Loquat
4mo ago
Just finished Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea as told by defectors. It's remarkable how the Kim dynasty managed to keep things going despite such drastic mismanagement. The craziest example, I think, when it became necessary to use human feces as farm fertilizer - you're probably assuming they just had the sewage treatment plants compost it, or had feces composted wherever it was being collected previously, or something else sane and reasonable, but no! That is not the North Korean way! Instead, citizens were commanded to bring feces in themselves, with not only a quota to fill but an unreasonably high quota at that, such that feces-theft became an actual thing.
Loquat
4mo ago
My favorite is Ronald Gene Barbour in 1994. He was driving to commit suicide at a particular destination, but missed his exit and decided he might as well continue on the highway all the way to Washington DC and shoot Bill Clinton. As it happened, Clinton was overseas at the time, so Barbour gave up, went home, and wound up telling a friend (and the friend's tape recorder) all about it.
Loquat
4mo ago
If I'm a dictator who wants to reduce obesity, a better approach would be to ban sugary drinks and junk-food vending machines, ban food advertising, and heavily (har har) regulate all types of prepared food. It's a whole lot easier to stay slim when you're not constantly bombarded with temptations to overeat.
Loquat
4mo ago
My husband is having success with Ozempic, after many years of being varying levels of obese. For our first several years together, he was convinced that all diets were either "woo" (ineffective) or "starve yourself" (intolerable). Eventually he decided to try keeping track of his caloric intake and realized that he could lose weight if he kept his daily average to 3000 and exercised vigorously every day, though having a demanding desk job tended to interfere with the latter goal. Cutting the daily intake down below 2500 calories was apparently not feasible until Ozempic chemically altered his appetite.
Loquat
4mo ago
Okra varieties can be really different on size and edibility - I once planted seeds of one called, IIRC, Milsap White, and those pods were still good even at 8 inches long. Alas, the vendor I got it from no longer sells that variety, though I did get a different one this year that claims similar performance. I may or may not be able to verify that this year; my four-year-old likes to pick and eat raw pods when they're still quite small.
Loquat
4mo ago
Yeah, I was expecting it to go more like this:
Low: wants Biden replaced, not knowing the rules prevent it
Mid: must support Biden because the rules prevent replacing him
High: wants Biden replaced, because rules are made by man and can be changed if extreme circumstances require it
Loquat
4mo ago
No direct impact, sure, but if some higher-ups in the party wanted a non-Biden scapegoat to punish then a convention challenger would be the obvious choice.
Loquat
4mo ago
I'm sure mod behavior is part of it; they've really narrowed the sub's boundaries to avoid becoming the new /r/fatpeoplehate and they're not shy about deleting posts that fall outside the lines.
I also feel like there's a certain inherent tension that causes a chilling effect. Is fat-activism a logical extension of the modern leftism, that calls the whole victimology apparatus into question, or is it a vile heresy that can and should be stamped out without harming the rest of the good and necessary structure? Only the latter is acceptable to say out loud over there, but there's a good chunk of the user base that leans towards the former, and mostly knows they have to bite their tongues on the subject.
Loquat
4mo ago
Well, /r/fatlogic is still alive and kicking, though it's mods tend to be cautious lest the admins nuke the place. About the spiciest type of comment you can get away with is remarking on the irony of various super-morbidly obese persons who advocated for fat rights and then died in their 40's.
Loquat
4mo ago
After watching his post-debate interview with Stephanopoulos, I think you're right. Biden genuinely believes all his bad poll numbers are wrong/biased and his true level of public support is much higher.
Loquat
4mo ago
I don't know if the book differs from the TV show here, but in the show she simply poisons all the figs. No special convincing needed.
Loquat
5mo ago
From the anecdotes I've heard about it, it seems that the primary problem is other women (or female persons who identify as not-women) who embrace the new trans religion and therefore consider it fundamentally immoral to try to maintain a penis-free lesbian scene.
Loquat
5mo ago
Are the kids able to help with the seed planting? My kids (4 and 7) love planting with me, though of course they need close supervision to avoid things like putting the entire packet of seeds in one spot or spacing the tomato plants 2 inches apart.
Loquat
5mo ago
The more snobbish PMC types might sneer at retail jobs in general, but a girl who works part-time at Target while she goes to college isn't going to get anywhere near the kind of lasting stigma her classmate with an OnlyFans is going to get.
Loquat
5mo ago
Does your wife have any nearby siblings with children, or who seem likely to have children in the future? One of the factors that influenced us to have a second kid was that our first would have been the only grandchild on both sides, so having a second both provided a playmate (in time) and a reason for the first kid to NOT believe herself the center of the universe. If there are first cousins near at hand, that's less of a concern.
Loquat
5mo ago
On a normal day I don't feel sleepy until late evening, when I'd be going to bed anyway for my 8 hours of sleep. I'm in my 40's.
Seconding the recommendation you do a sleep study if you haven't already.
Loquat
5mo ago
There was a bit I read once, possibly even on Slate Star Codex, that went a bit like this:
Person A: I don't want to eat (food item), it has too many chemicals in it.
Person B: I don't understand what you mean. Everything we eat is composed of chemicals - even water is a chemical!
Commentary from blogger: But, of course, B is being deliberately pedantic, and knows perfectly well that A is objecting to ingredients with complicated names that nobody uses in home cooking and most people don't even know what they are, e.g. sodium benzoate.
It seems like you're being Person B here? Yes, "chemicals" and "processed" are technically overbroad, but they work pretty well for normies to communicate concepts like, "this category of food tends to be low in fiber, high in added sugar and salt, and has good odds of being designed by food scientists to be as tasty and un-satiating as possible so you'll eat more of it per sitting and thus spend more money buying more of it".
Loquat
6mo ago
All right, all right, I'll quit lurking and register lol.
Anyhow, while it's true that Goodway is ineffectual in virtually all her appearances, it's a kid show with kid (dog) heroes; adults being near-universally silly and unable to solve their own problems is a necessary plot element. Consider Captain Turbot and his French cousin, both white males - whenever they're on screen together, it's virtually guaranteed that they'll make a bunch of stupid decisions and end up needing rescue.
Surely it wouldn't be too much trouble to send an agent over to ask the guy who he is and what he is doing? Maybe check out the tool bag to verify that it does in fact contain tools and not a gun?
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