There is a branch of medicine called functional neurology, where people get symptoms that present like seizures, tremors, or even paraplegia, but they have no physical cause, they’re usually a sign of pretty difficult trauma history. It’s honestly awful and I feel so bad for them, you end up in ER thinking you have epilepsy and some ignorant ER doctor treats you like you’re malingering but you absolutely are not, the symptoms are very real and compelling, and sometimes you can’t tell if it’s epileptic or not and it requires a lot of testing. Some people have both epileptic and nonepileptic seizures. It’s really tough and there’s very little treatment available. They are not harmful to you physically at all, but they’re quite distressing and I feel terrible for people who have them.
Academia, USA.
You’re getting the exact same quality of education for introductory classes at a community college, state school, and private school.
I know because I teach the same suite of classes at all 3 as an adjunct. Same book, same syllabus, same schedule, same assignments. The only difference is the price tag, and I’m hardly alone in that.
Actually, scratch that. You’re getting a better education at the community college because the people in charge there bother to remember that I exist and treat me as an equal.
The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.
If you’re a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn’t that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.
All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors
This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn’t mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it’s going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It’s not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that’s easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won’t get lost :/ )
Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you’ll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn’t bother putting any protective packing inside because “it’ll be fine if it bounces around a bit”.
When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn’t mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.
I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.
There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying “what does he know about Columbus anyway?” after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I’m having trouble finding it now.
The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats “massaged the message” with the news media, but watching it you’ll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks. (The video I mentioned about Couric and the historian might even be in this film, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it).
Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.
Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don’t know which breaker you’re working with, b) check that it’s off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don’t directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.
Most public school teachers have very little say about what happens in the school or the curriculum. We’re just carrying out orders and hope that students will go along.
Student discipline can only be applied with parent and administrator cooperation. If admin doesn’t do anything about bullying, fighting, or cheating, then the school is screwed.
Millions of government employees work hard every day on so much shit you’ll never see or understand that does in fact make your life so much nicer than you deserve when you complain about government workers.
And I’m NOT talking about the cultic worshipped military. I’m talking civilian civil servants at all levels of government.
SOME people are really gonna wonder why everything’s getting shittier and never make the connection that their idiotic notions about government led to it.
Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it’s built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.
Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.
Half of security is just making them be noisy enough to get worried someone will check
Broken/buggy software usually is not developers/QA’s fault but management and clients.
Consulting want something that conforms exactly what is signed and as fast as possible, if there are later bugs that doesn’t invalidates what was agreed or new features take longer to introduce it means more money as maintenance/evolution contracts.
Clients often don’t see why they should pay extra and include extra time for better code. Also they prioritise stupid things like changing the font in a page over fixing a bug in the checkout page.
