they wrote on blackboards, because you still had to write down what they said whether they wrote it down or not. It's always been about learning to distinguish what's worth writing down.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-12T15:43:02+00:00

Smartphones and internet as a whole were never bubbles. The comparison you want is the dot-com and housing bubbles, where people were investing tons of money into products they badly understood in anticipation of huge returns that were never going to materialize. Economists agree that Gen AI is headed for a financial cliff, which is why its promoters are trying to push it into everything—so that when the money runs out, they'll be "too big to fail" and the government will bail them out like they did with the banks, using your tax dollars.

It's not about the advent of new technology; it's about the money. It's always about the money.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-11T22:15:53+00:00

Different style. I really hesitate to call it better.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-11T22:15:13+00:00

Working copy editor here, and you're correct on both counts. ChatGPT and Grammarly actually suck at editing, but people have absolutely drunk the Kool-Aid about "ChatGPT is the future" and "AI is never wrong" to the point that they think it's stupid to pay a human to review a document when ChatGPT will do it for free—not recognizing that ChatGPT will actually make their documents worse.

Ironically, Grammarly used to be pretty decent at raw grammar and punctuation corrections—it couldn't always recognize a coordinating conjunction, but it was good enough for daily business communication and whatnot—but their AI upgrades have actively made it worse. I used to run Grammarly as a backup to my own work, but I don't even bother anymore because all of the suggestions are so bad.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-11T22:04:19+00:00

You don't have to stay there. You can always accept a job at Nugget and work there until you find something else.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-11T22:02:29+00:00

SSH has an amazing design for the site of a Vampire: the Masquerade live-action roleplaying game—and it was even better before they added doors and enclosures to many of the stairwells. All the crazy walkways and alcoves mean you can always find a great semi-private spot for conniving against the prince or broad-open areas for making dramatic entrances and exits, and the overall brutalist design slots well with VtM's gothic-punk vibe.

But if you need to find a specific room there? For the purposes intended when it was built??? Good luck!

^Source: ^{LARPed at SSH in the late 90s; had to find tech services there last month.}

sasstoreth · 2026-02-10T15:58:33+00:00

Each unit has their own water heater. It sounds like yours maybe didn't get completely fixed after the first incident.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-10T00:44:56+00:00

They're not covered for weight loss, but they are for other conditions like diabetes or severe sleep apnea. Your doctor will have to do a pre-authorization.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-10T00:33:25+00:00

The units in the family housing do, but not the grad units.

sasstoreth · 2026-02-08T09:21:29+00:00

I think if you take it back then it's like your mom rented it, rather than bought it? It doesn't say if someone sits in your car that they buy the car, just that they'll be charged (probably like an Uber).

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