That’s hard to deal with. You are clearly an empathetic person with deep concern and care for this friend.

When dealing with grief, the best practice is to not seek solace/comfort from someone on a more inner circle of the grief (with the circles being like immediate family > close friends > extended family, and so on). Like it would be generally seen as inappropriate if a man’s wife died and her coworker went to him to process their grief.

Your friend’s ‘joke’ about murder summarizes simply how a lot of victims feel like rape is a loss of self, of personhood, in a way that parallels the loss of that in death—except the victim has to live through it and process it. So getting back to the grief circles, with rape those same circles may exist except with the survivor at the center. And it seems like you needed your own space to process the grief but you were trying to respect the circles and so you didn’t have support in that.

I’m just rambling thoughts that all mirror what you’ve said—I think I’m just trying to acknowledge what you experienced in my own words.

I hope you and your friend are more at peace now or at least on your way to it <3

I appreciate your thoughtful response and consideration of how you phrased this originally. I know you are making the point with the best of intentions in trying to ensure that the word “rape” isn’t diluted down.

I struggled for many years to move beyond my experiences of being raped. I’m in a good place now, but it took time. I generally wouldn’t say I’m suffering from it any more (even if there may be moments where I’m triggered), so I think the comment here just hit me hard.

I also know there are other victims who have gone through weird levels of guilt and self-doubt because they haven’t felt the level of suffering that’s “expected.”

We both have the same desire here, but slightly different stances on where that line should be drawn and that’s ok.

I’m responding a second time because I think this is an important point to make as a top-level response.

the suffering of a living victim is an essential part of what makes rape rape.

This is a fucked up take. This says that a rape victim must suffer, and if they aren’t suffering, then it wasn’t rape. Just, no. People process things differently. Some will be more and some will be less traumatized by being raped.

Forcing a particular experience onto a victim, saying they must feel a certain way, is just so incredibly problematic. A victim can feel whatever they feel and process a crime against them however they want. And the way they do so doesn’t change whether a crime was committed against them.

Edit: And with a very literal reading of the statement, it also says that if someone kills their victim after raping them, then it’s not rape—because there isn’t a living victim who is suffering. I’m sure that’s not what you meant, but it’s important to think about these things and how we convey them.

From the details given, it’s not clear if the person was dead or only unconscious at the time of the assault and it’s not clear whether the attacker knew either.

I’m not clear on your second point; you say that it doesn’t seem right that defendant knowledge matters in one case and not the other. So if:

1. Defendant commits arson not knowing they kill someone in the building > call it murder
2. Defendant sexually violates a body not knowing if they are dead > don’t call it rape?

It seems like not calling it rape is what would apply a double standard here based on defendant knowledge.

Our society treats bodies as an extension of a person; for example, we do not harvest organs from a body if the person didn’t consent to be an organ donor while they were alive.

Your focus on the victim’s suffering as what determines the severity of the crime seems problematic to me. If a victim doesn’t let being raped destroy their life, do we not punish the rapist as severely? We distinguish between manslaughter and murder based on pre-meditation and intent, even though the victim is still dead in both cases, and similarly I think that focusing on the attacker’s actions and intent should be the key factor in calling their actions rape.

If the defendant were going to a morgue or funeral home and defiling bodies, I may feel differently but given the timing here it feels way too grey to not treat it as rape.

FWIW, I’m coming at this conversation as a rape survivor myself. I know the level of mental devastation it can cause. And personally, I don’t think that treating the sexual assault of someone who may or may not have been dead yet (and if they were dead, had been so for no more than 30 minutes) as rape takes anything away from the severity of the crime or my experience as a victim of it.

And anyway from a semantic perspective, according to the article it is being charged only as attempted rape.

I mean, the dead can’t consent.

Also the article says “unresponsive passenger.” We know now the person was dead, but that doesn’t mean the rapist was clear on that fact at the time.

I agree with most of what you said, but you are severely overestimating the cost of t-shirts at Walmart. They start at $4 for plain or $7 for graphic tees from what I can tell. Even band tees and things like Mickey Mouse are in the $9–14 range based on a cursory glance on their site.

Yeah, that’s on OP. The article is actually titled, “Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using Differential Privacy.”

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

The entire thing is explaining how they are upholding privacy to do this training.

1. It’s opt-in only (if you don’t choose to share analytics, nothing is collected).
2. They use differential privacy (adding noise so they get trends, not individual data).
3. They developed a new method to train on text patterns without collecting actual messages or emails from devices. (link to research on arXiv)

The problem is with receipts on thermal paper, not those printed with normal ink, so [edit: many some] receipts are not an issue any more.

If you want to tell the difference, you could try applying heat (like a hair dryer or iron) over the receipts and see which ones change color (usually turning grey or black where heated).

Once you find a few, you’ll likely get a feel for which ones are likely to be thermal paper just by looking and you can practice extra care with those. (Tip: they are usually the ones that appear a bit glossy.)

The idea that vaccines cause autism and therefore we shouldn’t give vaccines inherently implies that autism is a worse scenario than any of the diseases vaccines protect against. We have a measles epidemic killing children, and people would still prefer to not vaccinate because of a fear of autism.

If people think having a dead child is better than having an autistic child, that doesn’t bode well for autistic folks.

Talent, dedication, and luck. Spot on.

I am very successful in my career and earn more than my school-age self ever expected (tbf, I expected to be a teacher). I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all three, though.

Lucky points include:

• Being the kid of small business owners who gave me/made me get a job with them at 16.
• Knowing someone at a company who recommended me for an internship.
• Working adjacent to a badass development team that made the best proof of concept to build a new app, so they brought me to their team to support it.
• My Lead retiring so I was able to move to her level after only a couple years.

I wouldn’t have gotten those opportunities if I didn’t also have the dedication and talent, but luck was a huge factor.

I have tried the metaphor that luck opened doors for me, but I had to get to and walk through them. I will never take where I am today for granted.

Who are you arguing is to blame now? What other parents?

Yeah, our plan is paid for a year as well. If they drop our service quality before the year is up, that sure seems like a breach of contract.

OP knows they aren’t the same thing. Their point was that if the subscription model came with promise of repair, maybe there’s a purpose/value in it for the consumer. But without that, it’s pure greed.