I Don't Know What I'm Doing

Aiden-20s-He/they-My life and stuff I think is interesting. Welcome to the mess that is my blog.

[moghedien]

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy

[moghedien]

Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy

[bronzeagecrafts]

There's two commercials, if you wanna watch them XD

[elexecution]

there are too many things happening this summer that i'm thinking we are going to need an extra 6-12 months of june and possibly another 3-4 months of july. probably no extra august as the problem should hopefully sort itself out by then. we are also looking into extending the day night cycle to 55 hours and extending the human lifespan to 10000 years.

[asmeesh]

1$ flea market score. Tiny glass 1960s perfume bottles. I love them.

[shit-show-no-go]

Can you swap their heads ?

[asmeesh]

omg you can

[asmeesh]

Their meeting was foretold in the ancient texts

[theinvisiblespoon]

[byjove]

Me: *Removes my cat from my lap to do something else.*

My cat: Father is...evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

The spiritual successor to Miette

[manicgoblinnightmarewoman]

Might I also add

[shydestinybread]

May i add the piece from artist Verbal Vomit

[unyanizedcatboys]

Glad to see we’re all in agreement that cats talk like disparaged victorian children

[explorerrowan]

I am so incredibly glad we finally moved on from "i can has". Cats are clearly smart enough for advanced sentence structure and dumb enough to draw entirely incorrect conclusions about what they're talking about.

[dualclock]

My cat, banging the cabnet door over and over and over: bang bang bang

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

My cat, after waiting about 3 minutes: bang bang bang

[notcaycepollard]

[callmebliss]

Can haz snackytreat

[ladyshinga]

(source)

[dogsrulepeopledrool]

Source

[cryoverkiltmilk]

#the ancient texts

... My reblog was only six years ago!

[tieflingkisser]

[cutecipher]

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

[cutecipher]

scientists on this post: yuuuup 👍

people who aren't scientists: um actually ☝️

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I left research science for a multitude of personal reasons but a big one was that my autistic arse just could not keep up with the politics. Trying to increase your profile and your work's appeal for grant money (both critically important factors for succeeding in science) by carefully tailoring your work focus, grant proposals and papers to attract the interest of various grant committees focused on what research is in fashion and also to try to maximise the number of references to your papers in other people's papers takes so much time and just isn't interesting.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

People in the notes are all like "yes sometimes The Government or The Lobbyists remove funding from sciences that might reveal things that they do not want known" and yes yes covid and climate change and vaccine denialism and racism and all that, but it's not just the obvious stuff. When I was working in labs, metagenomics was the next big thing, so EVERYTHING was metagenomics. If you worked in environmental or medical microbio, there was an 80% chance that you were taking some mud or poop or something and doing metagenomics on it whether or not it was the best way to analyse what you wanted to analyse, and bam, that was a paper, possibly two, it kept the lights on. And if 100 labs run 100 experiments where they do metagenomics for random things to do with the human body, then at a 95% confidence interval, 5 of them will find a completely nonexistent correlation for any random thing you can think of if they happen to check their data for it, and they need to keep the lights on and the PhD student who's running the experiment needs a paper so even though that wasn't what they were looking for, bam -- everyone's seeing that men and women have different microbiomes in their large intestine! People with autism nave different microbiomes, people with MS have different microbiomes, kids who are vaccinated have different microbiomes so watch out! And there's not enough papers to do a review paper for six or seven years, and when that review paper is done only other scientists will read it, because Everyone Knows that vaccines alter your microbiome so stay away from them, and Everyone Knows that men and women are so so different because why else would their large intestines be so different? Look at this paper!

And the psych guys are doing MRIs because that's the Next Big Thing, and any bias culturally relevant enough will get positive papers for it because the 100 labs will check their 100 papers and the 95 that show no difference at 95% confidence are of course never published because there's nothing to say. And the medicine guys are running ten thousand seaweed extract experiments to kill cancer cells, and their confidence intervals do tend to be better, but there is no defense against an industry where the only way to survive is to publish and the only way to get funding is to look into something that the grant committee wants you to find something interesting about, and you'd better find that something interesting even if you kind of have to publish your study before repeating it to check for that confidence interval -- someone else will repeat it, or you will once the paper's out, but you've got to get the paper out. And that paper had better be useful for other scientists to reference, even if you have to change the tone and the implications and choose which results are worth referencing, because getting more references is how you keep your job and how you convince the next grant committee.

Big Bad Government Lies About Covid is a problem, but it's not the problem. A perfect government with a massive science budget does not solve the problem. The system of research is inherently political because it is inherently competitive and because it deals with numbers and statistics that are not intuitive to humans.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#fuck capitalism

Nono this problem also exists outside of capitalism. Any economic system has to distribute resources and any actually useful one has to care if its workers are actually producing something.

[queeranarchism]

[the cover of A consensus handbook by Seeds for Change, featuring the title in Orange lettering followed by an color drawing of 11 people working on the maintenance of a house]

I'm going to share this as a separate post for those that missed the ask: A consensus handbook by Seeds for Change https://seedsforchange.org.uk/handbook is a free and very handy guide to how to take decisions as a group without leaders or hierarchies. I'm going to drop the chapters here to show off just how much useful stuff it has. If you work with consensus, there's almost certainly a problem in here that you recognize and wish you had some answers to!

1: Making decisions by consensus What’s wrong with the democracy we’ve got? - Why use consensus? How does consensus work? - The consensus process - Key skills and values for consensus 2: Facilitating consensus The role of meetings in group work - What is facilitation? - Facilitating a meeting – Making meetings accessible - Taking minutes 3: Facilitating consensus in large groups Meeting the conditions for consensus in large groups - Processes for large groups 4: Facilitating consensus in virtual meetings Why have virtual meetings? - The tools for the job - Challenges of facilitating virtual meetings - A consensus process for virtual meetings 5: Quick consensus decision making Preparing for quick consensus - How it works 6: Facilitation techniques and activities Starting the meeting - Regulating the flow of the meeting - Encouraging involvement - Techniques for problem solving and tackling difficult issues - Prioritisation techniques - Activities for re-energising - Evaluating meetings 7: Troubleshooting in your meetings Our meetings take a long time - Time pressure - Our meetings lack focus - Our group is large and we don’t enjoy meetings - We’re stuck and can’t reach a decision - Too many ideas - ‘Steamroller’ proposals - How can we deal with disruptive behaviour? - What to do when someone blocks - Our group is biased towards the status quo 8: Bridging the gap between theory and practice Conflict and consensus - The life cycle of a conflict - Ways of dealing with conflict - Techniques for inviting collaboration Power dynamics - Step one: What are our feelings about power dynamics? - Step two: Diagnosis – what is actually going on - in your group? - Step three: Where do your power imbalances come from? - Step four: Work out some ways to change your power dynamics Other common issues - External pressures - Open groups with changing membership - What if you’re the only person who wants the group to change? 9: Consensus in wider society So how might it work? - Challenges, questions and tensions - How do we get there? - A final thought

[redstonedust]

love when a character is a scientist and their speciality is science and they do science in a science lab. no specifics no clear goals no clue where their funding comes from. dont even worry about it. science.

[integrise]

lessons that I was surprised but happy to take away from the artemis II mission:

STEM cannot survive without the arts and vice versa

The crew needs to publish a book of poetry IMMEDIATELY

Science is unifying and should be funded instead of wars!!

Microsoft outlook and press-to-talk technology is even sometimes difficult for the smartest, most trained humans on (and off) the planet to manage

[aloeverawrites]

Ngl finding out that people who could get to the moon couldn't get to their account made me feel a lot better about myself like it's not just me.

"It's not rocket science-" well it seems like the rocket science was easier microsoft-

[geckyjuno]

my bedsheet is pregnant and it's. the rest of my laundry

[muppetyaoi]

another one for the collection, gang.

[kosmogrl]

the goal is to always have days so good that you forget you have a phone

[hannbl]

[chrollo-tw]

me after I eliminated 21,042 people

[strawberry-crocodile]

ultimately the best way to prevent abuse is to organize society in such a way that everyone's needs are met wothout having to rely on a parent or employer or boyfriend or any one individual. obviously wont stop, like, manipulation or so on, but the ability to dangle basic needs over someone's head is one of the most powerful and consistant tools of abuse out there. if someone is able to just leave, and know that they will have access to food and shelter and clean water and education, that will enable so, so mamy victims of abuse to do just that.

[socialistexan]

Liberals, if you force this man on us then I will only pray for the end of the party and replacement with something actually useful.

He wants to be a Republican so badly. Like, he's the worst of all worlds. He's trying to play this Bill Clinton strategy, except Willie was the governor of Arkansas not pinko commie California. He's going to alienate the left with his right-wing views on economics, trans rights, immigration, and now occupied Palestine while also having the reputation of being the king of all the loony liberals in California to the NewsMax-brained half of the voting public meaning they will never vote for him no matter how far right he moves (see Harris, Kamala)

He has no base, he offers no policies, and has nothing but a conventionally attractive face and raw ambition you can see from space. That's a recipe for a blowout for Vance in 2028.

[socialistexan]

I'm just telling y'all now, if the Democratic platform is "I agree with Ben Shapiro on everything" then it's a recipe for utter disaster. 1984-style blowout.

This should be fully disqualifing.

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

making the radical claim "11 year old children should be taught how to make extremely simple food" has resulted in people making arguments like "I wasnt allowed to plug in electronics until I was 16 and I think this is super normal actually" and "children dont know what ratios are so its unfair to expect them to be able to comprehend the idea of adding equal amounts rice and water to a rice cooker" and I gotta say originally I thought maybe I was being too judgy but now I feel very secure in my opinion because what the fuck

[brainrotdotorg]

i really do think we should substitute gacha games instead for like. the random wikipedia article button. gives you the same "yay i got something new and exciting!" feeling without spending any money and you get to learn something new on wikipedia. the problem is that its missing a cute little storage menu where you can see all the links to different articles youve "collected"

[brainrotdotorg]

so many people could be weaned off of gambling if we just gamified that website a *little* bit

[brainrotdotorg]

okay so ummmmm. its real

[toxifoxx]

absolutely fucking legendary first pull

[kaijutegu]

HELL YES ENIGMATIC LEAF TURTLE

[kaijutegu]

you can use this game to make a cow fight the state of new jersey's constitutional amendment process

[worm-facts]

Flatworms pt.1!