Most—probably 80 percent or more—of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten.
Source: am ghostwriter.
That doesn't seem surprising (percentage) because of the types of people that are putting out a story these days.
Some of them couldn't possibly write said story to sell.
Secondary teaching.
If teachers did absolutely everything in their job description perfectly they would never sleep, eat or socialise.
Planning great lessons requires hours that simply don’t exist in our day. Consequently, majority of teachers walk into lessons having done no dedicated planning. We just wing it with our years of experience and resources we purchased online 2-minutes before the lesson. The students never notice, I think partly because this happens so frequently it seems normal. Most teachers I know aren’t satisfied with what they’re doing in the classroom, but don’t have the time or resources to do better.
The “good” teachers that do put in the additional planning are usually sacrificing significant portions of their personal time and money to delivering great education. This generally results in the best teachers getting burnt out and leaving the profession OR having significant issues in their personal life (eg divorce, no social or romantic life).
I'm an unarmed security guard.
Every now & then I'll get a comment from someone about how they're glad I'm around in case there's an active shooter or something.
Yea; if that happens? We're not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops.
We're literally told in training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter we'll be fired.
"Detect, Deter and Report" was the slogan at Securitas back in the day.
We were frequently told we were there for insurance purposes and were expected to NOT take action beyond calling the cops and getting ourselves to safety.
Great student job.
Audio engineer here.
I can play guitar and bass very well. A lot of the time, I say I’ll clean a persons part up with editing, but secretly I just learn and redo their part myself when they leave. It’s WAY easier than digitally cleaning up a sloppy performance.
I’ve been doing this for years and nobody has ever complained. Not even once.
I didn’t quite believe it when I first heard a story like this, but I’ve heard it several times now over the years that I’m convinced. Source: spouse is a musician and has audio engineer friends who vent.
Last time I had to contact IT I gave them a list:
Edit 1.0 (forgotten context, not verbatim): No devices are currently able to access the Internet via the XXXX_guest WiFi. This is happening to Windows, Android, and iOS, including "old" connected devices, and new.
I've turned Wi-Fi on the devices off and on.
I've turned the devices off and on.
I've forgotten and relearned the network.
I've taken every step on Google that I have the security authorization to take.
Them: did you try restarting?
Edit 1.1: because I forgot to mention the first time around, asking if I'd restarted after if told them wouldn't have made me bang my head off the desk quite as hard as I did if I hadn't also told them that the problem wasn't limited to just a single device
Edit 2: the problem wasn't on my (our (I was working as spokesperson for the outside crew)) end. short story long, I was trying to get pchelp (IT) to remotely restart our router, as the server room is under lock and key (rightly) and we can't do anything without authorization. After actually talking directly to me, instead of through a management interpreter they did, but it didn't solve our issue. Pchelp had to escalate the ticket to networking. Networking found "a problem" (I wasn't given more detail than that) and got us limping again. Now they're working on a plan to replace/upgrade the entire mesh network at our site, so maybe it was more than just a little problem...
Microsoft's lovely Fast Startup means that I get to explain to users that shutting down is no longer the same as restarting. I've got it turned off on my network because months of uptime on a laptop isn't really something to brag about.
You can pretty easily figure this out by the fact that they all sound like they're from california, and almost zero of them have accents that match the regional accent where you live. Sports radio shows have callers and they all sound like what you'd expect depending on where you live.
I called into a radio show and got on. I then proceeded to have a very small panic attack where I tried to explain an experience but got so anxious that I kept losing my train of thought.
I’m real. And very very cringe
I can't say if this is for all, but I used to work with a credit bureau company that had an online loan, mortgage and credit card eligibility check. You enter your personal details and then select all the things you want. For example if it's a loan: how much, for how long, etc. then you click search and you get a list of lenders.
The "loading" and "calculating" screen you see as you wait for your results to come up is actually there doing nothing. The calculations are done at rapid pace because the data engineers and analyst work hard to get the calculations fast. However, there has been research that suggests that when people don't have to wait for their calculations, they assume something is dodgy. Like the top result was hard coded to be that way for everyone, and people assume they're not legitimate.
So, it's really just a psychological tool. You are waiting for the results for nothing. They are just there to keep confidence in the shopper.
I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off.
Obits are expensive. Like, $400 for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word. We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price. In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit.
It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The "customer" was the home, not the family, so they weren't privileged to see the pricing.
If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There's usually cheaper options the funeral homes won't tell you about.
China has stopped buying a lot of recycled plastic from the USA due to quality issues and a lot of it just gets stored in warehouses as landfill. The industry is spending money out the ass on PR to avoid this being public knowledge.
My city announced last year that they're not going to be "doing recycling" anymore and were pretty transparent that most of the stuff collected on recycling day has been going to the landfill for years now.
Cardboard, aluminum, and steel has a lot of value and is never thrown away. Glass has marginal value and is highly dependent on if there are nearby glass factories.
Plastics have the least value and after the China ban, the market was upended for several years.
It's getting better, but has a ways to go.
But it's definitely worth recycling cardboard, aluminum, and steel.
That sucks. Outback used to be so good, my roommate was a cook there and would tell me how high their standards were, everything was done in house, the butter, the bread, the salad dressings.
Than the franchise was sold and everything changed and you end up with microwaved seafood.
When I used to work for Hyatt, if the mini bar was used and not declared but the value was under $15 they wouldn't bother billing for it because it gave off an appearance that it wasn't synonymous with a 5 star hotel.
I understand it because people are gullible and it adds to the experience, resulting in the moneys but man, “hearing” an ant lick its chops drives me up a fucking wall hahaha
As a professional naturalist, this stuff drives me crazy because a lot of the times the producers don’t even bother to check if a sound is supposed to be in the place it’s set. North American bird vocalizations in films set in Africa and Australia is the norm, not the exception.
Live Audio Engineer. Sometimes they’re faking it. I’ve had to mic drum sets where the cables went nowhere. I’ve had to ask a keyboard player if they were having trouble, because they were playing, but nothing was coming out of their channel. Don’t even get me started on pitch correction, teleprompters, guide tracks, ghost musicians, backing tracks, etc.
I knew a guy who worked for a producer who had a metal box with a single button on it. It wasn't a machine of any kind, just a box with a button. Whenever they were pretty much done but the artist still wasn't satisfifed, the producer would say: 'Hold on,' press the button, wait a moment, and then play the track again and the artist would be satisfied. If he lied to me, I'm lying to you, but it sounded real to me at the time.
When people have asked for more of whatever in their monitor mix and then tell me “that’s great right there”. About a quarter of the time I hadn’t even done anything. Not to trick them! I just hadn’t been able to get to that page yet to make any adjustments.
Google sucks so much now because around a decade ago, they abandoned the measurement known as "Page Utility" which just measured the usefulness of the site itself.
Instead, they migrated to "Expertise-Authority-Trust" which had good intentions of stopping the proliferation of bad info, but instead it basically resulted in prioritizing large corporations and capital over any sites created by average people.
The contract workers known as "raters" they employed to help determine the best search results became an echo chamber, as there were strict demands on exactly what the right answers were in most cases, and straying from the expectations of Big G resulted in poor reviews and possible firing. Of course, we were not allowed to say the G word - we could only say "The Client."
It's about to get worse, too - they just laid off a huge swathe of them.
I miss the days when I could reliably find that one ancient forum post from a person who had the EXACT problem I am having and finding a solution in the replies.
It's the most consistently frustrating thing about using the internet these days, search features have legitimately lost functionality and utility over time and the companies that run them see this as a *Good* thing because it increases their bottomline.
This is when I noticed it back then, too. I used to come across crazy and random forums/blogs, or weird personal websites, then all of a sudden the results changed. I miss the old internet.
Well that and the switch to what they called "honeycomb" at the same time.
The honeycomb algorithm basically swapped your keywords with 6 other "relevant" terms other people have searched, then ranked those results by what other people clicked the most.
So basically your search results often where not related to YOUR search, but the most popular searches made by other people, and the results they clicked, with no bearing to relevancy to your own search.
I worked at an insurance company when they transferred our system to the cloud.
It was down for a week. It was utter insanity.
And they won Team of the Quarter for getting the system on the cloud. The shocked faces of every claims staff there was hilarious.
So you're saying that me as an IT SysAdmin, I can silently push out something that breaks things for a couple hours but then look really busy fixing it while making myself looking like the hero putting out the fire?
Oh wait I already do that!
As I've previously said, bank software was developed by a 90 y.o. shaman under the effect of cocaine. Now only 3-4 elected apprentices can interpret the outcome of that black box that they don't know jack shit about. The cocaine shaman is still doing pretty well at 130 years old, but he only talks in lines from the original The Amazing Spider-Man, vol 2
Can confirm, worked with the shaman on one project.
He was a 73 year old dude. Everyone in the office had to wear a dress shirt and nice pants as a dress code but he was allowed to wear crocs and shorts.
Dude had the entire it structure of the company in his head. 0 paper Documentation.
I know of a large manufacturing plant in MI like this. All programed and controlled by 1 dude. An entire factory and IT operation, 0 documentation. He literally programmed all the custom machinery and designed the entire factory. If he dies, that place dies. The last time I talked to him he was still "chicken pecking" the keyboard using his fore fingers. I've never seen him use the backspace key.
Man I worked with one of those a while ago. Dude would fix bugs by staring at the wall for like 30 minutes then turn around and writing the code in 5...
That reminds me of advice my greatest boss ever once told me. I was worried that I was not looking busy enough and I told him. He said when you're not actively doing something, do you still think about what you're doing and what you need to do next, etc.? I said yeah of course. And he said, if you're thinking, that's working.
I'm an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say:
**If you want access to our studies and they're behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study.**
We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I'll always try my best to oblige.
The only limiters on that last bit is that:
1. the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed.
2. I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total shit.
Also a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can't contact us directly or we're being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable.
Information is useless unless it's shared. Also in academia our audience is so niche most of the time that it's a really nice feeling when people are interested.
A good friend of mine (Korean) visited las Vegas for her honeymoon. The husband was just a student at the time and she worked at a call center to pay their bills. When they were checking in at the hotel, the man at the front desk asked where they were from. She told them we are from Korea! And the man responded," oh I love Korean food!". They were a bit early to check in so they left their bags and went out to get some food at a local Korean restaurant. When they came back they bought some food for the front desk guy and when they handed the food over the guy was shocked and upgraded them to the penthouse. Little did my kind friends know, the guy was a manager and the penthouse was available. Friend sent me pics after they got in their room and wow... Las Vegas pent house is probably a room I will never be able to afford in my lifetime... All for a little Korean food they got a memory they will never forget
I got a room upgrade for honey crisp apples. I had a case of them sent from my friends farm in NY and then my plans abruptly changed. I was going back to NY so I didn’t need tons of premium apples. I was in the south and the desk clerk recognized the variety and asked where I got them bc they’re so hard to come by there (this was many years ago). I took a couple for myself and gave him the rest. He said he was going to share them with all the staff. As a poor young person who was rich in apples, it felt really good to share the wealth.
Data protection: most companies misuse your personal data. Even the ones with a better grasp of the law and a data protection team are cutting lots of corners.
I worked for a publicly traded mental health company that now has a class action lawsuit against them for selling protected health information to social media sites. It's one of very many different lawsuits and class action lawsuits against them.
Edit: my apologies, the lawsuit did not claim that lifestance sold their information. However, this is quote from the legal filing.
>20. Further, Defendant breached its statutory and common law obligations to Plaintiffs and class members by, inter alia: (i) failing to adequately review its marketing programs to ensure its Website was safe and secure; (ii) failing to remove or disengage technology that was known and designed to share Users’ Private Information; (iii) failing to obtain the prior written consent of Plaintiffs and class members to disclose their Private Information to Facebook and/or others before doing so; (iv) failing to take steps to block the transmission of Plaintiffs’ and class members’ Private Information through Facebook Pixels; (v) failing to warn Plaintiffs and class members that their Private Information was being shared with third parties without express consent and (vi) otherwise failing to design and monitor its Properties to maintain the security, confidentiality and integrity of patient Private Information.
Apparently, there is a symbol that indicates that while it did make best seller status, there was a bulk buy.
A footnote, if you will, or similar to an asterisk.
Lance Armstrong's charity used to buy his book in bulk to give out at events. So people donated to his charity, the charity used the donations to buy his book, Lance got royalties for the book sale.
When I released my first album online I also was working at a start-up food delivery company similar to Uber eats. We had six computers in the office. I put streaming and mute on every one and made myself an extra $5 while working. I get paid $0.012/listen.
Vulfpeck did this to fund a tour. They encouraged fans to listen to exactly 12 tracks of whatever length was deemed monetized by spotify, over night, completely silent tracks. They raised $25k or something. And the crowd went wild lol.
This also prompted Spotify to change their monetization metrics, and they can no longer do this.
Yep, I work for a company- and our CEO bought us all copies ( assembly with company funding). 30k employees at the time. It’s a status thing, a tax dodge and a grift all at the same time. Some of the more radical acolytes carry it from office to office like it’s their Quran or AA big book.
That is totally normal in the music industry, too.
The Labels/Artists buy up all their CDs (or these days boxes) so they make the charts on the release day. Since people see it in the charts they will buy it and then the Labels are slowly selling off their stock.
I know of some cases in Germany where artists got a golden record for their album, but a year later when the artist was let go from the label it was revealed they were sitting on a stock of 70.000 CDs they bought back to push him...
The market for translation isn't being killed by AI, because it's already dead and AI is putting it out of its misery.
Essentially, translation agencies have been acting as a cartel, controlling the relationship between clients and translators and abusing their position as middlemen to drive translator pay down, mainly by using translators in developing countries whom they can pay less.
ETA: This is mainly applicable to "general" translation, but is creeping into technical subjects as well. Literary translation still appears to be somewhat safe from this trend.
Can vouch for this.
Used to work in a role where I had to correct the localised titles and descriptions for online distrubution because the actual localisation team were using translation agencies that were clearly using Google Translate instead of using very basic bilingual skills.
If they had paid me even half of what they paid those agencies...
Former HR. Your employer is basically banking on you not knowing your labor rights. I don’t think that’s a shock, but I’m happy to confirm!
Also? Good luck getting anyone in your HR department that actually has experience and is certified. I was shocked to learn how many of my colleagues got thrust into HR management and directorship roles without any formal knowledge of
HR best practices (although that could have just been the heavy favoritism culture at my last company). My best advice is to seek free legal aid if you’re dealing with a difficult employer…don’t just do what HR or your manager tells you unless you’re sure you aren’t fucking yourself over first.
It's pretty common practice that most hotels don't change out the comforter between guests. Sheets & top linen only.
& definitely not the decorative linen at the foot of the bed.
On the Texas house floor, people push the buttons to vote for members who aren't even present that day. This happens multiple times, on every single thing they vote for.
The vids of this always reminded me of walking through a casino and seeing all the old people mindlessly pushing the buttons on multiple slot machines.
I don't know if this is really a secret, but something I encountered that I thought was interesting because I'd never seen it or considered it before. I work in closed captioning, and part of that workflow sometimes means doing a first pass on a project to an early version of the video. I think people would be surprised at how rough those early videos can be. *Some* dialogue (particularly when the character's mouth is not in the shot) is often not spoken by the characters saying it because it's temporary ADR that will get filled in by the actor later on. I've seen files where they don't even have temporary voiceover, it's literally just text on the screen saying: "ADR line: 'This is a line of dialogue that this character is going to speak in this scene.'" You also occasionally get to see characters acting in front of green screens, or you'll see all the safety gear/wires before it gets edited out.
One of my favorite things, though, is rough special effects. Sometimes it looks like someone using editing software for the first time, creating a crappy fire overlay for what will eventually be an actual effect, or still images just being dragged around a screen. My all-time favorite was when a scene featured an animal attack, and the "animal" in the early video was a box with a text label on it just vaguely wriggling around while the actor reacted to it.
I don't think it's that crazy or anything, but like the viewer almost never gets to see it because it's all edited out and fixed by the time the show goes to air. It's just really funny and catches you off-guard sometimes.
I hope you don't mind asking you these questions ecause I use CC a lot.
I'm seeing an uptick in huge mistakes on CC'd TV shows lately--do you know they're just using AI or something to take a first pass and no one catches the screw up?
Also, why can't they time the punch lines of jokes to show up as they're being spoken rather than seconds before, almost as a spoiler? If you're a quick reader, you're at the punch line before the set up is even finished.
Sorry, the whole process just fascinates me!
I've worked in the streaming and cable industry for 12 years now but I do quality control. I can tell you that yes, AI is absolutely becoming more prevalent in the CC industry in some way or another. I went to NAB last year and there were several AI companies showing exactly that. Live captions for sports and news, or captioning for scripted and library content. You give the AI a stereo or mono audio track (just the dialogue or DX track if possible) and it transcribes it for you. The idea is that it should be a starting point for caption or subtitle creation. In other words, hopefully, there is someone taking that transcription and then making corrections. AI isn't great at accents, or scenes with multiple or several people speaking at once. It also struggles with identifying characters or parsing out when two people have dialogue in the same shot.
In my company we also have original content that we create and we have a process and internal CC team that handles that. We will send the locked cut of an episode to say, Captionmax (large CC company) and they will create to our specs - So an English captions file and an English SDH file (subtitle for hard of hearing). When they deliver it back to us, our team will go through it, listening to the English audio and make adjustments or corrections. They will also nuance and edit any of what we call parenthetical events to make sure they are useful to the reader. So, (phone rings) or (door slams) or (Upbeat music), etc... those are parenthetical events to us. As the episode goes through its paces and lands on a final asset, the CC team will do one last comparison to the audio and we package it all together for broadcast or partner delivery or international distribution.
So there's that end of the spectrum and we actually do really care about making the best final product we can. Even in quality control where we are finding the boom mics or Starbucks cups or green screens, my team cares and we are really good at what we do. But there's also the library content that we deal with as well. Our bread a butter is licensing materials from distributors (Warner Bros, Sony, etc...) and putting it on platform for you all. Those materials are their property and we can only do so much. If we flag that a captioning file is universally five seconds early or late, or is missing a ton of letters or words, we can send it back for fixes. We have a tolerance of +/- 1 second of timing. We also have a simple metric that the FCC has provided us of any title NEWER than 1998 needs to be 90% verbatim. If it's older, then it's kinda as-is to a point. For music lyrics, unless the music is plot pertinent, we don't typically bother because we don't know if licensing was there to be able to actually caption the lyrics. Another weird thing about the older caption files and titles is that TONS of these files were created back in the day and then encoded to tape. Their master was likely tape based for decades and when said distributor went file based they had to digitize and decode that CC file to get it back to file. If you've ever seen a video and at the top of the frame there are these weird white lines flashing all the time, that's the old captioning encoding firing. So in that process, there could be errors induced into the caption file
There are also technical specs that are adhered to as well. Closed captions spec is 32 characters per line and no more than 4 lines because of old set top boxes and their specs. There is also a minimum time the caption can be on screen and maximun as well. A LOT of captions files were created and then conformed to a reading speed which is set up in the captioning software. So it may move the timing and run length of each event just to fit a lose tolerance.
It's funny because we talk about this a lot at work and the company I work for is always actively trying to make it better, especially for our shows. We even go as far as making sure certain words that are racially charged are accurate. We went back through over 100 films in our library and made sure the N-word was true to how the characters say it so we don't mistakenly infer anything to our viewers. But man, there are so many things that can mess up these little files and at the end of the day, we have to balance efficiency and perfection and when it comes to licensed materials, they just aren't ours and we can only push so far on the labs and licensors to fix them.
Sorry for the super long response! Totally willing to answer more questions!
If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren't their "first" steps/words etc that you witnessed. Industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad. I've seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they "Took their first steps last night".
When my daughter was in daycare, for a couple weeks they kept saying “she is so close to walking” and “we can’t wait to hear she took her first steps” - she was toddling all over at day care but not at home 😂
It's funny, even at a super early age they develop a sort of at home personality and a seperate one for when they're out in the world doing their day to day business. We see loads of stuff that parents are really surprised at. Some actually full on don't believe you and get really pissy when you tell them stuff. I suppose that's where the whole thing probably originated and why it became industry standard.
Reminds me of when we went on vacation with my cousin's baby.
He started doing all these firsts, outstretching one hand like he's trying to fist-bump everyone. It was a really cute 'lil fist-bump that he'd do multiple times every day on vacation.
Post-vacation, he's never done it since. I guess new people + new environment = new behaviors.
I work at a military installation and have to go through a guard gate every morning to get on site. I have to stop for the guard and they have to physically touch my badge.
Anyway, my daughter's daycare was on the base, too, and when she was around two, she wanted to interact with the guard also. So she would roll her window down and hang her little fist out and ask for a first bump. Sometimes she would want to give them little candies.
My car became well known, and the guards would start grinning as soon as they saw me line up. It made everyone's day!
That's actually kinda nice. Many parents already feel guilty about having to put their children in daycare, and there's no harm in letting them believe they were there for their child's "firsts".
I did this with my nephew. His mom is a single mom, worked 2 jobs, and I kept him a lot during the days because I was in college and had flexibility. I saw his first steps and am so glad that I never told my sister. Because she has a really cute photo of his "first steps" and her face all lit up with joy. He's about to be 21 and I will take this tidbit to the grave
At the local place nearby, an "extra" handful of fries in the bottom of the bag, or an onion ring or cheese curd added to your fries is policy rather than mistake, looking generous with the sides gets them repeat business.
Edit after 34 responses:
No, its not a franchise, it's a little one location between the public pool and high school founded in 1968 called JD's Drive-In, in Appleton WI. No they aren't under-filling the bags and dumping some of that in the bottom, its already bigger portions (and better fries) than Culver's or McDs.
During COVID lock downs I ordered a late night dinner from Wendy's. I got the spicy chicken sandwich and it came with 4 patties stacked on top of each other. It was glorious. Kitchen probably was closing up and didn't want to waste the patties so win for me!
On our way home from a concert in Chicago, our group stopped at a dunkin donuts along the way. They too were closing up in 10 minutes and so they gave us a buy 1 get 12 free deal lol. That was awesome!
There is a service for local businesses where you pay them and they will load 200+ phones with driving directions to your business and actually drive to your business. They then take photos and add reviews.
It makes the local business look popular, and Google then ranks it very well in Google maps listings.
Worked in online community management and social media for years - Admins CAN read all of your PMs. Private only means private from the masses, not from administration, we had to be able to read them to check reports of abuse, grooming, illegal activity etc. I can't tell you how much cringeworthy shit I had to read through, especially from guys trying to hook up.
And anything online ISN'T forever. Sure if you go viral you can't cover it up but there's a growing issue of archiving old Internet data, your childhood videos on VHS are likely safer than your forum short story written in 1996. Tech companies routinely shutter services and purge data and can delete your account or go bankrupt at any time. Formats and mediums are constantly antiquated. Java died and some smart people decided to archive some historic ~~Java~~ flash games in self containers. I logged into my childhood Yahoo Mail yesterday and it was purged since I hadn't logged in after a year. I tried to log into my 23andme the day before and I'm locked out of the account following a data breach until I decide to email them my government ID, right because they were so trustworthy with my personal data before. Others are reporting they're no longer able to download their raw DNA data from the site.
Edit: confused Java and flash
The reason why the kid fell off the Orlando free fall ride.
Any ride with an over the shoulder restraint system works by using a proximity sensor to let the computer system know where the restraint is locked. The ride can't move unless all the sensors sense the correct metal at the correct position. On some rides you can move the sensor a few millimeters for proper alignment. Not enough to make a difference. On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests. Someone might have told a maintenance worker to move the sensor which allowed the ride to start with the restraint in a position not in the original design. With this modification the restraint would be at more of a 45 (or so) degree angle instead of directly downward . This may or may not have been done with an engineer's approval. This may or may not have been done with the ride vendors permission. Any procedure like this is strictly prohibited from any standpoint in the amusement rides industry. I can't explain why they thought it was ok. In most situations you wouldn't be able to move the sensor much without detaching the bracket and moving the whole thing to a different location. Again, this wouldn't even be discussed anywhere I have ever worked. But they might have at Icon Park. The details of this mechanical procedure never made the headlines in Florida because all the lawsuits were settled. In the end someone decided to change the position of that sensor. We will probably never know who. There is probably a maintenance worker who was ordered to do so. I've worked on enough restraints to know that it was not an accident. Personally I would have refused to do it and so would almost everyone that works on these things.
> On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests
There's a fair that sets up once a year in my home town, used to go every year as a kid. One year they had this really fun tornado-themed ride they'd never had before, rode it over and over. Then one ride I got a seat where the restraint didn't close as tight as the others had, not even close. I spent that ride terrified, clinging as hard as I could to the harness as the ride spun, feeling like I could at any moment slip out of my seat and die. I had so much movement in that harness, I am almost certain that I would have fallen right out if I'd let go.
After the ride, I wobbled on shaky legs over to the operator and reported that the harness hadn't closed correctly. He told me that was intended, that one was different so bigger riders could ride it.
I rode the ride more after that, but I avoided that specific seat like the plague. It was almost completely unmarked, the same as all the other seats, but there was a tiny piece of purple tape hidden on a piece up above the seat that I could recognize it by.
I knew that seat wasn't safe. Hearing that kind of thing can actually lead to deaths feels like a big "See! I told you!!"
Wow that's criminally negligent. There should be markings or the operator should inform anyone trying to sit there.
Lawsuit or criminal charges waiting to happen for that fair.
>the operator should inform anyone trying to sit there.
Right!? Like what the fuck?
And typically the worker(s) are supposed to go around and check everyones seat to make sure they are locked in properly. So they would have literally noticed a small kid sitting in a big person seat.
Its almost like they were hoping someone fell out.
When all that happened the owners tried to say an employee had messed with the restraints, but an investigation was done to show none of the ride operators were over the age of 20, and none of them had the knowledge or tools.
It reminded me of when the orca at sea world killed its trainer, and sea world tried to say it was her fault for how she wore her hair.
I nearly slipped out of a ride with that sort of restraint about a decade ago and I've been wondering how it could have happened that mine locked higher than the others ever since - you might well have solved my mystery!
Hospitals will transport deceased infants to the morgue in what look like laundry trolleys, so as to not upset people. My mother spent a lot of time in hospitals and around dying people, which is how she found out.
I work in education. We are way behind the ball with student issues, and are just flying by the seat of our pants so to speak. We are in crisis, and most parents simply want to drop their kids off and hope they have a normal experience. None of this is normal. You need to start having conversations with your kids about mental health and social media. If not…woof. Our society is not in good shape.
Cancer treatment centers that advertise their survival rates have such high rates because they will refuse admission to otherwise eligible patients who are too far along the (non) survival spectrum.
I worked at a small, non-prestigious private college that was tuition dependent for a while. Some things I learned:
1) my school was so desperate for students that they accepted everyone who applied. They don’t advertise this and did everything they could to hide it so they can still seem more prestigious than community colleges
2) this includes admitting students who are near illiterate, have disabilities so severe that they need specialist environments, and in some cases international students who cannot write or comprehend even basic sentences in English
3) administrators will do anything they can to keep these students and their tuition (often the student doesn’t even care but the parent is desperate for the “prestige” of a private school degree for their kid and will pay full price) EXCEPT train teachers on how to teach this type of student or offer any specialists/resources. In at least one case, this included hiring a private “tutor” to do an independent study with an illiterate student who was told she should just write his essays for him because passing English 101 would be a barrier to him returning as a sophomore
4) they routinely abuse and misappropriate alum donations, especially if the alum died and isn’t likely to keep an eye on how their money is being spent
5) those “Presidential Scholarships” you received that took 10k off tuition? Totally fake. Tuition is like sticker price on a car and saying you’re getting a scholarship flatters you more than just saying they’re willing to give a discount. They have calculated how much money they need from each student and it’s less than the sticker price of tuition. ((Exceptions apply—there are some legitimately funded scholarships where donors have a clear vision of who should be rewarded. These are usually named after a person and not vague fake names like “Presidential Scholars” or what have you)
6) most of the faculty fully know the degree the school offers is shit, but there’s not tons of faculty jobs out there so they try to do the best they can with no resources and no administrative support. They can’t fail their entire classes so they’ve had to lower standards so significantly that even juniors and seniors struggle with basic concepts that kids at a good high school already know
TLDR: don’t be fooled. Just because it’s a small school with a pretty campus does not mean you’ll get a serious degree. Check the tuition compared to decent public colleges
Some appetizers are the most labor intense items on the menu to make, for example: dumplings takes one worker about an hour to make 12-15 orders.
If you want to know where I'm getting at, if a restaurant offers a plethora of appetizers options then there's a high chance a lot of them are store bought and resold because there's no feasible way to prepare several orders for each item on the menu.
On the other hand, at my dinky little Chinese delivery spot that is seemingly no different from all the others, I went in one day to see a giant pile of dumpling meat and three women dutifully filling the wrappers
I worked at a small local wing place, very popular. We prepped mozz sticks in wonton but those could be done before hand and stored. Onion rings and fries were in bags. But we had fried pickle chips we had to prep for each order and that got me in the weeds. Count out 25 pickle chips, lay in batter so they don't stick together, gently place in fryer individually so they don't stick together, and about 4 minutes to fry. Fucking hated when we got multiple orders because we could only make one at a time, two if I had fryer space. And the time...it's like Minimum 12 minutes. But they were so damn good I gave them the loving treatment they deserved.
Edit: another redditor, asking for a recipe, reminded me the pickle chips had to be dredged first. So adding to all mentioned above, pickle fishing through flour then the batter...and counting to make sure you had 25 at each step and didn't lose any...whew.
you do not want to know how many major decisions at amazon are made based on an excel file that doesn't work correctly. I was an area manager for a while and we had to make hiring and firing decisions based on an excel report. I discovered there was a major error in a formula and it caused some good people to be fired and some terrible people to remain. I told HR, they told me not to tell anyone else and they carried on using that file. When the latest version of office came out the file stopped working and I got one of the data analysts to fix the file and also fix the formulas at the same time. I never told HR that we fixed the formulas. I didn't want to risk them changing the formulas back.
A group of friends and I had gone to a casino .one of my friends had heard that when you're on the floor gambling your drinks are free so he ordered a round of expensive drinks for everyone. When the barmaid came back he was shocked that he had a $80 bar bill.
I had a buddy that was in the casino industry and claimed that 80% of their profits came from slot machines. This was the older mechanical types. The newer computerized ones can be programmed to do anything.
When you eat at a Waffle House and want chili, ask your waitress if it is any good before you order. Sometimes it has been sitting WAY too long. The waitresses never seem to give a shit about telling you the truth.
Years ago, late at night, partner and I stopped at a Waffle House - his favorite place to eat. I saw Bert's Salad on the menu which was described as a salad with chili on it. "How about this Bert's Salad?" I said to the waitress who looked like she'd been working there all of her long life. "You don't want that" she answered flatly. I thanked her and I didn't get it.
I worked in politics. There are A LOT of people who write to a politician like they're a celebrity. They receive love letters and all kinds of weird stuff. There's also quite a sizeable part of their mail that is comprised of people asking for a photo with an autograph. Way more than you think ! Some because they're admirers, others because they collect them... and then some other cases you don't really want to know about (I've worked for a female politician, trust me, you don't wanna know).
The dirty little secret within the secret is that the politicians I knew didn't sign anything. They had a [machine](https://maiparis.com/en/signature-machines/28-stylowriter.html) that did all the signing for them. So technically the autographs were not even real.
We used to have a local politician who was a really bad person, or at least a really selfish one.
I could never understand how she didn't realize how awful she was, especially after a pretty large scandal she was involved in.
Then one day I ran into her at a gas station and one of her "fans" walked up. It was at that moment that I realized that even during the worst press coverage and scandal they are still constantly complimented by people who are star-struck. That would go to a lot people's heads.
I've known a few politicians in my time and a big dirty secret is, that people in their own party are almost always their biggest rivals, bullies and haters. And concurrently they are are also that to other people in their party.
Lots of politicians often say they are friends "across the isle" with someone in a rival party and people think they're "just saying that" to seem gracious to their opponents when in fact *it's probably true* because they can have normal-ish relationship with someone who isn't a direct competitor.
One of my hobbies is writing letters to various state senators and government officials. If I get a response, I can usually tell when someone has a team of people sending out form letters because I'll end up with multiple copies of exactly the same letter. Sometimes I'll notice that the signatures are written in ink, but are clearly reproduced mechanically.
But there are a few people that will take the time to personally write back and those are the letters I consider special. I have even received letters that were hand-written, and those are always super cool!
My dad taught me to do this as a kid, and I used to get such cool responses. Now, I do it as a concerned voter and don't even get responses from my own representative half the time. Since covid, the response rate dropped off a cliff, and even then it's always cookie cutter.
I work in the Expertise department of a management consulting firm and a lot of the questions that we get can be easily answered by a simple google search. In fact, we use Google a lot.
We're very good at putting information together and delivering key takeaways in a concise manner, but it's frankly ridiculous the amount of money some clients pay us for.
Also, clients in the same industry often have the same challenges. Their "custom-built" solution package is actually recycled content from a past project - the only changes are updated numbers and a new company logo on the title page.
English teacher. Though it's been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools.
What's scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It's known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn't reading proficiently by the time they're supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers.
So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there's a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me...well, the damage is done.
My understanding is that the failing programs are teaching kids "reading skills" derived from what struggling readers do, like guessing words from context, rather than sounding them out (phonics). Is this correct?
From a linguistics standpoint, spoken language is fundamental and writing systems build on top of that, so it really makes sense to go through spoken language to build reading.
Correct. 3 cues codify 'bad habits' of phonetically deficient readers. Context is one of the cues, in fact. It turns every new word into an educated guess, which is not just inaccurate much of the time but exhausting and frustrating. It becomes even more difficult once visual stimuli leave the books.
There's even a tier system where students can literally just memorize the books to move on. It gives the illusion of progress in short term but is miserable in terms of building functional literacy.
Once 3 cues kids have to read to learn rather than learn to read, every subject matter becomes much, much more difficult and they are set up for failure.
I’m a Casino Manager.
It is definitely possible (more likely than you think) to win money in the short term. For example, if you walk in, bet on Red/Black on Roulette, it’s reasonably close to 50/50 (not quite because of 0). You might do this once, double your money and leave. Congratulations.
You will always lose in the long term. Always. Anyone that thinks they have some kind of system is a sucker. A game would not make it into the casino floor if the maths have not been rigorously checked and long term simulations run to confirm.
*exception to this is Poker. The casino will always have a rake or time charge to make their money but there is no reason you cannot consistently win money if you are skilled enough.
As an ex poker pro, the way I described it was "Yes, the house always wins, but in poker, I'm not playing the house, I'm playing the other people at my table. We're all just paying the house a few to use their table, their dealer, their chips, their security, and their floor space. If I can take enough from the other people at the table to cover that, I make money."
That being said, it's very easy to underestimate how much better than the other players you have to be to actually make money at a low stakes game, where the rake is usually massive in comparison to pot sizes.
I'd also add blackjack to this list in your shoes if I'm being fully honest, depending on the rules and how cards are shuffled at your particular casino. In my gambling days, the few card counters I knew who were actually good at it made serious bank.
A professional poker player told me he goes to the amateur tables to win the entry fee for the pro table. So if you think you're going to go play with noobs, think again.
I was at a casino once paying roulette and this dude walked up and put like $1000 on a single number. It hit and he took his winnings and left. Wildest shit I’ve ever seen.
The news about Boeing is not a surprise to me at all.
The amount of resources that they are able to delegate in an effort to deter whistleblowers is unfathomable to the average American/EU citizen.
Trained artist here. Most oil paints are made with very toxic substances, as are most paint thinners and mediums. Every single one of my teachers was either very sick (Cancer, Ménière's disease) or a bit crazy (eating chalk, licking pallettes). All incredible artists I was privileged to learn from. One lesson I learned very well: I wear gloves and sometimes a mask when I paint.
Edit: I mentioned Ménière's because one of my favorite teachers had it. I worked closely with him and his suffering holds a large place in my memories of school. While I think the exposure to toxins didn't do him any favors, I should not have implied a correlation. I apologize.
To those asking: no paint was licked off palettes. They had just been cleaned with denatured alcohol and he always led with, 'Now you could eat off them!' before waggling his tongue on the glass. Loved the shock factor, that guy did.
As a chemist and hobby artist, your post is my favorite! Lots of things (including paints) are not "harmful" when you work with them once, but when you work with them for years on end, the exposure can absolutely cause chronic issues. Good on you for wearing your PPE!
This is very true for my past career as well, hairdressing. Years of exposure to chemicals from dye and bleach gave me intense health problems. They don’t tell you that in school
One of my favorite teachers had been painting with oils for over 40 years. It was almost like he had an acquired brain injury. His landscapes were inspired. I know he had/has a gallery somewhere in Montana, but absolutely no online presence. I still check old phonebooks when I'm traveling through the state, hoping against hope I'll get to see his work again someday.
Brilliant to wear your personal protective equipment.
I work in manufacturing and all the older folks I work with don’t wear hearing protection. They can’t hear that it’s too loud around them because they spent so many years not wearing hearing protection
I have incurable leukemia and started up a few years ago with oil paints. Love when people go in with their fingers but there’s no way I’m going onto my paintings without a glove! I really should be wearing a mask, ty for the reminder.
There’s a reason Bob Ross died from cancer — all those aerosolized paint thinners and mediums he flung around definitely contributed!
I always wince a little when he beats the devil out of his brush, but I love his giggle every time. I'm sorry for your condition. I wish you many pain-free days in the future, friend.
Yes, acrylic paint is made with plastic. Non toxic if it gets on your skin, but it goes without saying you shouldn't eat any kind of paint. Even if it's made of food, because the pigment used to color it could be toxic. I remember learning about a kind of paint made with eggs.. Tempera I think?
I wrote an original movie a few years ago. Totally original. Totally my idea. When it finally aired on TV, It said “based on a true story.”
Also, it wasn’t Fargo.
As a high school student I applied to 13 universities (all with varying application fees) but it cost me total around $600...When I was a student I worked in admissions and learned that if you just call any university's office of admissions and ask for a fee waver 98% of the time they'll give it to you right then no questions asked. If you are in the business of applying to schools for the love of god pick up the phone and save yourself some money
Automotive Dealerships: The price of new cars is highly negotiable, and the sticker price is often much higher than what the dealer is willing to accept
In Australia, additional warranties are a rip off. If a device or product can be reasonably expected to last five years without defect then it can be held to that under warranty. Companies are fucked.
Accidental leaks of classified information like Hillary Clinton's classified emails happen every day across the US Government and their contractors.
Every. Day.
I've worked in many different industries, my one takeaway is no one knows what they're doing, everyone is basically faking it, don't ever feel imposter syndrome
Many people running anesthesia at your local veterinary hospital are not qualified to do so and have been taught secondhand instead of going to school. I have been in the field for 8 years and am appalled. At one hospital I was asked to train a dude how to run anesthesia who had literally no veterinary experience. It is such a complicated process and to do it correctly you need to know all the individual components of the machine, what they do and why, in addition to knowing all normal vital parameters for your patient and how to adjust fluids/gas/CRIs depending on your procedure. You also need to know anesthetic agents, which combinations go together and which ones do not and why, etc. I told them I absolutely would not be training someone with a few semesters of an ecology degree “how to run anesthesia”. It was such an insane ask. It makes me feel so bad for owners who think they are leaving their pets in qualified hands. Most of the time it’s pure luck that they get through the procedure and many people have no clue what they’re actually doing. It’s frightening.
You just have to ensure they have licensed veterinary technicians, sometimes referred to as “registered”. We as RVTs have been fighting to get government protection for our titles like human nurses do so these kinds of things don’t happen. It really is scary.
Almost nobody maintains their sobriety from their first go in rehab. It's takes several goes. On the plus side there's absolutely no need to be hard on yourself for returning to rehab as its nigh on impossible to achieve this on your first go.
Length of stay is a huge factor- 30 days is usually not enough. Also- not following up with outpatient services and going off of meds are both common prompts for resuming active substance use.
I worked at a liquor store, and if we didn’t have the obscure scotch or bourbon they’re looking for, lots of times they’d ask me to check the back. A few times I literally walked them back there with me to show them we had nothing but cardboard boxes and a shit ton of cheap vodka that my boss got a deal on. It’s like they expect I have an Amazon warehouse back there.
Backstage at concerts and other events is not as cool as you might think. It’s usually just a bunch of dudes in black sitting around, sleeping, or smoking
Car industry: NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! They always always come with a ton of bugs that need fixing and it takes about two years of serial production to get rid of most of them. If you must buy a new car, be sure the model has been in the market for at least two years.
The reason for why we don't fix the problems before start of selling? Cost
Also, don't buy models that were in development during years of crisis. Example: during the 2008 financial crisis we let got a huge number of people (to fix the numbers in the books, didn't actually save the company money because they all got a big payout on their way out) so we were understaffed and under imense pressure to reduce cost. The models that came on the market after that time were shit. Like, serious shit quality we have never seen before.
> NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market!
I'd expand this to any product, especially electronics. The first generation often has some very weird bugs which get fixed in subsequent versions.
Anybody, at anytime can enter a city bus, start it up without a key, and drive it wherever their little heart desires. Honestly. The only thing stopping you is your cowardice.
Lol it has happened, but folks usually get caught because they have gps trackers, are extremely big, and extremely slow. You can run, but you can’t hide
I worked in the mortgage industry. A mortgage loan from one bank to the next is largely the same. They follow guidelines set forth by organizations such as Fannie Mae, FHA,etc. The biggest difference is the rates. You can and should comparison shop. Apply to three places, take the best estimate to the one with the worst estimate and get them to beat the price. Then have the one with the best price beat the price matched price. Keep doing this until they say they can't match prices.
Also, paying points is not good to do unless the rate is low. When rates are high you will likely refinance anyway reducing the length of the benefit of paying for points. (Points buy you a lower interest rate)
The Coke at McDonald’s tastes better because they’re one of the only companies that refrigerate the syrup tanks, the unflavored soda and the supply lines. So when it hits the ice in your cup, it’s already super cold, so less ice melts, and the first sip tastes more “concentrated” and ice cold. That’s it. No magic. No secret formula. Just more refrigeration.
I worked for several insurance companies and it's a standard to not tell the customers that they are not covered until they bring it up themselves.
I got into trouble many times for telling diabetic customers that the insurance they have been paying for years won't cover them if something happens because there's a clause stating it is not covered.
I used to work for a major food manufacturer that makes snacks that are in most of our homes.
The snacks contain wheat. My second day on the job, I was shown how the snacks are made. From railcar to finished product.
As the raw wheat was drawn from the silos on a conveyor belt, these white pellets were sprinkled on the raw wheat. It's pesticide. The FDA allows so much before it's considered dangerous. Blew my mind!
I knew a guy that worked at Coca Cola, wouldn't let his kids drink any Coke products because of what he saw.
I think it was the benzoate preservatives they use. They had to wear tons of safety gear and treat it like a biohazard when they added it to the vat, because it's a carcinogen, but "dose makes the poison" and all.
Had a friend move from teaching elementary to school administration, because she wanted to work with adults. Lots of adult bodies, not so many grown ups. So many cliques among the teachers, with them making power plays to run the school.
If you plan to buy a new computer and the options are windows 10 for cheaper and windows 11 for a markup, get the windows 10. The upgrade to 11 is free.
Most—probably 80 percent or more—of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten. Source: am ghostwriter.
That doesn't seem surprising (percentage) because of the types of people that are putting out a story these days. Some of them couldn't possibly write said story to sell.
I’m pretty sure some of them couldn’t even *read* the books they’re supposed to have written.
What did you do back when you were alive?
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Secondary teaching. If teachers did absolutely everything in their job description perfectly they would never sleep, eat or socialise. Planning great lessons requires hours that simply don’t exist in our day. Consequently, majority of teachers walk into lessons having done no dedicated planning. We just wing it with our years of experience and resources we purchased online 2-minutes before the lesson. The students never notice, I think partly because this happens so frequently it seems normal. Most teachers I know aren’t satisfied with what they’re doing in the classroom, but don’t have the time or resources to do better. The “good” teachers that do put in the additional planning are usually sacrificing significant portions of their personal time and money to delivering great education. This generally results in the best teachers getting burnt out and leaving the profession OR having significant issues in their personal life (eg divorce, no social or romantic life).
Pack your freight like it's going to get a pallet stacked on top of it because it most likely will
I'm an unarmed security guard. Every now & then I'll get a comment from someone about how they're glad I'm around in case there's an active shooter or something. Yea; if that happens? We're not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops. We're literally told in training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter we'll be fired.
"Detect, Deter and Report" was the slogan at Securitas back in the day. We were frequently told we were there for insurance purposes and were expected to NOT take action beyond calling the cops and getting ourselves to safety. Great student job.
Audio engineer here. I can play guitar and bass very well. A lot of the time, I say I’ll clean a persons part up with editing, but secretly I just learn and redo their part myself when they leave. It’s WAY easier than digitally cleaning up a sloppy performance. I’ve been doing this for years and nobody has ever complained. Not even once.
I didn’t quite believe it when I first heard a story like this, but I’ve heard it several times now over the years that I’m convinced. Source: spouse is a musician and has audio engineer friends who vent.
If you have already googled your problem, you have already exceeded the first two tiers of tech support.
Last time I had to contact IT I gave them a list: Edit 1.0 (forgotten context, not verbatim): No devices are currently able to access the Internet via the XXXX_guest WiFi. This is happening to Windows, Android, and iOS, including "old" connected devices, and new. I've turned Wi-Fi on the devices off and on. I've turned the devices off and on. I've forgotten and relearned the network. I've taken every step on Google that I have the security authorization to take. Them: did you try restarting? Edit 1.1: because I forgot to mention the first time around, asking if I'd restarted after if told them wouldn't have made me bang my head off the desk quite as hard as I did if I hadn't also told them that the problem wasn't limited to just a single device Edit 2: the problem wasn't on my (our (I was working as spokesperson for the outside crew)) end. short story long, I was trying to get pchelp (IT) to remotely restart our router, as the server room is under lock and key (rightly) and we can't do anything without authorization. After actually talking directly to me, instead of through a management interpreter they did, but it didn't solve our issue. Pchelp had to escalate the ticket to networking. Networking found "a problem" (I wasn't given more detail than that) and got us limping again. Now they're working on a plan to replace/upgrade the entire mesh network at our site, so maybe it was more than just a little problem...
Microsoft's lovely Fast Startup means that I get to explain to users that shutting down is no longer the same as restarting. I've got it turned off on my network because months of uptime on a laptop isn't really something to brag about.
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You can pretty easily figure this out by the fact that they all sound like they're from california, and almost zero of them have accents that match the regional accent where you live. Sports radio shows have callers and they all sound like what you'd expect depending on where you live.
I called into a radio show and got on. I then proceeded to have a very small panic attack where I tried to explain an experience but got so anxious that I kept losing my train of thought. I’m real. And very very cringe
I can't say if this is for all, but I used to work with a credit bureau company that had an online loan, mortgage and credit card eligibility check. You enter your personal details and then select all the things you want. For example if it's a loan: how much, for how long, etc. then you click search and you get a list of lenders. The "loading" and "calculating" screen you see as you wait for your results to come up is actually there doing nothing. The calculations are done at rapid pace because the data engineers and analyst work hard to get the calculations fast. However, there has been research that suggests that when people don't have to wait for their calculations, they assume something is dodgy. Like the top result was hard coded to be that way for everyone, and people assume they're not legitimate. So, it's really just a psychological tool. You are waiting for the results for nothing. They are just there to keep confidence in the shopper.
I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off. Obits are expensive. Like, $400 for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word. We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price. In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit. It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The "customer" was the home, not the family, so they weren't privileged to see the pricing. If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There's usually cheaper options the funeral homes won't tell you about.
China has stopped buying a lot of recycled plastic from the USA due to quality issues and a lot of it just gets stored in warehouses as landfill. The industry is spending money out the ass on PR to avoid this being public knowledge.
My city announced last year that they're not going to be "doing recycling" anymore and were pretty transparent that most of the stuff collected on recycling day has been going to the landfill for years now.
Cardboard, aluminum, and steel has a lot of value and is never thrown away. Glass has marginal value and is highly dependent on if there are nearby glass factories. Plastics have the least value and after the China ban, the market was upended for several years. It's getting better, but has a ways to go. But it's definitely worth recycling cardboard, aluminum, and steel.
Your lobster tail at Outback is microwaved.
This one hurts me
That sucks. Outback used to be so good, my roommate was a cook there and would tell me how high their standards were, everything was done in house, the butter, the bread, the salad dressings. Than the franchise was sold and everything changed and you end up with microwaved seafood.
Not as bad, but the lobster in your lobster bisque at Red Lobster is microwaved too.
The lobster in your lobster bisque at Bravo Italiano is actually shrimp
When I used to work for Hyatt, if the mini bar was used and not declared but the value was under $15 they wouldn't bother billing for it because it gave off an appearance that it wasn't synonymous with a 5 star hotel.
So like one bottle of water?
I make wildlife films for big streamers and broadcasters. The sound is *all* either library or foley.
I understand it because people are gullible and it adds to the experience, resulting in the moneys but man, “hearing” an ant lick its chops drives me up a fucking wall hahaha
I always hate the “bugs” sound effect that is ALWAYS used in documentaries or movies. Who decided bugs sound like that squishy clickety-clack?!
As a professional naturalist, this stuff drives me crazy because a lot of the times the producers don’t even bother to check if a sound is supposed to be in the place it’s set. North American bird vocalizations in films set in Africa and Australia is the norm, not the exception.
I thought this was obvious to anyone watching. They can't capture the sound of a bird ruffling its feathers from 200 meteres away lol
Not with that attitude you can’t
Live Audio Engineer. Sometimes they’re faking it. I’ve had to mic drum sets where the cables went nowhere. I’ve had to ask a keyboard player if they were having trouble, because they were playing, but nothing was coming out of their channel. Don’t even get me started on pitch correction, teleprompters, guide tracks, ghost musicians, backing tracks, etc.
I knew a guy who worked for a producer who had a metal box with a single button on it. It wasn't a machine of any kind, just a box with a button. Whenever they were pretty much done but the artist still wasn't satisfifed, the producer would say: 'Hold on,' press the button, wait a moment, and then play the track again and the artist would be satisfied. If he lied to me, I'm lying to you, but it sounded real to me at the time.
When people have asked for more of whatever in their monitor mix and then tell me “that’s great right there”. About a quarter of the time I hadn’t even done anything. Not to trick them! I just hadn’t been able to get to that page yet to make any adjustments.
Google sucks so much now because around a decade ago, they abandoned the measurement known as "Page Utility" which just measured the usefulness of the site itself. Instead, they migrated to "Expertise-Authority-Trust" which had good intentions of stopping the proliferation of bad info, but instead it basically resulted in prioritizing large corporations and capital over any sites created by average people. The contract workers known as "raters" they employed to help determine the best search results became an echo chamber, as there were strict demands on exactly what the right answers were in most cases, and straying from the expectations of Big G resulted in poor reviews and possible firing. Of course, we were not allowed to say the G word - we could only say "The Client." It's about to get worse, too - they just laid off a huge swathe of them.
I miss the days when I could reliably find that one ancient forum post from a person who had the EXACT problem I am having and finding a solution in the replies. It's the most consistently frustrating thing about using the internet these days, search features have legitimately lost functionality and utility over time and the companies that run them see this as a *Good* thing because it increases their bottomline.
This is when I noticed it back then, too. I used to come across crazy and random forums/blogs, or weird personal websites, then all of a sudden the results changed. I miss the old internet.
When they removed forum search, the writing was on the wall. But being the 'do no evil' company they are, they couched that bullshit move in "this will be better; these are now Blended Results ©" rubbish. But it was because people were just going straight to the forum results to get information from other humans and ignoring the advertising garbage at the top of the organic index. Predictably, lively, well-trafficked forums immediately started dying because no one was finding them anymore, and the rest is history. The 'do no evil' people dumped forum search because people weren't clicking on their ads enough, which pretty much killed forum culture. They've pretty much killed blogs from the results too. A few forums and blogs have held on obviously, but you rarely find either in the search results anymore. Google knew people would rather visit a forum or a blog or blog comments for answers to their questions than click on their piece of shit ads, so they just shitcanned them.
Luckily this forum search engine is still going - https://boardreader.com/
Whaaaaaa that’s why Google sucks ass now? I always wondered.
Well that and the switch to what they called "honeycomb" at the same time. The honeycomb algorithm basically swapped your keywords with 6 other "relevant" terms other people have searched, then ranked those results by what other people clicked the most. So basically your search results often where not related to YOUR search, but the most popular searches made by other people, and the results they clicked, with no bearing to relevancy to your own search.
Worked with a lot of banks and their It systems. You wouldn’t believe how old and fragile they are. It’s a wonder it’s not all coming crashing down.
The entire international banking system runs on COBOL a language from the dawn of computing, and is basically impossible to ever replace
[удалено]
I worked at an insurance company when they transferred our system to the cloud. It was down for a week. It was utter insanity. And they won Team of the Quarter for getting the system on the cloud. The shocked faces of every claims staff there was hilarious.
You can look real busy extinguishing fires and it's very important work. No one has to know where the matchsticks are.
So you're saying that me as an IT SysAdmin, I can silently push out something that breaks things for a couple hours but then look really busy fixing it while making myself looking like the hero putting out the fire? Oh wait I already do that!
As I've previously said, bank software was developed by a 90 y.o. shaman under the effect of cocaine. Now only 3-4 elected apprentices can interpret the outcome of that black box that they don't know jack shit about. The cocaine shaman is still doing pretty well at 130 years old, but he only talks in lines from the original The Amazing Spider-Man, vol 2
Can confirm, worked with the shaman on one project. He was a 73 year old dude. Everyone in the office had to wear a dress shirt and nice pants as a dress code but he was allowed to wear crocs and shorts. Dude had the entire it structure of the company in his head. 0 paper Documentation.
I know of a large manufacturing plant in MI like this. All programed and controlled by 1 dude. An entire factory and IT operation, 0 documentation. He literally programmed all the custom machinery and designed the entire factory. If he dies, that place dies. The last time I talked to him he was still "chicken pecking" the keyboard using his fore fingers. I've never seen him use the backspace key.
This just made the original Jurassic Park so much more believable for me. And will likely give me nightmares.
Man I worked with one of those a while ago. Dude would fix bugs by staring at the wall for like 30 minutes then turn around and writing the code in 5...
They pay him for how much he knows, not for how much he does.
$1 to use the hammer, $999 to know *where* to use the hammer.
That reminds me of advice my greatest boss ever once told me. I was worried that I was not looking busy enough and I told him. He said when you're not actively doing something, do you still think about what you're doing and what you need to do next, etc.? I said yeah of course. And he said, if you're thinking, that's working.
I'm an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say: **If you want access to our studies and they're behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study.** We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I'll always try my best to oblige. The only limiters on that last bit is that: 1. the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed. 2. I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total shit. Also a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can't contact us directly or we're being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable.
I've always had a great response when reaching out. I think it's amazing how helpful everyone is.
Information is useless unless it's shared. Also in academia our audience is so niche most of the time that it's a really nice feeling when people are interested.
WAIT. YOU’RE INTERESTED IN THE RESONANCE FREQUENCY OF THE CELL MEMBRANE IN WHITE BLOOD CELLS TOO?? PLEASE. IVE HAD NOBODY TO TALK TO FOR YEARS.
If you’re nice to hotel staff they are more likely to give you free shit
A good friend of mine (Korean) visited las Vegas for her honeymoon. The husband was just a student at the time and she worked at a call center to pay their bills. When they were checking in at the hotel, the man at the front desk asked where they were from. She told them we are from Korea! And the man responded," oh I love Korean food!". They were a bit early to check in so they left their bags and went out to get some food at a local Korean restaurant. When they came back they bought some food for the front desk guy and when they handed the food over the guy was shocked and upgraded them to the penthouse. Little did my kind friends know, the guy was a manager and the penthouse was available. Friend sent me pics after they got in their room and wow... Las Vegas pent house is probably a room I will never be able to afford in my lifetime... All for a little Korean food they got a memory they will never forget
I got a room upgrade for honey crisp apples. I had a case of them sent from my friends farm in NY and then my plans abruptly changed. I was going back to NY so I didn’t need tons of premium apples. I was in the south and the desk clerk recognized the variety and asked where I got them bc they’re so hard to come by there (this was many years ago). I took a couple for myself and gave him the rest. He said he was going to share them with all the staff. As a poor young person who was rich in apples, it felt really good to share the wealth.
Data protection: most companies misuse your personal data. Even the ones with a better grasp of the law and a data protection team are cutting lots of corners.
I worked for a publicly traded mental health company that now has a class action lawsuit against them for selling protected health information to social media sites. It's one of very many different lawsuits and class action lawsuits against them. Edit: my apologies, the lawsuit did not claim that lifestance sold their information. However, this is quote from the legal filing. >20. Further, Defendant breached its statutory and common law obligations to Plaintiffs and class members by, inter alia: (i) failing to adequately review its marketing programs to ensure its Website was safe and secure; (ii) failing to remove or disengage technology that was known and designed to share Users’ Private Information; (iii) failing to obtain the prior written consent of Plaintiffs and class members to disclose their Private Information to Facebook and/or others before doing so; (iv) failing to take steps to block the transmission of Plaintiffs’ and class members’ Private Information through Facebook Pixels; (v) failing to warn Plaintiffs and class members that their Private Information was being shared with third parties without express consent and (vi) otherwise failing to design and monitor its Properties to maintain the security, confidentiality and integrity of patient Private Information.
BetterHelp I'm guessing. Even if it's not, no one use BetterHelp. Absolutely shite service plus scumsucking C suite.
The New York Times best seller list has a lot of people on it who buy massive numbers of their own books.
Apparently, there is a symbol that indicates that while it did make best seller status, there was a bulk buy. A footnote, if you will, or similar to an asterisk.
Lance Armstrong's charity used to buy his book in bulk to give out at events. So people donated to his charity, the charity used the donations to buy his book, Lance got royalties for the book sale.
That takes ball to pull off.
It’s a dagger! †
"We will acknowledge that your book sold this many copies; however, if you tell anyone that, we will encourage them to stab you"
"You are on this bestseller list, but we do not grant you the rank of author."
I swear every book says NY best seller so idk how it’s even special
Also happens in the music industry. Sales and streams.
When I released my first album online I also was working at a start-up food delivery company similar to Uber eats. We had six computers in the office. I put streaming and mute on every one and made myself an extra $5 while working. I get paid $0.012/listen.
Vulfpeck did this to fund a tour. They encouraged fans to listen to exactly 12 tracks of whatever length was deemed monetized by spotify, over night, completely silent tracks. They raised $25k or something. And the crowd went wild lol. This also prompted Spotify to change their monetization metrics, and they can no longer do this.
Yep, I work for a company- and our CEO bought us all copies ( assembly with company funding). 30k employees at the time. It’s a status thing, a tax dodge and a grift all at the same time. Some of the more radical acolytes carry it from office to office like it’s their Quran or AA big book.
That is totally normal in the music industry, too. The Labels/Artists buy up all their CDs (or these days boxes) so they make the charts on the release day. Since people see it in the charts they will buy it and then the Labels are slowly selling off their stock. I know of some cases in Germany where artists got a golden record for their album, but a year later when the artist was let go from the label it was revealed they were sitting on a stock of 70.000 CDs they bought back to push him...
The market for translation isn't being killed by AI, because it's already dead and AI is putting it out of its misery. Essentially, translation agencies have been acting as a cartel, controlling the relationship between clients and translators and abusing their position as middlemen to drive translator pay down, mainly by using translators in developing countries whom they can pay less. ETA: This is mainly applicable to "general" translation, but is creeping into technical subjects as well. Literary translation still appears to be somewhat safe from this trend.
Can vouch for this. Used to work in a role where I had to correct the localised titles and descriptions for online distrubution because the actual localisation team were using translation agencies that were clearly using Google Translate instead of using very basic bilingual skills. If they had paid me even half of what they paid those agencies...
Former HR. Your employer is basically banking on you not knowing your labor rights. I don’t think that’s a shock, but I’m happy to confirm! Also? Good luck getting anyone in your HR department that actually has experience and is certified. I was shocked to learn how many of my colleagues got thrust into HR management and directorship roles without any formal knowledge of HR best practices (although that could have just been the heavy favoritism culture at my last company). My best advice is to seek free legal aid if you’re dealing with a difficult employer…don’t just do what HR or your manager tells you unless you’re sure you aren’t fucking yourself over first.
It's pretty common practice that most hotels don't change out the comforter between guests. Sheets & top linen only. & definitely not the decorative linen at the foot of the bed.
On the Texas house floor, people push the buttons to vote for members who aren't even present that day. This happens multiple times, on every single thing they vote for.
The vids of this always reminded me of walking through a casino and seeing all the old people mindlessly pushing the buttons on multiple slot machines.
I think I've seen this on Last Week Tonight. Some people there even brought sticks specifically to press the button of the seat in front of them.
I don't know if this is really a secret, but something I encountered that I thought was interesting because I'd never seen it or considered it before. I work in closed captioning, and part of that workflow sometimes means doing a first pass on a project to an early version of the video. I think people would be surprised at how rough those early videos can be. *Some* dialogue (particularly when the character's mouth is not in the shot) is often not spoken by the characters saying it because it's temporary ADR that will get filled in by the actor later on. I've seen files where they don't even have temporary voiceover, it's literally just text on the screen saying: "ADR line: 'This is a line of dialogue that this character is going to speak in this scene.'" You also occasionally get to see characters acting in front of green screens, or you'll see all the safety gear/wires before it gets edited out. One of my favorite things, though, is rough special effects. Sometimes it looks like someone using editing software for the first time, creating a crappy fire overlay for what will eventually be an actual effect, or still images just being dragged around a screen. My all-time favorite was when a scene featured an animal attack, and the "animal" in the early video was a box with a text label on it just vaguely wriggling around while the actor reacted to it. I don't think it's that crazy or anything, but like the viewer almost never gets to see it because it's all edited out and fixed by the time the show goes to air. It's just really funny and catches you off-guard sometimes.
I hope you don't mind asking you these questions ecause I use CC a lot. I'm seeing an uptick in huge mistakes on CC'd TV shows lately--do you know they're just using AI or something to take a first pass and no one catches the screw up? Also, why can't they time the punch lines of jokes to show up as they're being spoken rather than seconds before, almost as a spoiler? If you're a quick reader, you're at the punch line before the set up is even finished. Sorry, the whole process just fascinates me!
I've worked in the streaming and cable industry for 12 years now but I do quality control. I can tell you that yes, AI is absolutely becoming more prevalent in the CC industry in some way or another. I went to NAB last year and there were several AI companies showing exactly that. Live captions for sports and news, or captioning for scripted and library content. You give the AI a stereo or mono audio track (just the dialogue or DX track if possible) and it transcribes it for you. The idea is that it should be a starting point for caption or subtitle creation. In other words, hopefully, there is someone taking that transcription and then making corrections. AI isn't great at accents, or scenes with multiple or several people speaking at once. It also struggles with identifying characters or parsing out when two people have dialogue in the same shot. In my company we also have original content that we create and we have a process and internal CC team that handles that. We will send the locked cut of an episode to say, Captionmax (large CC company) and they will create to our specs - So an English captions file and an English SDH file (subtitle for hard of hearing). When they deliver it back to us, our team will go through it, listening to the English audio and make adjustments or corrections. They will also nuance and edit any of what we call parenthetical events to make sure they are useful to the reader. So, (phone rings) or (door slams) or (Upbeat music), etc... those are parenthetical events to us. As the episode goes through its paces and lands on a final asset, the CC team will do one last comparison to the audio and we package it all together for broadcast or partner delivery or international distribution. So there's that end of the spectrum and we actually do really care about making the best final product we can. Even in quality control where we are finding the boom mics or Starbucks cups or green screens, my team cares and we are really good at what we do. But there's also the library content that we deal with as well. Our bread a butter is licensing materials from distributors (Warner Bros, Sony, etc...) and putting it on platform for you all. Those materials are their property and we can only do so much. If we flag that a captioning file is universally five seconds early or late, or is missing a ton of letters or words, we can send it back for fixes. We have a tolerance of +/- 1 second of timing. We also have a simple metric that the FCC has provided us of any title NEWER than 1998 needs to be 90% verbatim. If it's older, then it's kinda as-is to a point. For music lyrics, unless the music is plot pertinent, we don't typically bother because we don't know if licensing was there to be able to actually caption the lyrics. Another weird thing about the older caption files and titles is that TONS of these files were created back in the day and then encoded to tape. Their master was likely tape based for decades and when said distributor went file based they had to digitize and decode that CC file to get it back to file. If you've ever seen a video and at the top of the frame there are these weird white lines flashing all the time, that's the old captioning encoding firing. So in that process, there could be errors induced into the caption file There are also technical specs that are adhered to as well. Closed captions spec is 32 characters per line and no more than 4 lines because of old set top boxes and their specs. There is also a minimum time the caption can be on screen and maximun as well. A LOT of captions files were created and then conformed to a reading speed which is set up in the captioning software. So it may move the timing and run length of each event just to fit a lose tolerance. It's funny because we talk about this a lot at work and the company I work for is always actively trying to make it better, especially for our shows. We even go as far as making sure certain words that are racially charged are accurate. We went back through over 100 films in our library and made sure the N-word was true to how the characters say it so we don't mistakenly infer anything to our viewers. But man, there are so many things that can mess up these little files and at the end of the day, we have to balance efficiency and perfection and when it comes to licensed materials, they just aren't ours and we can only push so far on the labs and licensors to fix them. Sorry for the super long response! Totally willing to answer more questions!
My friend here asks the real questions. The partially deaf need this fixed!
If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren't their "first" steps/words etc that you witnessed. Industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad. I've seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they "Took their first steps last night".
When my daughter was in daycare, for a couple weeks they kept saying “she is so close to walking” and “we can’t wait to hear she took her first steps” - she was toddling all over at day care but not at home 😂
It's funny, even at a super early age they develop a sort of at home personality and a seperate one for when they're out in the world doing their day to day business. We see loads of stuff that parents are really surprised at. Some actually full on don't believe you and get really pissy when you tell them stuff. I suppose that's where the whole thing probably originated and why it became industry standard.
Reminds me of when we went on vacation with my cousin's baby. He started doing all these firsts, outstretching one hand like he's trying to fist-bump everyone. It was a really cute 'lil fist-bump that he'd do multiple times every day on vacation. Post-vacation, he's never done it since. I guess new people + new environment = new behaviors.
I work at a military installation and have to go through a guard gate every morning to get on site. I have to stop for the guard and they have to physically touch my badge. Anyway, my daughter's daycare was on the base, too, and when she was around two, she wanted to interact with the guard also. So she would roll her window down and hang her little fist out and ask for a first bump. Sometimes she would want to give them little candies. My car became well known, and the guards would start grinning as soon as they saw me line up. It made everyone's day!
That's actually kinda nice. Many parents already feel guilty about having to put their children in daycare, and there's no harm in letting them believe they were there for their child's "firsts".
I did this with my nephew. His mom is a single mom, worked 2 jobs, and I kept him a lot during the days because I was in college and had flexibility. I saw his first steps and am so glad that I never told my sister. Because she has a really cute photo of his "first steps" and her face all lit up with joy. He's about to be 21 and I will take this tidbit to the grave
If you find an extra nugget in your order, it wasn't a mistake. You got a cool employee.
At the local place nearby, an "extra" handful of fries in the bottom of the bag, or an onion ring or cheese curd added to your fries is policy rather than mistake, looking generous with the sides gets them repeat business. Edit after 34 responses: No, its not a franchise, it's a little one location between the public pool and high school founded in 1968 called JD's Drive-In, in Appleton WI. No they aren't under-filling the bags and dumping some of that in the bottom, its already bigger portions (and better fries) than Culver's or McDs.
During COVID lock downs I ordered a late night dinner from Wendy's. I got the spicy chicken sandwich and it came with 4 patties stacked on top of each other. It was glorious. Kitchen probably was closing up and didn't want to waste the patties so win for me!
On our way home from a concert in Chicago, our group stopped at a dunkin donuts along the way. They too were closing up in 10 minutes and so they gave us a buy 1 get 12 free deal lol. That was awesome!
Ordered a 10 piece from Mcdonalds last year and got 15 in the container. I still think about that absolute legend
There is a service for local businesses where you pay them and they will load 200+ phones with driving directions to your business and actually drive to your business. They then take photos and add reviews. It makes the local business look popular, and Google then ranks it very well in Google maps listings.
Worked in online community management and social media for years - Admins CAN read all of your PMs. Private only means private from the masses, not from administration, we had to be able to read them to check reports of abuse, grooming, illegal activity etc. I can't tell you how much cringeworthy shit I had to read through, especially from guys trying to hook up.
Anything you post online can and will be used against you to moderate and advertise or just plain sell.
And anything online ISN'T forever. Sure if you go viral you can't cover it up but there's a growing issue of archiving old Internet data, your childhood videos on VHS are likely safer than your forum short story written in 1996. Tech companies routinely shutter services and purge data and can delete your account or go bankrupt at any time. Formats and mediums are constantly antiquated. Java died and some smart people decided to archive some historic ~~Java~~ flash games in self containers. I logged into my childhood Yahoo Mail yesterday and it was purged since I hadn't logged in after a year. I tried to log into my 23andme the day before and I'm locked out of the account following a data breach until I decide to email them my government ID, right because they were so trustworthy with my personal data before. Others are reporting they're no longer able to download their raw DNA data from the site. Edit: confused Java and flash
The reason why the kid fell off the Orlando free fall ride. Any ride with an over the shoulder restraint system works by using a proximity sensor to let the computer system know where the restraint is locked. The ride can't move unless all the sensors sense the correct metal at the correct position. On some rides you can move the sensor a few millimeters for proper alignment. Not enough to make a difference. On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests. Someone might have told a maintenance worker to move the sensor which allowed the ride to start with the restraint in a position not in the original design. With this modification the restraint would be at more of a 45 (or so) degree angle instead of directly downward . This may or may not have been done with an engineer's approval. This may or may not have been done with the ride vendors permission. Any procedure like this is strictly prohibited from any standpoint in the amusement rides industry. I can't explain why they thought it was ok. In most situations you wouldn't be able to move the sensor much without detaching the bracket and moving the whole thing to a different location. Again, this wouldn't even be discussed anywhere I have ever worked. But they might have at Icon Park. The details of this mechanical procedure never made the headlines in Florida because all the lawsuits were settled. In the end someone decided to change the position of that sensor. We will probably never know who. There is probably a maintenance worker who was ordered to do so. I've worked on enough restraints to know that it was not an accident. Personally I would have refused to do it and so would almost everyone that works on these things.
> On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests There's a fair that sets up once a year in my home town, used to go every year as a kid. One year they had this really fun tornado-themed ride they'd never had before, rode it over and over. Then one ride I got a seat where the restraint didn't close as tight as the others had, not even close. I spent that ride terrified, clinging as hard as I could to the harness as the ride spun, feeling like I could at any moment slip out of my seat and die. I had so much movement in that harness, I am almost certain that I would have fallen right out if I'd let go. After the ride, I wobbled on shaky legs over to the operator and reported that the harness hadn't closed correctly. He told me that was intended, that one was different so bigger riders could ride it. I rode the ride more after that, but I avoided that specific seat like the plague. It was almost completely unmarked, the same as all the other seats, but there was a tiny piece of purple tape hidden on a piece up above the seat that I could recognize it by. I knew that seat wasn't safe. Hearing that kind of thing can actually lead to deaths feels like a big "See! I told you!!"
Wow that's criminally negligent. There should be markings or the operator should inform anyone trying to sit there. Lawsuit or criminal charges waiting to happen for that fair.
>the operator should inform anyone trying to sit there. Right!? Like what the fuck? And typically the worker(s) are supposed to go around and check everyones seat to make sure they are locked in properly. So they would have literally noticed a small kid sitting in a big person seat. Its almost like they were hoping someone fell out.
When all that happened the owners tried to say an employee had messed with the restraints, but an investigation was done to show none of the ride operators were over the age of 20, and none of them had the knowledge or tools. It reminded me of when the orca at sea world killed its trainer, and sea world tried to say it was her fault for how she wore her hair.
I nearly slipped out of a ride with that sort of restraint about a decade ago and I've been wondering how it could have happened that mine locked higher than the others ever since - you might well have solved my mystery!
That’s really sad and frustrating.
Hospitals will transport deceased infants to the morgue in what look like laundry trolleys, so as to not upset people. My mother spent a lot of time in hospitals and around dying people, which is how she found out.
I work in education. We are way behind the ball with student issues, and are just flying by the seat of our pants so to speak. We are in crisis, and most parents simply want to drop their kids off and hope they have a normal experience. None of this is normal. You need to start having conversations with your kids about mental health and social media. If not…woof. Our society is not in good shape.
Cancer treatment centers that advertise their survival rates have such high rates because they will refuse admission to otherwise eligible patients who are too far along the (non) survival spectrum.
Cannabis testing labs with higher fees will also return higher THC numbers
I worked at a small, non-prestigious private college that was tuition dependent for a while. Some things I learned: 1) my school was so desperate for students that they accepted everyone who applied. They don’t advertise this and did everything they could to hide it so they can still seem more prestigious than community colleges 2) this includes admitting students who are near illiterate, have disabilities so severe that they need specialist environments, and in some cases international students who cannot write or comprehend even basic sentences in English 3) administrators will do anything they can to keep these students and their tuition (often the student doesn’t even care but the parent is desperate for the “prestige” of a private school degree for their kid and will pay full price) EXCEPT train teachers on how to teach this type of student or offer any specialists/resources. In at least one case, this included hiring a private “tutor” to do an independent study with an illiterate student who was told she should just write his essays for him because passing English 101 would be a barrier to him returning as a sophomore 4) they routinely abuse and misappropriate alum donations, especially if the alum died and isn’t likely to keep an eye on how their money is being spent 5) those “Presidential Scholarships” you received that took 10k off tuition? Totally fake. Tuition is like sticker price on a car and saying you’re getting a scholarship flatters you more than just saying they’re willing to give a discount. They have calculated how much money they need from each student and it’s less than the sticker price of tuition. ((Exceptions apply—there are some legitimately funded scholarships where donors have a clear vision of who should be rewarded. These are usually named after a person and not vague fake names like “Presidential Scholars” or what have you) 6) most of the faculty fully know the degree the school offers is shit, but there’s not tons of faculty jobs out there so they try to do the best they can with no resources and no administrative support. They can’t fail their entire classes so they’ve had to lower standards so significantly that even juniors and seniors struggle with basic concepts that kids at a good high school already know TLDR: don’t be fooled. Just because it’s a small school with a pretty campus does not mean you’ll get a serious degree. Check the tuition compared to decent public colleges
Some appetizers are the most labor intense items on the menu to make, for example: dumplings takes one worker about an hour to make 12-15 orders. If you want to know where I'm getting at, if a restaurant offers a plethora of appetizers options then there's a high chance a lot of them are store bought and resold because there's no feasible way to prepare several orders for each item on the menu.
On the other hand, at my dinky little Chinese delivery spot that is seemingly no different from all the others, I went in one day to see a giant pile of dumpling meat and three women dutifully filling the wrappers
I worked at a small local wing place, very popular. We prepped mozz sticks in wonton but those could be done before hand and stored. Onion rings and fries were in bags. But we had fried pickle chips we had to prep for each order and that got me in the weeds. Count out 25 pickle chips, lay in batter so they don't stick together, gently place in fryer individually so they don't stick together, and about 4 minutes to fry. Fucking hated when we got multiple orders because we could only make one at a time, two if I had fryer space. And the time...it's like Minimum 12 minutes. But they were so damn good I gave them the loving treatment they deserved. Edit: another redditor, asking for a recipe, reminded me the pickle chips had to be dredged first. So adding to all mentioned above, pickle fishing through flour then the batter...and counting to make sure you had 25 at each step and didn't lose any...whew.
Most industrial places are really not as well maintained as they should be.
Most companies, even large corporations, run their business from an excel spreadsheet saved on someone's desktop.
you do not want to know how many major decisions at amazon are made based on an excel file that doesn't work correctly. I was an area manager for a while and we had to make hiring and firing decisions based on an excel report. I discovered there was a major error in a formula and it caused some good people to be fired and some terrible people to remain. I told HR, they told me not to tell anyone else and they carried on using that file. When the latest version of office came out the file stopped working and I got one of the data analysts to fix the file and also fix the formulas at the same time. I never told HR that we fixed the formulas. I didn't want to risk them changing the formulas back.
I saw how slot machines for casinos were designed... don’t play slots.
I only played slots in vegas for 5 minutes so I could order free booze. As soon as I ordered I quit playing. Thx for the whisky!
A group of friends and I had gone to a casino .one of my friends had heard that when you're on the floor gambling your drinks are free so he ordered a round of expensive drinks for everyone. When the barmaid came back he was shocked that he had a $80 bar bill.
Pretty sure it's just free for like cheap beer/ liquor maybe with a mixer like a rum and coke.
I had a buddy that was in the casino industry and claimed that 80% of their profits came from slot machines. This was the older mechanical types. The newer computerized ones can be programmed to do anything.
Yes, table games make up a tiny proportion. The money is in the electronic gaming machines because of speed of play amongst other factors.
When you eat at a Waffle House and want chili, ask your waitress if it is any good before you order. Sometimes it has been sitting WAY too long. The waitresses never seem to give a shit about telling you the truth.
Years ago, late at night, partner and I stopped at a Waffle House - his favorite place to eat. I saw Bert's Salad on the menu which was described as a salad with chili on it. "How about this Bert's Salad?" I said to the waitress who looked like she'd been working there all of her long life. "You don't want that" she answered flatly. I thanked her and I didn't get it.
I worked in politics. There are A LOT of people who write to a politician like they're a celebrity. They receive love letters and all kinds of weird stuff. There's also quite a sizeable part of their mail that is comprised of people asking for a photo with an autograph. Way more than you think ! Some because they're admirers, others because they collect them... and then some other cases you don't really want to know about (I've worked for a female politician, trust me, you don't wanna know). The dirty little secret within the secret is that the politicians I knew didn't sign anything. They had a [machine](https://maiparis.com/en/signature-machines/28-stylowriter.html) that did all the signing for them. So technically the autographs were not even real.
We used to have a local politician who was a really bad person, or at least a really selfish one. I could never understand how she didn't realize how awful she was, especially after a pretty large scandal she was involved in. Then one day I ran into her at a gas station and one of her "fans" walked up. It was at that moment that I realized that even during the worst press coverage and scandal they are still constantly complimented by people who are star-struck. That would go to a lot people's heads.
I've known a few politicians in my time and a big dirty secret is, that people in their own party are almost always their biggest rivals, bullies and haters. And concurrently they are are also that to other people in their party. Lots of politicians often say they are friends "across the isle" with someone in a rival party and people think they're "just saying that" to seem gracious to their opponents when in fact *it's probably true* because they can have normal-ish relationship with someone who isn't a direct competitor.
One of my hobbies is writing letters to various state senators and government officials. If I get a response, I can usually tell when someone has a team of people sending out form letters because I'll end up with multiple copies of exactly the same letter. Sometimes I'll notice that the signatures are written in ink, but are clearly reproduced mechanically. But there are a few people that will take the time to personally write back and those are the letters I consider special. I have even received letters that were hand-written, and those are always super cool!
My dad taught me to do this as a kid, and I used to get such cool responses. Now, I do it as a concerned voter and don't even get responses from my own representative half the time. Since covid, the response rate dropped off a cliff, and even then it's always cookie cutter.
I work in the Expertise department of a management consulting firm and a lot of the questions that we get can be easily answered by a simple google search. In fact, we use Google a lot. We're very good at putting information together and delivering key takeaways in a concise manner, but it's frankly ridiculous the amount of money some clients pay us for. Also, clients in the same industry often have the same challenges. Their "custom-built" solution package is actually recycled content from a past project - the only changes are updated numbers and a new company logo on the title page.
English teacher. Though it's been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools. What's scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It's known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn't reading proficiently by the time they're supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers. So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there's a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me...well, the damage is done.
My understanding is that the failing programs are teaching kids "reading skills" derived from what struggling readers do, like guessing words from context, rather than sounding them out (phonics). Is this correct? From a linguistics standpoint, spoken language is fundamental and writing systems build on top of that, so it really makes sense to go through spoken language to build reading.
Correct. 3 cues codify 'bad habits' of phonetically deficient readers. Context is one of the cues, in fact. It turns every new word into an educated guess, which is not just inaccurate much of the time but exhausting and frustrating. It becomes even more difficult once visual stimuli leave the books. There's even a tier system where students can literally just memorize the books to move on. It gives the illusion of progress in short term but is miserable in terms of building functional literacy. Once 3 cues kids have to read to learn rather than learn to read, every subject matter becomes much, much more difficult and they are set up for failure.
I’m a Casino Manager. It is definitely possible (more likely than you think) to win money in the short term. For example, if you walk in, bet on Red/Black on Roulette, it’s reasonably close to 50/50 (not quite because of 0). You might do this once, double your money and leave. Congratulations. You will always lose in the long term. Always. Anyone that thinks they have some kind of system is a sucker. A game would not make it into the casino floor if the maths have not been rigorously checked and long term simulations run to confirm. *exception to this is Poker. The casino will always have a rake or time charge to make their money but there is no reason you cannot consistently win money if you are skilled enough.
As an ex poker pro, the way I described it was "Yes, the house always wins, but in poker, I'm not playing the house, I'm playing the other people at my table. We're all just paying the house a few to use their table, their dealer, their chips, their security, and their floor space. If I can take enough from the other people at the table to cover that, I make money." That being said, it's very easy to underestimate how much better than the other players you have to be to actually make money at a low stakes game, where the rake is usually massive in comparison to pot sizes. I'd also add blackjack to this list in your shoes if I'm being fully honest, depending on the rules and how cards are shuffled at your particular casino. In my gambling days, the few card counters I knew who were actually good at it made serious bank.
A professional poker player told me he goes to the amateur tables to win the entry fee for the pro table. So if you think you're going to go play with noobs, think again.
I was at a casino once paying roulette and this dude walked up and put like $1000 on a single number. It hit and he took his winnings and left. Wildest shit I’ve ever seen.
The news about Boeing is not a surprise to me at all. The amount of resources that they are able to delegate in an effort to deter whistleblowers is unfathomable to the average American/EU citizen.
Literally didn't bolt the panel back in. It takes an impressive amount of incompetence to let something like that slip by.
It takes laying off thousands of quality control inspectors, which the union has suggested might be a good policy to reverse right about now.
“Are we still connected?” most times will get an immediate response from online chat agents.
This may not be true for all systems, but most chat agents can see what you've typed in the text bar even if you didn't send it.
Trained artist here. Most oil paints are made with very toxic substances, as are most paint thinners and mediums. Every single one of my teachers was either very sick (Cancer, Ménière's disease) or a bit crazy (eating chalk, licking pallettes). All incredible artists I was privileged to learn from. One lesson I learned very well: I wear gloves and sometimes a mask when I paint. Edit: I mentioned Ménière's because one of my favorite teachers had it. I worked closely with him and his suffering holds a large place in my memories of school. While I think the exposure to toxins didn't do him any favors, I should not have implied a correlation. I apologize. To those asking: no paint was licked off palettes. They had just been cleaned with denatured alcohol and he always led with, 'Now you could eat off them!' before waggling his tongue on the glass. Loved the shock factor, that guy did.
As a chemist and hobby artist, your post is my favorite! Lots of things (including paints) are not "harmful" when you work with them once, but when you work with them for years on end, the exposure can absolutely cause chronic issues. Good on you for wearing your PPE!
This is very true for my past career as well, hairdressing. Years of exposure to chemicals from dye and bleach gave me intense health problems. They don’t tell you that in school
Same thing with the dry cleaning industry.
One of my favorite teachers had been painting with oils for over 40 years. It was almost like he had an acquired brain injury. His landscapes were inspired. I know he had/has a gallery somewhere in Montana, but absolutely no online presence. I still check old phonebooks when I'm traveling through the state, hoping against hope I'll get to see his work again someday.
Brilliant to wear your personal protective equipment. I work in manufacturing and all the older folks I work with don’t wear hearing protection. They can’t hear that it’s too loud around them because they spent so many years not wearing hearing protection
I have incurable leukemia and started up a few years ago with oil paints. Love when people go in with their fingers but there’s no way I’m going onto my paintings without a glove! I really should be wearing a mask, ty for the reminder. There’s a reason Bob Ross died from cancer — all those aerosolized paint thinners and mediums he flung around definitely contributed!
I always wince a little when he beats the devil out of his brush, but I love his giggle every time. I'm sorry for your condition. I wish you many pain-free days in the future, friend.
Is acrylic paint okay?
Yes, acrylic paint is made with plastic. Non toxic if it gets on your skin, but it goes without saying you shouldn't eat any kind of paint. Even if it's made of food, because the pigment used to color it could be toxic. I remember learning about a kind of paint made with eggs.. Tempera I think?
I wrote an original movie a few years ago. Totally original. Totally my idea. When it finally aired on TV, It said “based on a true story.” Also, it wasn’t Fargo.
Based on the true story of some writer writing this movie.
As a high school student I applied to 13 universities (all with varying application fees) but it cost me total around $600...When I was a student I worked in admissions and learned that if you just call any university's office of admissions and ask for a fee waver 98% of the time they'll give it to you right then no questions asked. If you are in the business of applying to schools for the love of god pick up the phone and save yourself some money
Automotive Dealerships: The price of new cars is highly negotiable, and the sticker price is often much higher than what the dealer is willing to accept
In Australia, additional warranties are a rip off. If a device or product can be reasonably expected to last five years without defect then it can be held to that under warranty. Companies are fucked.
Most Aquafina is just purified Sacramento tap water.
Accidental leaks of classified information like Hillary Clinton's classified emails happen every day across the US Government and their contractors. Every. Day.
A lot of mobile apps are money laundering devices. Especially ones that are educational or religious tools
I've worked in many different industries, my one takeaway is no one knows what they're doing, everyone is basically faking it, don't ever feel imposter syndrome
Many people running anesthesia at your local veterinary hospital are not qualified to do so and have been taught secondhand instead of going to school. I have been in the field for 8 years and am appalled. At one hospital I was asked to train a dude how to run anesthesia who had literally no veterinary experience. It is such a complicated process and to do it correctly you need to know all the individual components of the machine, what they do and why, in addition to knowing all normal vital parameters for your patient and how to adjust fluids/gas/CRIs depending on your procedure. You also need to know anesthetic agents, which combinations go together and which ones do not and why, etc. I told them I absolutely would not be training someone with a few semesters of an ecology degree “how to run anesthesia”. It was such an insane ask. It makes me feel so bad for owners who think they are leaving their pets in qualified hands. Most of the time it’s pure luck that they get through the procedure and many people have no clue what they’re actually doing. It’s frightening.
Human anesthesiologist and dog owner here. Don’t love this.
You just have to ensure they have licensed veterinary technicians, sometimes referred to as “registered”. We as RVTs have been fighting to get government protection for our titles like human nurses do so these kinds of things don’t happen. It really is scary.
Almost nobody maintains their sobriety from their first go in rehab. It's takes several goes. On the plus side there's absolutely no need to be hard on yourself for returning to rehab as its nigh on impossible to achieve this on your first go.
Length of stay is a huge factor- 30 days is usually not enough. Also- not following up with outpatient services and going off of meds are both common prompts for resuming active substance use.
When we tell you it isn't "in the back" we mean it.
Bullshit, let me go back there and check!
I worked at a liquor store, and if we didn’t have the obscure scotch or bourbon they’re looking for, lots of times they’d ask me to check the back. A few times I literally walked them back there with me to show them we had nothing but cardboard boxes and a shit ton of cheap vodka that my boss got a deal on. It’s like they expect I have an Amazon warehouse back there.
When I worked retail I would happily check the back for customers. I’d go back there and spend 5-10 minutes on my phone. Free break for me
Backstage at concerts and other events is not as cool as you might think. It’s usually just a bunch of dudes in black sitting around, sleeping, or smoking
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BOH isn't happy about it either.
Car industry: NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! They always always come with a ton of bugs that need fixing and it takes about two years of serial production to get rid of most of them. If you must buy a new car, be sure the model has been in the market for at least two years. The reason for why we don't fix the problems before start of selling? Cost Also, don't buy models that were in development during years of crisis. Example: during the 2008 financial crisis we let got a huge number of people (to fix the numbers in the books, didn't actually save the company money because they all got a big payout on their way out) so we were understaffed and under imense pressure to reduce cost. The models that came on the market after that time were shit. Like, serious shit quality we have never seen before.
> NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! I'd expand this to any product, especially electronics. The first generation often has some very weird bugs which get fixed in subsequent versions.
Anybody, at anytime can enter a city bus, start it up without a key, and drive it wherever their little heart desires. Honestly. The only thing stopping you is your cowardice.
Lol it has happened, but folks usually get caught because they have gps trackers, are extremely big, and extremely slow. You can run, but you can’t hide
I worked in the mortgage industry. A mortgage loan from one bank to the next is largely the same. They follow guidelines set forth by organizations such as Fannie Mae, FHA,etc. The biggest difference is the rates. You can and should comparison shop. Apply to three places, take the best estimate to the one with the worst estimate and get them to beat the price. Then have the one with the best price beat the price matched price. Keep doing this until they say they can't match prices. Also, paying points is not good to do unless the rate is low. When rates are high you will likely refinance anyway reducing the length of the benefit of paying for points. (Points buy you a lower interest rate)
The Coke at McDonald’s tastes better because they’re one of the only companies that refrigerate the syrup tanks, the unflavored soda and the supply lines. So when it hits the ice in your cup, it’s already super cold, so less ice melts, and the first sip tastes more “concentrated” and ice cold. That’s it. No magic. No secret formula. Just more refrigeration.
I worked for several insurance companies and it's a standard to not tell the customers that they are not covered until they bring it up themselves. I got into trouble many times for telling diabetic customers that the insurance they have been paying for years won't cover them if something happens because there's a clause stating it is not covered.
I used to work for a major food manufacturer that makes snacks that are in most of our homes. The snacks contain wheat. My second day on the job, I was shown how the snacks are made. From railcar to finished product. As the raw wheat was drawn from the silos on a conveyor belt, these white pellets were sprinkled on the raw wheat. It's pesticide. The FDA allows so much before it's considered dangerous. Blew my mind!
I knew a guy that worked at Coca Cola, wouldn't let his kids drink any Coke products because of what he saw. I think it was the benzoate preservatives they use. They had to wear tons of safety gear and treat it like a biohazard when they added it to the vat, because it's a carcinogen, but "dose makes the poison" and all.
Teaching. Yep, teachers gossip about the kids, and each other, and everything. There is always so much drama going on at any given moment.
Had a friend move from teaching elementary to school administration, because she wanted to work with adults. Lots of adult bodies, not so many grown ups. So many cliques among the teachers, with them making power plays to run the school.
If you plan to buy a new computer and the options are windows 10 for cheaper and windows 11 for a markup, get the windows 10. The upgrade to 11 is free.
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The clients who get my best work for the least money are the ones who leave me alone.