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  • shikitohno@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzA tense moment.
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    7 days ago

    Closest I’ve come to this was twice, both from the same doctor. She was actually my favorite primary doctor I’ve had, up until my insurance changed and I could no longer see her without it being cripplingly expensive.

    Looking at my lab work results, one time she goes, “This is really interesting, you’ve got all kinds of stuff going on, don’t you?” and another was simply “Woah!”

    Even if she wasn’t generally pretty funny, would still be my favorite, since she pretty much nailed down diagnoses for several issues that had been ailing me for years within the first couple appointments, was great with giving me referrals and fighting with insurance about “Yes, this really is necessary, it’s in your coverage agreement, so shut up and pay!” and got me back up to some semblance of full health in a matter of months. Like, exhaustion and joint pain so bad, I couldn’t walk down the single flight of stairs to leave my apartment some days and migraines that made me have to lay in a dark room for an hour, to now just being generally always a bit more fatigued than I should be given the amount of stuff I do in a given day.


  • Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”

    I’m still a bit puzzled why we can’t just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you’re referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what’s the issue with something like this below?

    Books

    Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.

    Periodicals

    See above

    Journals

    Films

    etc.

    It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it’s pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.

    Then again, I’m quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I’m also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.




  • It depends on why they’re laughing for me. Lots of terribly unfunny people essentially provide their own real time laugh track to signal “This is the funny part, laugh please,” which gets old real quick. They also tend to laugh incredibly hard at their own jokes, far more than is merited by the actual joke. Unfunny people trying to force a joke like that get old fast.

    On the other hand, I don’t take issue with having a bit of a laugh with everyone else when you land a good one. On rare occasion, there are even jokes that wind up funnier because they’re just so hilarious that the person telling them can hardly get them out without busting up themselves.


  • In lots of places, they aren’t liable, but many people aren’t aware of this, and/or aren’t in a position to fight it. It’s one of those things that vary by state, but in NY, for example, it’s definitely illegal.

    Employers are only allowed to deduct certain items from an employee’s wages, such as taxes, insurance premiums, union dues, etc. They are not permitted to charge employees for breakages, cash shortages, fines or any other losses to the business.

    Restaurants tend to employ younger workers, and often hire undocumented immigrants, so it’s easier for them to pull one over on their staff who may not know their rights, or be scared of retaliation if they do try to insist on their rights being respected.


  • Shocking absolutely nobody, there’s a deafening silence from the blue MAGA brigade that, pre-election, kept crying about how not supporting Israel 100% would sink the Democrats’ chances of winning 100% and that Trump would do oh so much worse. Democrats have already lost the election, and now they double down on a losing policy when they literally have nothing at stake.

    The only difference between a Biden and a Trump administration for Palestine is the speed at which things occur. Biden is fundamentally onboard with the same genocidal policies as Trump is willing to support.



  • Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.

    On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?

    That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.

    Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.



  • The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

    Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

    Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.



  • When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.


  • X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.


  • shikitohno@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzUse Zotero
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    4 months ago

    Zotero is awesome, and I’d also recommend the browser extension with an account. Account is free, but it’ll let you save any web sources with all the metadata you need and sync it to the main program.

    Zotero in combination with LaTeX and Biber have saved me so much time. Especially when I had a crazy professor who would make last minute changes to style requirements. I remember we had a paper to write that they initially said “Just cite with whatever format you want, it’s fine as long as they info is there.” Cool, write my ten pages or whatever with footnotes containing short citations and full citations available in the bibliography at the end. The night before the paper was due, “Actually, I need all papers to use APA citations or you’ll be docked points.”. No problem, just change my citation style at the top of my LaTeX doc and tell it to reprocess the paper, all the citations fixed in about 5 seconds, without even needing to learn the ins and outs of APA formatting.