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Something that bothers me about a lot of people's sense of empathy is that they're only able to employ it by directly relating events to themselves. It's like a stereotypical "How would you feel if this happened to your daughter?" thing, where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it's possible for them to get into.

I also hear this a lot around disasters, whether they be natural, terrorist attacks, etc. If you're around somebody who has been anywhere near the location of the event, get ready for the "Gosh, that's so awful. I was only there six years ago, it could have been me." Can't you just fucking care about the wellbeing of things that aren't you? Feel bad because a bad thing happened, not by making it about yourself.

God this is true, there's a staggering amount of people that lack it. So much selfishness as well

Ur not wrong.

Yep and just waiting for their turn to speak

Same for apps and sites. Having to explain to someone multiple times that I'm not trying to force their users to be bilingual just because there is "lorem ipsum" text on the page is rough.

I frequently do blatantly inaccurate math just to spitball, and when I say the numbers that I'm computing out loud, people get amazed that I can keep track of so many numbers when I'm only tracking the result of the previous calculation and the operator that I'm about to perform.

I'm like, dude, if you accounted for the rounding errors, you would realize how fucking wrong I am, but this math is not precision-important, and so I'm just trying to get an idea of the scope of the numbers that I need to address whatever problem I'm working on.

For instance, if you asked me to spitball how far it is from Los Angeles, California to Atlanta, Georgia, and how long it would take you to drive that, I would assume you would average about 50 miles an hour after breaks and whatnot that you would be able to drive approximately 12 hours a day, which means you could clear 600 miles, and off the top of my head I would guess it's about 3,200 miles between Los Angeles and Atlanta, assuming that you stay on the 40 as much as you can once you get to Amarillo, TX, so I would assume that the average driver would take five days and approximately four hours to drive that distance.

This is very off the cuff, off the top of my head, I could be 600 miles off on the distance in either directions, I could be 10, 12 miles an hour in drive time off in either direction, and I could be off 4 or 5 hours or not even account for a co-driver on the trip.

You can do the trip in like 2ish days. I have done the trip in like twoish days.

But, reality and guesstimation are two separate things, and there's no reason to be amazed by somebody's guesstimation capabilities. It's very basic math that doesn't require any skill greater than your multiplication tables.

I don't know why more people aren't good at it.

People being bad at math isn't a new thing but it is getting worse now with everyone having a calculator (phone) in their pocket.

Also. Great time to dust off this old gem.

Honest question: what is there to learn? You've got a thread, a needle, you put the thread in the needle and then you stab the things that need to fit together with it. The only thing that i was told during such stabbing to a button once was that i should wrap the thread around the button when done, but it hasn't prevented me to attached them so far?

Agreed, fast fashion and it's equivalents have pretty much killed off basic repair in general. My great grandmother taught me how to rewire a lamp, and I think I'm the only person in my friend group that can do it. Most people just toss them when they stop working.

Nana was in her early 20s when the great depression hit, and her influence is probably why I'm so in favor of right-to-repair.

Eh, it depends. I don't know how to sew, except to fix a hole in my sock. Couldn't make a coat, never needed or wanted to.
My mother can't use a computer besides checking her emails and finding a movie to watch, which is all she needs and wants to know.
Now, if it's your job to use one effectively and haven't got a clue? I expect you'd end up in management in no time.

How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything

To be fair, many people don't know how to give constructive feedback very well either.

Yep... Some people pay electrician to come and change a lightbulb...

This isn't a spelling error. This is a grammatical error. "Your" is correctly spelled. It's just the wrong word.

The ability to use the correct words

"The capacious aptitude for the judicious deployment of linguistically felicitous and semantically apropos verbiage," I think you mean.

socioeconomics plays a large part here. I learned to swim at the ymca, but schlepping my silly ass to and from swim practice meant parental involvement.

bikes? learning to ride a bike in the suburbs is natural; learning to ride a bike when you live in an apartment building - hell keeping a bike from getting stolen is difficult when you don't have a garage.

imho, these are both easy to understand when you view through a larger socioeconomic starting point: we don't all have the same opportunities and resources.