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FiveHourMarathon

Listen to Pierre

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joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

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.


				
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FiveHourMarathon


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Listen to Pierre

				
				
				

				

					14 followers  

					follows 6 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC
				


				
					

					
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.



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.




See eg


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”.




We absolutely do. No society free from nepotism has ever existed, but societies with proportionately less nepotism have consistently outcompeted societies with proportionately more nepotism.




I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you?




The United States of America. Not only is this literally true comparable to other cultures throughout history, it's our national creed.




Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law that you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement.




I brought up TJS, because it's super direct and easy to follow cause/effect. What about the injuries in Basketball? In youth soccer?


Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them. I should be clear: if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five, I support you doing so. But I expect that if we apply such a theory to the mass of people, we'll start to see the same problems crop up.




I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive.




Moreso the aforementioned injuries from intensive training than anything else, combined with going from a highly regimented training regimen built around competition to having to steer oneself. They're an example of what happens to specialists left behind in scalable professions.


And if we're starting from age five, training will always be coercive. Many five year olds require coercion to get dressed and to eat. If you're suggesting that a child who wants to do nothing but mathematics should be encouraged, within reason sure I agree with that. But we'll probably run into the same problems we do with athletics. And we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


patient handoffs are so dangerous that one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.




Man, the goalposts are moving around so much that I can't even remember if this is a home or away game anymore. But let's chalk that up to exhaustion and address what you're saying point by point.


Our learned friend in argument @was started this discussion with the statement:




The practice of Medicine just isn't that deep. It's some pattern recognition (sick / not sick), extracting the right features from the patient (patient says "man my chest feels weird" and figuring out if they mean chest pain, shortness of breath, etc.), heuristics (this cluster of signs and symptoms matches this), and then a short decision tree (D-dimer --> CTA). It turns out that at the end of that relatively shallow decision tree, if you can't figure it out, 99% of the time it's not because there's a Dr. House moment waiting on the other side, it's because nobody knows. Sometimes that's -- well we've discovered that you have stage IV pancreatic cancer. Here's a clinical trial but otherwise that's the end of human knowledge. Sometimes it's "well, I don't know why your chest feels weird, but we've ruled out the bad stuff so let us know if it gets worse!".




So sure, fine, we need a few hero-genius doctors willing to work insane hours for complicated patients. That doesn't really address the majority of patient needs, the majority of interactions that a typical individual has with a doctor and with the medical system, which typically are simple checkups and checkins and outpatient procedures and don't require constant observation. Why are we incapable of discriminating between those tasks and assigning appropriately?




{Nurse Pratitioners aren't good enough.}




That's fine, no one brought them up. The whole argument I'm making is that improving access to doctors will be a positive, even if the doctors that one has access to are not hero-geniuses.




Train more doctors you say. Sure, fine. Except that that takes a long time, requires professors and other resources (we don't have enough cadavers for anatomy lab already) and things like surgery specialties don't have enough procedures to adequately train in a timely fashion. You need to see a variety of cases and patients and advancements in medical care have made this harder (which is mostly good but not for this specific issue).




All the more reason to start today. Not doing something because it takes a long time is setting us up for the same problem ten years from now. Pipeline problems require time to address, but you have to start. And what we're seeing today is downstream of what we did 40 years ago:




While today’s physician shortage is accepted as fact, it may come as a surprise to learn that just forty years ago the exact opposite problem was being predicted: a physician surplus. Back in 1980, reports warned that too many physicians were being trained, and organizations like the Pew Charitable Trust and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) urged a moratorium on new medical schools and a reduction of first-year residency positions to restrict the entry of foreign medical graduates. In fact, there was such urgency in the 1990s to slow the production of physicians that the government began paying hospitals not to train doctors. In 1997, a consortium of medical organizations agreed that further steps should be taken to limit the number of physicians, recommending a decrease in funding for postgraduate medical education. That same year, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped residency training funds, which would remain frozen for the next twenty-five years.




The physician shortage of today is the result of policies then. Do you think that the percentage of Americans who meet those rigorous hero-doctor requirements declined as a result of those changes in slot-availability, or do you think that fewer Americans who were capable of doing the job were being trained? So now we're downstream of those policies facing a shortage, we should give up? It will take institutional knowledge and years of training-the-trainers to come to fruition, so we should never start?


Also, RE: cadavers. Pay for them. Or make it opt-out rather than opt-in. We've got the dead bodies. Not having enough cadavers is a question of will, not some immutable law of the universe.




Import foreign doctors you say...They are also mostly good enough, especially after retraining...You are also stealing jobs and wealth from Americans, which is sometimes justified but most of the people making this complaint don't like it when it happens to them or people they like.




So, at this point, we get the whole story lined up directly: adding a large number of inferior doctors will be good enough to keep the system moving, but it would reduce the wealth of existing stakeholders. This is called rent-seeking. Look, if you want to work brutal hours in a hellscape because it will make you good money, that's mostly* your right. But then don't complain about it and attack the solutions to the brutal hours and the hellscape. Either this is a good deal you want to preserve, or it isn't.




In the longer term you'd kill Americans going into medicine, and Americans going into medicine and our absurd wealth is responsible for a huge amount of medical advancement.




Why would making more residency slots available for Americans kill Americans going into medicine? You know what increasing med-school spots and residency requirements would kill? Affirmative action. If every qualified applicant gets a spot, who cares who gets priority. And why would improving on a system which you say sucks kill applications? You say:




To put some context in, most jobs involve things like lunch breaks and misc. downtime during the day where you can shoot the shit, unwind, and refocus. It's extremely common for a physician to work 16+ hours with barely enough downtime to piss...




Ok, let's get you a piss break, and maybe even lunch and an afternoon smoke break. People aren't going to want that job?


*There is some point at which I'm uncomfortable with a job being done at all if it requires inhumane working conditions or incredibly low wages. But we're talking about different universes than medicine, like when I saw the illegal immigrant tree planting crews that a landscaper near us hired for an industrial job planting three inch caliper birch trees without any power equipment. Three Americans could have done the whole job in a day with a mini excavator you can rent at home depot, instead these guys were breaking their backs for days to put them in, paid piecework so ultimately a significantly sub-minimum wage. At minimum wage it wouldn't be profitable to have them do it, and you'd have to have somebody with a backhoe doing the work.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly NFL Thread: Week 8
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's one of those things where we looked at that Bengals team and said "when they just fix the O-Line they'll be dominant!" But that's easier said than done. Team culture is such an important thing in the NFL, in a way it seems not to be in the NBA or even MLB. Some teams just produce those role players one after another, and some teams don't. The Eagles' Jeff Stoutland can get overhyped by the fans, but they at times they seem to be getting more out of guys like Fred Johnson and Tyler Steen than a lot of teams get out of their starters.


Sometimes they just never figure it out. I'll always love Joe Burrow for that season though, it was such an honorable showing as a QB, going out there and getting blitzed over and over and still doing what needed to be done.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did societies that placed children in hereditary professions from childhood outperform societies that allowed adults to choose their own path?




That little kid you see at the Chinese restaurant['s]




...parents do not intend for him to work at that Chinese restaurant when he grows up.


But more to the point, we've seen the results of childhood specialization in sports, and while it has lead to improvements in technical quality among youth players, we also have to question the impact on the broader society of all the wasted potential of the failures and burnouts. What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?


Or consider the crisis of young baseball players getting Tommy John surgery on their elbows.




The need for Tommy John surgery has exploded at the youth level. According to Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, the biggest age group that needs the surgery in the country is from ages 15-19. [...] Another factor according to the experts is overuse. “The more you put a high load on something whether it’s a rope or a ligament in the elbow, it’s going to fatigue over time and if it doesn’t have time to recover and rest, that ligament is ultimately going to fail,” Dr. Shepet said. Doctors recommend avoiding single-sport specialization. “One should take (off) at least 2 months, some people advocate three or four months if you could,” Dr. Zellner said. “That doesn’t mean that a child or youth is sedentary during that time. They're able to do other sports, they’re able to cross-train lift weights and work on their conditioning. There are plenty of things that can be done outside of throwing with that arm.” Berken now owns Impact Sports Academy in De Pere which trains baseball players year round. He tries to help parents understand what can be done to minimize the risk of a pitching injury. “The biggest thing for me I think is, we try to let our coaches know that we gotta take it out of the kids hands,” Berken said. "The kids don’t know any better. Any competitive kid, if you ask them how do you feel, hey do you want to stay in the game, the answer is going to be yes.”




The children may long to identify only with the thing they like and are good at, but that doesn't mean it is good for them, any more than letting a kid eat only a single favorite food is good for them.


Personal anecdote, I dated a girl twelve years ago, her family of three siblings all specialized in different Olympic or non-school sports from middle school, to the point that they did alternative high school classes to avoid attending high school which would have interfered with training and competing. One figure skater, one skier, one cyclist. None made it. All are very fat now. The figure skater at least still looks more or less like herself, the skier and the cyclist are both so fat that one thinks of their health immediately upon seeing them walk across a room. By contrast, I've always been a mediocre dabbler, as a kid I played three sports at a mediocre level, and I kept picking up new ones as the specialists left me behind at each stage; my athletic career topped out competitively in undergrad with our club boat finishing dead-last at the Head of the Charles. At 33, I'm probably in the best shape of my life. Not good enough at anything for anyone to care, but I look good naked and man can I ever help someone move.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll note once again that the way to fix "My job is hard mostly because there are so few of us that we have to work long shifts with many patients and it is exhausting" is to lower standards and introduce more workers into the job, making it easier and reducing the standard of quality needed to perform the job, which would allow those lower standard workers to perform at the necessary level.


What you're describing is the inefficiency of a medieval guild system engaging in rent seeking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Sometimes people just don't like things because the things are bad.




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)




Or, given the insane adaptability of human aesthetics, because they haven't yet found a reason to cultivate the liking. In a world of impossible luxury, is it really surprising that people's preferences don't overlap?




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.




Disdain for Americana is a heuristic, a shorthand for a bunch of material and cultural luxuries. Disdain for America, or for one's family, is something else.




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)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly NFL Thread: Week 8
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly NFL Thread: Week 8
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly NFL Thread: Week 8
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for October 17, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes but not, or at least only marginally, with US support and weapons.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've decided to tackle the Platonic dialogues between now and the new year. Anyone have a good YouTube college lecture series on them?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly NFL Thread: Week 8
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.