derfunkatron

I think the real advice is that you shouldn’t do post-graduate studies unless it’s paid for, comes with a stipend, or comes with an assistantship. Too many people (including myself) have paid for advanced degrees out of pocket only to find that they were pure coursework with no tangible experience.

The other piece of advice that isn’t often given is that post-graduate work really is training for jobs in academia. If that’s not where you want to end up, then those degrees are rarely useful (outside of academia). There are a few fields where masters-level is required for entry level jobs, but setting your course for a PhD is really a course to an academic post.

I used to smoke but then I started bike commuting and the urge to smoke diminished quickly. If anything, exercise should highlight just how bad smoking makes you feel.

The social “harm,” in the case of the Mormons, was that Brigham Young declared polygamy a requirement for going to heaven, which meant that every man needed at least two wives. Older and more established “patriarchs” would marry anyone from literal children to widows and divorcees. This led to some dubious practices for “acquiring wives” since the population can only support so many one-to-many marriages. Additionally, the Church originally would only sanction marriages within the Church, so you’d have to find not one, but multiple women of your own localized cult to marry. Divorce among Mormons during this time was actually common (which probably didn’t help their case with the other Christians back east who deemed divorce a social problem).

The scale of polygamy in Utah during that time was staggering and Brigham Young had around 56 wives (the number is disputed and changes depending on the source and the criteria). Naturally, this formal, institutionalized approach to polygamy created an environment where abuse was rampant. Anna Eliza Young, one of Brigham’s 56 wives, even sued him for neglect and abuse after they divorced. She was then excommunicated from the LDS church after divorcing him.

But the real reason Mormon polygamy was soecifixally outlawed was because Brigham Young was an autocrat and was well on his way to building a rival country in Utah. The US obviously wanted Utah to remain a territory, but the Mormons were pushing for the creation of their Zion (the Biblical refuge from persecution and wandering, similar to but not the same as the state of Israel; this ventures off deep into Mormon theology territory and it’s best not to go there). The US civil war was also going on and the Union figured that a territory going rogue and establishing a new landlocked country wasn’t ideal. So even though Mormon polygamy became federally prohibited it wasn’t enforced until Utah petitioned to become a US state.

All of this to say that, historically, the anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy laws in the US require a bit of context to unpack. In general, the US should probably relax its legal position on bigamy and polygamy, but in the end, as another poster pointed out, polygamy makes property claims and inheritance more legally complicated (especially when crossing state lines as is often the case in bigamy). Social attitudes still have a ways to go before anyone will bother with reversing the various anti-polygamy laws from the 19th century.

What a total failure.

I don’t see any reference to the kid’s performance in alignment with APGs. She makes multiple references to clear KPIs while acknowledging his underperformance. Any toddler can mimic their parental units, but without a clear data-driven performance plan, I don’t see a future for him in that family.

There’s clear synergy between her and her spouse, but she admits to deficiencies in multiple KRAs. Delegation and outsourcing are powerful tools but must be specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant.

I read your other post and thought I’d give you some insight about why you shouldn’t pursue another degree, especially in music. I did multiple degrees in music and I have never worked professionally in music. In fact, by the time I completed the program I hated playing my instrument and didn’t play for almost a decade.

The only reason to attend a university for music is if you need/want the credential or the ensemble experience. One uncomfortable truth is that most freshman piano students have over a decade of training before they start college. If you aren’t ready for the entrance audition now, then music school isn’t the way to go.

You can take private lessons (often from the same professors you’d have in school) for instrument technique, theory, repertoire, and ear training. You don’t need the university for that.

One thing people don’t like to talk about when it comes to music programs is that they are lifestyle degrees as much as they are intellectual degrees. There’s the classist element, the physical element (as a pianist or guitarist you can’t use your hands for any physical labor), and the financial element (instrument maintenance, performance quality instruments, travel, etc.).

Take the investment advice from others in this thread to set yourself up and then find some private teachers. You don’t need a degree to study music.

Edit: DM me if you want to talk about this more.

This right here. The existence of carriers is what has always allowed people to own copies of things they themselves did not create.

Digital “sales” are using mediation to outright ignore that fact that ideas must be expressed in a physical manner for sale. And yes, digital files are physical as long as they continue to be written to storage media like hard drives and tape. Selling access licenses is what they are doing (and I’m okay with that when the companies doing it aren’t asshats about it.) but they also need to stop derailing the discourse with statements about how “we’ve never owned anything ever because we’re not the copyright holder!”

All of this just demonstrates how much IP law has lagged behind and how abusive corporate IP holders are when exploiting loopholes and faulty mental models.

I can understand that and how it would be somewhat comforting to know you have a purpose. The thing that trips me up about this particular thought experiment is that once the realization sets in that one has implanted memories then naturally one has to doubt every single thought, feeling, and memory. That instability of self is terrifying to me (not to say that I have any way to confirm that I’m currently not a replicant).

The definition of bootlegging is so broad that I think you can even legally be charged with bootlegging if you source your alcohol products for sale from anywhere other than a distributor, e.g. buying in bulk from Costco or a discount liquor place to stock the bar.

In general, I think it typically means illegal transport and sale, since not too many people have historically trusted moonshiners or developed a taste for moonshine. There was that weird moment in the mid-2010s where reality TV caused a huge interest in moonshine, but that was just distillers realizing that they could capitalize on a trend by making unaged 80-proof corn liquor, throwing some cinnamon sticks and apple slices in a Mason jar, and calling it “moonshine.”

8 fluid ounces is a cup, 4 cups is a quart, 4 quarts is a gallon. Most canned drinks are 12 fl. oz, or 3/4 of a pint.

8 ounces is half a pound.

It makes perfect sense!

This is an interesting take, I guess.

To fill you in, the replicants in Blade Runner are banned from Earth and are typically used in extremely dangerous lines of work like asteroid mining and space warfare, or sex work and mundane industrial labor. They aren’t considered people and are literally corporate property (i.e. slaves).

I personally side with the replicants who came back to earth to demand their makers “correct” the genetic time bomb they encoded into their DNA.

Certain strains of Christianity in the US are really apocalypse cults. Somewhere in the story there’s something about being persecuted and being threatened with death unless you renounce Christ.

They need to be persecuted because it reinforces the idea that they are living in the end times and therefore closer to rapture or whatever.

Edit: persecution is also a key part of Christianity’s origin story (Peter being crucified for his belief, Christians being fed to the lions in Rome, etc.).

There’s a movement within black metal that calls itself “National Socialist Black Metal” (NSBM). It’s what happens when any group of dickheads insert themselves into an existing scene or genre. Similar thing happened to skinhead punks in England in the 80s.

Some times it boils down to here’s a black metal band comprised solely of neo-Nazis and while they sing songs about trolls and despair they also do Nazi shit in their spare time. This only fuels the assertion you made earlier because a lot of times you can’t even tell they are NSBM from the music, you have to have read an interview, listened to their stage banter, or looked up a list of known NSBM-adjacent bands.