Rod and Karen respond to listener feedback.
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In a way I can relate to Karen when it comes to self evaluations. I have a colleague who went out of her way to ask what she had to do to exceed expectations. Every year she asked what was expected of her. Every year she did it and the goal post kept moving. She asked her supervisor why and he apologized because the issue was with HR, not him. She eventually left the company and was hired as a VP with another corporation. Meanwhile, she couldn’t get a promotion with our corp. I was discouraged because of her experience. I figured why should I bother when someone who tried harder than me couldn’t get ahead. Not all companies operate this way, but it happens so often it make employees feel like there’s no point in trying to self advocate.
The tourists numbers are already down with the largest EU countries, UK, and Canada already updating travel warnings to their citizens for traveling to the US. Interestingly, two big soccer competitions (Club World Cup and The World Cup) are supposed to happen this summer and next year that would normally attract people from all over the world. I wonder if there’ll be an effort to bend the rules so fans traveling in give good PR and the administration can use that as a “see, if we are so evil, why did we allow Africans, South Americans, and fans from around the world into USA?”
But knowing this administration, I wouldn’t be surprised if they fumble and ICE does it’s thing too. When it comes to the competitions. Mexico alone, has a lot of fans that usually travel to support their teams. Can ICE behave after being let loose?
Yes, finally someone put some respect to my offer. Look up Mauritius, I just got off the phone with the president and he says you can retire there. On less than $5k a month, name your 1st grandkid after me (if a girl, Raphaela it is in Portuguese). You’ll leave good out there.
Won’t Kang Do It. Play through the fire one more time my good brother, play it!
About the “trans issues” comment:
When you started reading I paused & yelled out the message I wanted to type while walking down the street. Then I took a breath and thought, “Let Rod handle it.”
I was not disappointed.
About ICE committing illegal detentions / deportations:
Recently several tourists including Jessica Brösche (white German tattoo artist), Lucas Sielaff (white German with a husband in the US), Becky Burke (white Welsh backpacker), & Jasmine Mooney (white Canadian business consultant) have been abducted, abused, detained, and repatriated after life-altering traumatic abuse at the hands of the criminal organization known as ICE.
Teaching at a language-focused university I can not in good conscious recommend any students travel or study abroad in the US.
ICE has officially moved past the paper-bag test to check whether you are a citizen and are just deporting anyone willy-nilly with no cause, justification, or legal reasoning. They’ve always acted in criminal and/or barely legal manners, but they appear to have gotten significantly worse.
I checked it out, those people traveled as tourists to the US trough Mexico and had all the right documents. They were still seen as illegal immigrants who wanted to work in the US. No thanks.
The Welsh woman had issues with her Canadian paperwork so was bounced back into the US. ICE illegally chose without any real legal precedent to consider this return as a new & for some reason illegal entry into the US. They held her in horrendous conditions for around two weeks despite her request to “self-deport” and go back home.
The Canadian woman had her work visa illegally revoked without notice because the company she worked for use hemp in its beverages. She was then abused for almost two weeks before being sent to Canada.
In continuation:
The one thing I would add is that immigration laws across the world are all kinds of fucked up. I illegally worked in Japan for half a year. The reason was that if I had gotten a company to sponsor my visa I would have ended up working longer hours in worse conditions for less pay. Instead I chose to do the ethical thing rather than the legal thing.
I ended up getting four companies to co-sponsor my visa which allowed me the freedom to seek better pay / conditions if I wished.
In countries, like the US, where they ask for a company to sponsor your visa you end up getting abused more often than not. The entire immigration infrastructure needs to be rewritten and ICE can go fuck themselves.
Re: Addictiveness of TikTok.
According to a recent research paper in the American Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (edited from the abstract):
306 participants . . . from a research university in the U.S . . . (who) had multiple active social media accounts (over 5 on average) . . . spent on average 3.8 hours on social media daily, while spending on average 3.7 hours on schoolwork daily. Interestingly, female participants spend more time on social media . . . as well as spent more time on schoolwork than their male counterparts . . . TikTok was the most popular social media platform, followed by Snapchat, Instagram, and others such as X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Facebook. Contrary to popular beliefs, while TikTok-favoring students were more likely to perceive that they were
vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption, their time on social media per day was not significantly different from any other social media active users . . . suggesting a discrepancy between student perception and reality.
(of interest from the body):
The average number of social media accounts held by millennial or Gen Z users worldwide is 8.5 (Shewale, 2023).
The perception of TikTok as more addictive than other social media platforms can perhaps be attributed to several factors: (a) the format tends to encourage users to consume a large volume of content in a short amount of time; (b) the diverse and entertaining nature of content on TikTok makes it very appealing to users; and (c) the algorithm is highly effective in serving users content that aligns with their interest.
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I couldn’t find many studies that actually broke things down by platform in academic journals (most focus on Social Media writ large, or TikTok in isolation). It may be that the reality is that TikTok is not more addictive, it just feels that way.
Sorry, I tried to make that as short as I could, but it still ended up long AF…
That’s a damn good thought Rochelle. A book list from Rod and Karen would be dope. I’ve read quite a few of the books they’ve mentioned on the show, and not one of them were a miss. ‘Amusing ourselves to Death’, and ‘The Cruelty Is The Point’ are the last two I read that Rod mentioned and that was some good reading.
I’m sure non white people are targeted more as tourists in the US now but that’s still does not make me visit more.
I tend to catastrophic thinking sometimes and would think non stop about everything that could happen. Maybe the police would read comments i wrote here and put me into a camp to reprogram me. See? Catastrophic thinking.
I’m sure other European people feel similarly.
I am a woman who does advocate for myself at work. I worry, I work a lot, I feel fear sometimes but also I enjoy my work and don’t let others steal my accomplishments. When I’m in a hard situation I tend to think that I will not find a solution this time, feel bad and anxious only to find an impressive solution pretty fast. And i talk about the success and i get the raise or the bonus. Yes, I talked in therapy about it often. Oh the multitudes of a person.
The German drivers license is hard to get, expensive and FOREVER. Please keep this information for yourself, I don’t understand it and I don’t want it to change.
Interesting fact, it’s not used for identification here. I was very surprised in the US how often the drivers license is good enough. We have two kinds of valid identification here.
The national ID or the passport. The national id is also good for travel in the EU.
I have them both , I had to redo my passport to go to London last year.
But I do have to do some driving for my work. Every 3 years or so I have to
do an intense driving safety course. It’s a whole day where you practice hardcore stops from a high speed, stops on a wet surface, driving on a simulated ice surface, learning to course correct in a dangerous situation ( you drive onto a Turing plate in the road pretty fast and have to stay on course anyway. Or you drive through an area and all of the sudden, a ton of water comes down your windshield from a hidden spot on the road, you don’t exactly know when, so you are surprised and don’t see for a second. It’s in a special area, we don’t just do it in a city.) We learn what do in extreme situations, and it does help. When I first did it, I was afraid to slam the breaks to the maximum, but they make you do it, to see that it’s pretty safe.
It’s very good that we do it, it also after the day, you are pretty exhausted.