partial_accumen

The ability to call out BS or contradictory requirements in a job posting.

“buck” is a common slang for a US Dollar. Its also a male deer. These are both very common words in American English. The “buck” in Starbucks doesn’t use either of these meanings, and thats fine, in this case you’re right that that part of Starbucks doesn’t carry any meaning from English…HOWEVER neither does “star” in Starbucks. The modern Starbucks logo has no star shapes in it, and nothing referencing astronomical stars. Its equal to “bucks” in that it is just a set of sounds. Yet in Mandarin, the “star” is literally translated as “star” like the astronomical body and spoken it sounds close to “sheen”, while the “bucks” sounds close to “bahcoo” for a total pronounced word of “sheenbahcoo”. So literal for the first part, phonetic for the second part. Essentially using two completely different sets of rules inside one word.

Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.

Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.

Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean “to hope”. 克 can mean “to restrain”. The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like “bahcoo” (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like “buck”.

“can’t afford” as in your business will cease to exist in the short term if you don’t lay this person off who helped facilitate the busesses’s survival to this point,

More this.

or because net profits will be too flat or underperforming for your liking?

“Liking” is a loaded term, but there’s a middle between these two states, as well. If the business is generating less revenue from this worker’s labor than it costs to pay the worker, then the business is losing money. This is absolutely fine in the short term if business is cyclical and expected to turn around. However, doing this too long with no end in sight, drains resources from the company. What this eventually can translate into is that the other workers that are earning profit for the company are essentially subsidizing this under performing worker in perpetuity. This means profit that should go to raises or other benefits for the other workers are instead going to keep this under performing worker employed. Again, short term with expected turnaround, very acceptable. Long term with no end in sight is where the problem is.

How many of us have received little to no raises when a business struggles? This may be because money that would have gone to your raise may have gone to keep someone else employed that isn’t producing.

If you don’t give raises to high and middle performing workers, they rightfully leave to businesses that will. The business suffers, and its another wound to a slow death of the business. If this goes on, the business ends and everyone loses their jobs regardless of how high a performing worker they were or how much they contributed.

These are a few of the ugly choices that have to be made in business that sometimes get labeled as “its just business”.

Hurting others for profit in the name of business shouldn’t be a defense, it should be considered an admission of guilt and come with consequences.

“Hurting others” as in poring toxic waste in residents drinking water or “hurting others” as in laying off a worker that you can’t afford to employ?

I worked at one company that was 7am-5pm for corporate office work. The company grew from a small retail parts company decades ago, but never changed the mindset. So even the office work was treated like shift work. Office workers wouldn’t even check email before 7am. Many times just hanging out in the cafeteria until 7 on the dot when they had to be at their desks. Further as soon as 5pm hit exactly, all the office workers would drop what they were doing and walk out to the parking lot with all of the other blue collar shift workers.

This resulted in things like Purchase Orders getting delayed by a day because it arrived at the approver at 5:01pm and the approver was gone. There was nearly no weekend office work, which caused its own problems.

It was such a strange place to work.

Bananaphone by Raffi

Before you replace the opener, make sure your door is still working properly.

You should have some kind of manual disconnect of the opener from the door (sometimes a red rope dangling). Once you’ve confirmed you’ve disengaged the opener, with your hands try to lift the door up. It should be pretty easy. This should not be a struggle at all. Now try to pull it down. That too should also be easy and little muscle effort. You shouldn’t need to exert much force either way because the springs on your door do most of the work.

If it is hard to lift either way, you have a door (or more likely spring) issue. Replacing your opener won’t fix your problem. Get garage door service. Also, if you aren’t REALLY REALLY experienced with garage door springs, don’t mess with them. There is a tremendous amount of force stored in them, and if you do it wrong, all that energy will come out and once and could maim or kill you. Garage door service doesn’t have to be crazy expensive. A couple hundred dollars is what it cost to have my springs replaced (parts included) a year or two ago.

Don’t take chances with your life.

I didn’t say anything but I’m confused about how is it weird. We are 15~16 y/o.

Your teens and 20s are years where you learning who you are. Use whatever safe means available to you to do this. Explore ideas, embrace the absurd until you find your personal limits for it. You knowing who you are is so powerful and incredibly important to your happiness and success later in life.

If this app and the information it gives you gives you a perspective of reflection (which it sounds like it is) that is helpful to you in any way in gaining understanding about who you are and where you are in the world, in time, I say use it.

However, commit this experience to your memory. In the days and years ahead you’ll see others in life that are doing things that you may find weird or different. They too may be exploring for themselves who they are. Remember today when someone called something you’re doing “weird” and try to be respectful to those others when you encounter them later in life (as long as their actions don’t cross your boundaries of safety for yourself).

Striker,

I know you were always concerned about it and feared rejection so I honored your wishes to never speak of the events while you were alive, allowing you to live your way. However, with you passing I believe I can share with the world the beauty (and horror) that you brought upon the world free of judgement and felony charges.

It was 5 years ago beginning with 23 drinking straws, a roll of duct tape, a fresh hair cut, 4 kilos of thermite, a very fetching scarf, and a copy of the Dialogues of Plato. You didn’t begin that evening planning to change local laws of Ann Arbor Michigan, but before the night was over, you certainly did…

Interestingly I see nothing in that policy that would dis-allow machine generated downvotes on proper answers and machine generated upvotes on incorrect ones. So even if LLMs are banned from posting questions or comments, looks like Stackoverflow is perfectly fine with bots voting.

A malicious response by users would be to employ an LLM instructed to write plausibly sounding but very wrong answers to historical and current questions, then an army of users upvoting the known wrong answer while downvoting accurate ones. This would poison the data I would think.

Just because they like haggling doesn’t imbue them with a sense of skill to it.

I’m not into it, but for some, the haggling is what they enjoy.

In a statement, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman accused President Biden of being “willing to sacrifice the American auto industry and its workers in service of its radical green agenda.”

If you look up the 10 most “Made in America” cars, the top 4 slots by a huge margin are Tesla Model 3,Y,S,X , which are all EVs, and they are at near 100% (or 100% for some models). There isn’t another American car brand on the list. So when Coleman is talking about sacrificing American auto workers, who’s he talking about? A car that is 40% American because all the parts are made in China or Mexico and there’s some final assembly done in the USA?

P.S. Musk is an idiot, though I’m not sure that needs to be said anymore as its so obvious.

So really its:

Because of primitive battery technology, ubiquitous pocket TVs were never a thing.

Speaking of which, I don’t get to experience quiet theaters anymore because of all the ads they play. When I was a kid/teenager, theaters only played movie trailers before a film. Maybe they might have some film trivia running before trailers start, but that was it.

In my youth I worked at a movie theater. The trivia questions and answers (as well as the lobby card photo pictures from famous movies displayed between questions and answers) were on slides. There was a separate projection window where the slide projector displayed on the movie screen. Yes, we’d very occasionally forget to turn off the slide projector when starting the movie projector, so you’d see both on the screen for a second until the projectionist realized it.

The theater was quiet and peaceful while you waited for your film to start.

You’re right about the quiet part. Almost like a church or a library. People sitting next to one another in the theater waiting for the movie to start would talk in hushed tones. The only exception to this was hugely popular midnight release movies where its a whole theater full of fans of the movie talking loudly in excitement with the shared experience of fandom. There was a really cool welcoming electricity where everyone was on equal footing and just excited to be seeing the movie with each other, friend or stranger alike.

Every fuel has its own hose and “pistol”. Each “pump” has two or three or four hoses.

While those do exist in the States too, a single hose and “pistol” is used for all grades of gasoline and the operator presses a button to select their grade of fuel. The only time there is a guaranteed separate is between desil and gasoline:

The button leads to some interesting minor social problems. The expectation is that the use uses their hand or fingers to press the button, but the buttons are usually disgustingly dirty, so that lead many to using the tip of the “pistol” to smack the grade of gasoline which may put a drop or two of gasoline on the button. So those that come next and use their hands end up smelling like gasoline.

No longer interacting with public gas pumps is one minor joy of driving an EV.

No worries at all! I’m interested in the topic. If you run across anything on it you find interesting, please share it.