u/Alaira314

They don't ask you about it explicitly because it would be a slam-dunk ADA lawsuit. It's always indirect. As a security officer, are you eligible to have a permit to carry? The carry permit has restrictions(depending on your state), so indirectly you can't be a security officer if you have such-and-such diagnosis. As an engineer for a defense contractor, you need a level whatever security clearance. The security clearance has restrictions, so indirectly you can't work that job if you have such-and-such diagnosis. And it doesn't pull the records, it just asks if you have ever been diagnosed with xyz, under penalty of perjury. The loophole is, of course, not to be diagnosed unless you absolutely have to.

There's also the concern that things could take a turn for the worse. All of what I wrote above is about the current situation.

• What happens if the ADA is gutted? That won't happen? Are you sure? There's been a lot of things I would have thought would never happen, that have happened.

• What if our medical records are breached and fed into AI? Yeah, it's a violation of HIPAA, but coming after the perp with a lawsuit doesn't put the cat back into the bag once it's out. Now all the AI screening software used for hiring knows our diagnoses, and because they're black box it can't be proven that they're discriminating, only that they chose not to pass a candidate on for some unspecified reason. Don't tell me the industry couldn't find a fall guy for that, with how much they'd profit off it.

• What if the world just turns on the disabled as a whole? Progress has (slowly) been in a positive direction over my lifetime, with countries like Canada removing their ban on autistic people immigrating, but LGBTQ rights were also moving in a positive direction over my lifetime until they weren't. I'd argue this has already started with medicare cuts and discussion around involuntary institutionalization.

You're right, that was ramen, I just checked. There were noodles in that seafood monstrosity Jared made? 😂

They already did soup, I thought? Didn't Jared make something cajun? And I think Zach was there too, and did matzah something?

There isn't an "ADA certification" for the animal, but I know that accommodations in hospitality and travel usually require a doctor's note(and even then 😫 I traveled post-9/11 with someone with a surgical pin, and even with a note presented before the scanner even went off we were held up in security for extra processing). I imagined that was what was being forged. I know the standard questions for bringing a service animal to a place of business, but hotels might have different rules since it's hospitality. I don't know, never worked at a hotel.

And I had one interviewer say “let me check my notes” and I was surprised she had to check her notes on a project she worked on…..

I have to check my notes during interviews. It's because I'm doing one of the most stressful things in life, and my brain is full of things like "ok make eye contact with this person, not too much, don't stare at the blinds, okay three people are talking so alternate who you're looking at, not in a straight line though bounce it around, are you smiling no you're not YOU HAVE TO BE SMILING FIX IT NOW, smile with your whole face not just your teeth, wait you've been staring at that person too long again..." instead of detailed information about what I'm supposed to be talking about.

So I bring papers with all the factual things I have to say, up to and including basic biographic details about myself because in that maxed-out state I will not remember jack shit about myself. They're going to ask me about a mistake I made, so I bring notes on a mistake. They're probably going to ask me about some kind of workplace conflict, so write down one with coworkers and one with management. They're going to ask about teamwork or leading a team, so bring an example of each. Any big projects I've done should also be on that sheet, including details because they like specific numbers, not vague statements.

How does someone in need get that accommodation without opening up the possibility for anyone who wants to AI their way to the top getting the same accommodation? Do we require a diagnosis for people who can't speak in front of a crowd? What diagnosis? If you're using pre-recorded presentations, do we require a dysphoria diagnosis for the people who can't watch video/listen to audio of themselves to revise?

And also consider how that mark in their medical record might affect their lives outside of this class. Nothing is happening in a vacuum anymore, and having to jump through a hoop for a class marks something on your record forever, affecting you for security clearances, job eligibility, custody cases(you'd be shocked at the things they'll pick on), and even potentially immigration. Being able to truthfully check that box that you've never been diagnosed with x y or z is such a privilege, and when accommodations require proof it strips that privilege from you.

Oh maybe! It's not the only typo in their post, so that's very plausible.

Who is Anton and what did republicans do to them? My outrage meter is currently topped out with the raid on Ilhan Omar's house and the Vivek Ramaswamy attack ad, so I must have missed it. I tried googling but there was a republican donor by the name of Anton that went to jail a few years ago, so that's polluted the results.

The bitter irony here is that, yes, adults will beg for fun events. But when we schedule them, promoting them all over the place, nobody comes, despite adults expressing interest when told about them. Because fun events are time consuming for staff to prepare, we can't justify repeating an event that only one person showed up to. Cue another round of "why don't we get to have a party like that!" and a few years later someone tries again, with the same result.

It's because, in the original game, you have two woohoo options: regular woohoo(where birth control is assumed, as there's 0% chance of pregnancy) and try for baby woohoo(which has a varying chance of pregnancy). The game is designed in a way that assumes, if you're using a pregnancy test, you've had your sims intentionally try to become pregnant, hence the sad moodlet if it didn't work. I believe that sims who hate children get a different set of moodlets here that are closer to what you're asking about, but it's possible I'm remembering something from a mod.

Yeah, I get what they were trying to do with the mechanic. Obviously, if the only time you ever practice handiness is when the bathroom is trashed and the sink is spraying water in your face, or if you constantly push on with woodworking through smashed fingers, you're gonna hate it! But if it's your hobby and you regularly engage with it when you're in a good mood, you'll enjoy it much more.

I think the system would work better as a sliding scale kind of situation, like character values, where your sim's affinity for and against certain tasks changes over time based on their mood during them(obvious caveat about how the unmodded mood system has gotten unbalanced since release). But it's silly how it happens in a flash.

The army in WWZ is hilariously incompetent,

Something that might be lost on modern readers is that WWZ, released in 2006, was in part a satire on the USA of the 00s. It's most obvious when looking at the US military subplot, as well as a few characters who go unnamed but are implied to be contemporary(at the time) figures. The army was hilariously incompetent, because the author was making a point about how he viewed the US leaders who'd spent the decade so far starting wars and acting like it was impossible for the US, the greatest country in the world, to ever lose. While losing.

Denial that covid existed at all was a fairly small portion of the problem. A bigger issue was the people who denied that they could have it, hid symptoms, etc. This is, of course, one common interpretation of the zombie genre: zombies as plague carriers, with asymptomatic infected who would inevitably turn.

It's probably because I said something was ableist(not in those words) and suggested that we should consider our words more carefully when speaking. Reddit doesn't like that. I expected downvotes.

Who knew that a community whose uniting factor is to fight against oppression starts fracturing the moment some of its sub-groups are slowly becoming less oppressed?

Hm, I wouldn't say that's it. A good amount of the time it's actually the opposite, where groups feel pressured to jettison the freakiest members in order to protect the rest of the group from increasing pressure. The logic is like throwing the fattest person off an overloaded boat, in that if you get rid of the "gender freaks" then maybe society will ease off of the trans people who are being "respectable" about it.

This is, of course, not how it works. If Pete Buttigieg isn't good enough (and he's not), then nobody is, no matter who you throw under the bus.(CW: slurs) But there's always a new crop of people who don't know any better trying this shit.

Sure, it means weird. Is that such a bad thing? It's not a word for everybody, but I personally feel that there's nothing wrong with being weird, or a freak, or etc.

I don't have a gender. That's pretty fucking weird, by the standards of our rigidly-binary society. What other word should I use? Agender is really clinical, and besides it's not always everybody's business in exactly what way I'm queer. Maybe I just want to identify myself as part of the alphabet soup without opening myself up to debate with people who think they know my own identity better than I do. Queer is vague, and my usage of the term is sometimes very intentional for that reason.

Ever since I've just said "lame" or something like that instead.

Ironically, you just swapped "gay" out with a slur against a different group of people.

It's a hard habit to break, because those words are the ones we learned as kids. But I've been trying to be mindful of my word choice in recent years, to ensure at minimum that what I say is what I mean. When I say "that was insane", do I literally feel like I've gone mad, or do I just feel that it was hectic and wild? Usually the latter, and if that's the case I say "that was wild" instead. Do I think that plan is something that only a very unintelligent person would propose? Then "that's a stupid idea" is appropriate, but if I merely think it's bad or not my preferred choice that's not the word I should be using. "Lame" isn't something that's in my vocabulary anymore, except if talking about horses, because it's never the word I actually meant.

Some years ago the discourse started going around again. I have my suspicions as to the motivations of the people who were driving it. The unsubstantiated rumor was that, on tumblr at least, it was a largely TERF-driven movement that took off with the younger crowd. What I can speak to seeing with my own two eyes is that it's been weaponized against anyone who doesn't fit neatly into labels, for the apparent purposes of excluding them.

For example, if the lesbians in a certain LGBTQ group say the he/him lesbian can't sit at their table, what table does he sit at? He's not gay or bisexual, he's not really transgender(though there certainly is some gender happening, it's just not really like that, at least not for him specifically), the lesbians won't have him, and the queer table doesn't exist because queer is a slur(the Q stands for questioning, not queer). So where does he go? Well...he doesn't get a seat at a table, as was the intention. This ultimately serves the purpose of fracturing the community, starting with the most vulnerable members.

I read the first three books when the 3rd one came out. I do remember a very small degree of that, but it felt like it was skimming the surface. Like he doubted, he reached out...and then it didn't go anywhere. If anything, it just served to reinforce the change I'd mentioned, and like I said, I'd thought this was building to something. And then it didn't, which left me feeling like I'd misplaced my trust in the author, which stung all the more because I'd had misgivings since book 1 and ignored them, largely due to the praise the books were getting.

My overall impression was that the author hadn't fully thought through the ramifications of his premise. I expected more because I was sitting there like, holy shit we're over here fighting eugenics with more eugenics, that's super fucked up, let's see how the protagonist grapples with that and what happens in the end to disrupt the terrible system(I just now realized, one reason I think I expected this was because the books had been compared to ender's game)! But he was like, wow yeah this sure is mega-dystopian, let's power up this guy and kick the ruling class's asses. Which is a completely different story. And it's fair if that's the story he set out to tell, but there are unfortunate implications of that story when you combine it with the specific choices the author made. And that's my primary criticism of this book.

The infiltration aspect was why I was holding out hope for a subversion, or perhaps a subplot where he reckons with the complicated feelings that are all wrapped up in that sort of thing. But it just never came. He defeated the Golds by becoming a Gold, and to the best of my recollection being totally okay with that. It was pretty awesome, actually. Not the revolution and setbacks and stuff, but being strong like a Gold? That was cool.

You're correct that it's not unique. The other series that use similar ideas without reflection should be criticized for the same reasons. It's worth mentioning that most of the popular recent dystopian caste novels I can think of managed to dodge this particular minefield by having their castes be primarily cultural, the result of operations inflicted upon healthy individuals, or personality-based(though Roth's special "divergent" brains thing was...questionable...hard to critique it though due to the premise not making coherent scientific sense). But Pierce ran straight into said minefield, and as far as I was concerned as a reader he blew the book's legs off.

I don't know what you mean about looking down on people. Others in this thread, including you just now, have made some derogatory implications about people who enjoyed the novel, but I haven't. My personal issue with it is that I found it to (inadvertently, most likely) reinforce some gross ideas regarding eugenics and caste systems. It has nothing to do with if it's "YA" or "poorly written" or has a "gary stu"(quoting what others have said).

The way it was described in the ghost kitchen episode made it sound like, in the case that three guests remained(which was not the situation, but they didn't know that for sure), voting out a guest would give the victory to the killers. I'm not going to dig through an hour+ long podcast to find the quote now, but most people seemed to have interpreted it that way? Otherwise, the only logical course of action would be to vote yes and take another banishment, since if you got a killer then great and if you got a guest then oh well it's only a gift card. It doesn't make sense for zach to talk about the rule the way he did unless it was meant to plug that hole.

I also did not like this series at all. My biggest complain about it is actually something nobody else has said in this thread(I read all the way down to the "load more comments", which is 50~ top level comments on desktop old reddit).

The book aimed to subvert a strict caste system, where a society was set up striated into colored castes based on biological and psychological differences. Reds were inferior to Golds because they were smaller and weaker, it's just biology! So we challenge this caste system by...surgically enhancing a Red to be able to keep pace with a Gold. Not just to visibly pass as a Gold, but to be as physically strong as them as well. This enhanced character proceeds to spawn a revolution.

This isn't the subversion the author seems to think it is.

People spoke so highly of the series that I thought he must have a double-subversion at the end of the original trilogy(all that was out at the time), so I kept reading, but it never came. He apparently thought his message had been properly delivered. But I walked away from it with a reinforcement, rather than a subversion, of the status quo: if Reds were truly equals, then why did they need to be altered to achieve their goals?

I've also seen a written-out version like this before. I wouldn't swear that the gun referenced is the same, but I remember some of the jokes(the sporting exemption, anti-kaiju rifle, you hope they hear you, erasing the burglar from existence). I don't think this is the first time this has been posted.

And while people in general did a decent job holding off spoiling major details... that's only going to last a month at most.

It was easier back in 2003. We didn't have algorithm-fed feeds, so your online socialization was typically in the form of either forums or chat rooms. If you hadn't read it yet, you'd stay out of the Potter chat rooms(or inside ones that were designated spoiler free). Forums were easier to navigate, because thread titles could differentiate between spoiler spaces or non-spoiler spaces. As for IRL(the office, friend groups, etc), if it hadn't been translated into your language, there wasn't going to be a lot of chatter about it.

It's not like today where, if you don't watch/read/play very quickly, you'll be minding your own business on youtube when suddenly a spoiler pops up in your recommended videos.

Not quite. Consider the scenario where three guests were present. I believe it was a rule that was edited out of the episode. This is fairly common in reality TV shows, where the contestants get a full rulebook and it's not all repeated on the broadcast.