• 4 Posts
  • 152 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • stealing * information* Nobody was harmed; nobody was deprived of life, limb, security, or physical property or currency. Knowledge was transferred without authorization, meaning that only the potential reduction of future profits for a corporation is at stake. It’s a breach of contract - about the least impactful thing that a human can do to non-human. This kind of crime should never result in prison, or else it should be applied to every knowledge worker, ceo, or vc who remembers any part of any business they’ve every been involved with in the past (which it never is).







  • Lots of advice here, some of it good, some of it questionable.

    Two things I’ll amplify from other comments: there’s a reason your therapist missed. It’s could be anything from messing up in their calendar app to a pet or a family member being injured it passing unexpectedly. This falls into the “shit happens” category. You’re allowed to be angry, upset, disappointed, or any combination - your time was wasted. There are generally two outcomes - 1) the miss was unintentional or unavoidable or 2) the therapist is unreliable. Until you find out that it’s case 2, recognize that a couple of wasted hours - in the course of your life- is small potatoes (perspective).

    Another is the concept of “agency”. There are things you can affect in your life, in your relationships, and in the world. There are things you cannot. Nobody can force you to allow yourself to ignore the latter. They will always get under your skin. However, if you find yourself dwelling on those items, try and take a step back and identify things in your life you control or which you can alter/adjust. Finding those areas where you have agency allows you to impart your will, to be a positive force in your life trajectory.

    I won’t even begin to tell you this is easy. It is a process and a way of interacting. Here’s an example - recognize your disappointment with your therapist but take the initiative to reschedule. Taking it a step further, the day before your next meeting, confirm the appointment. It can be a text or email - simple, low contact. If you don’t get a response, escalate near the end if the work day (or first thing the morning of the appointment) with a call. These are things you can do to manage your therapist and your collective schedules. Most professionals (I am one fwiw) will not be offended in the least with good (but not excessive) communication. If they are, or if the therapist still flakes out on you - well, we’re back to case (2) above and you’re on the troublesome path of finding a new / another therapist. BUT - you’ve done all you can in your power to make this a success. Recognize your initiative as a positive, personal attribute you will continue to leverage in your life.

    I wish you the best!


  • This is the internet so take this with a grain of salt. I work in a life safety field and the last 50 years of research has been to shift the evaluation of safety from an arbitrary value for safety to a statistical basis - all in the name of efficiency (cost, material, environmental - pick you’re cause, they all have a voice). There is generally no perfectly safe condition, only a poly at which the number of standard deviations from the norm makes failure so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. We have classes of prevention and imposed conditions and there are under the intersection of (failure in prevention)x(exceptional imposed danger) are dead people, or at least loss of property.

    Shifting the freezer set point is moving the prevention curve. The number may be small, but it’s still finite. The question the actuaries will ask is if the economic value of 19MT is worth an increase in probability for the sickness or death of X people. I’m merely arguing that the value, to me personally, is not sufficient.


  • You know what’s funny - before I clicked through to see the context, I thought you were replying to a comment I made about the Houthis attacking it ships in the Middle East. We get attacked by terrorists all the time. Lots of people around the world hate Americans because, like most of the colonial powers, we’ve been reading assholes to lot of people. They also hate us because the rules of life that were made up in the name of our imaginary deity conflicts with the version of rules that they made up in the name of their imaginary deity. And we hate them back.

    People are kidnapped and/or killed on a regular basis by “terrorists”. That’s a tragedy to everyone who hold them close. The lack of perspective is thinking that one particular tragedy is somehow larger because of the news coverage afforded.




  • This was my thought a well. Just using the internet at all guarantees that we’re supporting Amazon, Google, and Microsoft because they host most of the content.

    This conundrum points back to our need to have agency, and something OP will/should address. One way to lower anxiety is to understand where we have personal agency and where we don’t. No matter how hard or how long I beat on a brick wall with my bare hands I will not damage it, only tire and damage myself. This isn’t limited to man made/capitalism. I also cannot swim across an ocean. Recognizing when I can make a difference and accepting my personal limits allows me to focus my goals around things where I will succeed or produce results. They may be (globally) small, but they affect me and my community in a meaningful way. I might even use that brick wall to provide a brace for leverage or the water in the ocean for salt or brackish irrigation. Expending energy that I know will not affect change only lets them beat me twice.