In 2004, as a senior in high school, I tried enlisting in the Marines (infantry, what was I thinking based on the year). I scored 99 on the ASVAB (finished way earlier than everyone else) with a high SAT score as well.
Passed all the physicals at Fort Dix. I was rejected.
Soon after an Army recruiter called me and said they are willing to take me.
Someone told me I was rejected because of high test scores. I didn't really believe them, but it kind of makes sense.
> Someone told me I was rejected because of high test scores. I didn't really believe them, but it kind of makes sense.
Armed forces does a lot of tracking and they need a mix of people. It makes sense to try to get people into jobs that work for both the person and the seevice, and where the person is likely to stay (if the service wants you to). Marine infantry is an important and prestigious job, but it might not be something that would have kept your interest.
I think he's implying that SpaceX's success is evidence that Musk can possibly deliver on the robotaxis and Optimus forecasts, thus justifying TSLA's multiple. I for one am skeptical.
This may not make you feel better, but I was lonely until maybe age 25. That was the year I graduated and started my first job and made my first two real friends. Before that I sat alone in the back of the lecture hall in University and hated on all the fun-having classmates.
Age 25 was also when I met my first girlfriend that lasted less than a year. Age 34 was when I met my second girlfriend, who became my wife, and how we are separated. Long story short, I'm pretty content with my life now. You can say I'm a bit of a late bloomer.
I thought I would be alone forever too, so much so that in college I aspired to be a Buddhist monk.
What helped me was learning how to be less socially awkward through work interactions. When I was 32 I solo backpacked Europe which made me seem like a more interesting person. Also I'm a bit of a people pleaser and I was helpful to some key people in my life and they are now my good friends. Also I saved and invested a good chunk of my income which kind of helps overall with confidence.
> People find me funny and when I do talk to people we have decent conversations (though small talk tends to bore me). However that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t bring me any kind of comfort or fulfillment. I’ve attributed my lack of friends to something that places all the blame on me. Maybe I’m ugly, maybe I’m not funny enough, maybe I’m dumb.
I've felt all those things at some point. You don't have to be attractive or funny or a genius. I've always walked around with these recurring fantasies of being some secretly impressive superhero that saved the day publicly or had all these amazing talents and everyone would realize my worth. I realize now that everyone is too into their own lives to care, and even if they seem to admire something about you, they see it from the perspective of how it benefits themselves. This is absolutely fine, and human.
I guess what I'm saying is that you'll grow out of this phase. Right now I have all the friends I could ever want, ironically at a phase I'm my life I want to be more solitary.
I once watched a video of a man holding what looked to be a bicycle battery walking into an elevator. After the doors closed, it seemed to have exploded and burst into flame in his hands, and the aftermath was charred remains.
After seeing this I refuse to sleep near my 20,000 mAh power bank. I saw this Jackery power station for sale for an ultra discounted price and noticed it was not lithium iron phosphate and I noped so fast.
Someone once told me that a person who doesn't believe anything will fall for everything. So if we don't know what to believe, do we all join our own conspiracy communities? Like on a grand scale?
No, we apply appropriate skepticism by considering context, history, motivations and prior knowledge of both the source and the persons or entities involved. The uncomfortable reality that no news sources were ever worthy of our full trust isn't new or recent since the rise of AI or even digital editing. So, to me, it's a net positive that at least now many more people are aware of it.
AI-generated media elements as well as the slightly more labor-intensive manual digital manipulation before AI (eg Photoshop) are both almost quaintly mild because at least there are digital artifacts which can be fairly easily detected, disproven or otherwise countered. Whereas the far more subtle but no less deceptive techniques like changing the order of interview questions in editing or selectively excerpting answers are essentially indetectable and have been widely used to skew reporting at mainstream national news outlets since at least the 1970s.
About 20 years ago I was professionally involved behind-the-scenes with the creation of mainstream news content at a national level. Seeing how the sausage was made was pretty shocking. Subtle systemic bias was constant and impacted almost everything in ways it would be hard for non-insiders to detect (like motivated editorial curation or pre-aligned source selection). Blatantly overt bias was slightly less common but hardly infrequent. Seeing it happen first-hand disabused me of the notion there were ever "reliable sources of record" which could be trusted. While it's true the better outlets would tend to be mostly correct and mostly complete on many topics, even the very best were still heavily impacted by internal and external partisan influences - and, of course, bias tended to be exerted on the things that mattered.
I am a pharmacist who dabbles in web dev. We should easily be replaced because all of our work on checking pill images and drug interactions are actually already automated, or the software already tells us everything.
If every doctor agreed to electronically prescribe (instead of calling it in, or writing it down) using one single standard / platform / vendor, and all pharmacy software also used the same platform / standard, then our jobs are definitely redundant.
I worked at a hospital where basically doctors and pharmacists and nurses all use the same software and most of the time we click approve approve approve without data entry.
Of course we also make IVs and compounds by hand, but that's a small part of our job.
Passed all the physicals at Fort Dix. I was rejected.
Soon after an Army recruiter called me and said they are willing to take me.
Someone told me I was rejected because of high test scores. I didn't really believe them, but it kind of makes sense.