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StatisticalOutlier

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  1. Ok..maybe to some people it smells like fresh flowers, to me it smells like skunk. He said fresh flower, singular. Not fresh flowers. "Cannabis flower" is another term for the part of the marijuana that is smoked, and lots of people think it stinks. (I had a feeling people wouldn't know the difference between "flower" and "flowers" in this context. Suffice to say vaped weed smells nothing like lilacs or magnolias.) Well, you said she called him a pothead on national TV, not that she implied he was a pothead, or spoke in code about his being a pothead. And if she was speaking this indirectly, it's unlikely people who aren't steeped in pot culture would get the reference/accusation.
  2. Did she? I didn't take notes while watching the show or anything, but that's my recollection, too--nobody on the show has ever said what Austin vapes. But vaping weed stinks. There's no way you can vape cannabis in the bathroom of an apartment you share with someone and they won't smell it. It's produced a stinky cloud over the entire island of Manhattan. You even said you make people vape weed on your porch and not inside. (I'll leave aside the discussion of whether it's fair to make neighbors smell it for another day.) I haven't used cannabis since the kinder, gentler, days of 1970s weed, but I'd much rather someone in my life vape weed every once in a while, the equivalent of having a drink occasionally, to vaping nicotine all day every day. I wish they'd use edibles. Those don't stink.
  3. One of the mean older boys had taken his other mitten and I can't remember what he did with it but the little boy wasn't going to get it back, so he had no use for the one he did have.
  4. I can't even begin to imagine why they test only people over 40. In fact, as people age their distance vision sometimes gets better as their near vision worsens. Go figure.
  5. Are you looking into a machine? If so, then I assume the machine would make the letters look farther away to you than they actually are. At the last eye doc I went to, the chart I was reading was on the wall in front of me, but it was actually a mirror on that wall, reflecting a chart that's behind me, increasing the effective distance I was looking. They don't test the vision of people under 40!? That would actually track with testing close vision, because people start having trouble with that at 40, but as you noted it doesn't affect driving at all, except looking at the speedometer. But the acuity standards I was looking at for Texas, for example, don't care about that at all--it's all distance vision. As it should be. For some reason I'm thinking you might be in Canada. Might it be that different there from the U.S.? But if it is, why? I can't think of any reason to choose not to test younger people.
  6. But how do you know you're guessing? With the ones shown here, you know you can't read it and of course you'd dig to find out what it says. https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/can-you-read-these-rxs-09-2014 But isn't it also possible to encounter something that's sloppy but not illegible, and you unwittingly go one way when the other way was actually correct, like you look at a character that looks like a 1 and nothing like a 7 to you, but it actually is?
  7. Actually, Mr. Outlier recently had to get an eye exam from an eye doctor in order to renew his driver's license by mail. (His type of license can't be done online.) I looked at the documents, and visual acuity is expressed in terms of 20/xx. So it's just a regular exam and has nothing to do with signs we see while driving. Interestingly, I looked at the Texas Administrative Code to see what the visual acuity standards are, and the driver's license people didn't put a glasses restriction on his license even though he didn't meet the requirements: he's close because one eye and both eyes together meet the standard, but the other eye alone doesn't. But the eye doc's handwriting was atrocious. Seriously--his 3s? Were a backwards C with a horizontal line in the middle. Who the hell makes a 3 like that, especially someone whose job entails writing specific numbers that other people have to read? But at least you'd recognize it as a 3 (by ruling out everything else, but at least it can be done). His 2s--especially in "20"--look like they could be a 1, they way he draws them and hooks them to the 0. I don't know if the clerk misread it, or decided life is too short to pick on this particular application with documentation from an eye doctor who can't be arsed to write legibly. And...wasn't there criticism years ago about doctors' handwriting? There have always been jokes about it, but the joke quit being funny when their prescriptions were being filled incorrectly because of the bad handwriting.
  8. I favor avoiding technical terms, too, but "step up in basis" is something people might hear mentioned even if particulars aren't given. And it's actually descriptive, so it might stick. Aah, good point. I edited my post to acknowledge it.
  9. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what's going on, but the letters on street signs are a lot farther away than what you're looking at during the exam, so the ones used for the exam in the office would have to be a lot smaller than what's on the farther-away signs to be "the same." Right?
  10. Just to add to this--the reason for this is that when a person inherits property, he gets what is called a step-up in basis. I don't know anything about coop ownership, but for assets like real estate and shares of stock, which trigger capital gains tax when you sell them, the tax is imposed on the difference in the value between when you obtained the asset and when you sold it (i.e., the gain). Say a single mother of one son buys a house for $50,000 in 1980. She dies in 2020 and the house is worth $900,000. If her son inherits the house, her son gets a step-up in basis. If the single mother had sold the house in 2019, she would have had to pay capital gains tax on the ~$850,000 gain. If she still owned it at her death in 2020 and her son inherits it from her and then sells it in 2021 for $910,000, he owes capital gains tax on a $10,000 gain--the difference between what he sells it for and his basis, which is $900,000 because he inherited it and got a step-up in basis. [But see EtheltoTillie's post below about the personal residence exemption, which would apply to certain real estate but not to other assets, like shares of stock.] Losing the advantage of a step-up in basis is something a lot of people aren't aware of when they get the idea to transfer ownership of their house to their adult child instead of waiting for the child to inherit it upon the parent's death.
  11. Idiots indeed. I had a friend who was an auditor for the state in the 1980s, before computers did a lot of the work, so he was onsite for sales tax audits. He never understood why a business being audited would obviously mistreat him, like give him a place to work outside when it was cold. Those people were not thinking. And opposite of engineers, we have lawyers. I had an advent calendar-type thing once that Santa's face, and his beard had numbers on it, to put a cotton ball on each number corresponding to the day of the month. I turned it into a gambling thing, where people in my office "bought" a number for a dollar and not only put on the cotton ball but stood to win the pot as well. To do sales tax audits, the auditors would use random number generators to pick invoices to examine, and we had an auditor do it for our Santa beard numbers. It came up 2. The lawyers all protested because 2 didn't seem random enough.
  12. That's what I thought, which makes me wonder if Lauren and Orion actually got married. I also wonder about the officiant signing the license. If the officiant presided over a ceremony before the couple got a license, can he sign it once they do get a license a week later, based on the ceremony that happened before there was a license? (Although in this particular case, I found out Colorado seems to allow people to self-solemnize their marriages--the couple can sign the license themselves and don't need an officiant to sign it (or even to perform a ceremony.)
  13. Maybe it wasn't trying to forge new cinematic pathways, but it seemed really formulaic. Even if the story itself is formulaic, I don't think a portrayal of it has to be. As I was watching it, I was thinking, "What about this story in particular made Clooney think, 'I have to make this film'" and couldn't come up with anything. But when I think back and put it all together, it's a remarkable story. It somehow didn't seem that way as I was watching, but maybe that's because the swelling music would take foretell the emotion we were fixing to experience--that's what I mean by formulaic. FWIW, I went in knowing nothing about it except it was based on a true story. Plus I was distracted by Joe Rantz's hair. It was so obvious it was dyed/bleached, and assumed it was because the real person had blond hair. But it just looked wrong, for a poor man during the depression to be coloring his hair. I also noticed he had pierced ears, and his girlfriend in the movie had two piercings in an ear. I guess that's the down side of seeing movies on the big screen.
  14. I don't use an ear trumpet, but for my type of hearing loss, cupping my hand around my ear really does make things easier to hear, and conversation easier to understand. And it really DOES block out the sounds behind me. I remember my mother's hearing aid--gold metal, matchbox-sized, that hooked to her bra, with a very thick wire going up to her ear.
  15. No topic for American Fiction? I thought it was a whole lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed his interactions with his siblings, which I didn't think would be a focus of the movie, and loved it when his sister told him his book changed her life...because it was just the right height to stop her dining room table from wobbling. Aah, siblings. I could weave a blanket out of Jeffrey Wright's voice, I'd wrap myself up in it and never take it off.
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