PokerPirate
5d ago
It's a blast for the adults too! We occasionally play a game called "hurricane" where I jump cannonballs onto the roof/walls and shake the ship from the outside. 30 minutes of that is a full body workout better than anything I've ever done at the gym... I'll be sore for days after...
When we need to clean it, I'll throw a gallon of bubble juice in. There's air leaking out through seams all over (this is intentionally how they are designed), and this leads to instant bubbles everywhere. Like 3 foot high foam pits covering the floor.
The thing weighs ~500 pounds. (The box it came in says 900lbs, but that includes a trolley and blower.) I can move it by myself, but only barely, and it takes about an hour to pack/unpack. So it mostly stays in the backyard and I use a tarp to cover it when its deflated and not in use. During the hottest months of the summer I usually put it in the garage to make a bit more space in the backyard to play.
We once had a rat eat a giant hole in the bounce house (1 square foot, plus a lot of smaller punctures). Surprisingly, it still stays pretty well inflated with the hole, but it was an easy patch job.
I also have the blower setup about 50 feet away from the bounce house and use ducting to move the air from the blower to the bounce house. It makes the operation essentially silent.
PokerPirate
6d ago
Four years ago I bought a bounce house. A proper commercial grade bounce house. It's shaped like a pirate ship, 35 ft long, 15 ft wide, has a poop deck, a slide, a mast that can be climbed up, and a bunch of fake cannons.
I paid $1000 to get it used off craigslist, and it's the best investment I've ever made.
I've got 4 young kids: 7, 4, 3, and 2 years old. Right now, they're all jumping around and getting their energy out and happy to play together without daddy. It gives me a chance to cook dinner and write this real quick note. And they'll actually sleep tonight :)
PokerPirate
8d ago
I already have the wedding toast all planned out :)
PokerPirate
8d ago
Yeah, there's a scene in The Jungle Book 2 where Balu does a belly flop. They've been obsessed with that movie for the last month or so... acting out all of the other scenes... and they finally learned that cartoons aren't real life...
Two days ago, my 4 year old shouted "belly flop" and then jumped face first from our porch step onto the sidewalk below. The results were predictably gruesome. The main injury was three large gashes in his lips where he bit through the lip, but blood also gushed out of his nose and (more lightly) from his forehead, knees, and elbows.
This is one of my favorite events to happen so far as a father. (And I actually mean that literally.) It perfectly captures for me the idea of just how stupid/innocent kids are (and presumably I once was). I'm also really proud of the little guy for taking his injury in stride. There was lots of crying for 30 minutes or so, but once we got him cleaned up and bandaged, he was back outside playing with his brothers again. He's been showing off his injuries to all his little kid friends and making sure they know not to belly flop in the sidewalk too.
PokerPirate
28d ago
My boys do a lot of mock sword fighting (as all boys do), and I've been toying around with the idea of teaching them some proper techniques. (I fenced epee/saber in college 20 years ago and so at least have some idea about what this would look like). I think they'd also be totally thrilled to see some live HEMA tournaments to.
Do you have any recommendations for getting young kids (~7 years old) involved in the sport?
PokerPirate
30d ago
You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another.
This is profoundly not true. Young children easily learn multiple languages at once, and adults typically struggle to learn a second language to native-like proficiency.
Continuing the metaphor you've created here: I think it's very likely that a young person raised in a "multicultural" environment where they consume the full Western/Eastern canons simultaneously is likely to have a much better proficiency of both than someone who fully studies either canon before moving onto the other.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I'm happy to, and I believe that if you do that, the entire edifice falls apart. Not just puberty blockers, but the entire concept of "gender dysphoria" as a diagnosis.
All I'm trying to say is that your original post overemphasized the importance of RCTs in medicine. I'm not trying to make any claim about gender dysphoria or its treatment.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Medicine is hard, and answers to important medical questions can't fit in the length of a tweet. I have a phd in machine learning, so I'm confident I could form an opinion on your questions if I tried really hard and read a bunch of papers and thought about the problem for a week. But I don't care to do that, and so at some point I have to trust other people's judgements.
that the absence of certain design features tends to mean a study's finding will tend to be overturned, if done properly?
Part of the parachute study's point is that RCTs are not enough! And you are placing too much faith in RCTs! It's very easy to design a RCT that "looks good from the outside" but has a fatal flaw that makes it not applicable to the real world. In the parachute example, the fatal flaw is that the plane was grounded the whole time. Downthread, people are pointing out a bunch of fatal flaws in hypothetical RCTs for gender transition that would undermine any possible conclusion.
No matter what the methods are of an experiment, you can't get around having to sit down carefully and examine all of the assumptions.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults.
You're overstating the importance of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical research.
As a famous parody of your point, this 2003 study found that no RCTs had been done of parachute use when jumping out of airplanes and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that parachutes are effective. As a follow up, this 2018 study did implement a RCT for parachute use when jumping from airplanes and concluded that parachutes do not in fact prevent injury. (Participants jumped from an airplane on the ground.)
Less facetiously, we have no RCTs demonstrating that HIV causes AIDs, but we can still be pretty confident about the link between the virus and the disease. Recognizing this relationship has led to a lot of good medical progress both for the populationis affected by AIDs and those not affected by AIDs (by for example keeping HIV out of blood transfusions to prevent the spread of AIDs).
I happen to also be skeptical of the benefits of transition. But your explanation of the science is not good here and at best leading you to the "right belief for the wrong reason".
PokerPirate
1mo ago
That's a good point, thanks. I'm guessing that insurance costs are up, and it'll be hard to get a reliable quote before actually purchasing.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I'm going to buy a house in Southern California (LA area) sometime in the next 3 years. I'd like to time the market a bit, and I'm wondering if anyone has any insights to what housing prices might look like in the Trump admin?
My naive analysis is that prices will trend downward for a couple of reasons:
- if immigration goes down then there will be more supply and prices will go down,
- interest rates have gone up recently, and that drives house prices down, and the market is still catching up to this trend (I'm more concerned about the overall price than the monthly payment for various reasons).
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I'm an outsider to the legal system, not to the US :)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I like these court opinions that you (and others) post. For an outsider like me, it's nice to get some insight into how the legal system works and to not only be exposed to "activist judge did XXX" type cases.
Thanks :)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
There's a reason communism is the bourgeois ideology par excellence.
As a linguist, this is one of the best examples of linguistic drift I've ever read.
The 1800s communists and bourgeois would have obviously disagreed with this sentence (because communism was about stripping the bourgeois of their power and giving it to the working class).
But you're not using these terms how Marx and his contemporaries used them. The way I'm reading you is that: the bourgeois is idealized by the DINK couple who works an email job and got a degree in "gender-studies"; communism may-or-may-not be the traditional purely economic theory, but it likely has incorporated a lot of generic social leftism (that we would expect to be taught in a gender-studies program).
PokerPirate
2mo ago
It's certainly not a golden ticket. @cjet79's original claim is that veterans from a hypothetical European-Russian conflict will have outsized political influence in their respective governments. I'm just saying I think we've seen that trend in the US where the political class has a much larger fraction of veterans than ordinary citizens.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
FWIW your point seems obvious to me about the US. There have been 14 US presidents since WWII, and 8 of them have military experience.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
For the parents: How do you introduce/talk about yourself and your spouse to your kids friends? Are you on first name basis? Do you go by Mr/Mrs so-and-so?
My sense is that Mr/Mrs so-and-so makes it easier for young kids to understand their relationship to you and that they need to respect your decisions. Some of my peer group, however, goes by a first name basis. Most parents never even broach the subject with their kids' friends, and so the friends are in an awkward limbo where they don't know how to address parents.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
The song came first, but I doubt Stallman or any of the fellow GNU folk had that song as an explicit motivation.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Whoa... you're blowing my mind...
But do you really pronounce something like ISO/IEC 27000:2018 as "ey-so slash eye ee cee ..."? I guess I never refer to the name of the org without a bunch of other numbers after it.
I maintain a git repo about the "programmer dialect of English" that I use to teach my computer science/data science students how to not sound like a n00b/PHB. It's niche, but many people here are likely to fit into the niche.
The document goes over phonology / lexicon / grammar / discourse differences in programmer English vs American standard English, but to give you all a taste, here's the top of the phonology section:
-
RAG (as in retrieval augmented generation with LLMs) is pronounced "rag" not "R-A-G".
NOTE: The word "rag" has only one sylable and is faster/easier to pronounce than the 3-sylable "R-A-G". The practice of pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms stems from the programmer's desire for efficiency in all things.
-
ICLR (a famous machine learning conference) is pronounced "I clear".
-
PNG is pronounced "ping" and not "pee-en-gee". This pronunciation is specified in the standard.
The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I've enjoyed reading everyone else's advice here, so I'll add in my own: It's your responsibility to manage your own parents (and protect your spouse from their inlaws).
In the extreme case: my parents traumatized my wife ~1 year into our marriage by getting into a yelling match over politics/religion. I had to tell them that they were out of line, and that I'd be cutting contact with them if they continued to behave that way.
Less extreme: my wife's relatives regularly give too much sugar/presents to our kids, and it's my wife's job to let them know when to stop.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
This is my exact relationship with my kids/wife. I suspect it's overall healthy for the kids to have one "strict" parent and one "soft" parent, but I agree that modern mothers have gone off the deep end. I often find myself having to be harder on the kids than I'd like to be in order to strike a better balance.
When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?
I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.
For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)
So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:
It has to be safe to stop.
There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)
There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)
I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?
I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.
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