The story of seedless watermelons.

Originally developed by a scientist in Japan pre-WWII, the technology was picked up by watermelon breeding programs at universities in the South-East U.S. Over the next 30 years the university programs worked to develop the technology. Progress was very slow as it takes 15 generations to create a new female line.

Unfortunately for everyone the universities decided to use their tasteless, bland, long distance shipping types to create these females. The most famous of which is Charleston grey.

Finally in the mid-70’s the universities released the female inbreds to private companies to create seedless watermelons. The private companies crossed tasty, elongated allsweet and crimsons sweet types as a diplod male with the bland grey females. What resulted was the bland seedless types with large white pips and bland flavor. After all 2/3rd of the genetics came from those terrible females.

For the next 25 years all of the seedless watermelons used the same terrible female lines with slightly improved male lines.

Then a breeder from originally from China decided to create new females. He used small seeded varieties from China and Thailand with deep red color and much thinner rinds.

The resulting seedless watermelons had dark red color, tiny little pips, and a slightly bitter flavor. You see the breeder from China failed to recognize the different flavor profiles in the gene pools. Asian watermelons often have bitter flavors that are completely acceptable in those markets but not in European ones.

And thus we are stuck with bland or bitter shitty seedless watermelons at the store.

There was once a brave lady who attempted to buck the trend. She bred the most flavorful delicious seedless watermelon ever seen on the planet. It was almost honey sweet with strong aromatics and not a hint of bitterness. It was crisp and juicy without a hint of mealyness. It was large elongated and looked just like the good old seeded ones. Alas the market rejected them because “they look like seeded types”. She retired early with a big FU to them all.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

When I was first out of college I used to get 8-10 of pre-payed envelopes every week. I kept a PO box for my mail that I would check weekly.

I would have maybe 1 or two pieces of real mail and a full box of junk.

So I started folding up the junk mail I to the 8-10 prepared envelopes every week. This was all done at the counter next to my PO box and dropped mailed back right then.

It was quite cathartic.

Fucking hell, I understood that. I have slipped and fallen into the dark side. Learn from my mistakes and turn back before you get to this point. There is no hope for me now.

That’s okay, we can reschedule the 1 of the 60 TFCV meetings about theupcoming 5 TPS meetings, that so we can be prepared for the 2 SMR meetings in 3 and 4 months, which is needed for the the BRM meeting in 6 months. Then we’ll see if anything is decided at the BRM meeting. If not we’ll repeat the meeting schedule for the foreseeable future.

I have a work phone and a personal phone. The work phone i answer calls from I known numbers all the time. My contact information gets passed around as part of my business. For a while I had scammers hitting my number 3-4 times per day. I answered and fucked with them every time. A little free stress relief through the day. Now I almost never get them anymore.

My personal phone I have always screened all the calls. It still gets hit with scammers 2-3 times per week.

I guess you are right. There is a list going around of numbers who waste their time.

It will grow up to be a magnificent steed to ride into battle with. Ask the Mormons about them the next time you see them.

https://missedinsunday.com/memes/scripture/horse/

He would never admit to it (I met him several times early in my career), but he was a very much a Shiva character to history.

His work destroyed thousands of years of landraces. The genetic pool that we desperately need in our race against the evolution of pests and diseases.

His work also hurt impoverished farmers in third world countries even more. As high yields drove down commodity prices. Industrialized nations subsidized their farmers to ensure supply further depressing global price.

His work fed billions and has been instrumental in reducing early childhood fatality rates.

His work also freed up massive amounts of income to spend on other things. As food prices fell other industries developed rapidly. Poverty and hunger are no longer causes by not producing enough food but from the greed and selfishness of the parasitic top wealthy people.

That’s easy:

True crime: she is educating herself to murder you.

Gagging over the gore: the main reason your still breathing.

Only traditional qualifications for being a parent: Functional gonads.

That limitation can be overcome to some degree today.

The place was a toxic cesspool at the time. An investment group had purchased 7 different companies and forced merged them in the space of 3 years and went on a massive hiring spree. The company I started with was 350 people. The company I left was over 4,000 people

It was an illegal layoff that I could taken them to court over. However the in-house lawyer knew what was going on and made them give me one hell of a severance package to stop me from suing them. I basically got everything I reasonably would have gotten if I sued.

That ended up being the most profitable year of my life.

My boss ended up CEO for a few years. It didn’t go well. They have 1/2 the number of employees now and 50% less market share.

I am on my 3rd layoff in 10 years.

First one I had all sort of dirt on my boss who was kissing ass to climb the corporate ladder. I was a massive liability as I knew what a waste of space he was. They laid me off with some really week excuses and a years wage/benefits to keep me quiet.

Second one we got a new CEO who decided to make massive changes to the company “to make it more profitable”. It hasn’t shown a profit since and the layoffs are a yearly tradition now.

The last one was this past fall. Smaller company over-invested when times where good. Then the market turned around and they are in trouble. One of those small “family” businesses, me and 20 others got kicked out of the family.

So as of now I have my own business. I am on track to make 100% more than I ever have before working for someone else.

Just for shits and giggles I also have an interview tomorrow for a C-suite position in a tropical country. It’s too fucking cold here.

Write a series of single query per e-mail.

Set then up on delayed delivery every hour through their workday.

It only takes once or twice until people read your entire e-mails.

It started when the company I worked for had a policy against supplying dual sim phones. I have had my personal number for close to 20 years so I am not letting it up. So I carried two phones. At first I was annoyed but over time I got used to talking on one phone and using the other for notes and reference.

Now that I am self employed having the two phones is a habit with how I work.

I hit the point in my professional life when I just stopped asking for time off.

I started using phrases like “I will be out from July 15th to August 9.”, “I won’t be in that day.”, “Sorry that conflicts with my schedule.”.

For a while I kept getting random calls for stuff while I was on vacation. That’s about the time I started carrying 2 phones. The work phone and laptop got left at home.

This is not that new.

Android auto would allow apps to play ads when the car was in park.

After using the ad support version of Pandora for most of a decade, when the full screen video ad popped up on my 2016 work truck, it was immediately and permanently uninstalled. I used 128gb microSD in my phone instead.

I’ve never used a streaming service for music again.

People require different amounts of repetition to remember something in long term memory. The average is 8-10 repetitions if I recall correctly. What we define as gifted is really a lower required number of repetitions. Photographic memory is very rare but it only requires 1 repetition. Most “gifted students” require 2-4 repetitions to recall it. Students that struggle can require 30+ repetitions to recall the information. Some of the learning impaired can have 1000+ repetitions and never learn it.

What’s fascinating to me is that somebody can be a low repetition in some areas but high repetition in others. For example, a person can have a high ability to remember imagery but struggle with names and language.

To add in more complexity, short term memory varies as well. Some people have an exceptionally strong short term memory. These people excel at the study and forget it method. Give them a long sequence to remember for a short while like the old Simon game and they win everytime. Other people struggle to recall a sequence longer than 3 or 4.

Now what your friend is describing is the ability to process information. This is referred to sometimes as critical thinking. Just like memory this varies greatly by individual it also varies by age. Most people don’t start to develop the skill until their mid-20’s if they ever do. A large percentage of the population never develops this ability. Unfortunately this skill also commonly degrades as you get older.

FYI microeconomics is basically a little bit of vocabulary and critical thinking. Most of the text books could really be a pamphlet if they got rid of all the fluff.

You also had the work/life experience by then to be better able to filter out pertinent information from the material.

Most college textbooks are written in an overly complex manner and require some skill to extract and process the information from them.

So right out of highschool you could have read the textbooks but gotten very little out of them.

I once had to sit down with a suppliers accountant because the billion dollar company I worked for couldn’t figure out why the PO and the invoices on about 50 orders were slightly off.

Reason: The supplier and billion dollar companies systems used different units of measure. So the conversion created a rounding error as the billion dollar company only went out 4 decimal places This led the the invoices being between $0.01-$0.05 off. All told the difference was $0.01.

It took us 2 hours and I had to buy the suppliers accountant lunch to get it sorted out.

Depends on the state you live in.

First there is the debt collectors ability to sue to collect. This varies by state and the type of debt in the U.S.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/debt-relief/debt-relief-statute-of-limitations-debt-collection-by-state/

The delinquency is on your credit report for 7 years. After that you can request it be removed.

Federally subsidized student loans have no end date. These can not be discharged. This is the top reason that school tuition rates have skyrocketed. The lenders can loan people with no income vast sums of money little to no risk.

I had a roommate in college who married a citizen of another country. He applied and got approval for a work visa in their spouses native country. Before they left they paid off their federal student loans with credit cards. Something like $20-25K. They also had private student loans of around $10K. They then moved out of the country and went delinquent on the debt. They ended up moving back to the U.S. around 15 years later. By that time their credit report was empty.