naraburns's profile

naraburns nihil supernum 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

From what I've read up, it's HYS or nothing. I have a natural aversion to prestige games but I suppose for the prestige chasers that's just loser talk.

In the interest of completeness, it's worth nothing that there are other paths up the mountain. For example, one common bit of advice is that if there is a state you know you want to practice law in (and you actually want to practice law, not just be an academic or something) then you should try to get into the best law school in that state. If you can parlay that into a position as e.g. the state's Attorney General then you actually have a better chance of winding up in front of the Supreme Court than if you go BigLaw, and you will have direct impact on public policy even when you're not arguing it in front of the nine aristocrats who actually rule the country.

But yes, the legal profession is incredibly ~~infected~~ obsessed with prestige, which it routinely and wholeheartedly substitutes for genuine merit. In any number of venues there is just no amount of demonstrated intelligence or accomplishment that will make up for choosing a lower-ranked law school, and no amount of idiocy that won't be excused if you've got the right pedigree. Exhibit A is of course the educational demographics of the Supreme Court itself. But I have seen a backwater state legislature reject a state supreme court nominee for the crime of not having gotten a 4.0 GPA at their top in-state law school, while cheerfully approving nominees who went to Yale, which doesn't assign grades. It's a real problem.

I suppose this is what I am missing from my normal job, I don't have fulfillment. I feel that I do a good job and the people around me says I am and the company show sufficient financial appreciation, but at the end of the day it's just pushing text from left to right to get people to buy more stuff.

Are you married? Do you have children?

It might off-topic but fulfillment is elusive prey. "Success" in the workaday world entails climbing to the top of a heap and then defending your position there. But by definition most of us cannot be at the top of any heap of humanity. Modernity treats business and government as the only heaps worth climbing. We obsess over promotion and pay raises and political victories. A single layoff or a single health issue can knock us back a whole decade.

The simplest way to parlay that "financial appreciation" into fulfillment is to take on the long term project of community-building. The paradigmatic approach is to start making tiny humans, whose parent you will always be, no matter what the role specifically entails. Not everyone will have the opportunity to be President, or Governor, or Justice, or CEO--indeed, the vast majority of us never will be. But everyone can be a good parent. The title of "Mom" or "Dad" is available to all, if not biologically than through adoption, and the only promotions available are to "Grandma" or "Grandpa." This is why certain political thinkers are so anti-family--because if you are focused on success within your actual sphere of influence, you are much more difficult to recruit as a single-minded soldier advancing the policy visions of others. Family (along with church and other, similarly genuine communities) competes directly with business and politics for your time and attention and loyalty, but offers you fulfillment on your own terms, rather than the terms of whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.

And every time it seems like confusing and non-clear ROI. Nor does it seem like my job then would be more fulfilling, at least on the SWE path there are some pretty clear next steps I can do (big tech/unicorns/interesting startups/open source/anarcho-hackers/etc.). And yes, currently I have to wait for the company-sponsored green card process to complete before it seems like my next chapter in life can begin.

Sorry to hear that. It's never fun to be waiting on bureaucracy. Good luck!

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naraburns nihil supernum 1d ago

I suppose in my fantasy future, I would be doing appellate law and someday argue Supreme Court cases, but everything I read up shows that law is a high-stress, singular life.

Not always, but by far the best path to that point is to graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, maybe Chicago, to clerk for a Circuit justice (and then, if possible, a SCOTUS justice), and go to work at a large law firm. The first step is to take the LSAT. If you can score 175+ (less if you are an underrepresented minority) then at least that step is not impossible. But if appellate law is the only thing that really interests you, then you should probably just not go to law school--unless, perhaps, you are extremely well connected. Even if you go to Harvard, the odds of ever actually arguing interesting questions in front of the Supreme Court are quite low. Even arguing in front of state supreme courts is pretty unusual.

If you're sufficiently interested in law to accept a career well short of your fantasy future, then you might as well take the LSAT and see how it goes. STEM majors actually tend to do very well as it is for the most part an obfuscated psychometric, despite the recent removal of the logic games portion. If you do poorly, then you can turn your attention elsewhere. If you do well, then you can decide whether to take the next steps of figuring out plausible schools to apply to. But bear in mind that law careers have a "bimodal distribution" between highly compensated "BigLaw" attorneys and the rank-and-file of family and criminal and liability lawyers who are (often at best) comfortably middle class. You could easily end up spending 3 years and $100,000+ to take a pay cut and spend the rest of your life refereeing messy divorces.

I am a lawyer, but I only practice on rare occasion. I left behind full time law practice to become an academic philosopher. I find it much more fulfilling than law practice, and I get to argue about whatever issues I want with people who are actually a lot smarter than the median SCOTUS Justice. The pay is terrible and it's unlikely I will ever make a meaningful difference on actual public policy, but that would probably be true even if I were a powerful appellate attorney.

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naraburns nihil supernum 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

While Fable 5 was available, I was able to use it to update the AAQC listed-by-user post. It took less time and exhibited more capabilities, in particular integrating its own calls for AI assistance in sorting some of the less organized posts. I was also able to make the update in a couple of hours where the original took a couple of days, but the new attempt also was able to draw from the lessons of the original attempt so the increased speed might not be down to the model. (It did absolutely chew through my usage limits in a way I'd never seen before, though.)

My "max" subscription trial expires soon and I can't imagine ever paying for an AI subscription out of my own pocket. But I can see how anyone who codes for a living has probably had their job description permanently changed to "the wet part of an AI centaur." Artists and musicians are basically there, too. Of course there are remaining questions (like how much this all actually costs) but all the MBAs I know are currently doing their best to extract as much value as possible from the trend while contributing as little as possible of genuine worth in return so, who knows.

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naraburns nihil supernum 8d ago

It's kind of the opposite of life insurance, really. The point of an annuity is that you can't outlive it, so you purchase annuities as a hedge against living longer than you anticipate, where life insurance is a hedge (you erect for others) against dying sooner than you anticipate. I think many annuities also have death benefits associated but I assume that is to mitigate unjust windfalls to the brokers.

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naraburns nihil supernum 10d ago

What incenses me most about race-conscious rightoids

This is a bad start--it really communicates disdain in a way that wages culture war rather than discussing it. And while "race-conscious rightoids" is at least arguably a somewhat specific group (?)--

how incapable they are of sovereign thought

--seems too sweeping to apply to an appropriately specific group. The violation is not exactly egregious and there is some substance to your comment but I feel like I should at least say, "more light, less heat, please."

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naraburns nihil supernum 19d ago

It is far from the shortest AAQC ever! In fact I think we've had at least one one-liner accrue sufficient nominations as to make the cut, though I don't remember off the top of my head when that was.

The nature of the space is such that length is often rewarded (and sometimes confused for effort/quality) but shorter posts do sometimes get nominated, and pretty routinely make the roundup.

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naraburns nihil supernum 25d ago

Yes, @ToaKraka is correct--all front page posts are hidden until approved (otherwise, the site would consist overwhelmingly of Russian spam...). I was just letting you know that I had not approved this one.

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naraburns nihil supernum 26d ago

Two things. First, it's probably not a good approach to just reproduce an entire blog that isn't your own--a submission statement seems like the better way.

Second, while I don't think that every post about religion necessarily qualifies as "culture war," I do think that maybe this particular blog reaches that level, if only barely. So if you'd like to share this article as a link with a submission statement in the CW thread, that would be fine. But thanks for posting!

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naraburns nihil supernum 27d ago

I've never been diagnosed, but yes, I'm plausibly "autistic" under current use of the concept.

When I was young, only the most severe cases of "autism" were ever diagnosed, and IIRC it was considered by most to be a form of "childhood schizophrenia." I was in my 40s, give or take, when the "spectrum" really sank into the zeitgeist and people first started commenting about me being "on" it. Some of my children (who are all now adults) do have psychiatrically diagnosed autism, based on criteria that would clearly apply to me, so it seems fair to say that I'm genuinely autistic, insofar as any such diagnosis admits of authentication. Specifically, my social interaction norms are deep into "spectrum" territory, while my repetitive behavior and sensory processing tendencies are less severe but still noticeably autistic.

But I am "high functioning," especially verbally, and as an adult it seems pointless to get a personal "diagnosis" for a variety of reasons. Would I get an embossed certificate for my wall? I think that clocking me as autistic sometimes helps other people but I've lived an above-average life by most metrics; if it ain't broke, don't fix it! I do look back at many interactions of my youth and, viewed through the lens of disability, a lot of my suffering was arguably the result of other people genuinely abusing me. But they couldn't have known that any more than I did, and blaming myself (despite never really knowing what I had done wrong) probably developed my sense of agency.

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naraburns nihil supernum 28d ago

This is a very interesting post, and I appreciate the photographs. Thanks!

Here’s a fun one. Did you know that Pizza Hut in China is actually a sit down restaurant?

Some of us are old enough to remember when it was a sit down restaurant in the United States, too. Apparently the company is exploring a possible return to that norm.

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naraburns nihil supernum 29d ago

I've been lurking here for a bit and it was my impression that copy/pasting the essay wholesale was not the way things were done.

Well, not when it's someone else's essay. But yes, generally we don't mind if someone mirrors their blogpost here, and generally we do frown on bare links, so something between "include some commentary" and "make the whole post" is the norm. (It also tests our patience when someone posts their blogs here but then entirely refuses to engage with responses in the comments--obviously no one is under any obligation to reply to everyone, but we are watching for patterns that look more like the user using the site for their own ends, than for its stated purpose.)

But as I said--we haven't developed much in the way of hard-and-fast rules, particularly concerning non-CW posts. Again, welcome!

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naraburns nihil supernum 30d ago

Hello, and welcome to the Motte!

I am approving your post. However, I am doing so with some hesitation, because it intersects kind of an ongoing concern, for which I will, with apologies, partially hijack this thread to mention.

This is a discussion site. The sidebar explicitly invites posts more-or-less like this one: related to philosophy, submission statement, appropriately outside the CW thread, etc. However new users with zero posts or comments here, pitching their blog rather than engaging directly, raises questions about the extent to which this is a discussion site as opposed to a click-farm for geek links (it would for example have counted more in your favor if you'd simply reproduced the entire blog post here, but submission statements are also, strictly speaking, okay, and of course better when linking other people's stuff you don't technically have permission to copy). In the era of ubiquitous generative AI, the problem is further complicated by our aim of being a discussion site for sapient users.

The mod team has not (yet?) really worked out a consistent response to this. We do have some interest in new users, it's healthy to the site and helps advance the foundation of the rules. So I'm approving the post, but I make no guarantees as to whether similar posts (from you or other fresh-rolled accounts) will be let through in the future. For whatever it is worth, if you had posted this after participating in discussion elsewhere on the site for a while, I'd likely have approved the post without further comment. Users with an established posting and comment history are an easier call and continue to be encouraged to post. This is a reputation economy!

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naraburns nihil supernum 1mo ago

So, what are you reading?

I just started Platform Decay. Murderbot is comfortable science fiction, to me. It's not groundbreaking work, but it is smoothly executed and enjoyable. The series definitely does a bit of anti-capitalist pandering but this never does successfully undermine its meritocratic undertones. The TV adaptation was also watchable, though strictly inferior (and more inclined to lean into the pandering).

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naraburns nihil supernum 1mo ago

Please post CW content in the CW thread.

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naraburns nihil supernum 1mo ago

Wasn't Utah settled from the Midwest?

Initially, yes. But the earliest Utah settlers were quickly joined by converts from all over the world, albeit mostly England and Scandinavia.

I know they love cosmetic surgery almost as much as the Koreans, but I think s_m_h would've noticed that.

I think this is a "Mormon moms" thing ("staying hot for hubby")--girls out seeking converts will most often be in their early 20s, when cosmetic surgery would in most cases be premature.

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naraburns nihil supernum 1mo ago

Surely polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more.

Attractive women do not just come from attractive mothers; they also come from high value fathers with substantial resources (such as would be needed to support families with multiple wives). Additionally, Utah was disproportionately settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and the British Isles. You can find similar phenotypes in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is probably also an HBD explanation for why Mormons and Midwesterners have such rhyming cultural stereotypes (e.g. passive-aggressive politeness, or Mormon "funeral potatoes" versus Minnesotan "hot dish").

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naraburns nihil supernum 1mo ago

Do you have any idea what's going on?

Not to be a single-note piano, but "the Great Awokening" seems like a plausible culprit for what you've observed. It's just identitarianism forcefully asserting itself. This, basically, and then this (PDF warning). "Assimilation" used to be a goal; then it got dumped into a bucket with "colonialism" leading to the crazed perception that Indians (or whomever) who travel to Europe or the Americas are being "colonized" if they assimilate.

I have met a fair few immigrants who are actually quite insistent that their children assimilate, but in many cases this seems to backfire somewhat. There are definitely people out there who prefer to feel attached to the culture and practices of their ancestors, for various reasons, despite being geographically remote. That I am a rootless cosmopolitan does benefit me in some ways, but there are definitely times when I wish I had been better suited to becoming a key figure in a community of comparatively limited importance beyond its own boundaries.

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago

You can talk to Zorba about the details, but there is a "janitor" bot that already does this, and has been doing it since late 2019. The AAQC list is not strictly handcrafted but rather the bot compiles the entire list of user AAQC nominations, and then the moderators (in theory; in practice this is my contribution) whittle those down from about 200 per month to the top (roughly) 40. The final list gets a "commit" which (mostly) auto-formats the monthly post, and Zorba keeps that "commit" list in a database somewhere. That database was at one point fed into the "Vault" project for sorting but I don't think Zorba has touched the Vault in quite some time.

I do assume it would for someone with coding experience indeed be "trivial" to generate a list like this from that database. My suspicion however is that anyone who is both (A) adept at coding and (B) willing to contribute to the Motte's code needs would be significantly more valuable to the site working on, like, literally anything else in our list of priorities. But if spinning up a "running tab" of per-user AAQCs seems like a fun project for you, I doubt anyone would discourage its development.

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago

Dare I ask who has the highest AAQCs/Total comments ratio?

At a guess, I would bet that at least some of the single-AAQC posters have zero other comments--lurkers do occasionally pop up to say "hey, I actually know something about this topic..." and proceed to publish an absolute banger, only to return to lurking afterward.

But if you went with, say, users over 10 AAQCs, I would guess that /u/barnabycajones would be high on the list, considering he accumulated at least 60 AAQCs in the SSC era--about the same number that Dean has accumulated in the years since the switchover. /u/yodatsracist may have a similar comment ratio. I would also guess /u/gemmaem not for an overwhelming number of AAQCs but for a lower number of non-AAQC posts. /u/darwin2500 accumulated about thirty that in the SSC era, edging out myself and /u/TracingWoodGrains by a handful there, but all three of us were prolific commenters so our ratios wouldn't be very high.

Similarly, Doglatine pulled over 60 in the Motte sub era, while (say) fcfromssc and efficientsyllabus were half that in the same era. Fivehourmarathon has drawn more than 70 here, but themotte.org is the longest timeframe.

Longevity is of course the main driver in terms of sheer numbers, but I was honestly surprised to be the only unitary username over 100 AAQCs. I know my ratio would be much lower than many even if you don't count my modposting in the sub. Dean and Ilforte are also over 100 across usernames, and TracingWoodGrains should also be regarded as in the hundred club since I know there are probably few dozen AAQCs out there that weren't properly included in this compilation. One thing this project has resulted in is slight improvement to the /r/thethread wikis, so I could run the project again and likely improve the list, but I am a little burned out on wrestling with janky LLM tools this moment. A real coder like Zorba could do a much better job, but real coders like Zorba have more important things to do--like keeping the site operational!

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

Mine is missing "Introductory Texts to Rationalism".

It... looks like maybe that entire roundup did not get included in /r/thethread, actually! So none of those entries would show up here.

Now that all the links are in one place, any chance you can have Claude submit them to the Wayback Machine and archive.today?

I certainly can't. Someone else probably could.

But actually there was a point at which @ZorbaTHut scraped a bunch of them, and for several years now the full text of all AAQCs has been automatically archived. That is what led in part to the Vault, which project unfortunately hasn't had any forward motion in years. But Zorba does already have a database with much of the content archived. It's just a question of being able to actually do something with it.

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago

Sorry about that!

One thing I have discovered is that the parser Claude made me did not pick up any AAQC awards if there were in-text [brackets] used when linking to the AAQC in the roundup. Sometimes these were used (as with yours) to edit the text a bit, but sometimes they showed up in the formatting for other reasons (like stripped links that left the brackets behind). I think that is the main category of missed AAQCs as there are probably a few dozen that ended up getting reported like this. I tried to catch as many as I could but by the time I finished this up, I had decided that I probably could have done the whole thing faster by hand, and it would have been substantially more precise. Alas, I squandered my time vibe coding, instead.

But, I have edited yours in now.

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago

Is there somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user?

Here.

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago · Edited 9d ago

AAQC Archive, by Recipient — Part 1 of 3

This archive compiles every Actually-A-Quality-Contribution award by recipient, across all three eras: 🔵 /r/SlateStarCodex, 🟢 /r/TheMotte, and 🟣 TheMotte.org. 1142 contributors, 5284 AAQCs.

@ratanon — 1 AAQC

🔵 r/SlateStarCodex era

"Satire is supposed to be a literary form of social criticism..." — 12-10-17

@__unterwasser — 1 AAQC

🟢 r/TheMotte era

I — November 2020

@jkf — 1 AAQC

🟢 r/TheMotte era

"What did you expect when you told these people that they would be unable to earn a living, go out for lunch, or leave the country for the forseeable future?" — January 2022 2/2

@_windjammer — 1 AAQC

🟢 r/TheMotte era

How gender reassignment is nothing at all like taking your hair dryer to work. — July 2021 1/2

@-LVP- — 1 AAQC

🔵 r/SlateStarCodex era

Banging Continents Makes Mountains — Week of September 10th, 2018

@-Reman — 1 AAQC

🟢 r/TheMotte era

This article is very sophomoric take on the age-old democracy vs technocracy debate. The form of technocracy varies from ideology to ideology (e.g. aristocracy, communism, fascism, scientocracy, etc.) — Week of April 1st, 2019

@[deleted] — 2 AAQCs

🔵 r/SlateStarCodex era

@07mk — 17 AAQCs

🔵 r/SlateStarCodex era

diminishing returns of Social Justice — Week of April 30th, 2018
Rise and Decline of the SPLC — Week of June 25th, 2018
Consequences, Suffering, and Terminal Values — Week of September 17th, 2018
Against University Micromanagement by The Government: Gender Studies — Week of October 15th, 2018
> In that world, the only way to fight the class war is for all workers, across the world, to cooperate, and that first means tearing down the nationalistic and ethnic divisions we see between each — Week of November 19, 2018
> But this is kind of the point - yes, literally everything is violence, and that's why it's critical that we understand the violence we are doing and analyze it until we come up with a coherent fr — Week of December 10, 2018
> Similarly, I agree that progressives need to be self-reflective and look for ways to improve (like any movement), but it seems crazy to be trying to do that in this thread, where a few scrolls do — Week of December 10, 2018

🟢 r/TheMotte era

naraburns

naraburns

AAQC Archive, by Recipient — Part 1 of 3

@ratanon — 1 AAQC

@__unterwasser — 1 AAQC

@jkf — 1 AAQC

@_windjammer — 1 AAQC

@-LVP- — 1 AAQC

@-Reman — 1 AAQC

@[deleted] — 2 AAQCs

@07mk — 17 AAQCs

@0jzLenEZwBzipv8L — 4 AAQCs

@100ProofTollBooth — 29 AAQCs

@15ImpoundedCats — 1 AAQC

@2D3D — 3 AAQCs

@4570_throwaway — 1 AAQC

@4bpp — 24 AAQCs

@4QHURikzXS — 1 AAQC

@5434a — 3 AAQCs

@7thHanyou — 1 AAQC

@89237849237498237427 — 1 AAQC

@895158 — 6 AAQCs

@9461701 — 1 AAQC

@a_motte_alt — 1 AAQC

@a_random_user27 — 2 AAQCs

@aaa — 2 AAQCs

@aaronb50 — 3 AAQCs

@Abdul_Alhazred2018AD — 3 AAQCs

@Abdul_Alhazred2018D — 1 AAQC

@ABigGuy4U — 4 AAQCs

@Absox — 3 AAQCs

@ActuallyATleilaxuGhol — 1 AAQC

@Ademonera — 1 AAQC

@AdiabaticShear — 1 AAQC

@adnzzzzZ — 1 AAQC

@aeiluindae — 3 AAQCs

@agallantchrometiger — 1 AAQC

@Agentorange — 1 AAQC

@ahh_fuck_it — 2 AAQCs

@ahobata — 1 AAQC

@aiislove — 5 AAQCs

@ajijaak — 1 AAQC

@AlanCrowe — 1 AAQC

@AlertConfusion3782 — 1 AAQC

@alfrednachos — 1 AAQC

@AliveJesseJames — 1 AAQC

@alphanumericsprawl — 7 AAQCs

@AlternativeEbb — 2 AAQCs

@Amadan — 28 AAQCs

@Amadanb — 4 AAQCs

@Ame_Damnee — 26 AAQCs

@AmrikeeAkbar — 3 AAQCs

@anatoly — 4 AAQCs

@anechoicmedia — 12 AAQCs

@annafirtree — 1 AAQC

@anodognosic — 1 AAQC

@anonymous_rocketeer — 1 AAQC

@Anouleth — 1 AAQC

@anti_dan — 1 AAQC

@anti-intellectual — 1 AAQC

@Antidisestab — 1 AAQC

@AnythingMachine — 1 AAQC

@apostasy_is_cool — 1 AAQC

@ApplesauceIrishCream — 3 AAQCs

@Appropriate-Report — 1 AAQC

@ApproxKnowledgeSite — 2 AAQCs

@April16-1457BC — 1 AAQC

@April20-1400BC — 2 AAQCs

@aqouta — 10 AAQCs

@Areopagitica_ — 1 AAQC

@ares — 3 AAQCs

@ArgumentumAdLapidem — 12 AAQCs

@arjin_ferman — 2 AAQCs

@ArjinFerman — 9 AAQCs

@ArmedTooHeavily — 1 AAQC

@Armlegx218 — 1 AAQC

@Artimaeus332 — 7 AAQCs

@asdasdasdasd — 1 AAQC

@asdfasdflkjlkjlkj — 3 AAQCs

@asdfaslkjhdfaasd — 1 AAQC