I think that gets to the crux of the problem. Somehow he'd picked up the notion that having an expensive car and nice clothes would make him attractive to women who wanted that sort of thing. While I'm sure there are plenty of gold diggers out there that are as obsessed with those things as he was, they're a bit rarer in colleges where women are learning they can get that stuff for themselves, and they're also not looking for guys the same age as them (they want older men who have already established a pattern of financial luck.) He should have been going after cougars, or high school seniors.
You may be innocent, but what have you done to stop it? It's one thing to stick your head in the sand and go "lalala I'm not involved" - it's another thing to actively ignore it when you see it around you.
If you are surrounded by nothing but other totally innocent guys (and girls) who are not assholes to people of the opposite gender and thus have never witnessed someone getting harassed, then you're the luckiest guy on the planet and I wish I had your friend set.
Dude was also a WoW addict. Now, WoW is mainstream enough that it's no longer an activity limited to nerds, but it's also not something mundanes get addicted to.
Creepy is in the eye of the beholder. A good friend of mine thought that the guy I eventually married was "creepy." She also thought that a former manager of ours was creepy, when I thought a different manager at the same business was creepy. Creepy is very much subjective, but the definition is "I am not comfortable engaging in a conversation with you and would not voluntarily choose to do so because you are doing/saying things that frighten me." You can't judge creepy by appearances - Elliot Rodgers was actually kind of cute to my older eyes - but you can immediately get warning bells on your CreepDar as soon as someone moves or opens their mouth.
If you're not calling out guys (and girls) when they are being assholes, then yes, there is something wrong with you. You may personally being the nicest guy on the planet, have a loving girlfriend/wife and a half dozen girls who are jealous of her because you are so great, and take in foster kittens on the side. But if you have a single bro/bitch friend who harasses women (and/or men) and you aren't telling him to cut that shit out, then yes, you ARE part of the "us" in question.
NPR did a story this morning on common core in a poor school. The kids, a bunch of 5th grades, apparently LOVE it. And once the methods they were used were explained to me, I went "duh." Common Core's methods, when applied properly, are teaching these kids how to do math in their heads instead of crippling them by always needing a pencil and paper.
The example problem was 8x14 - you can write it out formally and get the answer in about a minute, or you can break it down as 8x10 (80) + 8x4 (32) and get the answer in about twenty seconds - in your head.
My school did. All "PE" type classes were 1 credit hour. One such class was required to fulfill graduation requirements. I picked Golf I. I learned how to properly hold a club and how to putt. It was pretty nice, actually - I took it during a short session, when I had a writing class in the morning. So I'd write in the morning and then go play golf all afternoon.
Then there were the actual kinesiology labs, which had some of the effects of PE classes but were much more difficult. You would take it as a 1-hour lab alongside your 3-hour kinesiology lecture, and then use your own body for the experiments in the lab. I heard it was rough and junior year kinesiology could feel like basic training if you took multiple classes.
They also work 60 hour works and have six figure student loan debt in the US. My best friend is a vet. She is incredibly stressed out most of the time, mostly because of how much money she owes. Her income is higher than mine, but her debt to income ratio is significantly higher. She'll be paying off her loans for thirty years.
It's quality control, but it's also based on trends and an incredible amount of bias from the agents who connect authors to publishers. I had a book that I tried to get published through traditional channels, and while I got a lot of positive responses from agents over the manuscript, there was always the caveat "but we don't think it will sell well." (At least a few were honest and said "I liked it, but I didn't love it.") The traditional publishing model requires an author to hit the magic sweet spot with an agent who is looking for new talent and who also thinks that 1. the book will do well and 2. the publishers will agree.
After twenty polite rejections, and a little bit of constructive criticism, I set my novel aside. I entered it in the Amazon Breakout Novel contest and made it to the second round. As a result, it's on Create Space, ready to be published to the wider Kindle world if I decide to hit the button. But all those rejections from the agents still haunt me - does this book really not appeal to anyone?
So it sits there. Unpublished by anyone. I'll never know if nobody likes it until I hit the go button. But I'm also scared to learn that I suck at something I enjoy doing.
Ah - something men may not know, that isn't common knowledge, but is a thing. Many women who take BC pills are going for 6-8 week stretches at a time per cycle now. So you cannot assume a woman is on the standard four week cycle (with or without the pills, everyone is different) unless she says so.
I have also found the same thing. I use a good moisturizer but I just stopped using anything stronger than water on my face on a daily basis. (Unless I've got on makeup or sunscreen, then it gets a really mild soap.) I still have the occasional zit sneak through - stupid demodex bugs cannot be completely eliminated - but my active acne is gone.
I don't think that computers "ruin" attention spans - anyone who has spent a few hours lost in Photoshop or playing The Sims can attest to the ability of some programs to keep us enthralled for long periods of time. I think it's social media specifically that makes us a little ADD. Also, there are fewer activities besides computer games or art programs that can engage flow concentration on the computer, compared to the hundreds of offline things (anything from playing sports to playing D&D to building hobby models.)
Is engaging flow concentration something that can be taught? I don't know. But that is clearly what is missing from the curriculum if kids can't concentrate in school.
We put in a solar hot water system shortly after we moved into the house. We got some subsidies for it, but still had to front about $4000 up front. It actually has cut our monthly power by a third, saving us about $600/year. (Joys of living in a modern energy efficient home.) So we'll get our payoff in seven years.
More importantly, since we have a double tank system that doesn't require external electricity, we have nearly unlimited hot water even during a blackout - and even during winter when there isn't much sunlight. (It's not as scorching hot as it can get in the summer.) That non-monetary payoff has actually been even better than the fifty bucks a month we've saved. Four adults can take a shower in a row and nobody's shower goes cold!
I think my parents paid very little when I was a kid. I was born in an Army hospital - the fee for my birth was $13 for a notarized birth certificate, according to my mother. We had Champus and later on Tricare. I have no idea what the monthly fees were for them.
Because if it had been thyroid cancer and not a low vitamin D level, the cost could have been $30,000 for treatment. I don't have 30K lying around, do you?
There is no competition now! That's the whole problem. My choices are slow but steady DSL, fast but unreliable cable, or slow AND unreliable dish network. The cable companies and the phone companies have zilch incentive to upgrade their lines to better support their Internet-only customers, since their primary phone and television customers are happy and don't realize what awful Internet service we're getting compared to all the other developed countries on the planet. If I want better service where I live, I have to pay several thousand dollars to the cable folks to run business class fiber to my house, for which I'll pay several hundred dollars a month... and the service will STILL cut out every hour, based on what I saw of the business service when I did third party tech support in town. The DSL company won't even consider giving us the business class package since we're not in a commercially developed area.
I'd be curious to know if I got my vitamin D levels up. They were on the floor about a year and a half ago. For some reason that test costs an arm and a leg too, and I had to fight my insurance company to get them to cover it. (They should have been happy it was something that could be fixed with $5 worth of pills and sunshine.)
We got exercise too. I vividly recall trying to do jumping jacks until I nearly collapsed to simulate how the heart pumps, and shoving pool noodles accross the table with other students during the calcium uptake channel lesson for muscle contraction.
And for those that DO want the add-on experience, you can get a PS Vita and do a live stream for some games from the PS4 to it. (The combo is suddenly hugely popular among the FFXIV crowd since they can play an MMO on a hand held that way.) And play stand alone games on it too. You can't do that with the Wii U controller.
Actually, it is working, because many big companies are reluctant to switch to Win 8 from Win 7 and are still ordering systems with the older OS on it when they can. MS probably hasn't sold as many Windows 8 enterprise volume licenses as they had hoped. And that's why they keep frantically trying to rescue the tainted brand while dribbling in fixes for the things people complained about. Now it's Windows 8.1! Look, we added your start button back. Wait wait now it's 8.1 UPDATE and we finally let you launch to desktop again!
That's just making it more confusing and frustrating for any company who had considered an upgrade to Windows 8, and so they're sitting on their hands waiting for Windows 8.x Super Final We Really Mean It Update.
Ironically, hospital connections tend to already be better than residential connections anyway. The clinics I used to help support all had business fiber installed and could max out at 60 mbps down, 30 mbps up. Now, if an ISP was offering that kind of node connection without the back end infrastructure pipes to support it (entirely possible) then they ought to be smacked for fraud.
When I was in high school anatomy class and we were learning all about the different cell types, our teacher associated them all with some kind of candy. Squamous cells became necco wafers. Fat cells were marshmallows. Striated muscles were Twizzlers. She even had us build models of DNA with different colored gum drops and tooth picks.
About the only time we stopped having a food related lesson was when we were dissecting cats, which was its own special kind of active learning *shudder*
From Slashdot, or any other place where people complain about horrible incidents that should have been prevented, but weren't (e.g. lack of power backup plan takes local hospital offline for hours, or severe data breach costs local company their customer's trust.) Of these stories, keep a list of the ones YOU took the appropriate steps to prevent. Then tidy these numbers up into a graph that shows the total number of potential incidents versus your total number of actual incidents. The ratio should be good, if things are boring.
This puts it in concrete numbers that you're doing your homework and preventing the fires from even starting.
My uni finally got rid of Blackboard last year. They put in something called Desire2Learn. I graduated so I don't have direct experience with it, but I've heard it's not really any better.
I had no issues on either my main desktop or my laptop, nor did my husband have problems on his Surface. But they're all less than a year old. This seems to be affecting people who had slightly older hardware and either upgraded to Windows 8 or bought something that came with Win8 and was fine with it, but it was juuuuust underspecced for Windows 8.1.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that gets to the crux of the problem. Somehow he'd picked up the notion that having an expensive car and nice clothes would make him attractive to women who wanted that sort of thing. While I'm sure there are plenty of gold diggers out there that are as obsessed with those things as he was, they're a bit rarer in colleges where women are learning they can get that stuff for themselves, and they're also not looking for guys the same age as them (they want older men who have already established a pattern of financial luck.) He should have been going after cougars, or high school seniors.
You may be innocent, but what have you done to stop it? It's one thing to stick your head in the sand and go "lalala I'm not involved" - it's another thing to actively ignore it when you see it around you.
If you are surrounded by nothing but other totally innocent guys (and girls) who are not assholes to people of the opposite gender and thus have never witnessed someone getting harassed, then you're the luckiest guy on the planet and I wish I had your friend set.
Dude was also a WoW addict. Now, WoW is mainstream enough that it's no longer an activity limited to nerds, but it's also not something mundanes get addicted to.
Creepy is in the eye of the beholder. A good friend of mine thought that the guy I eventually married was "creepy." She also thought that a former manager of ours was creepy, when I thought a different manager at the same business was creepy. Creepy is very much subjective, but the definition is "I am not comfortable engaging in a conversation with you and would not voluntarily choose to do so because you are doing/saying things that frighten me." You can't judge creepy by appearances - Elliot Rodgers was actually kind of cute to my older eyes - but you can immediately get warning bells on your CreepDar as soon as someone moves or opens their mouth.
If you're not calling out guys (and girls) when they are being assholes, then yes, there is something wrong with you. You may personally being the nicest guy on the planet, have a loving girlfriend/wife and a half dozen girls who are jealous of her because you are so great, and take in foster kittens on the side. But if you have a single bro/bitch friend who harasses women (and/or men) and you aren't telling him to cut that shit out, then yes, you ARE part of the "us" in question.
NPR did a story this morning on common core in a poor school. The kids, a bunch of 5th grades, apparently LOVE it. And once the methods they were used were explained to me, I went "duh." Common Core's methods, when applied properly, are teaching these kids how to do math in their heads instead of crippling them by always needing a pencil and paper.
The example problem was 8x14 - you can write it out formally and get the answer in about a minute, or you can break it down as 8x10 (80) + 8x4 (32) and get the answer in about twenty seconds - in your head.
My school did. All "PE" type classes were 1 credit hour. One such class was required to fulfill graduation requirements. I picked Golf I. I learned how to properly hold a club and how to putt. It was pretty nice, actually - I took it during a short session, when I had a writing class in the morning. So I'd write in the morning and then go play golf all afternoon.
Then there were the actual kinesiology labs, which had some of the effects of PE classes but were much more difficult. You would take it as a 1-hour lab alongside your 3-hour kinesiology lecture, and then use your own body for the experiments in the lab. I heard it was rough and junior year kinesiology could feel like basic training if you took multiple classes.
They also work 60 hour works and have six figure student loan debt in the US. My best friend is a vet. She is incredibly stressed out most of the time, mostly because of how much money she owes. Her income is higher than mine, but her debt to income ratio is significantly higher. She'll be paying off her loans for thirty years.
It's quality control, but it's also based on trends and an incredible amount of bias from the agents who connect authors to publishers. I had a book that I tried to get published through traditional channels, and while I got a lot of positive responses from agents over the manuscript, there was always the caveat "but we don't think it will sell well." (At least a few were honest and said "I liked it, but I didn't love it.") The traditional publishing model requires an author to hit the magic sweet spot with an agent who is looking for new talent and who also thinks that 1. the book will do well and 2. the publishers will agree.
After twenty polite rejections, and a little bit of constructive criticism, I set my novel aside. I entered it in the Amazon Breakout Novel contest and made it to the second round. As a result, it's on Create Space, ready to be published to the wider Kindle world if I decide to hit the button. But all those rejections from the agents still haunt me - does this book really not appeal to anyone?
So it sits there. Unpublished by anyone. I'll never know if nobody likes it until I hit the go button. But I'm also scared to learn that I suck at something I enjoy doing.
Ah - something men may not know, that isn't common knowledge, but is a thing. Many women who take BC pills are going for 6-8 week stretches at a time per cycle now. So you cannot assume a woman is on the standard four week cycle (with or without the pills, everyone is different) unless she says so.
I have also found the same thing. I use a good moisturizer but I just stopped using anything stronger than water on my face on a daily basis. (Unless I've got on makeup or sunscreen, then it gets a really mild soap.) I still have the occasional zit sneak through - stupid demodex bugs cannot be completely eliminated - but my active acne is gone.
I don't think that computers "ruin" attention spans - anyone who has spent a few hours lost in Photoshop or playing The Sims can attest to the ability of some programs to keep us enthralled for long periods of time. I think it's social media specifically that makes us a little ADD. Also, there are fewer activities besides computer games or art programs that can engage flow concentration on the computer, compared to the hundreds of offline things (anything from playing sports to playing D&D to building hobby models.)
Is engaging flow concentration something that can be taught? I don't know. But that is clearly what is missing from the curriculum if kids can't concentrate in school.
We put in a solar hot water system shortly after we moved into the house. We got some subsidies for it, but still had to front about $4000 up front. It actually has cut our monthly power by a third, saving us about $600/year. (Joys of living in a modern energy efficient home.) So we'll get our payoff in seven years.
More importantly, since we have a double tank system that doesn't require external electricity, we have nearly unlimited hot water even during a blackout - and even during winter when there isn't much sunlight. (It's not as scorching hot as it can get in the summer.) That non-monetary payoff has actually been even better than the fifty bucks a month we've saved. Four adults can take a shower in a row and nobody's shower goes cold!
I think my parents paid very little when I was a kid. I was born in an Army hospital - the fee for my birth was $13 for a notarized birth certificate, according to my mother. We had Champus and later on Tricare. I have no idea what the monthly fees were for them.
Because if it had been thyroid cancer and not a low vitamin D level, the cost could have been $30,000 for treatment. I don't have 30K lying around, do you?
There is no competition now! That's the whole problem. My choices are slow but steady DSL, fast but unreliable cable, or slow AND unreliable dish network. The cable companies and the phone companies have zilch incentive to upgrade their lines to better support their Internet-only customers, since their primary phone and television customers are happy and don't realize what awful Internet service we're getting compared to all the other developed countries on the planet. If I want better service where I live, I have to pay several thousand dollars to the cable folks to run business class fiber to my house, for which I'll pay several hundred dollars a month... and the service will STILL cut out every hour, based on what I saw of the business service when I did third party tech support in town. The DSL company won't even consider giving us the business class package since we're not in a commercially developed area.
I'd be curious to know if I got my vitamin D levels up. They were on the floor about a year and a half ago. For some reason that test costs an arm and a leg too, and I had to fight my insurance company to get them to cover it. (They should have been happy it was something that could be fixed with $5 worth of pills and sunshine.)
We got exercise too. I vividly recall trying to do jumping jacks until I nearly collapsed to simulate how the heart pumps, and shoving pool noodles accross the table with other students during the calcium uptake channel lesson for muscle contraction.
And for those that DO want the add-on experience, you can get a PS Vita and do a live stream for some games from the PS4 to it. (The combo is suddenly hugely popular among the FFXIV crowd since they can play an MMO on a hand held that way.) And play stand alone games on it too. You can't do that with the Wii U controller.
Actually, it is working, because many big companies are reluctant to switch to Win 8 from Win 7 and are still ordering systems with the older OS on it when they can. MS probably hasn't sold as many Windows 8 enterprise volume licenses as they had hoped. And that's why they keep frantically trying to rescue the tainted brand while dribbling in fixes for the things people complained about. Now it's Windows 8.1! Look, we added your start button back. Wait wait now it's 8.1 UPDATE and we finally let you launch to desktop again!
That's just making it more confusing and frustrating for any company who had considered an upgrade to Windows 8, and so they're sitting on their hands waiting for Windows 8.x Super Final We Really Mean It Update.
Ironically, hospital connections tend to already be better than residential connections anyway. The clinics I used to help support all had business fiber installed and could max out at 60 mbps down, 30 mbps up. Now, if an ISP was offering that kind of node connection without the back end infrastructure pipes to support it (entirely possible) then they ought to be smacked for fraud.
When I was in high school anatomy class and we were learning all about the different cell types, our teacher associated them all with some kind of candy. Squamous cells became necco wafers. Fat cells were marshmallows. Striated muscles were Twizzlers. She even had us build models of DNA with different colored gum drops and tooth picks.
About the only time we stopped having a food related lesson was when we were dissecting cats, which was its own special kind of active learning *shudder*
From Slashdot, or any other place where people complain about horrible incidents that should have been prevented, but weren't (e.g. lack of power backup plan takes local hospital offline for hours, or severe data breach costs local company their customer's trust.) Of these stories, keep a list of the ones YOU took the appropriate steps to prevent. Then tidy these numbers up into a graph that shows the total number of potential incidents versus your total number of actual incidents. The ratio should be good, if things are boring.
This puts it in concrete numbers that you're doing your homework and preventing the fires from even starting.
My uni finally got rid of Blackboard last year. They put in something called Desire2Learn. I graduated so I don't have direct experience with it, but I've heard it's not really any better.
I had no issues on either my main desktop or my laptop, nor did my husband have problems on his Surface. But they're all less than a year old. This seems to be affecting people who had slightly older hardware and either upgraded to Windows 8 or bought something that came with Win8 and was fine with it, but it was juuuuust underspecced for Windows 8.1.