The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored" follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but the bailey version used to dismiss other people's difficulty in losing weight as only self-control issues, which you've expressed as "You eat too much and you dont exercise enough", does not, because exercise is not the only way calories are output, fat is not the only way an input can be stored and absorbtion rates can vary.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
I think it's a defensive move; Trump is good at debates (well, not at debating, but at turning the debate to his advantage) so they want to force a 'draw' by making it as chaotic and unproductive as possible.
Not a great strategy, Kamala trying to match Trump will probably come off as 'bitchy', not the 'sassy' they're hoping for.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
I've been taking driving lessons recently in my late 30s (never bothered to before as I lived in the city) and I'm surprised by how it drains me. It's not anxiety, I'm not nervous about driving. There's nothing different about me before I go to a class. But I feel extremely tired after a 1 hour driving class, almost as if I'm sick, my brain get foggy. My current theory is that driving being an unfamiliar and potentially deadly activity my brain goes in an hyperfocused state that is extremely tiring to maintain for an hour. If that's the case I imagine it will get better as my degree of familiarity improves?
Did anyone else here have that experience of extreme tiredness for an only moderately long driving session? Did it improve? Were you a teen or an adult when you learned? I'm wondering if maybe teen brains get used to it faster.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?
Christians, like Jews before them, asserted quite strongly that the gods the average Roman of the day worshiped were false: non-existant and worthless at best, if not evil. This was unique to Jews and Christians, polytheist cultures in the region usually had an inclusive attitude towards foreign gods; not usually calling them "not real gods", but just ignoring them or sometimes adapting them within their own mythology.
This exclusive approach to God tended not to make monotheists very sympathetic to Romans.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Could be indirectly. Maybe the settlement pushed Fox to ask their hosts to tighten their belt and/or the leash they're kept on and that didn't sit well with Carlson.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think they might offer an exchange: Biden for Trump. The cathedral wants to gain back respectability. Biden is increasingly a drain on respectability, Trump was in itself a drain on respectability, and the actions they're taking to prevent Trump from getting power again (indictments and at the least in the eyes of about half of the US election shenanigans) are the biggest drain of respectability of all. But they can't stop because they've made Trump very very motivated to embark on Stalinian purges if he gets back in power; they won't be able to keep him busy and sheperded in a second term.
I can imagine the system being very keen for this exchange: both Biden and Trump publically renounce politics (Trump immediately and Biden as soon as his term ends) and drop from the 2024 race. In exchange, Biden pardons Trump of federal crimes, leans on state prosecutors to drop charges for Trump, Biden pardons himself and Republicans drop the inquiries. Everyone walks away, Biden stumbles through a speech about how it was necessary to put behind divisiveness and the strain on the democratic process that prosecutions and impeachments etc... the opposing side was causing. The cathedral gets back at least the veneer of respectability. Republicans lose Trump, but having the stronger candidate field below Trump they probably win 2024. The cathedral can let that happen because they don't really care about Republicans or Democrats, just Not Trump. It would help rebuild some of the credibility the electoral system lost. Democrats lose Biden, who was never a powerful candidate and was increasingly embarassing to keep around (too old, unfocussed, dwindling coherency, increasingly appearing corrupt). They had to sacrifice everyone else to prop Biden up and now they have no credible contender under him, but without the extreme imperative to win against Trump they can send Kamala get slaughtered against DeSantis or Ramaswamy and rebuild their field for 2028. I don't know if Trump would go for it, but if he believes himself he probably should. He has 3 ways out of the indictments: legal victory, electoral victory or PR victory. But his stated opinion is that the judges are unfair, elections are rigged and the media are against him. What exactly are his paths out of this mess then?
I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.
That's not impossible, but it seems more likely that these are people that are motivated to assume that any negative interaction at the border is proof that Trump's america is fascist, and would be calling the news immediately if it happened.
I'm not going to assume that these people also made this happen on purpose so that it can be used against the administration and/or raise their public profile, but I'll point out that it's also possible. Couple of weeks in detention to become internationally known is a deal many people would take, especially since the left tends to reward its martyrs and turncoats handsomely (though we'll see if perhaps cuts to some organisations might make them less free with the rewards).
pigeonburger
1mo ago
So exactly as he said.
It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
So sufficiently restricting calories necessarily results in reduction of mass.
Yes, indeed, but the "sufficiently" part can be much crueler on some people than others for reasons outside of self-control.
The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.
How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?
To me it reads like a very dehumanizing admission from Hamas, and a natural corrolary from the idea that Israel will retaliate more than ten-fold against attacks on its population. It enshrines the idea that Israel has such a social, technological, military, political advantage on Palestine that its people's lives, even just civilians and common soldiers, are worth orders of magnitude more than Palestinian lives. And Hamas agrees with that.
If it was plausible for Hamas to claim it was because they are kicking Israeli ass so much on the battlefield they forced them into negociating an unfavorable exchange, then maybe it would be a Hamas victory. But the only way Hamas is winning is that they getting killed so hard that Israel has to pull its punches for it not to look like they're outright massacring the helpless.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."
Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
I don't dislike the way Discord works; we really needed a replacement for IRC, as not everyone had the chops to run a bouncer and keeping a record was a big issue. Discord has the nice effect of mixing multiple types of communications people could want to have together in a semi-coherent structure.
I am a disappointed though that the solution we ended up going with was a centralized private company, instead of an open protocol. But Matrix is a mess.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
No, I do realise all of that. But the forms and niceties are important, even if they are just pretending. If you pretend to tolerate the other for long enough, you start believing you do. And when enough people believe it, something magical happens (or rather, something terrible doesn't happen); your society becomes more stable and its constituents don't jump to civil war anytime they lose an election.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
At the risk of oversharing, I lost my mother over the weekend and while I give my wife the advice that she shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing herself to be somber and mournful every single moment, I myself can't escape feeling like people would think me callous or unfeeling if my actions and demeanor didn't match their perception of what someone mourning their mother should be, so I do ultimately force myself to act differently just to not cause any unease. Am I overthinking this?
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Here in germany, we call the kind of person who can't help but point out wrong statements no matter the relevance nor the unwiseness of antagonizing the talker "Besserwisser" (literally "betterknower"). Both me and my wife are like that, which can make family life sometimes difficult.
In France this is a Monsieur Je-Sais-Tout, here in Quebec we call a Ti-Joe Connaissant.
Also, in most regions, the alleged "natives" had displaced, up to and including full genocide, a different group that lived there before. The entire concept is just ridiculous.
To begin with, is there specific date at which we should start feeling bad about history happening the way history always has? I can buy arguments for "within living memory" but that's not what's being applied here.
Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.
Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.
The interests of the person who wants a cheap employee or servant and the person trying to get an entry level job are not the same. The interests of the person who wants government housing in a nice part of town, and the person who already owns a house in the nice part of town are not the same. Many people also have bad ideas about how to get where they're trying to go.
I agree with you in general, but I need to nuance on this point. At that specific level of politics, their interests are perhaps not the same, but in the grand scheme of things, I think a critical mass, regardless of social class, race, gender differences, would agree to make some compromises in the optimal assignment of resources for them or the groups they associate with to live in a country where everyone can have decent access to jobs, reasonable housing, education, healthcare, etc... What objection would anyone have to everywhere being the nice part of town? So when you zoom out to that level, I think it is truly mistake theory. And that really is I think the distinction between high trust and low trust societies. Mutual trust in strangers is really a self sustaining miracle; when enough people believe that this critical mass exists, then it does. When not enough people do, when you stop believing that the other guy is willing to make compromises in your favor so that we can all live in a nice place, then suddenly you must start strategically defecting on the arrangement to make sure you and your family are not the ones to be dumped on constantly.
Hence why western remote work expats living like kings in gated enclaves in poor countries is a relatively new and marginal phenomenon; because maximizing your own resources when you're surrounded by violence and poverty still sucks, and it takes a special kind of sociopath to just shut themselves off to all of it around them. And why high class, high education people in dysfunctional countries still often want to move to functional countries when they have the opportunity, even if it means their education is not going to recognized and they will be relegated to unskilled work. While you have more stuff, maybe some servants, being rich in a low trust society is not as fulfilling as being average in a high trust society.
Because if my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to one of my machines (if I even cared to put one; I don't), I would not give a fuck. If you told me my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND unsupervised physical access to my machine for for a couple of hours, then yeah I'd be worried and wouldn't trust that machine anymore.
But so would I if he just had unsupervised physical access to my machine for a couple of hours.
Hence, the BIOS password is inconsequential.
Even putting aside fudged data, I struggle to see what the point of Supersize Me was, other than being an anti-corporate applause light. Trying to prove that you can't live healthily on McDonalds alone is arguing against a point pretty much no one made (I know, the documentary grasps at straw to try to show otherwise, but come on). And even if someone makes it, it would have been a lot better an argument if he wasn't making up rules or making decisions during his "experiment" to guarantee he got the result he wanted. McDonalds had salads already at that time, but of course he had to get burgers all the time. Yes, sure, people don't go to McDonalds for salad, but what was his point again? Him proving that people often don't make great decisions when it comes to their nutrition wouldn't please his audience as much as "proving" giant corporations are making it impossible to eat healthy.
I understand the worry some people have towards IoT devices, and I like a lot of the rules in that document, but ultimately the issue rests with the users. The issue is the idea that network devices, outside of standard end user devices like a computers and phones (and even then), can be secure by default, without thought. At this point, people need to be responsabilized with regards to their network security, and you can't mandate away all the ways that someone can shoot themselves in the foot with consumer devices.
Users need to learn to keep shit behind their firewall, in their home network, and access it via VPN if they need to access it remotely. They should learn to NOT ask for cloud services where they are not strictly necessary.
Sure, I'm a professional and it may sound like wishful thinking that users will learn to do this or hire professionals. But there's a lot of stuff inside a home I wouldn't do, like plumbing and electricity. We don't mandate that plumbing fixtures be impossible to fuck up. And while we have standardized power outlets, everything other than plugging in something, to do with electricity inside a home expects some degree of expertise.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?
I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.
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