Try again or ask a question or explain your confusion.
Also, next time you get stuck, don’t read the answer, so we can work through it without you having spoilers.
I have 50 widgets. I give you 3 widgets. What fraction of my widgets (not of all widgets) did I gave you?
It’s the same thing. I have X amount of pizza, give you Y amount, what fraction of the pizza i had did I give you?
Neat enough that you don’t get the wrong answer. Or wouldn’t blame your work being messy if you were wrong.
You’re the one who said your work was “sort of a mess” as one of the reasons you got it wrong. I was just responding to your own communication that your work was too messy.
Looking at your work I don’t see how you got 1.6 as your answer. I’m also not sure if you wrote some of your work or crossed stuff out after reading the solution or what. But in this case and some others it’s hard to tell from reading your work what your solution is.
Also how could he give her 1.6 pizzas (more than one) when he has less than one pizza? Or if he gave her 1.6x the amount he had, rather than 1.6 whole pizzas, that also isn’t possible.
I’ll respond to the other stuff later. This just didn’t cross my mind to mention. Woops. Uhh I didn’t get 1.6 as an answer. I mistyped and hit enter very fast. So for that particular question I only had 1 attempt. I noticed my mistake and just typed it as 1/6.
I’ll try it again soon. I actually wanted to practice it. I didn’t look at the answer. I just screenshotted the answer to save it.
You gave me 3 out of your 50 widgets or 3/50.
You have X amount of pizza. If you give me Y from that, then you’ve given me Y out of X pizzas. Y/X.
Hmm. So the original question:
He has 2/3. He gives away 1/4. He gave away (1/4)/(2/3) of his pizza. Ok. I did that and got 3/8. But I’m still confused by certain aspects of the wording. He has 2/3 of an entire pizza. So now he no longer has an entire pizza. He has 2/3 a pizza. I guess that 2/3 pizza becomes an entire whole for the sake of “if he gives 1/4 of an entire pizza to his friend Marlene”. Thats where the wording was confusing me. Entire pizza to me sounds like whole pizza which is represented by 1.
The number 1 represents 1 pizza. Gregory has 2/3 of a pizza, represented by the number 2/3. He gives away 1/4 of 1 pizza, represented by the number 1.
Suppose a pizza weighed 5 lbs, he had 3 lbs of pizza, and he gave away 1 lb of pizza, and you were asked what fraction of his pizza he gave away. I think you’d understand that and find it easy since I used units and whole numbers?
I saw you wrote a ton of posts yesterday. What do you think about that? Does it feel productive or good to you? Do you intellectually evaluate it as important, valuable, etc? Why did you do it but don’t do it most days? Did you have extra free time or extra energy? Do you not consider it very important and just happened to do it but aren’t really trying to do or not do it?
Yeah. I think so. He had 3lbs of pizza. He gave away 1lb of his 3lb pizza. He gave away 1/3 of his pizza.
I think I get the question better now. He had 2/3 of an entire pizza. He gave away 1/4 of an entire pizzas worth to somebody. So he gave away a quarter of an original quantity from two thirds of an original quantity. It’d be different if he gave away 1/4 of that 2/3. Then it would be 1/4 *2/3.
I think it was fun. Idk. I like talking. I like posting about stuff.
It felt productive and good.
I think it’s important and valuable. I tried, and I think succeeded (in the short term), for a bit in the past to post a lot. I think I should discuss more and get more feedback.
Yesterday, I did feel particularly good. I was surprised too. I had gotten up earlier than I ever had in the last few months for a rare morning shift, and I felt pretty good. I think that plays a part in why I posted a lot yesterday? Also a few other thoughts:
I consider posting and doing stuff important. I’ve been trying to get myself at a point where i can do it. I guess in that sense philosophy doesn’t always end up a priority? Somedays it is (as today), other days its school or something else.
Do you have any questions about that? You can discuss or share if you want. Did you read anything about mold btw?
Some Alcumus Problems:
1.) Got it right.
2.) Got it right.
3.) Got it right.
4.) Got it right the second time. I’m very bad at remembering a number is negative. I think at certain times I treat -8 as “This number is negative eight”, other times I treat it as “This is 8 with a minus sticking on it”. When I treat it the second way, I forget a lot to keep a number negative.
5.) Got it right.
Your work looks too messy to me. I don’t see clear sections. I see x= but I don’t see y=. I think it being hard to tell what’s what is related to making arithmetic errors or typos or memory errors or whatever losing a negative sign is.
Also, you don’t need to find a common denominator to compare fractions to figure out which is bigger. There are other ways. In this case, the comparison can be easily done another way. If you stop and look at numbers and think about them and compare them and play around with them, before you start calculating, it usually helps. Sometimes you’ll find a solution and sometimes it’ll help you know what’s reasonable or unreasonable so you don’t get a wildly wrong answer and think it’s right.
See if you can look at -8/13 and -4/7 and notice anything about them, compare them, play with them, find some way to determine which is bigger without getting a common denominator or multiplying 13 with 7.
Some writing to share:
I remember seeing a YouTube short where a woman goes off on a guy for wearing a sports jersey not of her said team. I think in the YouTube short the women went like this “This is Buffalo Bills territory” and was harassing the dude over a different sports team. A bunch of comments were calling out for being childish, stupid and dumb. Yet I think it was also a bit misogynistic. There was an element of saying that woman is trying to be like her man. That this is some kind of woman copying men behavior?
Reason I bring the above YouTube short up is because I saw another YouTube short where a cop harasses (nothing crazy) a guy in public for wearing an opposing sports team in a city. The cop pulls up behind him and uses the speaker of his police car to tell him to take it off. He seemed kinda serious. He wasn’t aggressive. The comments in this just found funny and talked about that’s what you get for wearing stuff like that in opposing sports team territory.
Another thing: I’ve seen videos where kids pull that kind of stuff and get aggressive and violent. People call them out online and say this kinda behavior is pathetic. But idk, its just the treatment of these violent kids is way different from the treatment that woman got above. Even though, imo, their kinda the same kind of tribalist losers.
Oh yeah I remember comments like “can’t bring the girl with you” “poor husband must be cringing rn”. first of all wild to assume husband, i don’t think that was clear in the video (or even a boyfriend, but then again idk how wild. I think a lot of women statistically are in relationships). second, guys pull this kind of shit all the time. for all they know the husband is like this too. idk.
Mmm. Not really. I’‘m kinda just doing what I’ve done before with some success. In the past I’ve gotten my life in a semblance of order over time. It started off with brushing my teeth for a few days and not focusing on anything else. After getting that habit sorted I would then focus on working out and then something else. This is what I’m doing now again. This is also related to why I sometimes don’t do philosophy. I’m probably introducing something new in my life and I just focus on making sure I do that. I’m planning on doing that with my philosophy stuff soon.
Right now I just do philosophy when I have the time. My goal is to make it a first thing in the morning task.
Oh yeah, one issue is that I don’t really schedule or plan things out still. I remember some advice being shared about that. I should probably go check it out. I kinda just do stuff until I’m done. So one reason I may miss some philosophy (or other stuff) is because I’m just working on something until I feel done and by the time I’m done its late.
For mold: no I haven’t read anything yet. I didn’t forget about it. Its something I plan to do soon.
Nothing particular about that article. Just looked for one talking about all the closures.
Just something I’ve noticed as all this is going on:
The difference between the people who are working at the company versus the people who don’t. Within the people who don’t work at the company customers and non-customers seem to vary a lot.
If you go to r/starbucks right now you’ll find a lot of dissatisfaction with how Starbucks has handled its company closures. I don’t know what the normal and standard way of handling stuff like this is, but it just seemed kinda wack. Sprung out of nowhere with a company that yaps on about caring about its team and communities (which I’m sure a lot of them say they do). Possibly breaking some notice laws when it comes to lay offs. Making those people apparently work to help close their stores. Not telling certain people that their store is closed until they get there. It just seems really mean and unprofessional. The people who got fired are obviously mad, but people who weren’t affected are mad for them and are worried for a “random” lay-off happening to them too.
Now most of the people on something like r/starbucks are starbucks workers and customers/fans. They see this is as sad/bad.
I would say people who work for the company (SMs and below primarily) are quite heavily dissatisfied wherever I go. Hate their job more than ever. Hate the management. Hate a lot of the stuff Starbucks is doing. They hate the hypocrisy. We were told we would simplify the menu, Brian has added some of the most complex drinks we’ve ever had to made under his management. He’s simply removed some drinks from the menu (which were easy to make).
I say all the above to highlight that I think overall Starbucks workers hate Starbucks more than ever (from what I can tell) and Starbucks fans agree with them to an extent (whether they’re going to do stuff like stop purchasing is a different issue).
Yet when I go outside of a Starbucks workers circle and fans, people seem pretty happy/indifferent/ok with what’s going on.
When we get our current CEO, workers at r/chiptole celebrated getting rid of him. Workers at Starbucks were slightly worried about him. Yet the world at large seemed excited. I remember hearing stock prices were going to soar. Workers were happy to get away from him, yet investors were happy to get him.
When we started enforcing a stricter uniform policy workers got frustrated. The general outside sentiment seemed to be workers were being dramatic.
There are some other internal stuff that I could share (nothing really “secretive”) that people were dissatisfied with, yet I’m sure the publics reaction would be business as usual.
Now here the companies are closing a bunch of stores. These closures really affect people’s lives. From income to their ability to do college. Overnight they just messed all that up. I’m sure they more-or-less had the legal right to do so (the stuff I saw saying they did the layoffs wrong didn’t seem massively amazing). Its their company. It just seems, again, really shitty. Yet I go online and sentiment is stuff like “Companies aren’t in business for your sake.”,”Great! Go support your local businesses.” “Nobody wants to pay $10 for your crappy coffee LOL!” . “You guys think its unfair? Life is unfair. Grow up.”
I share all this because I don’t know how to make sense of all this (not necessarily asking for someone to make sense of it for me). Companies can lay-off people, sure. It just seems like a crappy thing to do. I also wonder how many of these people are indifferent to lay-offs when it happens to them. Starbucks doesn’t have the greatest public image. I wonder if those people would have the same reaction for companies people have more respect for like Costco (I remember reading lay-off stories about other companies where people seemed more sympathetic to the people getting laid off, nothing specific tho).
An excerpt on Szasz in my psychology textbook:
The Myth of Mental Illness
In the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of mental illness was widely criticized. One of the major criticisms focused on the notion that mental illness was a “myth that justifies psychiatric intervention in socially disapproved behavior” (Wakefield, 1992). Thomas Szasz (1960), a noted psychiatrist, was perhaps the biggest proponent of this view. Szasz argued that the notion of mental illness was invented by society (and the mental health establishment) to stigmatize and subjugate people whose behavior violates accepted social and legal norms. Indeed, Szasz suggested that what appear to be symptoms of mental illness are more appropriately characterized as “problems in living” (Szasz, 1960).
In his 1961 book, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, Szasz expressed his disdain for the concept of mental illness and for the field of psychiatry in general (Oliver, 2006). The basis for Szasz’s attack was his contention that detectable abnormalities in bodily structures and functions (e.g., infections and organ damage or dysfunction) represent the defining features of genuine illness or disease, and because symptoms of purported mental illness are not accompanied by such detectable abnormalities, so-called psychological disorders are not disorders at all. Szasz (1961/2010) proclaimed that “disease or illness can only affect the body; hence, there can be no mental illness” (p. 267).
Today, we recognize the extreme level of psychological suffering experienced by people with psychological disorders: the painful thoughts and feelings they experience, the disordered behavior they demonstrate, and the levels of distress and impairment they exhibit. This makes it very difficult to deny the reality of mental illness.
However controversial Szasz’s views and those of his supporters might have been, they have influenced the mental health community and society in several ways. First, lay people, politicians, and professionals now often refer to mental illness as mental health “problems,” implicitly acknowledging the “problems in living” perspective Szasz described (Buchanan-Barker & Barker, 2009). Also influential was Szasz’s view of sexual orientation. Szasz was perhaps the first psychiatrist to openly challenge the idea that same-sex attraction represented a form of mental illness or disease (Szasz, 1965), which helped pave the way for the social and civil rights that gay and lesbian people now have (Barker, 2010). His work also inspired legal changes that protect the rights of people in psychiatric institutions and allow such individuals a greater degree of influence and responsibility over their lives (Buchanan-Barker & Barker, 2009).
That’s really dismissive, doesn’t give an actual counter-argument. It suggests Szasz was insensitive and ignorant, which is not actually what was going on.
The disrespect is interesting given the acknowledgment of Szasz as a leader in defending homosexuality, which was incorrectly labelled a mental illness. Somehow getting that right didn’t win Szasz more of a fair hearing about the other things he said also weren’t mental illnesses.
Do you know why they’re closing stores? Did the executives make mistakes about planning how many stores they need where? Did the marketing team fail to reach as many potential customers as they should have? Did the menu need to be customized for some locations to match local tastes but wasn’t? Did individual stores lose money due to poor local managers or workers? Are the stores being closed actually losing money or just making a lower rate of profit than most stores or making a high rate of profit but there’s some other issue? How long in advance did leadership have concerns and what steps did they take to try to solve the problem before giving up on solutions and deciding to close stores? In general, how does leadership monitor for problems, try to spot them early, and then try to solve them, and why did they fail in this case? Who did what wrong?
If no one will identify who made mistakes or whose fault this is, I’d take that as a bad sign about leadership and a risk that more people may lose their jobs, through no fault of their own, with no explanation, and no accountability from the potentially very-highly-paid people at fault who get to keep their jobs.
Yeah I was a bit confused about that. I thought it was going to into why he was bad/wrong and then it acknowledges something good that happened because of him. I was just surprised to see him mentioned. I also thought it was kinda neat. Though I don’t know if this kind of recognition is good.
This kinda reminds of a basic Philosophy course I took a while back for an elective. I think this was before I started tutoring. Would’ve been neat to share about specifically because he talked about Rand. He didn’t dismiss her outright and his treatment of her thoughts seemed ok at a surface level for a beginner like me. I just thought it was neat that Rand was mentioned and not fully dismissively. I think I still have access to some of the stuff from the class. Let’s see:
Oh it was from the first module called “Why is Philosophy Important” He had us read “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” (the essay) from Miss Rand and “The Value of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell.
In a different module called “Do Humans Have Free Will?” he had us read Holbach, The System of Nature: “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency” and Branden, “Volition and the Law of Causality”
The last module called What Now? consisted of us reading Miss Rands “What Can One Do” and Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus”.
I still have access to the lectures. I think I’ll skim through them soon just to see the academic treatment of Rand. I remember him not being outright unfair and mean. I thought it was pretty neat to see Rand mentioned kinda positively/ok/as a philosopher.
I don’t know if these are just thoughts to consider in this kind of scenarios or things actually being asked of me. Regardless I tried to answer/find answers for some of them.
As to why they’re closing stores, their official reasoning from https://about.starbucks.com/press/2025/message-from-brian-an-important-update/ :
During the review, we identified coffeehouses where we’re unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance, and these locations will be closed.
I can kinda believe that/I think its that with other unstated reasons. Certain stores that were closed were high risk locations. Other stores closed I believe could be underperformers. There are stories of areas with 4 starbucks in proximity to each other. So I can believe they overbuilt. I’m kinda partial to the whole union theory. Starbucks has gotten in trouble for closing union stores directly before. So this was an excuse to close union stores along with other stores happening to get in the crossfire.
I think its a mix of all three. Safety, union busting, and low profits. I’m partial to union busting cause I don’t like upper management (so thats definitely a bias) and because as they mention from that message above:
Each year, we open and close coffeehouses for a variety of reasons, from financial performance to lease expirations.
so I don’t quite believe the need to close so many stores at once save for union busting. But idk the financials and other stuff upper management sees.
Some other comments:
I think Starbucks marketing team sucks. We let TikTok and brand recognition do our marketing. Our new in-store signage looks terrible. People joke about it being either AI generated or made by a kid in Canva. We also give up on marketing something fast. We had a line of olive infused drinks called Oleato a year or so ago. I think it would be fairly obvious that olive oil infused coffee would be an uphill battle (though I thought it was quite nice). We pushed it for like two weeks giving free samples and all that and then proceeded to give up very quickly. It was still on the menu board (they added it to the core, not seasonal, menu immediately) but they gave up on trying to sell it. If things don’t go well immediately, they give up on it really fast. I also think they’re testing team sucks. We get a lot of flops that corporates assures us is “Loved by our tasters and test markets”. Get new tasters and a new market. Your current one sucks.
I think Starbucks taste fits well with various local tastes. I think one thing I do think Starbucks does well is how customizable your drinks can get. Though its debatable if customers knew that.
To just generally answer how leadership handles this stuff. My experience with most of the upper management of Starbucks is very corporate handling. They notice an issue, reference an internal resource on how to solve it, and don’t give their managers much else.
Also another reason why I’m skeptical of the store closing thing is that my area has some stores with abnormally high incidence rates. No stores in my area were closed. Maybe there are stores with even worse crime and harassment and stuff then ours? Its not unbelievable.
No. No identification really given or statement of fault. They just said some stores we gotta close cause we need to.
