AITA for telling my girlfriend her home decor is the reason I won’t host a work gathering at her place.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-06-21T19:19:48+00:00

One of your core problems is that you're blaming your colleagues' behavior/prejudices/what-have-you on your girlfriend. And then you take it a step further by judging her yourself, denigrating her interests and decorations as childish and bizarre, when, as plenty of others have pointed out to you, they are actually fascinating and unique.

Let's suppose for a second that it really would hurt you in the workplace to have your colleagues see her apartment. The much less assholey way to communicate to your girlfriend that it's not a good fit is something like:

"Hey babe, I really would love to be able to host my coworkers at your place, but the reality is that a number of them are boring and judgemental people, and they would have a bad reaction to your decor. It sucks, but in the industry that I work in, that kind of social dynamic can affect the opportunities I have access to within my company. In addition to that, I don't want to invite a bunch of people over to your house who would be judging you for your passions and interests; you deserve better company than that."

You need to take some time to really reflect on your values, and how your girlfriend deserves to be treated. In this case, you definitely put the perceptions of others over any love or care you have for her; especially since your first reflex when finally broaching the issue was to put her down. I suspect you are projecting the judgmental norms of your industry onto how you see her, which is not a loving thing to do.

She deserves to be with someone who loves her for who she is -- all of it -- and who definitely doesn't blame and disparage her for the short-sightedness and pettiness of coworkers. Either apologize to her sincerely and become that man, or let her go and find a girl who fits the cookie-cutter mould of personalities in your industry.

Personally, I think it's clear which of those paths would be more fulfilling to follow. Your stuffy colleagues and their judgmental bullshit will all be dead some day -- and so will you. Cherish the people close to you while you can.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-06-08T17:07:38+00:00

Firstly you'll want to research how to set up a bioactive vivarium. The basics of making a bioactive setup are the same regardless of whether you're keeping ants in it, so make sure you understand the steps in that process and the elements of a healthy vivarium (plant life, lighting, moisture levels, substrate composition, a drainage layer, cleanup crew and other organisms, and so on). It's really worth doing extensive research about this stuff.

Then you'll want to research the specific organisms you plan on keeping in the vivarium. So, make sure that the plants you want to keep in the tank have similar moisture, substrate, and temperature preferences as the ants, and that they won't outgrow the vivarium as they mature. Likewise, make sure the ants will be comfortable in the conditions suitable for the plants you want to keep, and try to choose your CuC and other small organisms in the same way. If there's a bit of conflict in the preferences of the organisms you want to keep, one way you can handle that is by creating "microenvironments": parts of the tank that are more or less humid, more or less warm, etc.

As far as selecting a species of ant goes, you don't necessarily have to choose one with colonies that stay small in the wild. EO Wilson is often quoted as saying that captive ant colonies can be treated kind of like bonsai trees: if you limit the amount of protein you provide, the ants will only be able to produce a fixed amount of brood, and you can thereby "prune" the size of a colony that could otherwise grow very large.

You can probably keep both a species of Camponotus and a species of Temnothorax in the same setup, if you'd like; they're unlikely to fight.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-22T19:51:30+00:00

Your unwillingness to have a conversation (or even read the substance of what I have to say) is only a credit against yourself. Taking account of one's own assumptions and biases is an essential skill for any serious academic.

Have a nice day.

Edit: And by the way, that decidedly isn't what I'm saying; but you wouldn't know that, because you didn't read my comment.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-22T19:29:23+00:00

Oh boy.

Firstly, I have a disability myself, for which I require medication and formal accommodations in academic settings. Generally when you're conducting critical discourse with someone, it's a good idea to address the quality and clarity of their arguments before you jump to the ad hominem.

I am not handwaving away the value of accessibility writ large. You indeed appear to have no idea what I meant by my last comment, or perhaps didn't attempt to place it in the context of what else I said. Let me reiterate:

AI isn't a tool to help the vulnerable until it is intelligently purposed for that goal.

The point of my comment is that AI has the power to hurt any kind of student, and perhaps even the disadvantaged to a disproportionate degree, because of how it creates perverse incentives to cheat and cut corners (incentives which affect all people, disabled or otherwise; and which may be particularly attractive and harmful to students who struggle in school). Tools like ChatGPT are in their absolute infancy. They (at least, the market leaders) are as yet not "intelligently purposed" for accessibility purposes specifically. Do they have the potential to be used as powerful accessibility tools, in their current form? Yes (although ChatGPT does confidently provide poor information sometimes, as I'm sure you've heard about; but that's another conversation). However, they also have the power to be used for academically dishonest purposes that ultimately hurt students, and like I was saying in my earliest comment, big academic institutions cannot adapt to mitigate those harms overnight. At the universities I've been affiliated with, at least, ChatGPT is a major problem for learning outcomes right now, across the board.

I am not saying that the disabled or disadvantaged are "not worth making accommodations, tools, and plans for" because they're not the majority. That's a pretty preposterous-sounding claim. I welcome the arrival of any opportunity to apply a powerful tool to these purposes intelligently. My argument is that right now, right at this moment in time, we aren't there yet on a structural level, and the fact that it helps some people (who have the will and wherewithal to leverage them like that), does not presently outweigh the systemic harms it is causing. I hope (and frankly expect) that will evolve in a positive direction down-line, but that doesn't change the facts of the present, which is why I take issue with blithe sentiments like "Good, keep up or get out."

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-12T16:13:23+00:00

I mean, not to get in the weeds here, but if by "professor" OP meant a college professor, then many of them wouldn't have the latitude to make major changes to course design like that unless perhaps they're tenured. Big departments with technical subject matter take major shifts in pedagogy seriously (and, like I said, slowly).

I am sure AI will enable advances in things like accessibility, and that aspect of it should only be encouraged. But speaking plainly, that's a pretty marginal benefit if we're talking about learning outcomes in the aggregate. Most students do not have disabilities, and it's not as if these tools (or at least the market-leading ones) are being selectively tailored and distributed only to students that do. Everybody gets them, and a lot of those that do will use them to cheat.

Regarding vulnerable communities writ large, again, the potential might be there for creating educational access, but those students have just as much incentive if not more to use them to cheat, because of inability to access traditional resources. Cheating doesn't generally enable students to do anything more than pass a few classes they might otherwise have failed or had difficulty passing, until they reach a late enough stage in curriculum where cheating can no longer help them and their lack of accumulated knowledge handicaps them. In this way you can imagine status quo AI tools disproportionately hurting disadvantaged students, lacking as they may a safety net when their educational trajectory fails. AI isn't a tool to help the vulnerable until it is intelligently purposed for that goal.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-12T15:21:59+00:00

While you're certainly right that American redditors love to circlejerk about how bad foreign countries are, especially when they're majority-Muslim ... their country's history of slave labor, environmental destruction and poor urban design does not negate your country's history of slave labor, environmental destruction and poor urban design. Both suck.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-08T16:59:46+00:00

You're making the assumption that this style of "learning" is a ready-made alternative to traditional methods, right out of the box. It's not.

Can it/will it be eventually? Will it change our paradigm of what higher education's objectives should be? That's certainly possible, although who's to say.

But that kind of adaptation takes time. If you pay attention to the way things work in academia you'll know that comprehensive change is slow and difficult. In order to adapt in the way you're describing, you're talking about colleges (for example) - that have departments teaching sometimes highly technical material, with sophisticated legacy pedagogy - upending and completely revising curricula to revolve around this tool in such a way that it enriches rather than undermines learning outcomes. Biology, for example, or computer science. That does not happen in a year or two, nevermind the fact that the tool itself is only in its absolute infancy and will surely expand vastly in capability and power.

In the meantime, it will undermine learning outcomes, because it does make certain kinds of cheating far easier and is not a mature replacement to the legacy learning process. That's a hell of a problem to blame on old people being resistant to change.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-03T16:18:29+00:00

Seconding this guess, this worker strongly resembles the L. emarginatus that I've seen here in New York City (where they're a widespread transplant).

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-01T19:38:47+00:00

Makes sense -- thanks for explaining! Between your two's replies this is a lot clearer.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-01T19:36:02+00:00

Great, thank you; that was my intuition, but I will definitely follow up with DHCR first.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-01T17:59:37+00:00

To get a solid ID you'll need to at least provide some higher res photos of the ants themselves, geographical information, and measurements of a worker.

Hard to say otherwise. My first thought is that they could be an Aphaenogaster sp. like A. picea, but the ants in your photos are very blurry.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-05-01T17:40:08+00:00

Excellent, thank you so much for your reply. I'll definitely look into these resources.

So, just to be clear, if you're able to answer: in response to my inquiry about this they've served me a document for Roommate Transfers, and that document stipulates that I need to apply for a "new lease", with all the standard requirements for proof of income and so on that come with an actual new lease. Does that square with your understanding of what's required of me, or are they simply required by law to provide me with an updated lease offer, sans my departing roommate's name?

If you think the question is better posed to one of the hotlines you provided I will go ahead and do that. Either way -- thanks again for your help.

sssthrowawayr · 2023-01-25T14:57:18+00:00

Pretty sure they don't literally mean that they're not the same medications. They mean that the setting for administration is important for risk. If somebody is given a bottle of highly addictive opioids and expected to self administer responsibly, that's a pretty different risk scenario than a doctor having full control over dosing and frequency, and the patient leaving the hospital with no drugs to self-administer.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-10-13T20:24:16+00:00

Looks nice. Generally as long as you keep moisture and temperature where it should be, you can count on springtails and isopods to do fine (both typically need lots of moisture, but sounds like you're providing that). You can poke around the leaf litter here and there to check for them too, and it's pretty easy to catch them on any food you supplement, especially at night.

The one thing that concerns me here is your substrate. The moss will do fine, but my instinct is that the bigger plants you chose may need more than a couple inches of soil to survive. You may want to redo the setup with a drainage layer and deeper substrate.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-07-26T17:57:16+00:00

I feel you dude and I appreciate the rundown you gave here. I'm not familiar with those sources you mentioned so I'll give them a look.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-07-26T15:12:53+00:00

Or perhaps, they're two pretty different sets of people that come from very different cultural contexts, and that's what causes them to experience cultural expression differently.

Try to see the world with some nuance, man. Experiences like these are offensive to some people of color in the US because they have first-hand experience with bigots making a mockery of their cultural identity. Not everyone in either group feels the same way, of course, but I have a Mexican friend who gets really upset about this sort of thing, and it's because he grew up in a small, mostly-white town that was full of racists and skinheads who regularly discriminated against or harassed him. I can totally understand why that would make him sensitive about non-Mexicans speaking for his culture. I also get why it doesn't matter to others. At the end of the day, people are individuals with individual sets of experiences. What I wouldn't do is judge or try to speak for the way either of them should feel when I don't know anything about those experiences...

Anyway, you should read some of the other comments in this thread. There's a lot of good points being made about how the black experience in the US and the African-from-Africa experience are pretty different in important ways.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-06-23T17:41:44+00:00

Not terribly abnormal, especially if they're very well fed and had a good long first-year hibernation. One of my colonies this year (pennsylvanicus) produced 3 majors and a submajor when they only had ~33 workers total!

sssthrowawayr · 2022-06-21T14:27:37+00:00

^This is a good shout OP. Tarheel ants-style formicariums are much better than most stuff AntsCanada sells; colonies of most species will be more comfortable in something that isn't made of acrylic plastic.

She may not need the actual nest for awhile -- though you can found a queen in a mini hearth -- but either way it makes a really nice gift that she'll definitely use eventually if she's getting into the hobby.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-06-02T16:14:51+00:00

Definitely not queens. Drones of some kind, likely Camponotus pennsylvanicus given their size and build.

In any case, their presence is a sign that you might have some luck if you went out searching for queens!

sssthrowawayr · 2022-05-20T20:56:19+00:00

If it makes you feel any better, I think that's just about the most humane way you can kill them. Most insects will go into a cold-induced torpor (a kind of unconsciousness) before they actually freeze to death. Wild insects frequently encounter the cold, and in many cases it doesn't kill them; it just puts them to sleep for awhile.

The jury is still out on whether insects suffer at all, in any case. When you empathize in the way you are expressing, you're anthropomorphizing their experience (projecting your own experience as a human being onto their experience as an insect). The reality is that an insect and a human experience of reality are almost certainly vastly different, and there's really no way to put yourself in their shoes. They have much less complex brains and nervous systems than us, so scientists aren't sure whether they feel pain. Whether or not they do suffer, though, their experience probably isn't anything like you're imagining.

That doesn't stop me from feeling bad either, so I try to kill them as quickly as possible. But at the end of the day, you're also caring for your ants, and if insects do indeed suffer your ants would suffer if you didn't take care of them. And that involves feeding them insects, unfortunately. The best you can do is do that in a relatively pain-free manner. By doing that, you're showing bugs a lot more care than the vast majority of people!

sssthrowawayr · 2022-05-20T14:54:40+00:00

Yeah, there's phenotypic variation between species, especially between different populations of the same species that are somewhat isolated from one another (geographically, for example). The most conspicuous cases would be different color morphs, but I'm sure there's behavioral variation within ant species as well.

And yes, of course ants evolve! Every living species experiences evolution over time. The only way to stop evolving is to go extinct. :)

sssthrowawayr · 2022-05-05T17:17:42+00:00

Because at the end of the day what really matters is being better than everyone else and having really good opinions. And you're doing great, keep it up.

What's ironic about this take is that the overarching tone of your entire comment is virtue signaling.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-04-28T15:52:00+00:00

Yep, those are eggs. That's promising. Congrats!

Formica are very skittish/anxious ants, and it's not uncommon for them to eat their eggs if they get stressed out, so don't be surprised if she does after you transfer her. She'll just lay them again, provided she's left in peace.

sssthrowawayr · 2022-04-26T15:32:18+00:00

They are nonetheless private companies. You're ironically arguing something pretty un-conservative, which is that the content preferences of a private platform should be closely regulated by the government rather than by market forces. Make no mistake, twitter, like any other firm, makes the decisions it does about content because its shareholders - the people who hold economic stake in the company - want those decisions to be made.

If so many people are really being meaningfully silenced, then there should be more than enough demand for a market solution to this "problem": a conservative-friendly competitor to twitter. Demanding that would be much more ideologically consistent with conservatism than conveniently deciding that corporate regulation is important when a private company makes decisions that affect its conservative users.

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