Loquat
7d ago
Upon reading the comments in the reddit thread, it seems that this meme is also a reference to Team Fortress 2 online multiplayer having a "team rebalancing" function that's intended to keep things fun by fixing imbalanced matches but routinely fails at evaluating player quality and thus often makes matters worse.
So the meme-maker was just going a bit wild with that analogy.
Loquat
7d ago
Related: I went to a college with a high Asian student population, also around 20 years ago, and there was a long-simmering argument over the issue of Asian women dating white men (at a much higher rate than Asian men dated white women). The Asian women were most likely to defend this choice with some variant of "you don't own us", but if pressed or in a spicy mood they would also point out that white men almost never expect a 10/10 submissive housewife, or have a mother who expects a servile daughter-in-law, whereas a non-trivial percentage of Asian men do.
Loquat
12d ago
IMO the best thing to do to clear up fluoride confusion is to remind people that it is a naturally occurring mineral, and therefore many water sources naturally contain some, without any human intervention. I suspect most of the anti-flouride sentiment would go away if people understood that, and the language question of adding vs topping up wouldn't make much difference.
Loquat
12d ago
I've been thinking about this as well, Joe Rogan has had a number of left-wing guests over the years and he's sympathetic to many left-wing ideas but he's "part of the right-wing misinformation machine" because he'll listen to right-wingers too. So a "liberal Joe Rogan" would have to: (1) never speak with a known right-winger, (2) immediately push back on any guest that happened to express a right-wing idea, (3) never utter or express sympathy for any right-wing idea himself, and (4) pay close attention to the ever-evolving liberal orthodoxy so he never accidentally violates rules 1-3.
There are guys with podcasts right now who follow all of these rules, but I seriously doubt anyone of that ilk could build a mass following among apolitical men the way Rogan has.
Loquat
14d ago
Yes, it would be nice if reporters interviewing anti-flouride activists would ask about this. Genuine, hard-hitting reporting is a rare and valuable thing in all sorts of fields, alas.
I do continue to wonder, though, whether your scenario of a town official deliberately adding unnecessary extra fluoride in exchange for kickbacks from the fluoride company has ever actually happened anywhere, and if it did happen how the situation was handled once it became public knowledge.
the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
And this is an extraordinarily bad idea. Any time you take a statement which is clearly true in vernacular speech, and try to tell normies it's false because Science(tm) has assigned a different definition to one or more of the component words, you are lowering the general public's respect for science and scientists.
Loquat
15d ago
Is this an actual thing that happens with any regularity? And even if it is, I'm skeptical that trying to teach the public scientific jargon will fix it.
A much better solution for Dr. Nerd-boy here would be to use vernacular language like a normal person instead of like an idiot. "The town government is wasting money adding extra fluoride to the water supply, when our water already had enough fluoride in it naturally!" Boom, now everybody understands what he's talking about.
Loquat
18d ago
Just a personal data point: I was leaning Harris when she was first selected, but she lost my vote when all the neocons from the Bush administration came out of the woodwork to endorse her, and she started doing joint events with Liz Cheney. I'd be curious to know if that decision overall helped or hurt her, though I suppose we'll never have hard data on it.
Loquat
19d ago
Only in the extremely broad vibes sense, in which overly intrusive bureaucracy micromanaging your life "for your own good" is generally associated with the left, and is routinely denounced by the right. Also it happened in the state of New York, which has a Democrat-dominated government at present (governor plus supermajorities in both houses of the legislature).
Loquat
19d ago
The squirrel bit a guy who was trying to take the squirrel away. If there was a car that could punch your balls when you tried to steal it, a lot of people would probably want one.
Loquat
19d ago
Certainly, there's a lot more love for chili peppers in China. I was once told a bit of Chinese wordplay about the provinces of Hunan, Hubei, and Sichuan that roughly translates to say the first two don't fear spice, while the third fears what is not spicy.
Loquat
19d ago
Fun fact: Onlyfans wasn't originally intended to be a porn site, but rather something like Patreon where any sort of content creator can set up shop and get fans to send them money for content. They just didn't ban porn, so much like the fabled no-witch-hunts-ever utopia, it's got seven zillion pornstars and three principled civil libertarians (and an animal shelter, apparently).
Loquat
20d ago
Yeah, I've had a similar thing at Japanese restaurants under the name "shabu-shabu". When I was first introduced to hot pot maybe 20 years ago, there was always only one big pot at the table, possibly divided in half so you could have a spicy broth and a non-spicy broth, but the place we went to the other day offered a choice of the big pot or individual soup pots for everyone.
Loquat
20d ago
I finally managed to get my husband and kids to go to a Chinese hot pot restaurant with me, and now they're 100% on board with making it a regular thing. The basic concept is this: you have one or more pots of broth at your table, with individual burners built in to keep them boiling, and then you have various raw vegetables, noodles, thin-sliced raw meats, etc, which you cook in the broth and then remove to your plate to eat. At the place we went to, there was basically an open buffet with all kinds of stuff to take and cook in your broth, plus sauces to dip your cooked food in afterwards.
Loquat
21d ago
Article says the guy was keeping a raccoon as a pet too, and neighbors had been complaining to the authorities about the raccoon. And since raccoons are one of the major rabies vector species, I guess the authorities felt the need to come remove it, and the squirrel was declared guilty by association.
Loquat
22d ago
You all may be interested in this Critical Drinker video: Why Modern Movies Suck: They're Written by Children
Loquat
23d ago
A humorless pedant explains the joke in excessive detail: the word "viscera" technically refers to the internal organs found in the torso, such as heart, liver, intestines, etc. "Eviscerate" originally meant removing those organs, for example while preparing a freshly killed animal for consumption. The other poster was joking that your use of the word eviscerated implied that prior to your surgery your nose had contained some unneeded heart/liver/intestines/etc.
Loquat
26d ago
In an interesting coincidence, the owner of the LA Times, who caused such a controversy by telling his editorial board not to endorse any candidate for president, was also born and raised in South Africa.
Loquat
26d ago
How did it come to be that the LA Times did something similar?
If the owner's daughter is to be believed, he just genuinely believes that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and doesn't want to help a candidate who won't take action against it.
Loquat
28d ago
A key HRC quote that was credited with knocking Sanders out of her way
If we broke up the big banks tomorrow (parenthetical about how she would totally do that IF it were necessary), would that end racism? Would that end sexism?
Loquat
29d ago
Google gave me the below link to a law firm specializing in Disability Law.
Social Security does not have any clear guidelines to distinguish what types of volunteer work are considered SGA (Substantial Gainful Activity), but some circumstances are likely to convince the SSA that a person is capable of working a full-time job:
- Volunteering more than a few hours per week
- Volunteer work that would earn above SGA if the person was paid for the work
- The requirements of the work indicate the person could work at SGA level or return to their previous job
- Volunteering at a business owned by a relative
So a volunteer activity like "No One Dies Alone", where you're basically just sitting in hospital rooms for a few hours a week, should be totally fine.
Loquat
30d ago
It remains insofar as you can't have an explicitly segregated school any more. If some non-white families happen to move into a previously all-white school district, their kids are going to that previously all-white school.
Loquat
1mo ago
Gay and trans were absolutely part of the same club back in the day, and coincidentally pretty much the only people who wanted to live as the opposite sex at that time were super effeminate gay men and super butch lesbians. Nobody in 1980 would ever have anticipated the modern phenomenon of straight men putting on dresses and calling themselves trans lesbians, nor the prevalence of the religious belief among young women that such men must be respected and treated as women in all ways.
Loquat
1mo ago
I haven't investigated the AI art options too closely yet, but it seems to me that it would be really useful if I could sketch out a composition and have the AI make it look good. Does this capability not exist yet?
Loquat
1mo ago
It's fascinating what's happened with McDonald's over this war. The only pro-Israel action was that the dude who owned all their franchises in Israel decided to give free meals to the IDF, of his own accord with no involvement from corporate HQ, and in fact corporate leadership took pains to distance McDonald's as a whole from this guy's actions, but nonetheless Muslims around the world became convinced that McDonald's supports Israel and should be boycotted, to the point where McDonald's franchises in Arab countries suffered substantial loss of business. Corporate HQ even decided it was worth buying all the Israeli restaurants from the aforementioned Israeli franchisee in hopes of restoring their reputation among Muslims, and apparently that happened in April of this year, but if you're still seeing protestors outside a McDonald's in October I guess that didn't work out as well as they hoped.
My immediate neighborhood had very few signs, but there were absolutely places within a 15-20 minute drive where loads of houses had signs for one or the other. Roughly speaking, the places with quaint, walkable mini-downtown shopping area had mostly Harris signs, the people who seemed like they frequently used their pickup trucks to actually haul stuff had mostly Trump signs, and nice suburban houses with big lawns could go either way. (Location: Pennsylvania)
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