probably my favorite thing abt being a millennial is that i can lie on my resume abt shit like being proficient in excel bc i have the common sense to just google anything i dont know how to do which gives me a giant fucking edge over gen x in the job market bc somehow that strategy never occurs to employers and my underqualified ass looks like steve jobs every time i use a youtube tutorial to make a spreadsheet
Everyone in my office sings my praises for what I can do with excel for this exact reason, even though I joke with them that “I have no idea how to do that – but give me half an hour and an internet connection and I’ll figure something out for you.” I even once specifically said in response to my grandboss commenting on my excel skills, “You do realize that I just like…google stuff when you ask me to do something with excel that I don’t know how to do, right?”
But his praise didn’t change at all. There was no “Wait, that’s all it is?”
Instead, he said “Yes, but the fact that you think to do that – and that you know exactly how to phrase your searches and how to sift through the results to get the right answer, and you then integrate what you’ve learned and use it going forward – is still so much more than any of the rest of us [the other 5 ppl on my team are all mid-40s and up] can do. To you, it’s “just googling stuff,” but it’s still a unique and valuable skill you bring, so don’t shrug off the compliments so cavalierly, okay?“
And this was coming from an executive with an MBA. Don’t undervalue your googling skills, kids. It’s not lying if you know you can figure it out.
top tier search skills: finding the source of a rare meme
Googling for the thing in Excel was what I did in the test part of the interview for my current job
Hi, I’m here to propose that A.A. Milne’s distinctive syntax in the Winnie-the-Pooh books is a major origin of modern Capital Letters Used For Emphasis On The Internet. Observe:
(in which Pooh wryly self-deprecates)
(in which Eeyore masters modern sarcasm)
(in which Eeyore is vagueblogging)
(in which Owl says something i would absolutely type in the YOOL 2017)
(In which Eeyore continues to be a shining example to us all)
(in which Pooh describes a Big Mood)
(in which Piglet has a Relatable Experience)
I could go on, but you can read the books and find your own. It’s a weirdly modern-feeling layer to an old, thoroughly enjoyable story and most of the original Pooh books are online for free. I cited from this online text upload of the book. Enjoy!
holy shit i think you just cracked the linguistic case of the era
the space race may be the funniest point in history period and i’ll stand by that. the US is like “yes whoever gets into space first will prove once and for all that our economic model is superior and that we are, in general, the superior country of superior and smarter people.” then the soviets just went and did it and the US freaked out and needed to cover their ass so were like “WE MEAN THE MOON, WE MEAN THE FIRST TO LAND ON THE MOON.”
yeah its cus walking on the moon was cool as hell and all this other boring shit sucked ass
When I was a freshman in a red-state college, I had a professor who taught Newtonian physics with a super thick Russian accent. The student body was unusually conservative for a state college, so there was a sort of general bemusement about learning physics from a Russian, but even back then the Cold War was far enough in the past that not even the red tribe was inclined to stir up trouble about it.
He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though. Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically. And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.
One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little. So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”
And this beautiful man spins around on one heel to face the class, whiteboard marker triumphantly over his head, clearly having been waiting for this moment the entire semester:
It is never too early to start talking about outer space labor law
Like even NASA has been guilty of treating astronauts like organic robots in the past (see SkyLab Strike). You really think someone like Elon Musk will care about their employees working in microgravity beyond their ability to continue performing their job?
For example, NASA astronauts are currently required to work out two hours a day to keep up their bone and muscle mass. This helps prevent irreparable damage/loss and lets them eventually return to living their normal lives on Earth. But exercise equipment is heavy, and it costs $10000 per pound when you’re shooting something into orbit. That’s a lot! Can a company be trusted to send enough equipment into space for each of their employees to get that two hours in when the benefit is for the employees after they’ve served their time?
How long will these companies expect their employees to stay in microgravity when it’s cheaper for them to leave a single person up there for a long period of time than to bring them down and switch them out? If someone gets sick or wants to quit?
These are questions and concerns that will need to be addressed in the near future as the space industry becomes further and further commercialized and companies begin to break away from merely contracting for government space agencies.
Speaking as someone forever salty that we as leftists so often abdicate space stuff to the right-wing and the private sector, I am all for this.
