Ah...I see. I am not much of a gambler either, so this is a very useful piece to know why Roulette gambling, in the long run, turns negative for the gambler. Thank you.
I do not have a lot of background on statistics. Hoping someone here could explain why in Roulette game, although the apparent chances of getting number between 0-18 (inclusive) and 19-36 (inclusive) are the same, we lose money if we keep playing more and more numbers of games.
Your suggested approach was exactly what I did when I had gone through a similar system in Myanmar as the OP described above, where lazy teachers leave managing the class to students among themselves.
Stay as neutral as possible so that it doesn't bite back at you when the name-taker is someone else. It worked for the most part because my classmates would start recommending me to be the name taker and in return, I told them to not make too much noise when talking during teacher's absence.
As an immigrant, that was one of the cultural adjustment that I had to do in the US. In my home country in SE Asia, people usually ask "Have you eaten (have you had a meal)?" as a greeting. It's easier to answer with "No, I haven't." or "Yes, I just had lunch" for example.
But when I moved to the states for college, I was perplexed as to how to answer "How're ya?" or "What's up?". :D I learned to answer that question with a standard, "I'm good. Thank you". But even nowadays, I sometimes venture to answer it honestly like, "I'm okay. [insert some really honest reason why I'm just okay]" or "I'm busy, but it's all good".
This is just a small example of adjustment that I made as I try to settle in my new home.
As an immigrant with no family to rely on in the US, I always give credit to Reddit for helping me learn so many things from buying old/used car, applying to grad school, to looking for an apartment. Just like you said, its diverse user base means it has almost all the information one needs. I hope it never changes (although with the recent re-design, I'm afraid it might have unintended repercussions...)
A great story. It's similar in a lot of ways to how people believe that Buddhas (according to Theravada Buddhism, many, many Buddhas live among us and almost all of us will become one) fulfill his path to enlightenment this way--reincarnation after another, absorbing all experiences along the way until he is ready to become the Enlightened one.
Disclaimer: I was born Buddhist, but no longer. But I still admire a few aspects of Theravada Buddhism.
I agree with you about not trusting anything we see on TV/Newspapers (even if it is from 60 Minutes; NYT; whatever-is-reputed-to-be-reliable). I grew up in Myanmar and after reading a lot of one-sided coverage about the refugee issue there (labeled as 'genocide'), I realized it's impossible for news organizations to be almost always impartial and accurate.
They have to obtain information from some source. Almost always, that source of information can mislead the reporter/news writer easily because of the latter's lack of familiarity with the issue, the region or the culture. The reporter, on the other hand, works against time. Plus, s/he is, after all, human (susceptible to persuasion/personal biases and worse, is sometimes too lazy to do a fact-check and more importantly, to hear the voices from the other side).
As most things in life, the truth is always in somewhere the middle.
I believe that it's not too bad to let negative thoughts pass through our stream of consciousness everyday. I mean, it's part of being human to have different kinds of emotion, right? The intervention is necessary ONLY IF one feels like negative thoughts are occupying too much of his/her mind space and is debilitating his/her day-to-day functions.
Other than that, we may sometimes be happy, be sad, be angry, be disgusted, be afraid and so on. Just don't linger on one for too long (know that time will help us forget) and that's a good enough approach to manage the emotional flux.
I've been working from home once a week in the past couple of months, and noticed that I spend more time working at home than I do in the office. For example, if I work from home, I'd be working from 8am to 6pm (with a few short breaks for lunch and etc.). If I go to work, I clock in at 8:30am (commute) and checks out at 5:30pm sharp.
In a way, my employer is getting an extra 30-60 mins out of me for the days I work from home (assuming that I'm as productive working from home as I am at the office, which I believe is to be the case).