Like my mom always taught me, don’t get into the back of a stranger’s van, not even if they offer you pretty blue cockroaches.

I’m 5’9", honestly, truly. I have a work colleague who is maybe half an inch shorter than me and he insists I am 6 foot because he is. He also comments every damn time I wear a shoe with any sort of heel. Bruh, no I’m not 6’. He’s a really intelligent guy who seems self-aware about most things, I really can’t tell if he knows what he’s saying in this case or if it’s just a hilarious blind spot.

Assume minus two inches from any self-reported height under six feet. Assume minus four inches from any over six feet.

Except for me, I’m always perfectly honest about my height.

I feel like people keep wanting him to be consistently on one side or the other but he isn’t.

I’ve been using this as an example of how there are not two sides. No matter how much we red/blue team things in the US, it’s not actually how most people live their everyday lives. R vs D is a synthetic construct that a person can opt in or out of at any given moment, on any given topic.

AMA

What country are you in?

A hospital proactively checking your history for trends and asking you to come in for a checkup when a concerning trend is identified is not a thing that happens where I am.

You need height if you want to build a structure with a large area and not a ton of internal columns for support.

US, similar to others, I had to ask permission and it was always granted.

I can recall once I ran to the bathroom for an emergency without permission. My teacher checked in with me later and discretely to make sure I was ok. Most of my teachers over the years were reasonable people who saw their students as human beings, so I wasn’t worried about getting into trouble.

There was a student in my class one year who had to get an escort if he needed to go anywhere during class because he had a history of doing dangerous things. He tried running away, he wandered into a janitor closet and started randomly mixing chemicals together, he went into the teacher lounge and started eating their lunches, he went into the girls locker room and was found rifling through their gym bags. So yeah, from simple liability and the protection of other students, he wasn’t allowed to leave the classroom whenever he asked.

5’9", which is just fine for me. A touch taller than average, not so tall to cause health or ergonomic issues.

Shoes are difficult, my size isn’t typically carried in average stores. Also, larger womens shoe sizes often aren’t scaled up with correct proportions.

Driving in snow, I gave myself a good four times the distance to brake like they teach you. It wasn’t enough. I did get it slowed some, under 20mph I would estimate, and rode in slow motion as I rear-ended a brand new, lifted, very expensive looking pickup.

No injuries, fortunately. That was the most “time dilation” I’ve ever experienced. Somehow it happened so fast but also so slow.

Most of them know my actual name.

They know I have a lot of plants and cook experimentally, so probably a nickname related to those if they were to use one.

And it’s cheaper. I’m not full vegan nor vegetarian, but pared way down on red meat especially due to cost.

Not sure what pressures exactly this guy faced to lead him to shift his career, but previously a VP at Cigna and now admitting to lies and propaganda. I’ve been seeing this pop up repeatedly the last two days.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5631285/this-former-u-s-health-insurance-exec-says-he-lied-to-americans-about-canadian-health-care-1.5631874

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/27/884307565/after-pushing-lies-former-cigna-executive-praises-canadas-health-care-system

The next one that comes to mind is Boeing CEO Calhoun stepping down, allegedly his choice.

https://apnews.com/article/boeing-ceo-calhoun-0abff1ccc6262ffb03f97c6a619bd1ec

College educated parents. Education and early career is so much easier to navigate with parents who know the ropes and have a network.

They seem overrepresented in my algorithms. I don’t particularly like them, I don’t click on them, I’ll even spend limited free skips to rush past them sometimes, yet they seem to be everywhere. I can only assume their label is spending an ungodly amount of money to push them in the algorithm, making me shift from neutral about them to negative. Like how Nickelback was on every radio station despite not really being anything special. Hozier seems to sneak through despite my efforts to curate and train my algorithm intentionally.

So Hozier represents what is wrong with enshittifying music streaming apps to me. Probably not entirely fair of me, but that is my explanation for why I am confused and mildly irritated Spotify would call them my top artist.

Maybe, it doesn’t ring a bell but I might recognize it if I heard it.

I’ve come to the conclusion my top 5 lists are bunk. I know there is a particular song I listened to at least a half dozen times; neither it nor the artist were on my top lists. Yet somehow Hozier is my top artist? No, it’s broken.

Yes, to both ends.

My family hosted a student in my grade and we went to high school together. The exchange program did her so dirty. She was told students got placed in cities and thought she would be where she would be able to go into NYC on the weekends. She ended up on our farm, an hour and a half from what could only be called a small city if being generous, at least two flights from NYC, and eight hours by car to an actual large city.

I studied abroad for a semester in college and moved out of my host family’s and into my own apartment quickly for many reasons.

Sooooo, the private school you went to in Turkey was better than public schools in the same area. That’s a lot different than saying private schools are better, full stop.

Public schools in my area have 2, 3, 5, and 6 for example, with options for equivalent trips to 1.

Tut tut, I would expect someone with a private school education to not make claims built on such specious reasoning

Musicals tend to have misleading trailers, IMO. Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp comes to mind. I knew it was a musical because I was already familiar with the stage musical, but would not have guessed based on the trailer alone. I had friends similarly surprised that the 2024 Mean Girls is also a musical.

Anna Kendrick’s recent movie Woman of the Hour had a situation like that. Turns out, based on a real story when a victim of the Dating Game Killer tricked him into a situation in which she could escape.

Fascinating. Are you in the US?

I could not have avoided knowing about it. Even if I were to stay off the internet completely, it has been a major conversation topic in real life with friends and family. My work has BCBS health insurance coverage so when they were dropping coverage for anesthesia, all casual conversations at work with colleagues were about it too. I couldn’t have avoided it if I actively tried.