FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
This is a really idiotic question, but would the coding you describe distinguish between an elective mastectomy and a medically indicated one i.e. for an adolescent patient with breast cancer?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
Ireland has its very own George Floyd.
... kind of.
Two weeks ago, a 35-year-old Congolese man named Yves Sakila was accused of shoplifting perfume from a department store in Dublin. Private security guards from the department store restrained him by holding him down on the footpath outside the department store. By the time police officers arrived on the scene he'd stopped moving, and despite performing CPR on him, he was pronounced dead at the hospital. An autopsy was conducted the following day, but the results have not yet been published (that is, it has not yet been conclusively established that Sakila's death was caused by his being restrained). An investigation is ongoing.
Depending on what the investigation determines, I will have little difficulty believing that the private security guards acted overly aggressively in their restraint of Sakila. It's the nature of the profession that private security guards tend to be macho and aggressive, often with criminal records for violent crimes, and tend to have much less training in how to safely restrain someone than a police officer would. However, it will not surprise you to learn that I don't think Sakila was killed because he was black, that the security guards "murdered" him, that the security guards would have treated him with more forbearance had he been white, that he would still be alive today had he been white and so on. It will equally not surprise you to learn that these are the exact accusations already being irresponsibly lobbed by Ireland's cadre of woke activists and NGOs, not to mention (and far less excusably) elected officials. Who will then immediately turn around and accuse the mythic Irish far-right of employing "hateful" and "divisive" rhetoric.
It's all so tiresome.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Come to think of it, my fiancée and I did watch the first episode of season 3 awhile back, but for some reason gave up. Not because we weren't enjoying it, I think we just got distracted or left it too long before watching the next episode. I would like to pick it up again.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
No, absolutely not. A primary reason that Country A doesn't invade Country B is because Country B has an army i.e. a group of soldiers who will attack Country A's soldiers should they cross Country B's borders.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
I agree that providing deterrence at the geopolitical level is a purpose that armies serve, but not the sole one (e.g. when an army invades a foreign country). But in any case, it's a distinction without a difference. The only reason armies are an effective deterrent is because they are willing and able to do lethal violence on their masters' behalf. Functionally, there's no difference between training someone to do lethal violence and training someone to be willing and able to do lethal violence should the need arise.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
I think you should spend less time inventing pedantic counterfactual hypotheticals.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
The only reason an army exists is so that their employers (typically, the government of the nation they represent) can credibly claim that lethal violence will ensue if the need should arise. Thus, the purpose of an army is to kill people.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
I loved seasons 1 and 2 of Mad Men. They felt adult and novelistic in a way that Breaking Bad was claimed to feel but, to my mind, never really did. For some reason I've never watched further than that though.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
The means by which armies secure the borders of their respective nations is by killing people or by providing a credible threat that lethal violence will ensue if their demands are not met. Any purpose an army might conceivably have therefore ultimately boils down to killing people.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
It's like saying armies exist to kill people.
Of course armies exist to kill people. Any other statement of their purpose (e.g. "to secure a nation's borders") is just a euphemistic rephrasing thereof.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Sure, but he'll be out of office in two years and probably dead in less than ten.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
David Cage is a hack. Twenty years after his first interactive fiction/CYOA thing, his writing skills don't appear to have improved one iota.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I don't think he's a crypto-conservative, but I do think he might undergo an ideological shift over the following years.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Read any of his recent Substack posts. His seething hatred for Israel is on full display.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I can't speak for Fetterman's policy stances in general, but it's indisputably true that he used to support a two-state solution in Israel but no longer does.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Per @ToaKraka's suggestion, I've built a fairly snazzy-looking map in QGIS. What I'd now like to do is export it to HTML so that senior management can peruse it at their leisure without having to install QGIS. When you open the link, it should show you a map of my country broken down into counties, with scale-based rendering applied so that, when you zoom in, the county boundaries disappear and are replaced with electoral boundaries. Clicking on any electoral district should produce a pop-up listing key metrics (population, population density, average age etc.). There should also be several layers that you can toggle on and off visually representing e.g. average age by electoral district.
Someone is bound to suggest exporting to qgis2web. I have tried this, and while it works perfectly when zoomed all the way in, panning and zooming are unforgivably slow when zoomed out to the national level. ChatGPT and Gemini have suggested several ways to improve performance (dramatically simplifying my vector layers, exporting to vector tiles, customising the JavaScript produced by qgis2web), with limited success. One or the other also suggested exporting to raster tiles, and in fairness the panning and zooming are as smooth and fast as I'd like. On the other hand, the export files are half a gigabyte, and that's only including 2 of my desired 11 layers. This seems preposterously large for a 2-dimensional map of a small island.
Anyone with any experience in GIS have any resources on how to produce a lightweight, high-performance webmap, ideally for someone with limited coding experience?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I liked Jeff Maurer's take on Platner. The Dems are heavily pushing him because, unlike so many of their candidates, he comes off as an ordinary man of the people. He's a tough guy (a veteran), an oyster farmer, and he curses a lot. His working-class credibility make it easy to overlook certain flaws which would sink a more milquetoast candidate. All bolded text is in the passage below is my emphasis:
On the one hand, this doesn’t surprise me: Brawny dudes with the politics of a Portlandia character don’t come along every day. On the other hand, I’m surprised because the left just went through this with John Fetterman. Fetterman, of course, is now persona non-grata on the progressive left due to his strong backing of Israel and occasional support for Trump (he was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Pam Bondi). He sits alongside J.K. Rowling and Bari Weiss in the Pantheon of People Hated By the Progressive Left. Is nobody on the progressive left thinking that there might be a chance that if elected, Platner might go the Fetterman route?
Platner’s Reddit posts — some of which are as recent as 2021 — do not reflect uniformly left-wing views. Yes, he called himself a “communist” and an “ANTIFA supersoldier”, but he also mocked gay people and took a casual attitude towards sexual assault... Combined with the whole Nazi unpleasantness, these posts might cause one to wonder how deep Platner’s progressive convictions run...
And Fetterman, of course, is far from the only person to start out on the populist left and end up right-of-center... Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are journalists who made the switch. Tulsi Gabbard went from endorsing Bernie to being part of the Trump administration in just four short years, which makes you wonder if she was a centrist for 20 minutes as she rocketed from one end of the political spectrum to the other.
...the populist tough-guy schtick is a shallow narrative that appeals to people with shallow political beliefs, so we shouldn’t be surprised when those beliefs change.
Platner has showed a decades-long interest in being an anti-establishment edgelord but only a recent interest in progressive politics. Which isn’t too surprising — a lot of people who like the “high-testosterone progressive badass” persona really only like the “high-testosterone badass” part. As of four years ago, Platner’s politics were a mix of left and right, and now they’re hard left, but who can say where they’ll be in another four years? Nobody. But some people like Platner’s vibes and have decided that’s good enough.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if, in the next ten years, Platner jumps ship and joins the GOP.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
If your diagnosis is accurate, do you have any suggestions for how I could correct it?
I've had intermittent lower back pain for years, long before I ever started lifting weights. The earliest I remember experiencing it was 2019, which I attributed to an old mattress: replacing it seemed to do the trick. In the first few weeks of Covid I was sitting on a kitchen chair for eight hours a day which aggravated my back dreadfully, but my employer was good enough to have a swivel chair delivered, after which the pain subsided for months. Ever since then I've had periodic flare-ups wherein my lower back will feel a bit stiff and painful for a week or so, before receding. Over the years I've tried dozens of different back stretches and exercises, with effectiveness ranging from mild to non-existent.
By some combination of search terms the benevolent YouTube algorithm bestowed upon me this video yesterday evening, and after completing all the stretches in it (which took all of fifteen minutes), my back felt better than it had in weeks. I immediately went to the gym and did five sets of deadlifts at 170kg, experiencing no discomfort during or after.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I authorize anyone and everyone to call me unkind names.
Be advised: I can be very creative.
Or indeed with Alex Coughlan, a man in his thirties who was murdered by two black Muslim teenagers in a less central part of Dublin five days later. Where are the protests for justice for him? Where are the accusations that his murder was a racially motivated hate crime? Nowhere to be seen, of course.
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