Wow… I feel like “substance over form” contradicts a core sovcit belief: That there are specific magic phrases and processes that must be executed precisely to be valid. The systems in place intentionally hide, obscuring, and otherwise make it as difficult as possible for the sovcit to perform the rituals correctly. But if they do, they will “win”.

Of course, leave it to a sovcit to find another contradictory concept to shove into the rest of their contradictory beliefs.

Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Close up

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

Oh hell yeah. I want to see a Dendy reboot.

I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

Or use a scale.

If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.

Haha. Re: option 4, I was being glib. A more charitable way to say it is that they want to connect with you and spend time talking with you (and they don’t realize you are busy and want to keep working on your task). A lot of NTs will use time talking to coworkers as a way to recharge. To them it’s a nice break from what they’re doing.

Good context and explanation. Thanks. After reading that, I’m less sure my reasons apply as much to your particular situation, but I’ll throw them out there anyway:

1. They assume you don’t just want the answer but why that is the answer. For me, I tend the learn and remember better if I understand why X is correct. If I’m just told X, I’m more likely to forget that answer later. If I have the context around the answer, I understand it better and can recall it better. Similarly, they may think you have (or will have) similar questions, so are showing you how to find the answer to those related questions.

2. They don’t realize your question is precise/pointed and think you will have follow on questions, so are answering the potential related questions.

3. if the question doesn’t have one right answer or they think their answer is right but could be wrong, they are providing background sort of to say “This is how I came to this conclusion, but you may come to a different one or there may be alternatives.”

4. they just like to hear themselves talk and are happy to have a break from their work.

Aside: when I said “they assume you don’t just want the answer…” or similar statements, I don’t mean that they are literally stopping and thinking about whether or not that is what you want. It’s probably subconscious and their default way of answering questions. Understandably, this leads to your frustration: even though you are giving a clear, well thought out question, they aren’t stopping and thinking about why you asked the question that way. Instead they are answering in their default mode.

NT here. I’m interested to learn more about this. I see that when you ask a question, you’re just looking for a concise answer. Is that fairly typical for people who are autistic or something that tends to vary a lot?

I have some possible answers for why NT people tend to communicate like this. If you want to hear them, let me know.

Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.

I’m pretty sure it’s just headphones attached to the nasal mask.

Funded and authored by the company wanting to sell you their disinfectant.

Conflicts of interest: Drs. Julie McKinney and M. Khalid Ijaz are engaged in R&D at Reckitt Benckiser LLC. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Funding/support: This study was funded by a grant to the University of Arizona from Reckitt Benckiser.

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

I honestly wanted to walk when I heard that but my mom and her husband wanted to still give them a chance.

You must be young. You need to find someone with sense to help you with the car buying process. Your mom and her husband are not it if they still hadn’t figured out the dealership and sales guy were shady at that point.