• 452: Last week Steven Crowder and Jeremy Boreing gave the world a Masterclass on how NOT to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal. Steven reacted emotionally to lowball offers with onerous terms. Jeremy reacted similarly and escalated an already bad situation., submitted on 2023-01-24 00:40:05+08:00.
• 453: Don’t stare at her!!! Shes really uncomfortable., submitted on 2023-01-24 10:24:13+08:00.
• 454: Parents Calling on Your Behalf, submitted on 2023-01-26 23:09:10+08:00.
• 455: professor called me out in front of class when trying to leave, submitted on 2023-01-27 04:32:07+08:00.
• 456: 100% similarity score on TurnItIn, submitted on 2023-01-27 12:32:20+08:00.
• 457: Finacial aid suspension, submitted on 2023-01-28 17:00:56+08:00.
• 458: I’ve been playing guitar for about 2 years now and I’ve been using a squire Stratocaster. I’m wanting to get a new guitar now and was wondering if this is worth it?, submitted on 2023-01-29 04:05:59+08:00.

452: Last week Steven Crowder and Jeremy Boreing gave the world a Masterclass on how NOT to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal. Steven reacted emotionally to lowball offers with onerous terms. Jeremy reacted similarly and escalated an already bad situation., submitted on 2023-01-24 00:40:05+08:00.

—– 452.1 —–2023-01-24 14:37:30+08:00:

The OP’s article’s headline is somewhat misleading.

First, the word “emotional” is meant to manipulate the reader. That word is used to imply irrationality, without saying “irrational.” And if “irrational” is not what OP meant, I suggest better copy editing. Crowder wasn’t being irrational; the deal the Daily Wire offered was very unsophisticated, incompetently drafted and very heavy handed against the Daily Wire’s potentially recruited talent.

Second, Crowder did not “take . . . public” any contract negotiations. Crowder unequivocally rejected Boreing’s offer and ended their negotiations, without countering. The negotiation between Crowder and The Daily Wire ended before Crowder started talking about what happened.

Third, Boreing unilaterally interpreted Crowder’s “public” discussion as an effort to continue negotiation by other means. Boering speculated that Crowder’s public comments regarding their negotiations and the terms they were negotiating was an effort to continue negotiation by some other means. A part of me wonders if Boreing quoted Clausewitz while trying to make sense of the situation.

Fourth, Boreing revealed the terms proposed by the Daily Wire’s standard contract and Crowder did not. I really don’t know what Boreing was thinking. He is either not even close to as good of a businessman as he thinks he is, or he assumes everyone is just going to hear the amount offered and inquire no further. But I’m inclined to think Boreing just isn’t very good at making sophisticated offers, forecasting value to be added from a deal or even understanding how value in such a deal is added. I think Boreing just made the best offer the Daily Wire was in a position to convey given their (limited) understanding of valuing future revenue streams from monetizing talent.

Crowder’s point in going public, however, was that Jeremy Boreing and the Daily Wire’s standard terms placed Crowder on a leash as long as media platforms’ moderation policies.

And he’s right.

The Daily Wire’s terms would have cut Crowder’s production budget and considerably financially penalized Crowder’s company as a result of something totally beyond his control.

And that is unconscionable.

Boreing and the Daily Wire walk away from this looking incompetent. Not to mention hypocritical.

453: Don’t stare at her!!! Shes really uncomfortable., submitted on 2023-01-24 10:24:13+08:00.

—– 453.1 —–2023-02-25 13:57:14+08:00:

I see women like this in the gym, from time to time. But if I’m looking at what they’re doing, it’s because they’re doing stupid things that put themselves in danger or place others’ safety at risk.

I’ve only had one woman go into thundercunt mode on me at the gym.

And my response was simple:

Don’t flatter yourself, darling. You’re not that attractive. And you’re not my type, even if you were.

Then she was offended I wasn’t sexually harassing her.

So when my (now ex) boyfriend got done with his set, I slapped his ass and kissed him on the cheek right in front of her.

I’d much rather have sexually harassed him.

454: Parents Calling on Your Behalf, submitted on 2023-01-26 23:09:10+08:00.

—– 454.1 —–2023-01-27 12:10:32+08:00:

I will not talk to any student’s parents about their child’s experience in my class.

However, any parent who has the unmitigated audacity to contact me for such a purpose would likely never forget the experience.

Those conversations tend to proceed along the lines of:

[First name of parent], let us explore together what your decision to communicate with me means about you, both as a parent and as a human being.

After we complete that educational exercise, let us examine how your parental failures have brought us to this point.

It never goes well for the parents.

But then I tend to feel bad for the students, because of how unbelievably fucked up their home lives must have been.

455: professor called me out in front of class when trying to leave, submitted on 2023-01-27 04:32:07+08:00.

—– 455.1 —–2023-01-27 11:37:58+08:00:

Speaking as someone who once taught similar classes, I think your professor probably doesn’t appreciate how much daylight exists between the things he’s saying and what the class is understanding. It is also entirely possible that he just doesn’t have a clue how to interpret the actions of other human beings. I had professors like that when I was an undergraduate and graduate student as well.

I would bet you’re not the only one who is not learning the material, and this is something that should be brought to his attention. You might not be in the best position to do it, though. It sounds like he may have been genuinely surprised that anyone might not be following what he’s saying, because I’m sure it’s perfectly clear in his imagination of how he communicated it.

—– 455.2 —–2023-01-27 11:48:20+08:00:

I had a prof freshman semester that wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom.

College freshmen can be irritating as hell. But a professor that won’t let students use the restroom likely has psychological, or other behavioral health issues.

I am serious about that, too. Exercising that level of control over students in a classroom is not something you do if you’re in a proper state.

In my experience, the professors who conduct their affairs with such an attitude also have a delusionally grandiose sense of their own importance and the importance of their material.

Usually, that is to compensate for the fact that such a professor tends to have a low h-index, almost certainly struggles to receive grants and likely hasn’t even published anything anyone cares about in many years (if ever).

There are high-stakes environments, like where one wrong move can result in billion-dollar losses. But a college freshman class doesn’t even come close.

You tried to? He’d call you out as you were walking, demand to know where you were going, whether it was an emergency, etc.

I’m going to be very blunt about this: I would have tormented that professor for the rest of the semester. I had exactly one professor with an ego problem and his professional inferiority became a subject of conversation in every single class.

I routinely volunteered that I noticed how his colleagues wrote papers on subjects he was interested in, which were cited by others in his field as opposed to the papers he wrote.

I found substantive errors throughout numerous of his papers, and related them to the class material in any way I could, for any reason or sometimes for no reason at all other than because I thought he was a jackass.

And he was a jackass. An insufferable jackass. So I returned that garbage in kind. He despised me, and still hates me to this day. Which is just fine because he’s a fucking idiot, who no one wants to work with.

—– 455.3 —–2023-01-27 12:00:55+08:00:

You may dislike your professor, and you may not come to lectures, but common social etiquette of attending lectures requires you to sit through the end or sit in the back row if you know you need to leave early.

Former professor here, and I very strongly disagree.

Students have lives outside of my class (I hope), and that’s their business. Not mine. When you sit in my class, you are an adult and that’s how you’re going to be treated.

That means I assume that if you leave, you have a good reason to do it. Or whatever reason you have is at least good enough to justify your action. That being the case, I’m never going to stop you. Even if you have a shitty reason, that’s on you. That’s another part of what being an adult means.

I don’t even care if students learn the material. If you don’t want to learn what I’m teaching, don’t take my class (or change your areas of focus so it isn’t required). Just don’t disrupt others who do.

It is not my job to hold your hand through my material. I will teach and you will learn, assuming you can keep up. I try to make sure the class can keep up overall and I tailored my approach to account for what an actually reasonable starting point is (with appropriate foundation being laid at each iterative step).

Leaving costs me nothing. If anything, it reduces the number of bodies in my class.

I also made it very clear to all freshmen I taught that I would not enforce the department’s attendance policy because I thought it was stupid.

The policy was that if you missed more than three classes without a doctor’s note, you had to be dropped half a letter grade. That policy was imposed by one of my former colleagues, who was so stupid I do not understand how she even managed to obtain a B.S., much less a Ph.D. in anything.

Like most failures in academia, she found her way into university administration.

I also invited my students to e-mail her their thoughts on why her policy was stupid, with specific points that I suggested.

—– 455.4 —–2023-01-27 14:50:16+08:00:

Film History

Wow. I was expecting you to be talking about some intro-level core requirement class.

I must rant a bit. The following has nothing to do with your comment. Just my waxing nostalgic about electives in my college days.

I had a philosophy professor encourage the class to experiment with drugs. Which I of course already was. We got drunk in the kind of bar where the bartender had a handlebar mustache (that I still remember all these years later) when the class was over. This was my introduction to Jean Baudrillard, for example.

I had a contemporary film-focused class that once assigned old reruns of my all-time favorite show, Queer as Folk (the Showtime version).

I could go on. But I think these are what electives should be, in addition to some others that ensure you have some minimal level of cultural literacy.

For example, I took a couple of hard-hitting courses in Russian literature, a course in French lit and several others in non-mathematical philosophy.

You probably were hoping to find something like a source of baseline cultural literacy in your film class. Instead, you got a basket case. Next time you see a professor like that, drop their class.

456: 100% similarity score on TurnItIn, submitted on 2023-01-27 12:32:20+08:00.

—– 456.1 —–2023-01-27 15:21:34+08:00:

Alright, kiddo. I’ve got good news. And I’ve got bad news.

Here’s the good news: I believe you.

Here’s the bad news: The reason I believe you is because I have a little bit of insight into what TurnItIn is and how it works.

What TurnItIn actually measures is not the same thing that it is held out to measure. That platform is marketed as competent to determine “plagiarism” based on “similarity or dissimilarity with a finite and pathetically flawed set of reference data, which is not even close to the same thing. Except that isn’t plagiarism.

Plagiarism is when you steal someone else’s ideas and pass them off as your own, like George Lucas did when he made “Dune for idiots,” known as “Star Wars.”

So here are the problems: What exactly is “similarity”? How is that determined? How “similar” does some piece of language have to be to some other piece of language, to be flagged as “similar”? And at exactly what level of generality or specificity?

TurnItIn’s methods are both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. For example, they’re over-inclusive because they capture a lot more than what is actually plagiarized. They’re under-inclusive because fail to capture entire universes of what is plagiarized and what might ever be plagiarized (because of their limited reference datasets). That program doesn’t even have a known error rate, much less anything that might vaguely resemble a method to determine its own error rate.

But the problem is that the people who make decisions about how to detect “plagiarism” are typically brain-dead fuckwits, with about as much cognitive activity as a certain fish that participated in an experiment a number of years ago. And the marketing efforts of the company that makes TurnItIn have as much impact on university admin as the pictures those researchers showed the fish.

Just because you have a piece of alleged technology that says it does something, doesn’t mean that technology actually does the thing it says it does.

TurnItIn is to plagiarism what patent medicines are to health maladies.

457: Finacial aid suspension, submitted on 2023-01-28 17:00:56+08:00.

—– 457.1 —–2023-01-29 07:22:07+08:00:

Communicate to them that withdrawing financial aid will result in financial hardship that, in all reality, may result in your dropping out of school.

That being said, I think you should withdraw and transfer to another school.

—– 457.2 —–2023-01-29 12:21:21+08:00:

It’s best to look around and see what your options are, and then make the call once you have all the information.

—– 457.3 —–2023-01-29 12:28:14+08:00:

I know it may not be worth more than a picture of air to someone who is drowning, but for what little that is . . .

I really do feel for your situation. And if you want to DM me when you hear back from your appeal, you can.

—– 457.4 —–2023-01-30 00:27:55+08:00:

It’s stressful because I come from a very religious and strict family of it’s either college or nothing.

You’ll make it.

Let me know what becomes of the appeal.

458: I’ve been playing guitar for about 2 years now and I’ve been using a squire Stratocaster. I’m wanting to get a new guitar now and was wondering if this is worth it?, submitted on 2023-01-29 04:05:59+08:00.

—– 458.1 —–2023-01-29 07:53:38+08:00:

Very true.

—– 458.2 —–2023-01-29 08:20:22+08:00:

Please list your guitars and what dog breeds they remind you of.

I would compare my EOB strat to a husky, but my early 70s vintage to an old german shepherd.

—– 458.3 —–2023-01-29 08:20:37+08:00:

Buy it.

—– 458.4 —–2023-01-29 12:25:32+08:00:

I’ve never owned a Les Paul.

Although it’s the only guitar my brother will play.

We debate Fender vs. Gibson periodically.