• 8 Posts
  • 274 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • Do you ever find that sometimes when you intervene in to other people’s conversations to pull out some of your best absolute cracker lines like “why don’t you google that?” that people just don’t react properly at all? Like you’d expect an appropriate response like some light cheering and maybe lifting you up on their shoulders and handing you a medal and at least a couple of trophies. You know, something befitting of your incisive and insightful contributions, and instead they just kinda stop talking to you? That’s so weird huh?



  • You deadly seriously didn’t know if they were talking about the Pacific Ocean? In a post about someone who has trouble speaking clearly, in a reply clearly establishing you were aware there were writing errors, zeroing in on a word well known to be accidentally substituted for the word “specifically” by some speakers. You deadly seriously didn’t know?


  • Unfortunately you just cannot simply take English as it’s spoken in your country and assume it will apply universally and without change across all English speaking countries even as you and I now mostly successfully converse in English. The roots of words can be interesting and sometimes informative to know but it’s not the whole story and ignoring actual usage will never garner a true understanding. It sounds like it’s pretty important avoid the word in the US, but not so in Australia. It’s not totally neutral here, it’s still swearing and you won’t hear a school teacher saying it to children, but it’s also not coming from the same place in terms of meaning as in the US or UK for example. Sometimes it’s an insult, essentially meaning a bad or objectionable person, sometimes it’s used in much the same way as “mate”, other times it can simply mean “person/people”. Much like English itself, context is important and you have to know the background and contextual cues to understand which meaning to take.

    You should come over here some time, you might like it, the weather is nice, we share a lot in common with the US, so you’d feel right at home but there’s just enough interesting differences to be exotic and provide opportunities to learn something about the world you didn’t know before. I can tell you’re well meaning and I think people will probably appreciate that too.





  • I don’t, in general make this same bargain, and I’m not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn’t inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that’s better understood won’t translate to people suddenly realising what they’re giving up. We aren’t always simply one great analogy away from changing every person’s world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude “well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely” is accepting defeat, again not something I’m yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one’s thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy’s big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it’s insane to ignore them. That quote that you’ve produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn’t irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it’s difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn’t. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that’s reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can’t prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.






  • There’s better answers here addressing the unlikeliness of contract killers existing in the sense of a freelancer available for hire to all the general public rather than someone trusted by peers in a criminal enterprise and also about the “contract” not really being a contract because it’s unenforceable but I think you could also draw the conclusion just by reasoning alone that if a contract killer in that Hollywood sense of the term existed, and breached their contract and you the client don’t have the personal connections or power to threaten that particular assassin’s life in response, there’s always just good old reputation at stake. I mean, it wouldn’t help you in your specific case if they’ve nicked off with the money and left your target very much alive but to have hired them in the first place would have required word of mouth in hopefully a pretty small community of people since you can’t exactly expect to find them on fiverr so you could make it know pretty quickly that this person doesn’t honour their contracts so their wet work career would be over pretty quick.





  • Yes I figured that that was how it worked when Dad insisted I asked because, although, of course, logically what he was saying made sense, I knew intuitively that that isn’t the world I live in, and that unlike a white collar career, the minimum wage world does not care about making conditions or contracts that would attract or retain employees because they have 100% of the bargaining power and will find a different wage slave if you ask weird and inconvenient questions. That was why it was so awkward and I was reluctant to ask in the first place.

    The thing is, while I’m all for a “fuck them” attitude towards insurance companies, if I’m going to commit insurance fraud, even if I think the risks are exceedingly low, I’m not doing it for Dominos, and doing it for them is indeed what’s happening there because in a just world this should obviously be the cost of offering a delivery service and by taking on this legal risk myself (and the burden of the increased premiums in the case of an accident) I’m gifting Dominos, the multinational megacorp, the opportunity to shirk what should definitely be their responsibility.

    The insurance issue and terrible amateur legal advice alone wasn’t actually what made me pass on that job, despite really needing it at the time. The rest of the interview was a train wreck in terms of me evaluating them as employers and though they seemed keen to hire me anyway on the basis of me apparently having a pulse, I was fortunate enough not to actually be destitute at the time and so wasn’t obliged to accept the offer.




  • I once interviewed to be a delivery driver for Domino’s and my Dad was adamant it was a bad idea and I should find different work and then insisted that I ask them about insurance if I was going to do it.

    It felt super awkward because I was pretty young and people just don’t ask those kinds of questions for minimum wage. He wanted me to ask them if they provided insurance to their drivers when they’re driving cars for them on the clock and explained to me that if there’s an accident while using the car for work then my insurance wouldn’t cover it which I checked and indeed they wouldn’t.

    The interviewer said they didn’t provide insurance but asked if I was insured and if I was, wouldn’t I be fine anyway? I said the insurance was not going to cover me while using the car for the job and the guy had this answer in a different tone like a kind of I’ve got this super clever scam that no one’s ever thought of but I’ll let you in on it vibe and leant forward and said “oh yeh, we know what to do here in that situation, what you do is you just say you weren’t working at the time”. I was incredulous but still a nervous teen and kind of meekly protested “but like what about the several pizzas in a bag and the uniform?” And he’s like “oh you just tell them you were on your way home from work and that’s your dinner”. That, along with many other fucked up things that occurred in the brief space of time this interview occupied convinced me to nope out of there.

    Yeh dude, I’m going to try and commit insurance fraud… very poorly… for Dominos… who can’t simply provide the necessary protection to allow people to do the job they’re asking them to do. If I have to get my own insurance, if it has to be a special kind of more expensive insurance that’s going to cover me driving for work, then I’m a contractor, not an employee and I’m going to set my own rates and they’re going to be a lot higher then what they were offering considering I also have to maintain my own vehicle and pay for fuel and insurance, to a certain extent I even arguably have to use the skill of knowing how and also being licensed to drive in the first place which makes it not exactly “unskilled” labour in this first place.