NovemberWest's comments

No, not actually. But you can check my other comment, below, for a crumb more info. I have mostly walked away from this topic. I am getting myself and my son well. If the rest of the world wants to be openly assholish to me, hey, their health issues are not my problem. Paying my bills and getting off the street is my problem.

What she meane is that wellness is not a welcome topic in most circles, nor easily monetized. Everyone wants a new drug, literally or figuratively -- a quick fix, easy answer. No one wants to eat right, exercise, make dramatic lifestyle changes, etc. Wellness looks more like religious edicts than it does medicine.

This I cannot comprehend. Compared to the drugs I have gotten off and the potential surgeries I have evaded, what I am currently doing is a pleasant picnic. But trying to share that info has gotten me mostly open hostility. So I took the site down.

Please note that "cure cancer" is in quotes. I am speaking from (bitter) firsthand experience about some other condition.

I don't expect to ever get the Nobel Prize. I mostly get called crazy.

You apparently have no fucking clue why some people come to the U.S. The overprivileged assumptions so many Americans make are just completely out of touch with what goes on in many parts of the world. There are plenty of people not eating who would be happy to work hard so they live better than that.

There is also not much money in "curing cancer", unfortunately.

What do you mean by "recover"? In practical terms? Get another job. In emotional terms? Cry/vent/watch cathartic movies, etc. Anger is generally an acid which corrodes the vessel which holds it. No one can make you do that to yourself.

Yeah, I know that. I am homeless and people have told me I should not admit that online, they would not hire me..blah blah. But most homeless were not born that way. It isn't a trait like skin color. "The homeless" come from the rest of of the population. They aren't some distinct separate population that interbreed or something, geez. So you get homeless by failing all of your citizens in some important way.

Welfare in America was designed to "help poor single moms" at a time when most poor single moms were widows and intentionally having a baby out of wedlock was a huge taboo. The very framing of it changed the social contract and actively undermines the social fabric. It has helped foster an atmosphere actively hostile to fathers and has single handedly all but put an end to the practice of "shotgun weddings." In Europe, programs are more generally designed to help women (like maternity leave), help children, help families -- not POOR women, not POOR children, not POOR families.

America requires you to be a failure before you qualify for assistance. Therein lies the problem. It actively creates a culture of failure and too many broken, shamed people.

It's a terrible system. Just terrible.

But I don't really want to discuss this at length tonight.

Later.

It would be better to provide support that makes the family successful rather than tearing it apart as our default approach.

Well, we need to stop trying to solve homelessness per se. We need to work on taking better care of people generally. That will shrink the numbers of homeless.

Nope. The so-called "news" is generally highly biased towards bad news. It has a negative slant. I think it actively creates problems in the world.

I don't get them. I am only replying in hopes of getting someone to notice your ask and reply. Sorry I can't be more help.

Yes, apparently, but too late to delete.

There is a lot of learning by asking questions, which works well guy to guy but there are serious barriers if you are female. I have repeatedly run into the fact that most men either do not want to talk to me at all or, if they do, it is usually in hopes of getting into my pants. Neither scenario leads to professional development. They are both equally poisonous, just in different ways. It is rare for me to run into a man who will converse with me at length about something other than whether or not I might sleep with him, in essence. That is a huge barrier to networking and professional development.

I had fantasies there would be videotape with legible audio of the first encounter in the parking lot and pics of the second encounter at the access road next to the parking lot. There were no cameras trained on either the parking lot or the access road. The camera in the stairwell had no audio and I kind of want to say it took stills every couple of seconds or something, not video, but I do not really recall. Regardless, I was shocked. The cameras everywhere and ID bagdes, etc, turned out to be far less Big Brother Is Watching You than I had believed prio to that incident.

As far as privacy in the future, I think one thing that will happen will be cultural adaptation. I think that is already occurring. I often discuss "personal" things online with acquaintances and strangers that I rarely discuss in person with acquaintances or strangers. This has nothing to do with being shy and everything to do with opportunity to have a meatier discussion online. If I need to give a lot of background info, I can do that online in ways I cannot do in person. For example, I can give links that give additional info for those that need it.

So I think new technology is already redefining what kinds of info are socially acceptable to divulge and changing how people react to knowledge about things that were previously much more deeply secret. As technology continues to evolve, we will face new questions about situations that never existed before. These days, people routinely wrestle with questions about handling social media, online privacy, etc. Those were questions that did not exist when I was growing up. No one has outlawed FaceBook even though, for example, people have been fired for things they said there.

Well, it does not sound like a very big picture goal, unless you are leaving something out. Without a big picture goal, "outstanding" success seems very unlikely.

Take care.

On skim, I do not see any hard definition of the "outstanding success" you envisioned for Nickler. If you never defined it, you cannot achieve it or know if you have. What gets measured gets done but, also, you need a measurable goal to know when you are done.

So I think what you had in your van were easily achieved and easily measured or recognized goals. Things get harder to see when the goal is larger and seems nebulous. You need to make it tangible somehow.

Best of luck.

I don't know. I have a tendency to get noticd merely for being different. I have genuine concerns about ordinary, nonsecret activities of mine taking notice. But that concern is mostly not relevant to the kind of intelligence being discussed here.

/pedant

Funny, my concerns about the social climate here are rather different. But I suspect writing this type of article is probably not the way to fix things. When people feel attacked, they get defensive and tend to become more entrenched, not less, due to trying to justify their behavior.

I worked for a big company where security was a big thing. I had to have an ID badge to enter the building. My boss once admitted to requesting the logs to determine if people on the team were really showing up on time to work. So I was aware the information could be used in let's say a predatory fashion for things not immediately obvious.

However, I once had an ugly run in with another employee I did not know while in the parking lot. I went to security to look at film and try to ID them. We were not able to ID the employee. We checked film from the stairwell I exited through and caught a glimpse of the person, but you only had to swipe your ID to get in, not to leave. So, no, there was no timed ID badge record to match the picture against.

I was surprised by the outcome. Given the ID badges and security cameras, etc, I had expected a Star Trek style set up. No, not remotely.

I am well aware info can be used against people. That mostly scares me in cases of hostile intent. And where you have hostile intent, it almost does not matter what info they have. They can spin it as something bad anyway.

At this point, I think being innocent is mostly not a defense either. I hope things change. Currently, there is a lot of assumption of guilt and, to me, that is the real problem.

I actually just like the blog but thought I would try to pick one post to focus on. It is mostly pictures of wildlife in Antarctica, with very little in the way of commentary, not much to go on to start a discussion. This post of the female author in a bikini with coworkers on New Year's Eve in the Antarctic brought up discussion of sexism, the male gaze, etc. elsewhere, so I thought it might be a good jumping off point here as well. Please keep in mind these are nerds in extremis who were all stationed at a research facility.