BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Pacific islanders also have the additional issue that they are genetically predisposed to higher BMI. In a lot of the rest of the world since the agricultural revolution there has been selection against high BMI over the last 10,000 or so years (we know this by comparing modern vs ancient DNA), however pacific islanders haven't seen the same thing happen. As such today they have more high BMI alleles so it's no surprise they just balloon when exposed to modern highly processed western food.
The tech / hustle -bro response to this is presumably “how do I make money with this?”.
Some prop trading firms have put in huge orders for NVIDIA chips in the last 6 months and rumors are swirling around about them making huge amounts of money: Turns out that you can use transformer models not just to write text or make images/video but also to forecast future values of time series (e.g. is this stock going to go up or down in the next 5 minutes) which if your model is better than the competition lets you make ungodly amounts of money very quickly.
Hearing about these was the first time I ever felt that my job may be at risk to AI. Still, even in the worst case I'm smart enough to pivot towards developing the time series forecasting AI if vanilla quant jobs start to be replaced, so it's not all that bad for me personally.
What I know I won't do, unlike the median human being who's threatened by AI taking their job, is start wailing about some cosmic injustice and demanding the government hand me gibs or force employers to keep me in the job past its use by date.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
It reduces hedonia yes, but doesn't affect eudaimonia in any way. The fact that I'm not chasing hedonia any more leaves me better prepared to achieve eudaimonia. It all depends on how much you value the two things relatively.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Oh I definitely recommend them. I do a fair bit of dancing though so shaving those extra few KGs of fat off has higher returns for me than for most people. Also my ethnicity means that the BMI cutoff for "overweight" for me is 22.9 and not 25 so technically I was overweight when I started them and not just "middle of the pack healthy weight".
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
This may not be an entirely rational decision, but most people can skip desert and snacking and drink water instead of sugar drinks. They just don’t want to.
I can apply this to myself (I have a sweet tooth). I am completely capable of skipping desserts and used to do it regularly. However every time I did this when I wanted to eat the dessert I faced a loss of short term utilons from wanting something but not getting it. Now I was perfectly capable of telling myself I'd get more long term utilons from not eating the kheer and so in the end I didn't mind too much, but the loss of short term utilons still stung.
After wrangling a prescription for tirzapetide I no longer even want to eat the dessert in the first place. I still get the benefit of the long term utilons but I don't have to pay the short term penalty either as there is no intrinsic desire to eat anymore. Even though the previous status quo of me deciding to skip dessert when I wanted to eat it was net positive for me the current situation is still an improvement.
Even if you're not fat GLP-1 agonists are useful. I decided to start taking low doze tirzapetide after my BMI went above 23. I'm back down to 21 and feel lighter and nimbler, not to mention generally healthier these days. It feels almost like how I used to feel back when I was 18.
It's also helped me control how much time I was spending gaming (it didn't feel anywhere near as fun anymore) and I'm now using it much more productively reading instead.
I've personally found the drugs to be very powerful "Id control" medicine rather than mere appetite suppressants. They get a +1 from me.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
That's your takeaway from the whole saga? It's far more reasonable to conclude that LibsofTikTok is the equivalent of David Gerard. She's a culture warrior to whom truthfulness matters not one whit through and through but unlike Hanania doesn't have the intelligence and social grace to present as respectable. I support her name being dragged through the mud for the same reason I support Gerard's name being dragged through it.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
But in the US the optics of whipping black people would create a shitstorm.
This is a hangup the the people of the US need, ahem, beat out of them.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Don't forget that rent is a fixed amount that you pay each month which includes stuff like repairs and home taxes etc. (in some countries, but alas, not the UK) while mortgages though are a lower bound on your housing costs because you're responsible for all the repairs and taxes etc.
The solution, as always, is beatings. Operant conditioning works on dogs, it absolutely should work on the psychotic homeless too regardless of how poor their rational reasoning skills are (unless society is willing to admit these people are less capable of reasoning than Fido, which it will never do).
Create a rule where any homeless person publicly under the influence of drugs or caught doing them is subjected to half a dozen lashes delivered ASAP and you'll very quickly get these people associating drugs with pain no different to how they associate drugs with a high right now and a good portion of them will stop quickly.
And for the small proportion that doesn't? Well given that they've now demonstrated they can't conform to a basic principle followed by pretty much all mammals instinctively (avoid doing things that lead to punishment) you can use this as evidence of them being certifiably insane and use it to lock them up for a very long time.
And they will use homeless as a pawn.
Finally a productive socially net positive use for the lumpenproles!
These are the French we're talking about. Famously the country with one of the largest tax to GDP ratios in the world. Cutting off the ability for their government to function (and thus extract even more tax to fund even more spending) is like taking a fish out of water. It's gonna hurt.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
One thing I've always liked about Macron how willing he is to put the common man in his place and his actions over the last month have only solidified this view. A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least. Here's hoping next time around they see sense (the pessimist in me knows though that it'll take at least a few more rounds of "treatment" before they behave).
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Canon EOS-R5. Excellent camera body.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Say it in hushed tones but I think the European far right has a ceiling of 30-35% because the rest of society will make any compromises necessary to keep them out of any real power (we saw what happened the last time). In the end they'll be loud and a thorn in everyone's sides but utterly and completely insignificant in therms of how much power they wield. I think Macron was completely correct to call out the voter's bluff and slap down Le Pen by proxy.
People noticed how the UK's election saw our far right Reform party get less than 1% of the seats on around 15% of the vote and they talk about how FPTP stops extremists but a part of me feels that because of FPTP the UK is one of the few places where the far right could ever end up welding significant power because unlike Europe where 35% gets you 35% of the seats and no power here 35% (or less) can give you a large majority to enact whatever laws you want.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Funnily enough the African slaves who were sent to the US had it good in their new countries compared to the fates of those who were unlucky enough to be sent to the Caribbean or Brazil to break their backs on sugar plantations. If anything the Caribbean descendants should be eligible for first class tickets on the US racial gravy train.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
I voted Labour. I'm basically a single issue voter on housing and infrastructure at the moment and the Labour party is the only one with a remotely credible plan (now it remains to be seen how far they go towards implementing it).
Abolish the green belt yesterday!
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
this paranoia reminds me of the book "I, Claudius". Read it, if you haven't!
Seconding the recommendation for I, Claudius.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
If you're going the IVF route seriously consider getting your embryos screened for autism via Orchid genomics. It costs about $1200 per embryo but can easily save you hundreds of thousands in money and emotional worry from having to deal with an autistic child for life.
No links to Orchid, they're just the only ones I know who do polygenic screening for tism at the moment.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Now imagine you'd lost the old phone or it got stolen. You'd basically have lost your Google account there and then. It's one big reason why I'm not a fan of TOTP methods that don't allow me to register on multiple devices as a backup plan in case my main one becomes unusable for whatever reason.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The UK doesn't require SIM card registration. Just get a cheap physical SIM from your nearest small scale mobile phone store and go to another one of them and get a £25 dumb Nokia. Put SIM card inside Nokia and you're good to go.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4
Nah, I'm not that concerned about government agencies, I've already made peace with the fact that if they come after me there's nothing I can do. I'm more concerned about your average journ*list etc. wanting to gather info on me.
I hate the antichrist!
Modern technology is in dire need of modern solutions
Our story starts a few days ago when I changed the IP address of the VPN I use to connect to my BurdensomeCount accounts and identity. This is a fairly regular thing I do for Opsec reasons. I also scramble the MAC address of my devices every once in a while, same reason. Normally this is all fine and dandy except that last time I decided to do both of these things together. Looking back this was a very bad idea indeed. While minor minutae of misfortunes I've had to face in my daily life aren't worth making a mottepost on my struggles over those pained few hours, if only for didactic reasons about the current state of modern large technology companies and the decay of the anonymous free internet, are well worth writing about.
On Saturday I tried to log into my discord account for a voice game of Blood on the Clocktower (on a server that originally sprung up from The Motte so populated by smart people, it's quite a fun way to spend an afternoon if you have nothing better to do). After inputting my email address and password and solving the captcha- these days they're using one with a picture containing multiple objects, all but one of which are in pairs, so like 2 trucks in the image, 2 lions in the image, one rabbit and you have to click on the unpaired object to pass- Discord did the whole "new login location detected, please check your email address" thing, all well and expected because of my VPN reset.
At this point I went to Gmail to log in. Email address, check; Password, check; no issues here. Since I was using a new IP and MAC Gmail asked for an extra security check before they let me in: they wanted a mobile phone number to send me a 6 digit code. This was the first sign that something was wrong: I didn't even have a mobile phone associated to this account so why was Gmail asking for a phone number? Like seriously, why do you need me to associate a phone number before you let me into my own account? I tried to see if there was a way around this but apparently not, Google wanted a phone number or it was no dice for me.
Obviously I didn't want to provide my registered phone number linked to me in real life but fortunately I have a burner phone. I gave Gmail one of my burner numbers and got the code from Google. Note that since I didn't have any associated phone numbers with the account anyone could have used literally any phone they had lying around for this so it's not like this was providing any real security benefit to my account against intruders, it was all a charade for Google to get its hand on a phone number. I was medium annoyed at this but I had a voice game to play so let it slide. I got my six digit code and put it in, only to be told:
Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you. Try again later or use Account Recovery for help.
No shit you couldn't verify this account belongs to me when I don't even have a phone number associated with the account? What possible reason related to identity verification could you have to ask me for a phone number in the first place?
It was off to Account Recovery for me. Google again wanted my email address and password, which I provided. I also had some security questions registered to my account that I knew the answers to but Google didn't even bother asking me about them, instead taking me straight to:
You didn’t provide enough info for Google to be sure that this account is really yours. Google asks for this info to keep your account secure.
If possible, when signing in: Use a device where you’ve signed in before Use a familiar Wi-Fi network, such as at home or work
and leaving me at a complete blank wall. My only reaction at this point was WTF?? Locking people out of their accounts when they've forgotten their ID details is one thing, but doing it to someone who remembers literally every single piece of identity information associated with their account is a whole new level of bastardry. Do no evil indeed.
All this meant I needed a new Discord account, which meant a new disposable email account as well, and I needed it fast, the games were starting in less than half an hour. I wasn't gonna create another Gmail account after their recent treatment so I went to what I thought was the provider most open to anonymous accounts and least likely to pull another Google on me: Protonmail.
Fortunately making a new account with Protonmail was fast and without issue. I took this new email and tried to use it to create a Discord account. Discord though was much less nice. Firstly it wanted all the standard details: username, email, date of birth (1st Jan 1984 in case anyone is curious) and password. Before making the account it wanted me to verify I was human: it was time for another captcha but that wasn't enough to sate Eris, she also wanted me to verify my phone number to create an account, which as usual I didn't want to provide for Opsec reasons.
At this point I was already feeling some burnout so tabbed over to other stuff for a few minuets. When I came back it was to the landing page Discord has for all new accounts where they tell you about how they are a worse IRC clone and try to upsell you into buying Nitro (but hey, at least it's still better than Slack). Thinking I had lucked through somehow and wouldn't need to go through the whole phone number charade and was home safe I closed these popups but instead of the expected stuff I was presented with the login screen again. It looked like I had timed out instead on the previous screen and would need to login again into the new account.
No matter, at least I was getting somewhere. I put in my new email and password and hit "Log in", only to be rewarded with "Wait! Are you human?". It was captcha time again. I got my burner phone ready and clicked on the rabbit, just about having had it with Discord. Time was ticking, the game was about to start soon and I didn't want to miss out on the first round.
Your Account has been disabled
Fuck me with a pointed stick. Why has this account been disabled when it's never been properly logged into ever in the first place? What possible reason could you have for disabling the account? No phone number? In that case why not just ask for one instead of nixing the account straight up? I hadn't got the time to seethe here so I went straight back to the account creation screen. Since the previous attempt had failed to create a working account I tried to create another one only to be told "Email is already registered", but not before going through another round of captchas.
Great, because I had the temerity to switch over to another tab for a few minutes you've now basically made it impossible to use my email address with discord forever. Normally at this point I'd have gone outside and touched grass to cool off a bit but there wasn't any time for that right now. I immediately went back to Protonmail and created a new account then returned to Discord signing up for another shiny new account with my shiny new email. One more captcha later I was back to the "verify your phone number page". This time I had my burner in hand and gave Eris my number post haste prior to her fickle nature banishing me again only to be met with another "Wait! Are you human?" before she'd send me the six digit code needed to gain access to her inner valuables.
I got the code and typed the digits in one by one, then hit enter. My reward for this was, yep, you guessed it, another captcha. These newfangled automatic registration bots must be getting really good now at inserting themselves directly into the middle of the process given that you need to verify your humanity basically every other click.
Even this was not enough to satisfy her, she wanted me to verify my email as well before letting me in. I clicked on the button to send a verification email only to be presented with yet another captcha. This was too much, I was one sliver away from going full REEEEEE now: Verification can was supposed to be a meme you guys, not an accurate description of reality! Nevertheless I kept my composure, clicked on the rabbit and waited for the fated email to arrive.
Instead of the signup email from Discord I was expecting I got one from Protonmail instead:
Dear User,
Thank you for your interest in our service.
Our system has flagged third-party service registration emails shortly after your account creation, which goes against the intended use of our service and may indicate disposable account usage.
We've implemented these measures to enhance the overall reputation of Proton Mail. This helps protect our domain and prevents the risk of our IP being banned by third-party services, which could affect service availability for all users.
Currently, your account has some limitations, restricting its use for registering on third-party services.
To remove these limitations, you will need to add a verified recovery email address or phone number, or consider upgrading your account.
Learn more about how to verify your account recovery methods here: https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Best regards,
The Proton Anti-Abuse Team
WTF???????? The fact that you knew this was a registration email from Discord implies that you have scanned my email. I thought one of the unique selling points of Protonmail was that you were so privacy focused to the point that everything was encrypted and if governments served you a warrant you wouldn't ever have any info about your customer's emails beyond their encrypted inbox you couldn't do anything about. Scanning their emails is about the biggest breach of trust possible here. And it turns out you aren't just doing it when your hand is forced by the government (understandable) but willingly to make some extra pieces of lucre.
What's even the point of Protonmail then if you're going to be just as bad as the big providers when it comes to privacy but also provide a paltry amount of free storage compared to what they give, and we haven't even started talking about how you gimp new accounts or your sketchy and misleading advertising (they say new free accounts get 1GB storage but it's actually only 500MB by default with the rest requiring you to set up autoforwarding from your gmail account to use their UI and also download their app; oh and to create a sense of FOMO you only have 15 days to do this or you're forever stuck at 500MB).
I remember the days when you used to have two passwords for protonmail, one to download your encrypted mailbox from the site and then the other to decrypt the mailbox locally on your own machine. Oh how you people have fallen. I used to be highly supportive of them in the past but after seeing this I would't piss on them if their servers were on fire.
And of course by now Discord had timed out again and my fledgling account had been disabled. I would have to start the process from the beginning and go through the captcha gauntlet one more time. I was legit malding now, why did they have to make it so fucking hard to create a usable discord account? I was close to giving up by now, no clocktower game was worth this much strife.
Eventually I had to go to Microsoft and create an Outlook email to be able to create a functioning Discord account. I had just about given up and didn't expect much from them but surprisingly the process with them was completely smooth. All those capchas by the end though had me channelling my inner Elmer Fudd and I was just about ready to kill that damn rabbit. I noticed quite wryly that in the year 2024 AD Microsoft, that old bogeyman of the 90s, was somehow more OK with completely anonymous accounts than services which a few short years ago were loudly trumpeting how pro-anonymity they were.
But even now I was not home safe. I may finally have had a working Discord account but still needed an invite to the BOTC server because surprise surprise my last link had expired. Even though we're an open fun server that's happy to welcome pretty much anyone from rdrama/themotte in 2022 Discord got rid of permanent non-expiring invitation links unless the owner designates it as a "community server" which means giving Discord full rights to scan all content as well as getting it listed on a public directory on the discord website (not a good thing for us, the server's culture risks getting run over). This means we are forced to rely on invite links that expire every seven days...
This change by Discord making user experience worse sounds completely nonsensical until you realize that Discord wants to compete with other established social media sites like Twitter. That means they're trying to incentivise people to spend as much time as possible on their site and pushing community servers that people can self discover is one way of doing it (same reason they switched to fixed usernames). These incentives also have a side effect of Discord cannibalizing other smaller discussion sites like drama where Aevann who runs rdrama.net now hardblocks links to them because they very noticeably siphon off conversations and people; I can't say this policy is wrong either, something like it is probably necessary for the long term health of the site.
In the end I ended up messaging multiple different people I knew to be on the server and very obliquely asking them for an invite link (because I didn't want my messages to get filtered), hoping one of them would respond so I could join my game. Fortunately @everyone saw my message and I was able to join the game, but not before he got his drama account temp shadowbanned for falling afoul of the Discord filter. After wandering the modern technological desert I had eventually made it to the promised land, but not without half a headache and an intense burning hatred inside of me for the way these big companies operate...
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Where's Rekieta's NYT article?
The wider world of normies really needs to know more about his saga, it's hilarious!
The biggest takeaway I have from the discussion below is how bad American drug prices are. I'm paying around £100 a month ($130) for my tirzapetide by buying high dose pens and then taking half dozes every week. In the end the net cost to me of this medicine is minimal because it means I eat almost £100 less worth of food a month too. One the other hand you guys are having to pay $500+ per month for semaglutide which is worse.
I'm not the biggest fan of the NHS but you can't deny it gets us cheap drugs, their development paid for on the American dime. Long may that continue!
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