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[zompist]

I think the circumference/diameter ratio has always had the same value, no matter what humans thought it was. I also think it's either true or false that Napoleon reached Moscow, and that dinosaurs existed. I think if p and q are true, then "p or q" is true. I don't think any of these beliefs merit being called "transcendent", which seems to be a swear word in your dialect.

sure, i believe all of those too, and none of those is transcendent. "there exist immaterial real objects that exist outside space and time" is pretty transcendent though. which is why i ask: ultimately, are maths true on account of real numbers existing out there somewhere? and if not, what are we even arguing about here?

I dunno, why do you keep ignoring the things I actually say? " Pi isn't a physical object, nor a god; it doesn't live in Mathland eating smaller irrational numbers", "I'm not a Platonist", etc.

I don't think the laws of logic are true because of something in physics, but I expect we'd agree that it's nice that the universe can be modeled so well with math and logic.

fair enough, but final detail: there's a substantial difference between not reifying science and denying it.

"Reifying science" is a pretty hilarious formation for "taking seriously what physicists say." You should share that with the creationists.

i'm not saying qm is false, i'm saying it doesn't entail mathematical realism.

Nor did I, but I do say it makes your map/territory distinction harder to maintain. At quantum scales the "territory" pretty much disappears, or at best gets spotty. But as bradrn says, when we do get an experimental and a theoretical stab at the same thing, they're remarkably close.

there's almost certainly going to be post-quantum physics at some point. then again. because of what bradrn correctly points out about scales, however, it'll possibly be even *more* weird, not less... hopefully it will be less weird though: an unfortunate side effect of the weirdness of QM is that people use claim it as evidence for all kinds of stuff.

Sure, but an unfortunate side effect of 1870s physics, or the physics of everyday tangible objects, is the same.

[zompist]

I've always loved the culture tests on the Zompist main page. I think i've read them more than anything else on the site. I've been considering making an "improved" one for my generation (since i actually am a millennial), or at least one for some subculture i am a part of. I'd definitely like the archive them.

Been considering making my own little webpage like Zomp does, but man i am too tired to code. I'll see what i can do. One day.

I like the culture tests too, of course. I still recommend doing them for concultures, it helps bring them to life.

Sadly the old web was discoverable in a way the new one is not. I used to get several mails a week about my pages; now, not so much. That's why the culture tests stopped coming.

[Torco]

I dunno, why do you keep ignoring the things I actually say? " Pi isn't a physical object, nor a god; it doesn't live in Mathland eating smaller irrational numbers", "I'm not a Platonist", etc.

I don't think the laws of logic are true because of something in physics, but I expect we'd agree that it's nice that the universe can be modeled so well with math and logic.

that's why i'm confused. if you're not a platonist, then what are numbers, other than features of a tradition of human praxis? is there a middle ground i'm missing?

also, yeah, it is nice that math works, agreed.

Nor did I, but I do say it makes your map/territory distinction harder to maintain. At quantum scales the "territory" pretty much disappears, or at best gets spotty. But as bradrn says, when we do get an experimental and a theoretical stab at the same thing, they're remarkably close.

sure, qm is a great theory. it still is the case that it's a theory, and theories are maps. we generally find out where and how the territory differs from the map when we have multiple theoretical or observational frameworks that work well enough from which to look at things, right? like we can look at mice through one theoretical framework where they're either pregnant or not, but then we use a different framework and we can see the gray areas. this hasn't happened with qm yet, other than the discrepancies between gr and qm which suggests we could come up with some different theory that reconciles them. this doesn't make the map-territory distinction false. we haven't found the a theory to come after qm, but that doesn't make qm the territory itself.

[Raphael]

I've always loved the culture tests on the Zompist main page. I think i've read them more than anything else on the site. I've been considering making an "improved" one for my generation (since i actually am a millennial), or at least one for some subculture i am a part of. I'd definitely like the archive them.

Been considering making my own little webpage like Zomp does, but man i am too tired to code. I'll see what i can do. One day.

Millennial? Odd; I would have guessed you were younger.

I agree that the culture tests are great, though I guess they're all a bit outdated by now.

[zompist]

that's why i'm confused. if you're not a platonist, then what are numbers, other than features of a tradition of human praxis? is there a middle ground i'm missing?

Yeah, I think so. Just to start with, "features of anyone's praxis." I don't think that's enough, but it'd be a start.

we haven't found the a theory to come after qm, but that doesn't make qm the territory itself.

When we have this magical new theory we can revisit the ontology. Till then QM is what we have. Again, you don't seem to realize that there are proofs against there being hidden variables-- proofs that can and have been tested by experiment. You can hope all you want that QM is wrong, but that doesn't make it so.

[Raphael]

I can't speak for zompist, but I'd say mathematical phenomena, like numbers, are kind of a property of the universe.

[bradrn]

we haven't found the a theory to come after qm, but that doesn't make qm the territory itself.

When we have this magical new theory we can revisit the ontology. Till then QM is what we have. Again, you don't seem to realize that there are proofs against there being hidden variables-- proofs that can and have been tested by experiment. You can hope all you want that QM is wrong, but that doesn't make it so.

I think part of the difficulty in scientific epistemology is that the ‘territory’ or reality, such as it may be, is inherently unknowable. It’s possible to disprove things about it (e.g. that it has any local hidden variables determined within the past 7.8 billion years, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403), but never to prove anything positively. The ‘map‘ or model is therefore all we have. At this point our two best ‘maps’ are quantum mechanics and general relativity.

[zompist]

I think part of the difficulty in scientific epistemology is that the ‘territory’ or reality, such as it may be, is inherently unknowable. It’s possible to disprove things about it (e.g. that it has any local hidden variables determined within the past 7.8 billion years, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403), but never to prove anything positively. The ‘map‘ or model is therefore all we have. At this point our two best ‘maps’ are quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Yes, well put. At human scales we can feel like we see and touch "reality" directly... but we miss more than we think. (E.g. we can't perceive the radio waves surrounding us, the radiation, the ultraviolet light, the neutrinos, whatever the fuck dark matter is....)

It's kind of ironic... the ancient philosophers had to spend a lot of pages telling readers that their senses could be fooled. They didn't realize that it was a bigger story what senses we are missing.

[Starbeam]

I've always loved the culture tests on the Zompist main page. I think i've read them more than anything else on the site. I've been considering making an "improved" one for my generation (since i actually am a millennial), or at least one for some subculture i am a part of. I'd definitely like the archive them.

Been considering making my own little webpage like Zomp does, but man i am too tired to code. I'll see what i can do. One day.

Millennial? Odd; I would have guessed you were younger.

I agree that the culture tests are great, though I guess they're all a bit outdated by now.

Technically, i'm a cuspie (1997), but i get that a lot. I'd love it if the other ones were updated too (and put on a more eye-friendly background), but i respect having a time capsule for the early 00s.

In any case, i appreciate the positive encouragement . I'll let you see what I make when i'm done.

[Starbeam]

Alright, here's my first draft. I plan on re-organizing these under different headers, since i realize the original collections were kind of haphazard. Regadless, i think it's a good base. I grayed out anything that's intact from the original.

More: show

If you're American...

• You believe deep down in the First Amendment, guaranteed by the government or perhaps God.
• You know Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Stephen Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Lara Croft, The Sims, GladOS, Reading Rainbow. Plus Survivor, Walter White, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Key and Peele, Gordon Ramsay, Oprah Winfrey, and some internet celebrities.
• You know how baseball, basketball, (American) football, hockey, and soccer are played. There's a great chance you do not follow the pro leagues for the last two, tho. Sports are male-dominated, and the leagues are gender-segregated. You're more likely to watch college men's teams than any women's teams, even if you're not a man.
• Hardly any of your travelling requires a passport. You think you get enough diversity in your own country. You laugh at foreign tourists expecting to see the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty in the same day.
• You count yourself fortunate if you get a month of paid vacation a year. Nothing is guaranteed nationwide.

If you died tonight

• You're fairly likely to believe in God, but also more likely to be irreligious or atheist than your elders.
• You think of McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, etc. as cheap, quick, but unhealthy food.
• You own a computer and a cellphone, which may also be a computer. You have an email. Only businesses still use landline phones. Every PC has a rudimentary microphone and camera.
• You never kill your own food, you eat at a table sitting on chairs, and you're not allowed to eat some of your food with just your hands.
• Your place is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer.
• You don't consider insects, dogs, cats, monkeys, or guinea pigs to be food.
• A bathroom might not have a bath in it, but it definitely has a toilet and a sink. All of your toiletries are stored in the same room. Showers are slightly more common than baths, and you don't take both. You have never seen a bidet in person.
• Most communication services, utilities, and transportation methods are privately run. There are a scant few local public options, but you can't possibly imagine them being predominant.
• You expect whatever new gizmo you get to work, even if you have to replace it every few years. Fixing things around the house is a matter of calling a repair person, or perhaps a superintendent.
• You're online and aware of netiquette. You're used to using the internet in many different ways and cannot imagine a world completely bereft of it.
• You may know older people unfamiliar with the internet, but have never heard of growing up without a phone or radio. You get annoyed at elders asking you for tech support, but older technology (like rotary phones and floppy discs) is just as likely to throw you for a loop.
• You're familiar with all the area codes local to your part of the country and can pinpoint somebody's hometown using only their phone number.
• The train system isn't very good. AMTRAK goes no faster than cars. You're better of taking a plane. Public transit networks with trains and buses dot many cities, but these are not usually extensive and mainly used by people who can't afford a car.
• You find a two-party system natural. Chances are you think of the other party as "evil" and yours as "good". Regardless of your political leanings, you have no idea what it would be like to live under any different system of government and think of your country as exceptionally priviliged and free.
• You may or may not defend socialism and even communism, but not hearing them supported by the existing political class prevents everyone from doing so publically. You can't properly distinguish between socialism, communism, and Marxism.
• Labor Day is in the fall; you get time off and your city has parades and fairs for the occasion. "May Day" is what cartoon characters say when their plane is crashing.
• The main races you perceive are White, Black, Native, Latino, and Asian (mainly East Asian). Asian and Latin people are stereotyped as strange foreigners; Latino, Black, and Native people generally are more blue-collar segments of society. Mixed race people are perceived differently depending on what they look like and where they're hanging out.
• You consider Latino, Iberian, Muslim, and perhaps Jewish "white" people to be separate races from their Anglo/ Christian counterparts. At the same time, you might screw up seeing the differences between white Greeks and white Belgians or black Caribbeans and black Americans.
• You're unlikely to know any Indigenous people or cultural differences between any tribes. You cannot name which ones were displaced from your hometown, nor their history more broadly. Because of your (very likely) non-Native background, you don't have a problem talking about your ancestry or even identifying by it.
• You think most problems would be solved if people put aside their prejudices and worked together.
• You'd respect somebody who spoke French, German, or Japanese, but you can't speak any of them well enough to communicate with a monolingual foreigner. Spanish is something you halfheartedly tried to learn, but generally just dismiss. You take the predominance of English in your country and the planet for granted.
• School is free until high school. Colleges and university aren't unless you get scholarships and grants. It seems like any decent job requires you to complete both. 'College' and 'university' mean roughly the same thing, and you prefer saying the former word.

Everyone knows that

• Many restaurants, particularly chains, have cheaper menus for kids with American basics like hamburgers and fried chicken. If it's a sit-down place, they also give a few crayons and mats to color on.
• You measure temperature in Fahrenheit, measure weight in pounds, measure speed in miles per hour, record time with a 12-hour clock, print paper on 8.5/11 sheets, the decimal point is a dot, large numbers are separated by a comma, Sunday is the first day of the week, Christmas is on the 25th, and the day comes second in a date: 9/11/2001 (and you know what happened on that day).
• You can't convert any of the above imperial units to the metric system without a calculator or the internet. You consider your units more sensical anyway.
• A billion is thousand times a million. You have never heard of it being a million times a million.
• You expect marriages to be made for love and never arranged by third parties. Most marriages happen in a church but merely getting approved by a judge is also an option. You get only one spouse at a time, mostly because it's the law.
• Couples spend money on expensive clothes and food used only at the wedding, go on a honeymoon by themselves on a following day, and remember their wedding date for the rest of the marriage. Proposals typically require a man get a diamond ring in a small box and ask their partner on their knees.
• At the same time, don't have issues with sex outside marriage and take no fault divorce for granted. Your generation is less likely to marry to begin with.
• You're more likely to be queer-friendly than your elder counterparts. You try not to think hard about them unless you're a queer yourself.
• Sex and nudity are more scandalous to you than violence. You'd feel more comfortable watching Saw in public than an ad where a woman is topless.
• Once you're introduced to somebody, you call them by their given name (which is their first name). Honorifics are only necessary for addressing the president and other lofty figures.
• Nobody goes to the beach topless, even tho it's legal to be top-free in entire states.
• You seriously expect to conduct business or deal with the government without using bribes. News reports of corruption are a problem in that single city, with that single person.
• It would be scandalous for a politician to be a cheater or an addict, but it wouldn't stop you from voting for them. Sexual abuse and embezzlement, however, you have little patience for.
• You watch very few foreign films, and the ones you might see are subbed rather than dubbed. Dubbing is for cartoons.
• You don't see much foreign media in general, especially if the work wasn't originally made in English. The big exceptions are "classics" you were forced to read in school, and anime/ video games some geeky people pushed into the mainstream. You expect those big crossover foreign directors to come over to Hollywood eventually.
• Cartoons aren't given as much respect as live action media. Except for maybe some anime, they are virtually always kid's shows and comedies. TV in general has a more lowbrow reputation than the movies.
• Every store will take your credit card. They might even let you use the version on your phone.
• A business can fire anybody it wants and not hire anybody it wants. They just can't (openly) discriminate. Unless you reach a certain level of stature in the company, you do not get severance pay.

Contributions to world civilization

• You've seen Spider-Man, Titanic, Avatar, Toy Story, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and perhaps some of the older generation's favorites. It never occurs to you just how much influence Hollywood has on world cinema.
• You've listened to Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Jay Z, Eminem, Kanye West. In fact, you've definitely listened to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson, Simon & Garfunkel, and Linda Ronstadt too.
• You count on excellent, yet expensive and convoluted medical treatment. You wish it wasn't like this. There are no truly free options, but every job is forced to provide health, dental, and vision insurance. You expect strong measures to be taken for very ill babies and people in their eighties. You think dying at 65 would be a tragedy.
• Retirement is at 65, using a 401k from one's career, any personal funds or savings accounts, and sheer luck.
• You went over American history, some local history, some European history, and a few stories of Great Civilizations of Eurasia. The rest of the world is pretty neglected. You were taught American interventions since the Cold War were for the world's own good.
• You expect the military fight wars, not get involved in politics. You are not a soldier and don't need to fear being conscripted for service.
• You are also not a farmer.
• Comics consist of short strips on the internet (who reads newspapers?!), or short magazines about superheros. You only know of manga from maybe their anime adaptions. Anything else is in the realm of hipsters and nerds.
• Guests on talk shows are entertainers, athletes, politicians, or rather strange individuals. Not, say authors or academics. But with the decline of linear TV, you're not likely to see them anyway.
• You think of Canada as a pleasant, peaceful, but rather dull country. You cannot explain why Canadians didn't join the other British American colonies in rebelling against King George.
• You think of Mexico as a rough, colorful, and crowded place. Unless you're Latino yourself, you may be ignorant of the differences between Mexico and other parts of Latin America or even Mexico and Spain.
• Western Europeans are cultured, but delicate individuals who live in easier countries than yours.They are obsessed with soccer and Eurovision, and drink a little much for your liking.
• You don't consider Alaska, Hawai'i, or "the territories" foreign countries, but may accidentally refer to them as such if you go there on vacation. You rarely interact with people in them otherwise.
• The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.
• You get miffed when foreigners don't know the difference between your states or other niche parts of your country; after all, they get so much American media already.
• You think of the Volkswagen Beetle as a small car, but it used to be even smaller.
• If somebody is fatter than average, it doesn't improve their looks.
• The nationality people make the most jokes about are the Italians.
• As a rule, suburbs are filled with a less wealthier, less diverse crowd than city centers. However, cities are much less dangerous than they've used to be, and the historic downtown is never one of the rough neighborhoods.

Outside the Beltway

• You have never not lived in a time where people complained about the economy.
• You can't name any governmental figures besides the president, vice president, and your governor. If you live in a big city, you also know your mayor.
• The normal thing when a couple dies is for their estate to be split between their children.
• You think of opera and ballet as rather elite entertainments. It's likely you don't see many plays, either.
• Christmas is in the winter. Unless you're devout in a non-Christian way, you celebrate the time off, put ornaments on a pine tree inside your home and give presents to your family. You don't consider Halloween and Valentine's Day to be Christian at all.
• There's a few other notable holidays, but the ones you really care about are the ones that give you time off.
• You may think churches are too powerful and/or the state is; but you are not used to a state church and don't think it would be a good idea.
• You don't know which foreign cities are the capital of their country, and are even less likely to know any world leaders besides your own. You probably think Toronto is the capital of Canada.
• You have voicemail, call waiting, caller ID, hold, texting, and conference calls on the average phone. You can use all of it flawlessly, and don't remember a time when some of these features required a new device.
• Nobody uses traditional taxis anymore, their business has been overtaken by rideshares. Most of them are driven by immigrants who follow a GPS to the letter.
• You are distrustful of welfare and unemployment payments; you think people should earn a living and not take handouts. But you would not be in favor of eliminating Social Security and Medicare. You don't like freeloaders any more than your parents, yet you are in favor of more federal support programs.
• There sure are a lot of accountants.

Space and time

• You have known how to play video games your entire life.
• If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're ten minutes late, and apologize profusely if you're fifteen minutes late. An hour late is almost inexcusable.
• During an appointment or interview, you expect to have that person to yourself and that it won't take more than an hour or so.
• If you're talking to somebody, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than two feet. Especially if you don't know them.
• You don't haggle for anything, unless it's not sold by a professional merchant.
• Only your family and (other) authorities get to show up to your place unannounced. That said, it's not a big deal to suddenly make arrangements.
• You very likely to be on social media. Even if you aren't, you have opinions on all the big name websites.
• It's easy to find Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Korean, Thai, Jamaican, and barbecue restaurants near you. You'll need to do more searching to find authenticity and/or quality, but it's a genuine scandal whenever a local joint turns out to be unsanitary.
• "Hours" and "minutes" are also units of distance based on how long it takes to drive somewhere.

I definitely left off a few things i either didn't understand (what does it mean one cares about "what family somebody comes from"?) or consider irrelevant ("When you negotiate, you are polite, of course, but it's only good business to 'play hardball'...). Feel free to give me your opinions.

[Raphael]

I definitely left off a few things i either didn't understand (what does it mean one cares about "what family somebody comes from"?)

That's a good example of how people in a culture might be so used to something that they can't really imagine how doing things differently might be like.

There are cultures that traditionally were, or perhaps even partly still are, ruled by old-school aristocracies. Not a billionaire class, where some people in it are the first or second generation in their family who are rich, but a landowning aristocracy that places a lot of value on being born into it. In a culture like that, people do pay a lot of attention to who was or wasn't born into an aristocratic family. And the aristocrats themselves, because of their own internal traditional feuds and fine gradations of rank, might care a lot about which aristocratic family someone was born into, too.

There are cultures where this stuff matters not just for whether you are ruling or ruled over, but also for your specific position among the ruled over. Like the traditional Indian caste system or the guild system of medieval and early modern Europe, where craftsmen generally worked in which their fathers had worked before them.

And there are cultures where extended family networks - not just your parents and siblings, but your third cousins twice removed, too - play an important role in people's lives. One modern American example might be the Mob's crime families.

[Starbeam]

There are cultures that traditionally were, or perhaps even partly still are, ruled by old-school aristocracies. Not a billionaire class, where some people in it are the first or second generation in their family who are rich, but a landowning aristocracy that places a lot of value on being born into it. In a culture like that, people do pay a lot of attention to who was or wasn't born into an aristocratic family. And the aristocrats themselves, because of their own internal traditional feuds and fine gradations of rank, might care a lot about which aristocratic family someone was born into, too.

There are cultures where this stuff matters not just for whether you are ruling or ruled over, but also for your specific position among the ruled over. Like the traditional Indian caste system or the guild system of medieval and early modern Europe, where craftsmen generally worked in which their fathers had worked before them.

And there are cultures where extended family networks - not just your parents and siblings, but your third cousins twice removed, too - play an important role in people's lives. One modern American example might be the Mob's crime families.

Thanks for the explanation. The original comment seemed quite vague to me. The United States has its share of classism, but there's no sense of "nouveau riche". No occupation castes, no Major Families, nothing like that. Not with a history this young and foundation this individualist. If a family name means anything, it's because they're celebrities of a sort. To me, this seems esoteric and unthinkable. It might mean something in India or Korea, but I wonder where else it would matter at all. It would be interesting to know more about.

The answers on other tests "you don't care what family someone comes from...but you secretly wish they were as much like yours as possible" still kinda baffle me. Not as much anymore tho.

How did you think of the rest of the culture test?

[bradrn]

To me, this seems esoteric and unthinkable. It might mean something in India or Korea, but I wonder where else it would matter at all. It would be interesting to know more about.

The British aristocracy still exists, for one.

[Starbeam]

I'm aware of their peerage, but does the average person think about it?

[bradrn]

I'm aware of their peerage, but does the average person think about it?

I doubt that ‘the average person’ even meets a member of the peerage very often. But I’ll let the actual Brits here respond.

[zompist]

Alright, here's my first draft. I plan on re-organizing these under different headers, since i realize the original collections were kind of haphazard. Regadless, i think it's a good base. I grayed out anything that's intact from the original.

Good work, though I think it needs some editing. E-mail me if you want more detailed notes.

As a general note, I think you should be either clearer about what subset of people you're talking about (Millennials?), or a little more careful about universality. The idea is to avoid things that are only true of half the population. In a few places it feels like you're assuming the reader is young, urban, and white.

I definitely left off a few things i either didn't understand (what does it mean one cares about "what family somebody comes from"?) or consider irrelevant ("When you negotiate, you are polite, of course, but it's only good business to 'play hardball'...). Feel free to give me your opinions.

These things are of course intended to contrast with other nations, or earlier times.

Raphael has already explained the bit about family. The easiest reference I can think of is the hobbit chapters of LOTR: look at how Tolkien writes about the Tooks or the Sackville-Bagginses. It doesn't come naturally to Americans, that's the point.

On negotiation, the contrast is with places like Japan, where you really don't play hardball— Japan is more consensus-based than the US and asking for things directly is often discouraged— and with Middle Eastern culture, where a certain level of florid insults may be a normal part of negotiations.

[Starbeam]

Alright, here's my first draft. I plan on re-organizing these under different headers, since i realize the original collections were kind of haphazard. Regadless, i think it's a good base. I grayed out anything that's intact from the original.

Good work, though I think it needs some editing. E-mail me if you want more detailed notes.

Sure thing, what's your email? Would DMs here work as well?

As a general note, I think you should be either clearer about what subset of people you're talking about (Millennials?), or a little more careful about universality. The idea is to avoid things that are only true of half the population. In a few places it feels like you're assuming the reader is young, urban, and white.

I should have mentioned this was for (the average) millennial American. I had assumed it was clear from context, my apologies. The "universal American" stuff I grayed out, the list is meant to target a majority rather than factor in each nuance or assume a uniform population. For example, rural people are a somewhat small segment of the American population, so the list is urban. And by "urban", i don't mean in a metropolitan center, but living in an urban environment. But i don't want to write for pluralities, so i really apologize when i did.

Raphael has already explained the bit about family. The easiest reference I can think of is the hobbit chapters of LOTR: look at how Tolkien writes about the Tooks or the Sackville-Bagginses. It doesn't come naturally to Americans, that's the point.

No worries, I didn't mean to dismiss their inclusion entirely. I haven't read LOTR yet.

On negotiation, the contrast is with places like Japan, where you really don't play hardball— Japan is more consensus-based than the US and asking for things directly is often discouraged— and with Middle Eastern culture, where a certain level of florid insults may be a normal part of negotiations.

The thing is, when does this come up in society? I have never had to negotiate professionally and nobody I know has. It might be a generational or perhaps occupational gap. Keep in mind, i never graduated college and have lived my entire life in service work. Considering that gap, i wonder how often white collar workers negotiate.

[zompist]

Alright, here's my first draft. I plan on re-organizing these under different headers, since i realize the original collections were kind of haphazard. Regadless, i think it's a good base. I grayed out anything that's intact from the original.

Good work, though I think it needs some editing. E-mail me if you want more detailed notes.

Sure thing, what's your email? Would DMs here work as well?

Please no. My e-mail is in my profile here.

The thing is, when does this come up in society? I have never had to negotiate professionally and nobody I know has. It might be a generational or perhaps occupational gap. Keep in mind, i never graduated college and have lived my entire life in service work. Considering that gap, i wonder how often white collar workers negotiate.

Examples might be buying a car, asking for a raise, buying a house, condo association meetings, union negotiations— and surely you've seen meetings on TV? But fair enough, it might not be a common part of most people's lives.

[Starbeam]

Please no. My e-mail is in my profile here.

No worries! But clicking on your profile only gives me your website, Twitter, and DM links. I can't find your email in there.

edit: Zomp dm'd me his email.

Examples might be buying a car, asking for a raise, buying a house, condo association meetings, union negotiations— and surely you've seen meetings on TV? But fair enough, it might not be a common part of most people's lives.

Okay, now i'm starting to understand. But as you said, it's just not a part of my life and a gap in my experiences.

[malloc]

Based on everything I am hearing, the prospects of China invading Taiwan are getting higher everyday. They really want the island and the US has lost much credibility in deterring them given the Iran war. Since my workplace is owned by a Taiwanese company, an invasion would undoubtedly force it to shutter and leave me unemployed. Much as it clashes with my love of routine, I must seriously consider looking for another job. Waiting until the factory closes to start my job search would force me to survive months without any money until I manage to find new employment.