5434a
1d ago
Might squeeze in a few ornamental annuals. I've got phlox, sunflower, sweet pea and cosmos seeds and I'll buy some fuchsias when they're in the shops.
Most of my gardening is reducing the size or number of things, not increasing them.
5434a
1d ago
I can happily drink half a bottle of whiskey, it's the entire can of condensed milk I struggle with.
Cheap Irish cream is ~£7/700ml. Cheap whiskey is £7 for enough to make 700ml of Irish cream.
If you break it down the major taste elements are sugar, whiskey and coffee/chocolate combined with a cream texture. It's easy to put those together and tailor them to taste without the need for condensed milk and the corresponding need to make up a whole bottle.
It's worth making it for the experience, on the other hand for me the experience taught me it's not worth making it. It's like making up a whole bottle of one specific cocktail.
5434a
3d ago
After one attempt at making my own I decided it's cheaper and easier to just buy the ready made stuff. Alternatively add cream, whiskey, optional flavouring and a lot of sugar to coffee. Easy, quick, cheap, versatile, and you can readjust the ratios to your taste every time. No need to mess around with sterilising bottles or using up half a bottle of whiskey each time either.
5434a
8d ago
I assume you've already checked you're not playing 5.1 audio through a 2 channel system, I struggled through a number of films around the time 5 channel rips got popular before I remembered to check and set my software to force 2 channel playback. I'm not sure if dedicated separates have that option.
On the other hand something like Tenet was irredeemable.
5434a
12d ago
You scored an average of 1390 over 10 rounds in today's EthnoGuessr!
Your best round was round 1 with 2696 points guessing ProtoEthiopid!
5434a
12d ago
Park Tool videos are solid. I really like RJ The Bike Guy too for his videos showing how you can do the same work without specialised tools and why you should save yourself a lot of trouble and just spend the money on the right tool, even if it's not the pro spec Park Tool version.
5434a
14d ago
I was reading a post yesterday that made a point that all/most of the AI is currently funded by VC money that presumably will eventually want a return on its investments. You make it sound like Adobe, MS Office, Salesforce et al could get decimated but it doesn't seem like the value will be redirected to the AI companies, it will just largely evaporate as the underlying activity is made redundant. Can the cost of so much compute break even?
I don't know if that's accurate and would like to hear your perspective as someone who is a lot closer professionally to those kinds of issues.
5434a
14d ago
He could reason. Sports mean prizes. Winning means cash. If women were equally good at football you could make a stronger team by replacing the second best men with the best women and winning more cash.
The same principle is more stark in warfare. If women were equally strong then societies would have an advantage if they encouraged women to be warriors to better protect and defend those societies, and women would be similarly self-interested in doing so.
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men? Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
As I talk about frequently on this blog, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I'm not sure I buy into the idea of autism creating these blindspots. Are there two types of autism? It seems like there's one type that says "You utter utter moron, how could you mistake the northern lesser spotted arctic giullemot for its close cousin the lesser spotted arctic northern guillemot! Can't you see the distinctive circle around the eye doesn't fully extend to the beak? What?! Of course it matters!" And then there's this other type that says, I don't know, something like "The television must be true because only the best people are on television, and lying is bad, and the best people don't lie. That's just basic logic".
Can anyone explain this for me?
5434a
15d ago
I'm merely asking if puberty blockers fit into that previously-used-without-objection definition. My conclusion is: yes. Do you disagree?
I don't agree with the definition. It would classify a child being prescribed puberty blockers as an on-label treatment for precocious puberty as being chemically castrated.
5434a
16d ago
It depends how you define castration. The strict definition would be a double orchiectomy. If these chemicals made your balls wither up and drop off then yes, that plainly qualifies as chemically induced castration.
It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].
If you define it as anything that reduces normal sexual function then you put it on a vague and very wide spectrum and it becomes a matter of arguing the balance. The trouble is that would drag a lot of other things into the category. Too much whisky? Recreational amphetamines? SSRIs? It's starting to look like I've been chemically castrated a few times and it reversed rapidly with a good night's sleep and some eggs and coffee. What looked like a powerful rhetorical weapon to attack the trans movement finds itself a little impotent.
What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.
If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.
5434a
19d ago
powerline adapter
I'd recommend paying the extra for power passthrough so as to not lose a socket, and wifi for the added connectivity. All the gains with none of the trade offs.
5434a
22d ago
An individual claim is only one piece of circumstantial evidence. It's also trivially faked and so provides an incredibly weak basis for the epistemic confidence of our assumptions and should be weighted accordingly.
"A woman is anyone who says they are a woman" prejudicially privileges the weakest evidence over all the other evidence.
5434a
22d ago
That implies that whoever doesn't say they are a woman isn't a woman. Or at least that we are incapable of knowing who is a woman until they declare whether they are or not.
It's not that it's simple, it's that it's simplistic. It's intellectual garbage. Accepting it sincerely is corrosive to the very meaning it seeks to assume. It naively installs a back door to womanhood at the cost of collapsing the entire structure. What good is saying you are a woman if being a woman holds no more meaning than a kid saying that he is a t-rex? Should we alert the local zoo that we've discovered a living dinosaur? Why not?
5434a
22d ago
Efforts to nail [language/meaning/words] down are always doomed.
Can meaning be refined and, albeit imperfect, made more exact?
You mention position but the direction matters too. There is a position where transwomen are not women, and there is a direction that when followed arrives at a point where transwomen are women. That is not the only direction meaning can travel, and that's not the point where that particular direction comes to a rest.
Recasting meaning so as to recategorise transwomen as women isn't bold intellectualism, it's sophism. If it was intellectualism it would pursue the direction until it could travel no further, but it always stops at that. one. point.
5434a
25d ago
the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction
Like modern art's relation to photography I feel your discussion of modern architecture is missing some mention of the development of novel materials. A great big part of why so much of it is steel beams, sheet glass and reinforced concrete or finished in synthetic colours and assembled with adhesives and rivets or such is because they were newly available and made what was previously impossible possible. Tie that in with the "truth to materials" attitude from the Arts & Crafts movement and you arrive at a distinctly industrial era aesthetic, both in the sense that the materials are made in a factory and the resulting buildings are often vaguely reminiscent of the factories where the materials were made.
5434a
1mo ago
5434a
1mo ago
My mother grew up on a farm and as a result always took the pragmatic position regarding these matters that nature knows what it's doing, and it knows what it's not doing too. One seed grows, another seed doesn't, they both had the same care and conditions. All you can do is keep sowing and keep caring. Sounds like you and your wife share a similar level-headed and caring attitude to each other.
5434a
1mo ago
Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. It's short, with suitably lively prose to paint the picture of unfettered big-R/little-r romantic emotionality. Haven't finished it yet but the closing section kind of reminds me of reading Faust in how it's unravelling into disjointed fragments.
5434a
1mo ago
You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.
Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.
5434a
1mo ago
5434a
1mo ago
The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.
5434a
1mo ago
This argument can easily go either way. Since before humanity the mother supplied the egg, the womb, and archetypically the nursing and parenting too. Now technology means that we can take an egg from one woman, implant it into another, and then pass the baby to another after delivery. They're all doing parts of mothering but none of them are doing all of mothering, and so there's always room to say they are or aren't a "real" mother, it's a matter of how pedantic you need to be.
To illustrate by inversion, would you say that the random Swedish woman is the mother? Because there's a trivial counter that she had no part in a biologically fundamental part of mothering. But does that mean that the child doesn't have a mother? Or two? If two, why are they different? I don't know the answer other than it seems the word is inadequate to properly describe the novel situation. Metamother? Metasexual reproduction? Egg mother, womb mother, and breast mother? Fractional mother? I don't know. Just that if you draw your line too rigidly you probably have to conclude the child doesn't have a mother, which doesn't sit well with the drawing of rigid lines. Relaxing those lines though opens up an argument that anyone who can claim a part of the label is entitled to the whole, and we all know where that goes.
Perhaps we could sweep the whole argument aside and ask why does it matter, what matters is knowledge of the underlying facts. But then the argument rears up again because the label implies a set of facts that ought to provide knowledge, otherwise what use is the label?
Just some thoughts.
5434a
1mo ago
Started Generation F by Winston Smith, from the short-lived era of blog-turned-book behind-the-scenes public sector exposés. It's partly "if only you knew how bad things really are" but so far it's been let down by its shallow analysis. For example the author questions why the number of supported housing units expanded so rapidly under New Labour? Answer: Because "it became easier for parents to offload their children into State care". Leaving aside how that puts the cart before the horse it also begs the question of how New Labour and more importantly their backers and supporters benefitted from this change, and this coming immediately after a brief accounting of his workplace's state-funded running costs.
The characters are very two dimensional too, boiling down to little more than interchangeable pastiches standing for male resident, female resident, coworker, and lower/middle/upper management.
On the plus side it's not shy about critiquing the poor/negative outcomes of the system the author finds himself working under.
Heard a piece on the radio about this the other day. IIRC apparently what happened was they were paid equally per their contracted hours but the binmen were allowed to go home when their work was finished while the cooks and cleaners had to stay until the end of their shifts. The cooks etc then sued the council for pay discrimination because they were doing more hours active work for the same pay.
It's arguable that the binmen had finished their work, so why sit around the yard drinking tea just to fill out the hours. It's also arguable that the streets are never perfectly clean so why couldn't they pick up a broom and get to work refilling the bins if they've got a couple of hours left, they're not being paid to drink tea or leave early. Obviously at that point they stop working so hard because they don't have the incentive to finish early any more. At some point the council propose reducing either the number of binmen or their hours (and resulting pay) and you get a strike.
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