A 15-year-old puts up a Facebook post bashing her parents for making her work too hard, dad reacts by posting a video response to her grievances on her Facebook page.

Was this parent’s Facebook parenting too harsh?

Bonus: Alphabet taught to kids nowadays….WOW

Collected from AskReddit

Monster cables are the only cables to give you a “true HD” experience.

Fact: More glasses get broken in the presence of alcohol.

Greenpeace activist telling me that nuclear power causes both global warming and the ozone hole over the Arctic and Antarctic.
I could not even start arguing, she was so clueless.

I was told by the guy at the liquor store that I should not buy wine because it will not get anyone drunk. “The alcohol in there is so low you would need to drink ten bottles.” He then suggested PBR.

person trying to sell me a water filter and talking about how bad our water is under the ground.
Bitch I’m a geologist.
The chicot aquifer if amazing.

AT&T sales lady just told me I had to use their router so my internet would work with the “special underground wires” that they use ?_?

Bestbuy employee trying to get me to pay an additional $90 dollars to let the “tech experts” there optimize the laptop I wanted to purchase. Apparently my computer would run up to 100x faster and I wasn’t qualified to do this myself. A quick Google search on my smartphone revealed it was a scam where they would just delete some of the programs that come with the laptop and do the initial turn on.

I went with my younger sister to buy her first laptop for school, about a year ago when tablets were becoming a huge thing. I explained to the Best Buy salesman that we were here to buy a laptop or perhaps a netbook, and he kept saying that “laptops are basically obsolete now, everyone is switching to tablets.” I told him that we wanted a simple computer for her to type essays etc. on and that a touchscreen keyboard wouldn’t be ideal for that anyway. He seemed extremely reluctant to sell us a computer and kept stressing that “nobody uses laptops anymore.”
I couldn’t believe it.

Gold-plated optical cables give a better connection.
Optical cables. With gold plating.
They really do exist.
EDIT: 3000 people voted on this, not a single one pointed out I couldn’t spell “cables”. I don’t know whether to be happy or disappointed.

I was once told by a woman at the local farmer’s market that only organic food has any nutrients and everything else is just empty, because that’s what genetic farming does, it strips all the nutrients from food.
Edit: Wow, I guess I’m still new to Reddit. Didn’t expect so many people here to be so… fierce for their love of organic food. So just so I fully offend everyone and make sure no one is left out, here are a few words.
ahem
If you want to support a program like Organic Farming, with absolutely no scientific backing and led forward on the premise that you can’t prove it wrong, you should go support creationism in school.
What does your Girlfriend and Organic Farming have in common? They both offer you more body, but just end up taking more of your money.
What’s the difference between an Organic Meal and a Genetically Grown Meal? About $3000 dollars a year.
If I wanted to spend more money to get an inferior project, I would go buy a game with Ubisoft’s DRM.
And last but not least,
What’s the difference between buying dinner for an Organic Lobbyist and going to dinner with your mom? When I buy the Organic Dinner I get fucked in the ass, when I buy your mom dinner, I get to fuck her in the ass.
I hope that covers everyone,
Love lots, Genetic Farming
Edit 2 Sorry, was thinking about this after some dinner. I’m sure I came off as fierce on this subject. So to be serious a moment (sorry if it ruins the mood, Don’t read if you’d rather be amused!), there is a reason. For those who wish to know: I have a close friend, a single mom who is a really sweet, determined woman who wants the best for her kids. She is a redditor too I think, so if you see this, you know who you are. She is dirt poor, trying to keep her family afloat, and about a year ago she changed all her food to Organic. Even though it cost her to cut out a lot of her children’s, and her own entertainment. When I found out, I asked her why. And she said she kept hearing in the news and on TV how Organic for is healthier for her family. How Organic food is better for the growth of her children. It took me months to convince her this was utterly false, and she should be putting her money towards better things for her kids.
Any business practice that relies on exploiting the love and worry of a mother for her children to pull more money that she doesn’t have out of her pockets can burn in Hell for all I care.
So if you ever want to explain to someone why the Organic Movement harms people, feel free to share this view.

That megabytes are the same as megabits. ?_?

A salesperson from a home security company told me the motion sensors will not detect cats because it can sense their brain waves. Didn’t go with that company.

I was told that the used Ford Escort I was looking at was a real panty dropper.

My brother (an idiot) was told that a special cleaning spray would make CD’s and DVD’s play better.
My brother now claims it makes his video games load faster and improves the movie quality beyond BluRay.
I tried explaining why he was a dolt, but it just made him defensive.

I was buying a set of 4.1 computer speakers at a major chain and the salesman told me I should get the product service plan because “if one speaker is disconnected, then the current that was going through it is directed to the other speakers and that could overload and damage them”.

“You need to get a screen protector because the oils and heat from your fingers will wear down the touch screen on your new Android phone.”
That day I learned that my fingers will destroy gorilla glass.

There are scummy electronics/gadgets shops on Tenerife – don’t buy anything from them.
I was looking at a display of binoculars and the sign said they had nightvision ones for sale. I asked the salesman which ones had night vision
“all of them”.
These were regular binoculars. I asked where would the batteries go in them – he said they had a coating on them to see infra-red. I looked through them and they were regular optical binoculars. I called him on this, and he says
“Did I say infra-red? I meant infra-green”.
Infra-fricken-green!

Bonus: Drop Test!!!

Written by theatlantic

Tolstoy holds a 11-point lead over Shakespeare in these literary opinion polls.

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—”to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list—so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:

“If you’re putting together a list of ‘the greatest books,’ you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word ‘great’ means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of ‘greatness’ might look like this:1. ‘Great’ means ‘books that have been greatest for me.’

2. ‘Great’ means ‘books that would be considered great by the most people over time.’

3. ‘Great’ has nothing to do with you or me—or people at all. It involves transcendental concepts like God or the Sublime.

4. ‘Great’? I like Tom Clancy. “

From David Foster Wallace (#1: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis) to Stephen King (#1: The Golden Argosy, a 1955 anthology of the best short stories in the English language), the collection offers a rare glimpse of the building blocks of great creators’ combinatorial creativity—because, as Austin Kleon put it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.”

The book concludes with an appendix of “literary number games” summing up some patterns and constructing several overall rankings based on the totality of the different authors’ picks. Among them (*with links to free public domain works where available):

 

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

2.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

4. Ulysses* by James Joyce

5. Dubliners* by James Joyce

6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

9. The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor

10. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

 

1. Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

5. The stories of Anton Chekhov

6. Middlemarch* by George Eliot

7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

8. Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens

9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

10. Emma* by Jane Austen

 

1. William Shakespeare – 11

2. William Faulkner – 6

3. Henry James – 6

4. Jane Austen – 5

5. Charles Dickens – 5

6. Fyodor Dostoevsky – 5

7. Ernest Hemingway – 5

8. Franz Kafka – 5

9. Tied: James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf – 4

 

1. Leo Tolstoy – 327

2. William Shakespeare – 293

3. James Joyce – 194

4. Vladimir Nabokov – 190

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky – 177

6. William Faulkner – 173

7. Charles Dickens – 168

8. Anton Checkhov – 165

9. Gustave Flaubert – 163

10. Jane Austen – 161

As a nonfiction loyalist, I’d love a similar anthology of nonfiction favorites—then again, famous writers might wave a knowing finger and point me to the complex relationship between truth and fiction.

Bonus: This guy was elected President of Finland yesterday, first morning after elections.

Samsung you’re doing it right. More and more companies need to do this.

watch on vimeo

Bonus: My fiancee said that we don’t have any interesting pics of our dog. I gave her these…

Written by Tracy L. Crawford

1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.

2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.

3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.

4. Then analyze the situation:

a. If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.

b. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.

c. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.

d. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.

e. If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.

f. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.

g. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.

h. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.

i. If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.

j. If they have already left for the day, put them in Management.

k. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.

l. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management.

m. Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Congress.

 

Bonus: The fifties were a simpler time…

 

 

Written by marcandangel

When you stop chasing the wrong things you give
the right things a chance to catch you.

As Maria Robinson once said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”  Nothing could be closer to the truth.  But before you can begin this process of transformation you have to stop doing the things that have been holding you back.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. – Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.  If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you.  You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot.  Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth.  And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.
2. Stop running from your problems. – Face them head on.  No, it won’t be easy.  There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them.  We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems.  That’s not how we’re made.  In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall.  Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time.  This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.
3. Stop lying to yourself. – You can lie to anyone else in the world, but you can’t lie to yourself.  Our lives improve only when we take chances, and the first and most difficult chance we can take is to be honest with ourselves.  Read The Road Less Traveled.
4. Stop putting your own needs on the back burner. – The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.  Yes, help others; but help yourself too.  If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do something that matters to you, that moment is now.
5. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. – One of the greatest challenges in life is being yourself in a world that’s trying to make you likeeveryone else.  Someone will always be prettier, someone will always be smarter, someone will always be younger, but they will never be you.  Don’t change so people will like you.  Be yourself and the right people will love the real you.
6. Stop trying to hold onto the past. – You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one.
7. Stop being scared to make a mistake. – Doing something and getting it wrong is at least ten times more productive than doing nothing.  Every success has a trail of failures behind it, and every failure is leading towards success.  You end up regretting the things you did NOT do far more than the things you did.
8. Stop berating yourself for old mistakes. – We may love the wrong person and cry about the wrong things, but no matter how things go wrong, one thing is for sure, mistakes help us find the person and things that are right for us.  We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past.  But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.  Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.
9. Stop trying to buy happiness. – Many of the things we desire are expensive.  But the truth is, the things that really satisfy us are totally free – love, laughter and working on our passions.
10. Stop exclusively looking to others for happiness. – If you’re not happy with who you are on the inside, you won’t be happy in a long-term relationship with anyone else either.  You have to create stability in your own life first before you can share it with someone else.  Read Stumbling on Happiness.
11. Stop being idle. – Don’t think too much or you’ll create a problem that wasn’t even there in the first place.  Evaluate situations and take decisive action.  You cannot change what you refuse to confront.  Making progress involves risk.  Period!  You can’t make it to second base with your foot on first.
12. Stop thinking you’re not ready. – Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises.  Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.
13. Stop getting involved in relationships for the wrong reasons. – Relationships must be chosen wisely.  It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company.  There’s no need to rush.  If something is meant to be, it will happen – in the right time, with the right person, and for the best reason. Fall in love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.
14. Stop rejecting new relationships just because old ones didn’t work. – In life you’ll realize that there is a purpose for everyone you meet.  Some will test you, some will use you and some will teach you.  But most importantly, some will bring out the best in you.
15. Stop trying to compete against everyone else. – Don’t worry about what others are doing better than you.  Concentrate on beating your own records every day.  Success is a battle between YOU and YOURSELF only.
16. Stop being jealous of others. – Jealousy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings instead of your own.  Ask yourself this:  “What’s something I have that everyone wants?”
17. Stop complaining and feeling sorry for yourself. – Life’s curveballs are thrown for a reason – to shift your path in a direction that is meant for you.  You may not see or understand everything the moment it happens, and it may be tough.  But reflect back on those negative curveballs thrown at you in the past.  You’ll often see that eventually they led you to a better place, person, state of mind, or situation.  So smile!  Let everyone know that today you are a lot stronger than you were yesterday, and you will be.
18. Stop holding grudges. – Don’t live your life with hate in your heart.  You will end up hurting yourself more than the people you hate.  Forgiveness is not saying, “What you did to me is okay.”  It is saying, “I’m not going to let what you did to me ruin my happiness forever.”  Forgiveness is the answer… let go, find peace, liberate yourself!  And remember, forgiveness is not just for other people, it’s for you too.  If you must, forgive yourself, move on and try to do better next time.
19. Stop letting others bring you down to their level. – Refuse to lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.
20. Stop wasting time explaining yourself to others. – Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it anyway.  Just do what you know in your heart is right.
21. Stop doing the same things over and over without taking a break. – The time to take a deep breath is when you don’t have time for it.  If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.  Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.
22. Stop overlooking the beauty of small moments. – Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and discover they were the big things.  The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.
23. Stop trying to make things perfect. – The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards people who get things done.  Read Getting Things Done.
24. Stop following the path of least resistance. – Life is not easy, especially when you plan on achieving something worthwhile.  Don’t take the easy way out.  Do something extraordinary.
25. Stop acting like everything is fine if it isn’t. – It’s okay to fall apart for a little while.  You don’t always have to pretend to be strong, and there is no need to constantly prove that everything is going well.  You shouldn’t be concerned with what other people are thinking either – cry if you need to – it’s healthy to shed your tears.  The sooner you do, the sooner you will be able to smile again.
26. Stop blaming others for your troubles. – The extent to which you can achieve your dreams depends on the extent to which you take responsibility for your life.  When you blame others for what you’re going through, you deny responsibility – you give others power over that part of your life.
27. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. – Doing so is impossible, and trying will only burn you out.  But making one person smile CAN change the world.  Maybe not the whole world, but their world.  So narrow your focus.
28. Stop worrying so much. – Worry will not strip tomorrow of its burdens, it will strip today of its joy.  One way to check if something is worth mulling over is to ask yourself this question: “Will this matter in one year’s time?  Three years?  Five years?”  If not, then it’s not worth worrying about.
29. Stop focusing on what you don’t want to happen. – Focus on what you do want to happen.  Positive thinking is at the forefront of every great success story.  If you awake every morning with the thought that something wonderful will happen in your life today, and you pay close attention, you’ll often find that you’re right.
30. Stop being ungrateful. – No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life.  Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs.  Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

Photo by: Rob Brucker

 

Written by  Maria Popova

“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.”

As a lover of letters and famous correspondence, I was thrilled to stumble across this 1928 letter from Jackson Pollock’s dad, LeRoy, to his son, uncovered by our very own Michelle Legro in the“Family” issue of the always-excellent Lapham’s Quarterly. Culled from American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family, the letter is a beautiful paean to what matters most in life, and how to cultivate it.

Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.”

Full text below, courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly:

Dear Son Jack,

Well it has been some time since I received your fine letter. It makes me a bit proud and swelled up to get letters from five young fellows by the names of Charles, Mart, Frank, Sande, and Jack. The letters are so full of life, interest, ambition, and good fellowship. It fills my old heart with gladness and makes me feel ‘Bully.’ Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.

I think your philosophy on religion is okay. I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without too much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power, a supreme force, a governor, a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist; gas, vapor, ashes. They are all there just the same.

I had a couple of letters from mother the other day, one written the twelfth and one the fifteenth. Am always glad to get letters from your mother, she is a Dear isn’t she? Your mother and I have been a complete failure financially but if the boys turn out to be good and useful citizens nothing else matters and we know this is happening so why not be jubilant?

The weather up here couldn’t be beat, but I suppose it won’t last always, in fact we are looking forward to some snowstorms and an excuse to come back to the orange belt. I do not know anything about what I will do or if I will have a job when I leave here, but I am not worrying about it because it is no use to worry about what you can’t help, or what you can help, moral ‘don’t worry.’

Write and tell me all about your schoolwork and yourself in general. I will appreciate your confidence.

You no doubt had some hard days on your job at Crestline this summer. I can imagine the steep climbing, the hot weather, etc. But those hard things are what builds character and physic. Well Jack I presume by the time you have read all this you will be mentally fatigued and will need to relax. So goodnight, pleasant dreams and God bless you.

Your affectionate Dad

Find more everyday poetics in the fantastic collection of letters, from which this gem came.

Bonus:  Before and after the iPhone

Collected by reddit

Smart girls like it when you make them feel pretty. Pretty girls like it when you make them feel smart.

When I was an angsty teenager, I sat up one night and talked with my grandpa for a few hours. He told me “I don’t care what your problems are, I know you have problems we all do. But the thing is, nothing I can do will fix your problems. Nothing anyone can do can fix your problems. You have to sit down, and figure out what your problem is. And then you have to figure out what you need to do to fix your problem. And then you do that.” It was so simple. But it’s helped me a lot, oddly enough.

Keep cool, never freeze.
I read that on a condiment bottle.

Another redditor once said, “Always go for the decision that makes a better story.”

I learnt this myself the hard way through many years of fucking up:
Don’t make any decision while you’re angry.

Always tell the truth, it’s much easier to remember.

Righty tighty
Lefty loosy

TRAINER TIPS:
If you want to avoid
battles, stay away from
the grassy areas!

Buy a plunger before you need a plunger
Alternatively
School without experience isn’t learning.

To impress a chick, helicopter dick.

Make sure there’s toilet paper BEFORE you sit down.

Keys, phone, wallet.

You can best judge the character of a person by the way the treat a waiter, maid, cashier, etc. Seeing how a person treats a stranger is the best way to judge a person’s character, particularly seeing how a person treats another human being who is “lower” than them in a social setting.

“Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased”. Spider Robinson.

never get involved in a land war in asia

“When in doubt, throw it out.” – because food poisoning sucks.

You can’t control how people act, only how you react.

Be best friends with your spouse, not just lovers.

You can never have enough socks.

Don’t forget to bring a towel!

This too shall pass.

“Don’t give anyone your best advice, because they probably won’t take it.” –Jack Nicholson
it has helped me realize no one listens to anything i suggest (including reddit)

No matter how hard you try, all the glitter won’t come off.