THIS! My cardiologist has instructed me to eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. He literally encouraged me to eat things like chips, pretzels, pickles, salted nuts, and ramen to get more.

I supplement with electrolyte mixes with 1g sodium. They cost over $1 each and I am supposed to drink 2-3 a day. I still don’t get enough salt to feel my best.

It’s fucking obnoxious to have health conditions that mean I need a thing that so much of the world tells me is bad, and everyone else is trying to get rid of.

That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.

For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.

The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

You make a good point, and yet I wouldn’t be shocked if many people were still rabid fans even if he sold it at their expense. There’s a lot of weird idolization around him, and seems like the kind of thing many of his fans would laud as his great business acumen, ignoring the negative impacts it had on them.

Thanks for the clarification on your intent. I understand (and appreciate) skepticism; however, I took your original comment to be a dig rather than helpful criticism, but your clarification here helps me read it more positively.

Someone else commented and used words that aligned with my intent behind the comment, which was just to leave open the door that there are nuances I may be uninformed about. But I recognize I could have been more explicit about what research I had done to maybe establish a little more credibility.

Thanks for responding with such a level head!

Ah yeah, in both cases I’m referring to they were saying the gerrymandered districts meant their blue votes for president didn’t count. I agree that the apathy strongly affects the overall outcome!

In one case, I tried to correct the perception by saying basically when I said here (popular vote determines the state’s allocation of electoral college votes), and I was “corrected” by my acquaintance that the president race is determined by electoral vote, not popular vote. 🤦🏻‍♀️

True, some states are too extreme to ever flip. Then other states like Texas or North Carolina are perceived as firmly in one camp, but they might not be if everyone actually voted.

Exactly what I’m trying to help counter! In just 24 hours I heard two people I know from Texas mention that the presidential vote was affected by gerrymandering. I did my research to confirm that was wrong and have been trying to help fix that false belief since then.

And what you’re saying now is, “What you said doesn’t align to what I think, so I’m sure you’re wrong.”

So here’s proof:

Of the 50 states, all but two award all of their presidential electors to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state (Maine and Nebraska each award two of their electors to the candidate who wins a plurality of the statewide vote; the remaining electors are allocated to the winners of the plurality vote in the states’ congressional districts). (source)

Ok, fair point, lol.

That’s precisely what prompted this post: conversations with friends in Texas who said their presidential vote didn’t count because of gerrymandering.

I agree districts are fucked, but that doesn’t affect the electoral college outcome. Texas is leaning more blue every year and getting everyone who feels like their vote doesn’t matter out and voting anyway is the first step to changing it. (One example source)

The state has 30 million people. Of those, 8M are in the Dallas area, 7.5M are in the Houston area, and about 5M between San Antonio and Austin. That means over 20 million of the state residents live in one of the 4 largest metro areas which are all majority blue.

Yet only 11M voted in 2020. National average turnout in the 2020 election was 66% but Texas was less than 40%, and it’s because of the exact sentiment you called out.

I’m from Texas (but don’t live there now) and I know how disheartening the voting season always felt. I want to fight the perception I’ve heard now from multiple people in Texas that their vote for president doesn’t mean anything, because it absolutely could if everyone gets out to vote.

It means I didn’t go look at the laws of 50 different states, correct. Doesn’t mean I didn’t do any research at all; I did confirm for multiple states where I heard people saying this (OH, NC, and TX) and I confirmed that only those two states allocate votes based on districts while all others allocate all voters to one candidate. Maybe there’s some other method out there other than district-driven or popular vote–driven; I’m holding space that I could be unaware of something rather than trying to claim I know everything.

You could look at it that way. I think gerrymandering specifically refers to lines being drawn specifically to create advantage or disadvantage in voting though, and we don’t move state lines that way. So it’s more just like bad district allocation?

I don’t disagree, but it’s the system we have and I want to ensure people aren’t disenfranchising themselves in states that could swing the opposite way if everyone actually voted.

Remorse: “I am sorry for what I did and the impact it had on the victim. I made stupid choices that hurt another person, and while I can never take that back, I will seek to do better so no one needs to suffer from my actions again.”

Not sorry you did it, just sorry you got caught: “I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

I believe people can change and I think it’s important we hold space for people to do so. However, that hinges on the person actually growing, which often starts with showing remorse. I know you implied that this guy has done so, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Even the quote you posted somewhere else about it being the worst thing he’d done, or something like that? That very much sounds like a, “I’m not sorry I did it, I’m sorry I got caught” kind of statement.

Asked if van de Velde had ever expressed any remorse to him for rape, Immers [his teammate] said: “No, he doesn’t, he doesn’t explain it.” (source)

“I have been branded as a sex monster, as a pedophile,” he said. "That I am not — really not.” (source)

If there’s an apology or some actual statement showing his remorse, I’d love to see it, but I’m skeptical that it exists. This whole controversy he’s had a huge opportunity to step up, apologize, and rebuke his prior actions. Instead, he’s faced it all with silence and a reaction of ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ That is not the behavior of a person who acknowledges they were in the wrong, imo.

I hired a 65-year-old guy last year. I knew he was older, but didn’t know his age until after he joined my team.

It was also a slightly new career path for him. He’d worked as an IT Project Manager for most of his career, focused on backend systems interacting only with other IT folks. Now he’s a Program Manager on a Product team so it’s not wildly different, but his stakeholders are significantly different and the way he works is different (focusing at a higher level than before).

And he is rockin’ it. I love working with him and seeing him grow into this role has brought me a lot of satisfaction. He is a great member of my team. He’s mentioned wanting to retire within 5 years and I’ll be sad when that happens, but I hope I have the chance to be his last manager and support him through when he makes that choice.

I’m not trying to minimize the challenges of changing jobs as you get older; the statistics speak for themselves. But I do hope that if you want that change that this anecdote might help inspire you. There are other hiring managers who will only care about what you can bring to the table.

That’s interesting context on the root of the word, but just because the name of the personality disorder was inspired by Greek mythology doesn’t mean the word’s use today is invalid.

Words change and adapt new meanings. Etymology tracks where words come from, but those roots don’t dictate how new words are formed. The word “narcissism” has been in use for over 100 years and while people might know it has ties to the myth, there isn’t anyone who would use it to mean “this person is just like Narcissus.”

If we followed your logic, we’d have to stop using words like atlas, cereal, music, mentor, morphine, nemesis, and so many other words that come from names of people/gods in Greek mythology lest someone assume we mean some detail from the inspiring myth that most people don’t even know about.

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.