FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
20d ago
It doesn't have to be superior to be what he believes.
In sports we've been seeing thirty years of coaches, even very objectively successful ones, believing totally irrational and disproven things that a Nate Silver running PECOTA could tell you.
They also have access to door to door canvasing data, which public polling rarely has.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
20d ago
Trump's internal polling/perception of the state of the race might range from "We're fucked, throw a hail Mary" to "We've already won."
I also doubt Rogan is going on the attack. I've never seen him take a hard line with a guest outside of Covid stuff. They're going to bro out for five hours, maybe get in some cheap shots about trans kids, and call it a day.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
20d ago
Seconded. When I click on some intellectual dark web would be radical, and his blog is interspersed with images of him drawn up as a cartoon hero, I close it. When I go on Twitter and a thread features a million irrelevant ai generated images, I click away.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
That's a good point, bro. I've studied Plato before in college, so I'm not totally foreign to reading the dialogues. I really want to flesh out a lot of the ones I haven't read, rather than being limited to the Symposium, Republic, and a couple others.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
Ultimately I intend to read all of them. Do you have the Hackett edition? 1800 pages is a lot, but pretty similar to other things I've read. I figure to start with some of the classics and then work my way to the obscure ones.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
The injury was non contact but getting smashed in the backfield over and over isn't doing any favors in terms of movement quality. Beyond the sacks, I thought the Eagles were gonna catch a suspension for the late hits they were laying on him last week.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
I agree with you, at times, but not at others. Trump loves America, but too often it's an America that he remembers dimly from before he was born. Patriotism is to a large extent loving what your country is, not what you imagine it was or should be.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
It looked like a team that would last for a long time, but now we're seeing it maybe fall apart. Same with the Joe Burrow Bengals, when they made it to the Suber Bowl everyone thought they were coming back soon. Contending windows are short! Makes the Rams look smarter, they made hay while the sun shined.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
You're right, in that much of purpose was to split away from High School friend groups. Everyone in high school has friends age 18, few have close friends age 21+. When I was in high school, from 15 onward I could have gotten an 18 year old to buy me cigarettes, it wasn't until after I graduated that I could reliably acquire alcohol.
The results of all this are kind of uneven and mixed. As a kid it was easier for my peers, or me though I didn't at the time, to smoke weed than to drink alcohol, weed was already illegal so the dealers didn't card, and it's easier to transport than alcohol. Good kids, like me, basically didn't drink in high school, the bad kids who did want to drink found ways to, and it meant interacting with real shitbirds of adults who would help them get it. I'm sure there's a lot of bad people who make a habit of preying on minors looking for booze.
I'd love to see it set at the municipal rather than the state level, using the same techniques. No state government can turn down government highway funding just to let 18 year olds drink. But a city? Say, a beach town like Asbury Park, which would benefit from attracting 19 year olds to party? Or a college town like Ithaca, which would be able to better regulate student drinking if so much of it wasn't technically illegal?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke, and years later with better technology they found they could produce something closer to regular Coke, but by then Diet Coke had its own loyal customer base that would be dangerous to offend. In my own household, my wife loves Diet Coke, while I prefer Coke Zero.
It's interesting how the original goal was to make fake Coke, but then releasing a new product that was closer to real Coke didn't entirely supplant the original fake, because the original fake now had its own specific reputation and flavor.
it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's
I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American. A certain kind of urban blue triber hates actually existing American traditions, they hate baseball and football and fast food drive-throughs and Christmas and guns and elections and cars with V8 engines. They hate their own families and communities, they hate where they grew up and those they grew up with, they are sure that whatever somebody else has over there is better than what we have here. How much of this is a still-lingering hatred of the jocks and preps and pretty girls from high school is left as an exercise for the reader. The crossover between self-professed progressives who hate McDonald's and self-professed rightists who hate McDonald's is where you hit horseshoe theory, where the radicals and the reactionaries run into each other, the Hlynka-point.
My wife is American-born, but her parents are immigrants while my family has been in America (and basically in our town) for generations. Sometimes the difference in traditions becomes obvious, and it has made me recognize things that are American for me.
So just after we got married, some eight years ago now, and moved in together for the first time, I mentioned one day before I left for work that I was craving macaroni and cheese, just had a yen for it. My wife, being an excellent wife, went into one of her cookbooks and made an Ina Garten recipe for a five-cheese baked macaroni and cheese, picked up really nice cheeses from Wegmans, and presented me with this delicious dish when I got home. Truly spectacular dinner, it was delicious (if so rich that it was nap inducing), she's since made the same recipe for company several times but...I did have to tell her afterward that when I said I was craving macaroni and cheese, this wasn't really what I was thinking of. I wanted the yellow, boxed, artificial Kraft stuff. My wife was pissed, she still laughs about it, she'd never had boxed mac'n'cheese as a kid, it wasn't something her family would eat, and didn't even really understand what I meant. She thought I was just insulting her cooking, saying it wasn't as good as some processed bullshit.
I'm aware that my wife's five-cheese macaroni and cheese is better, but I still sometimes crave what my mom would pop on the stove when I was a kid. Honestly, even as an adult, I sometimes buy the cartoon-character Kraft boxes, because they're better, I'm not sure if it's just the pasta shapes transporting the cheese better or if the sauce packet is formulated differently. A few days later I got the boxed stuff and made it, and she understood: this is just a totally different food, and she got why I was craving it a little.
McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King feel the same nostalgic way to me, but McDonald's is the alpha, the icon. I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's not something I fit into my weekly diet. But it still feels nostalgic to me in a deeply Americana way, and every now and then I have a craving for it. The drive through is so American, so ingrained in my mind with memories of the road trip, or hanging out at the mall, or in the car with your friends driving around to nowhere in particular American Graffiti style. Drinking a soda, cruising down the highway, on my way to wherever, it's ingrained in my psyche.
As an aside, I remember growing up a stock stand-up comedy joke, which I literally think I remember hearing from different comedians in Dane Cook/Carlos Mencia/Bill Engvall range, went something like: you know what's so unbelievably stupid? When you see someone at a McDonald's and they order a burger, and fries and then get a diet coke! You think the DIET coke is going to keep you from getting fat?! What a DUMBASS!
And as a ten year old I laughed at the joke, because duh the diet coke didn't make any difference! What an idiot that fat person is ordering a diet coke! For some reason we all despised diet soda, it was a mockable concept.
Now, as an adult, that's exactly my ideal drive-through fast food order on that road trip. Cheeseburger, small fries just for a taste, small chicken nuggets, large diet coke. (My actual order tends to be determined by coupons and online offers) A mcdouble is 390 calories and 22g of protein, not that bad occasionally on an IIFYM scale though I wouldn't recommend living off them. A small fry isn't great but it's only 230 calories. The McNuggets are even decent: 190 calories and 9g of protein. Eliminating the sugar and empty calories from the soda is the [single best way] to improve the nutrition of an occasional fast-food indulgence! I get all my nostalgia buttons pressed for the fast food I ate as a kid, and the final result is something like 800 calories and 35g of protein, too much in the way of salt and fat and whatever bad stuff, but not going to ruin my week or anything.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
It's like every season is an experiment in how much of the team can go to shit before Mahomes alone isn't enough to win.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
21d ago
Yes but not, or at least only marginally, with US support and weapons.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
I've decided to tackle the Platonic dialogues between now and the new year. Anyone have a good YouTube college lecture series on them?
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch").
"No Free Lunch" is cope outside of the context of a competitive environment of evolutionary adaptation. This isn't D&D character creation, you don't have a set number of points to spread around. Some people are just strictly better, and others are just strictly worse. While at some point optimizing for one thing might preclude other things, we're a long way from that frontier. The Marathon was contested for a considerable period of time before runners routinely broke the mark that the best Ironman triathletes have set today.
There's no free lunch in genetics in the sense that if there were something that was simply better for the organism in terms of survival and reproductive success, over enough iterations it would have happened already. But, in our case, we aren't really dealing with a competitive evolutionary environment, and a lot of what would have been evolutionary tradeoffs that would have made an adaptation a dead-end until the last hundred years are now trivially unimportant. Tradeoffs like 'burns 2x calories' or 'takes an extra year to mature' might be fatal in the Great Rift Valley and literally meaningless in Berkley.
That said, I share your concern that IQ might be an imperfect measurement. One of the things that frustrates me about IQ debates is that we're rarely limited to talking about actual IQ scores from an actual IQ test, instead dealing with layers of people using proxies like profession or "sounding like" a high IQ person, then correlating that back to IQ, then correlating IQ to that indicator. It's a weird kind of autocorrelation: we know Einstein must have had a massive IQ because he did a bunch of things that indicate intelligence, and because Einstein had a massive iQ we know you need a massive IQ to do things that indicate intelligence.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
This week was the closest thing the Eagles have had to a Get Right win since October of '23. While there was some weirdness to it (70 or so net passing yards in the entire game), it was for the most part a wall to wall win. The Browns win would have looked pretty similar, to be fair, without the blocked field goal TD; but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. The Giants are terrible, and were banged up, but this is what you're supposed to do to terrible teams and the Eagles seemed incapable of just being normal for almost a year now, every game featured unaccountably weird and bad decision making or performance issues. This win probably protects Nick Sirianni's job for the rest of the regular season, though if he misses the playoffs he's probably out in the off season.
Jalen Hurts didn't throw the ball much, but he didn't turn it over either, and he was out by the middle of the fourth quarter to rest anyway. Interesting contrast between the Eagles and the Lions: against the Cowboys the Lions had an insurmountable lead, and used the opportunity to scheme up bizarre trick plays to get an offensive tackle a touchdown. The Eagles, with a smaller lead, chose to take their foot off the gas, putting in lots of backups to get reps. Even Saquon personally, when Nick Sirianni asked him if he wanted to go for a new PR in rushing yards against his old team, he demurred, saying to get the other guys some reps. Maybe the Eagles lack killer instinct, or maybe they have sportsmanship. I'm not sure which.
Elsewhere, it looks like Deshaun Watson's sad saga has taken another turn. Watson tore his Achilles during the game Sunday, and will be out for the remainder of the season. Browns fans reportedly booed aggressively, having no patience for their downed hero, leading to Miles Garrett pronouncing afterward that Watson had been a model citizen "most of the time." The Browns reportedly insured Watson's contract, and thus will get salary cap relief as a result of the injury, which may therefore be a best case scenario for the team. I'm a Truther here, this is entirely too convenient for the league and the team. While players tear their ligaments all the time, and Watson was getting beat up by every pass rush he faced, the timing lines up a liiiiitle too conveniently. Every football commentary podcast was talking about "what are the Browns going to do about Watson?" It was a black eye on the league, even moreso because the off-the-field stuff interacted with the on-the-field product. I think this is all kabuki theater to shuffle Watson out of the league.
As a related aside for the other kind of football, The NYT proves again and again why women's sports never makes it. TLDR: there's a new pro women's soccer team coming to Boston, their marketing slogan is that up until now sports has had too many balls, meaning men. There's been an outcry against the "transphobia" of equating lacking testicles with being a woman. I have occasionally watched women's sports: the olympics, the UFC women's divisions. But I'm so angry that women's professional sports, which I don't watch, is held hostage by weirdo activist types, who also don't watch the games. Professional Women's sports isn't about winning, it's about making some kind of political point. Women just don't understand that if Watson had played well, the Browns fans would have forgiven him, and as long as they even thought he might help them win his teammates accepted him. Have politics, fine, but they come after winning on priorities.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
The only impacts I recall in 2020 were a few local businesses whose owners were arrested on Jan 6th. Other than that I didn't notice any disruptions.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
The thing that blows my mind the most as I look back is how many of my college friends did the worst of their drinking before 21 and calmed down after.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
22d ago
Don't forget in option B: Russian ethnics are dispossessed at least and massacred at worst in Crimea and DPR/LPR, with NATO weapons.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
23d ago
Varies wildly depending on where you live.
But the biggest thing in my mind is just that if you're not THAT attached to the idea you just might not get to it. Sleep in so you don't get to it first thing before work, didn't ask off work so you can't go until after, uh oh I have to go to the bank/mechanic/whatever. For some portion of people it might slip through the cracks.
Keep in mind that as of last week 800,000 ballots were already cast in PA. We're watching the strategy in the 8th inning of a baseball game in which neither we as the audience nor the players or the managers know the score or what happened in the earlier innings.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
23d ago
You need a plan to vote if you're an hourly worker who needs to put in for time off in order to get to a polling place at a time when you can vote. Or wake up early. Or go immediately to get in line after you get off work.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
24d ago
I think it got reported less largely because A) It was pretty much immediately headshot fatal so no horserace to cover, B) the worst parts are actually so bad they're impossible to report in normal news outlets.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
25d ago
I think they will, personally, though I'm not sure what the protections are.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
25d ago
US Election Bold Predictions Thread
Give me your hot takes about the results of the upcoming US Elections. These should be BOLD, don't just follow the prediction markets or the odds, and probably not about who wins the electoral college since the current best guess is that it's anyone's guess who wins. I should preface all this that on the POTUS front, I'm expecting a narrow Trump win, with a very low confidence in that prediction.
For me:
-- Trump is going to lose North Carolina badly, significantly underperforming his polling numbers. The very best recent results for Mark Robinson have him down by ten points after the Nude Africa, "I'm a black Nazi," "I write erotica about my sister in law pissing on me" scandal. Most of his staff has abandoned him. Reverse coat-tails normally don't work out, but Robinson's complete lack of any campaign infrastructure is a different animal than just being disliked. The Robinson campaign won't be doing any of the GOTV work that you'd expect from a gubernatorial campaign. I expect Robinson to do better, thanks to Trump, than his poll numbers indicate, he's probably not going to lose by 20 points. But I expect Trump to do a couple points worse than his averages, thanks to Robinson.
-- Deadlocked Senate. I don't know how, but I expect the Dems to pull out one upset in a red-leaning seat. They've overperformed in statewide elections since Dobbs, and I just think they'll pull one out somewhere. Trump is harmed less by abortion than virtually every other R candidate, because a lot of people who like him just don't believe he's pro-life. R senate candidates are getting crushed on the issue. R candidates for competitive seats like McCormick are trying to swing back towards pro-life, but it's not going to work, it's just going to make them look weak and unreliable.
I don't like Coldplay. I think their music is what they play in a waiting room for your vasectomy. I don't go around using Coldplay as a [prefix to indicate everything bad in the world]. Nevermind, I was going to link the wikipedia article, but the actual title of the article is too funny:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_prefixed_with_Mc-_(derogatory)
I don't like Hockey. I try to like hockey, pretty regularly, but I don't like it. I don't go around complaining about the NHL for existing.
Yet the two ideas are tied together. "I love America, but I hate everything American and want America to be completely different" has some obvious illogic to it. Patriotism is Hegelian, it's about synthesis, glorifying both sides of a conflict. The patriotic American version of the Civil War isn't the Lost Cause or Marching Through Georgia, it is both. Within that ad, the Yankees and Red Sox hate each other, but baseball wouldn't be better off without either team, it needs both, both embody part of baseball's romance and joy. As ever, the success of Augustus wasn't at core about the brutal victory of one side in the Roman civil war, but about his success in glorifying the other side as brave Romans embodying Roman values who were nonetheless mistaken. The English aristocrats who descended from William's retinue came to honor the Anglo Saxon heritage of their conquered homeland. Russian patriotism today struggles to swallow a world in which both Lenin and Alexander were admirable, but it seeks it.
American patriotism today which does not contain McDonald's and the NFL and MTV isn't, at core, patriotism, because for most Americans it doesn't contain the traditions of your literal ancestors and the people you grew up with, your teachers and scoutmasters and little league coaches and the boss at your summer job. That doesn't mean you can't dislike McDonald's. To be honest, I don't really like McDonald's. I've been to a McDonald's three times in the past two years, and once was just a drink, while another time I just bought a medium fry to get change for a fifty so I could buy a velvet painting of JFK for $30 in the parking lot. I prefer Wendy's, when I do eat fast food, which is rarely. But I understand the appeal of it. (I'll note that by my own standard I'm far from perfect: I haven't seen a superhero movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman)
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