it's not so much about "what" as it is about "how"
women tend to place more importance on emotional and relational characteristics of a person, story, situation, etc (who, why?) and so their conversational frame reflects this
whereas men tend to see the world through a more quantitative and physical lense (what, where, when?)
if you are not broadly interested in the same questions, it is fundamentally difficult to retain interest in the conversation, regardless of topic
both must learn to ask questions that do not come naturally
Customer buys 90 year old brick house
Doesn’t realize that in the 30s brick mortar was mostly made up of lime with next to zero Portland cement. (It’s pretty much just lime putty and sand)
Gets mad at me when I explain to him that I can’t anchor anything to his foundation until he gets a brick mason to redo his entire home with modern mortar which is almost 97% Portland cement (with lime added only for workability).
“I’m gonna call your boss!”
Here, you can use my phone.
“Alright look. I get it, but my wife isn’t happy.”
Bruh, that’s not my problem. Take her out for tacos or something.
Cormac McCarthy is basically designed to one-shot the Sensitive Young Man when he reads it at a time of despair and ennui sometime between sixteen and twenty-five
I thought this was a joke but no. So the veggietales vegetables are canonically antiheroes.
They exist to save others but are aware due to their transgressions (being vegetables) they cannot be redeemed and are going to hell.
an older guy (late 70s) at my swim practice told me this funny story and it questioned why door dash exists and i love how right he is. makes too much sense. here's my quick paraphrase:
"so my daughter got me this gift card for a thing called door dash for my phone. it's an app.
so i asked her what it was. she said, you can order food with it. like pizza or chinese food.
so i said, i already order that stuff.
and she said how?
and i said, i just call the restaurant and tell them what i want. and they deliver it.
and she said now you can use the app. and i asked why?
and she said, this way you don't have to call.
and i said, i like calling. my guy at the pizza place knows my order already. he's nice. from queens. mets fan. can i talk to him in the app?
she says no.
so i tell her to keep the gift card."
A history teacher once told me the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving.
I asked her about George Washington's 1789 proclamation.
She had no idea what I was talking about.
October 3, 1789.
The Constitution is barely ratified. Congress asks the President to declare a national day of thanks.
Washington doesn't suggest it. He commands it.
"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for His benefits."
Duty. Not option.
He called Americans to "sincere and humble thanks" for winning the Revolution. For the Constitution. For religious liberty.
Then he told them to pray.
To "beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions."
The Father of our Country. Publicly confessing national sin. Calling a nation to its knees.
The Pilgrims weren't even mentioned.
That story came later. Sanitized. Secularized. Safe for public schools.
The real first Thanksgiving was a President declaring that gratitude to God was the price of being American.
They don't teach that anymore...
Yesterday I noticed the office printer was working perfectly, which raised my suspicion immediately.
I checked the logs and saw someone had cleared a paper jam at 3:12 p.m.
No ticket, no Slack, no communication.
Just silent action.
I asked the office if anyone had fixed it.
Everyone looked confused except one employee, who stared at his laptop a little too hard.
I pulled him aside afterward.
He admitted he unjammed it because “it was right there” and “took five seconds.”
I told him unilateral problem-solving disrupts our culture of collaboration and that he needed to go through the right channels if he wanted to take on a new project outside of his job description.
He said he didn’t realize fixing things was a chain-of-command issue.
I told him everything is a chain-of-command issue.
I wrote down “rogue operational autonomy” and locked the printer tray.
Go get a job at your local ship anchor chain factory. You could start off as an anchor jockey, and work your way up to anchor jockey supervisor. Buy a small 2-bedroom sea shack down the road at below market rates. You might even meet a nice girl who works as a waitress at the local fish fry joint. It could all be so simple, anon.
The thing about dishwashing is you have a hard ceiling for efficiency, which is the length of the run time of the dishwasher program. As long as you are making the dishwasher run with zero downtime, every time the program is done you instantly shift in new shit and start it again, then congratulations, you are litteraly as efficient as it is possible to be. Doing tricks with the plates and setting up multiple rows of plastic containers is not more efficient, but tricks you do to "look busy" rather than actually "be efficient"
A math professor noticed his kitchen sink at home was leaking.
He called a plumber.
The plumber came the next day, tightened a couple of nuts, and the sink worked perfectly again. The professor was delighted. But when, a minute later, the plumber handed him the bill, he was shocked.
“This is a third of my monthly salary!”
“Yeah, I get it…” said the plumber. “Why don’t you come work for our company as a plumber? You’ll make three times more than you do as a professor. Just remember: when you apply, say you only finished seventh grade. They don’t like hiring educated people.”
So the professor got a job as a plumber, and his life really did improve. All he had to do was tighten a nut here and there every so often, and his salary was much higher.
One day, the management of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to attend evening classes to finish eighth grade. So our professor had to go too.
By chance, the very first class was math.
The evening school teacher, wanting to check what the students knew, asked for the formula for the area of a circle.
They called the professor up to the board, and he suddenly realized he’d forgotten it. He started frantically reasoning it out, covering the board with integrals, differentials, and all sorts of fancy formulas to re-derive the result. In the end, he got:
S = –π r²
He didn’t like the minus sign, so he started again.
Again he got a minus. No matter what he did, it kept coming out negative.
He cast a panicked look at the class, and all the plumbers were whispering:
“Swap the limits of integration!”
Ah! You see, this miserable little document, this so-called date-me doc, is our era’s most honest pornography. It pretends to be romance, but what is it really? It is no longer the trembling hand on paper, the confession of desire. It is a spreadsheet of desire. “I am ready. I am six foot four. I have done the work.” What work? Love is precisely the place where work collapses into failure. You study and then you fail the exam.
And look at this language. “Highly agentic, emotionally warm.” Beautiful nonsense. Freedom, yes, but domesticated. Agency, yes, but pointing politely towards him. For Hegel, love is the risky collision of two freedoms. Here, there is no risk. She must arrive pre-formatted.
Then the farce reaches ecstasy. “If she does not appear, I will pursue single fatherhood.” Magnificent. Chance is canceled. Eros becomes procedure. The miracle of two gazes across a smoky room is replaced by paperwork and a receipt. The objet petit a is now a literal baby routed around the Other.
And of course, the “monogamish” clause. Pure ideology. Fidelity with a footnote. Like Coke Zero: love without sugar, passion without calories. He wants the experience of devotion, but sterilized of danger.
The document offers no asylum from loneliness. It is loneliness, meticulously formatted, hyperlinked, and begging for comments. He does not whisper “I love you.” He says “I am prepared to love you, conditionally, pending review.”
Pavel observed that. while an Americans first impulse when picking up a weight was to curl it, a Soviet always tried to press it overhead. This is a very deep reflection of cultural values
The first Obama Card (Black Amex) I ever saw belonged to a guy who got wealthy in tech and cashed out.
He didn’t even have a Phone.
He had his wife and kid in the penthouse and his live in hoes on rotation a few floors below that in a beautiful condo.
You had to email him. If you wanted to get in touch. His assistant would email / sms or call you back.
His reasoning “when I’m with my wife the hoes can’t bother me. When I’m with my hoes the wife can’t bother me”
I haven’t spoken to him in years for no particular reason, just fell out of touch. I’m going email him now and see if it bounces back or not.
I miss that legend.
one of my most productive work days ever when I decided I was sick of dealing with an intractable perf problem, took an uber to get ramen, had three beers with lunch, decided to walk the two or three miles back, and realized a redesign that would trivially parallelize 95% of it
i think valve and epic chungus gaben get a lot of weird undue neckbeard praise for everything they do but i gotta say changing the entire cs skin system and tanking a billion dollar fake economy for no reason overnight is really, really funny