SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
I did some work with a textbook ~20 years ago, but never got very good and basically forgot everything.
What really helped me was working through the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck. It's a deck of several thousand sentences, with cards having Chinese on one side and English on the other side. I did both Chinese to English, as well as Chinese to English to help with production.
It also has audio recordings of the sentences. What I did was listen and repeat as many times as it took me to pronounce a sentence correctly from memory at natural speed before moving on to the next card. This is key, IMO. Early on I would often have to repeat longer sentences 10-20 times to get it right.
I used the Chinese Grammar Wiki to figure out grammatical patterns I didn't understand.
This made me really good at pronunciation and speaking at a natural speed. Unfortunately, it didn't help much with listening. I'm working on that now with podcasts while walking to/from work. I'm going with 大鵬說中文, but it's not suitable for total beginners. I've heard good things about ChinesePod, which covers a broader range of ability levels.
Also, make sure you understand, in terms of where you need to be placing your tongue, how to pronounce the phonemes not used in English. X, j, and q are kind of like English sh, j, and ch, but they're pronounced with the tip of your tongue down below your lower incisors. Zh, ch, and sh are like English j, ch, and sh, but with the tip of the tongue curled slightly upwards. R has extensive regional variation, so just try to imitate it and it will probably be close enough.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
The link has expired. What was it?
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
And we're judging the hell out of your browser history.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while.
I don't know exactly what's wrong with your back, but two-handed kettlebell swings have actually really helped when I've tweaked my back, as I do every five years or so.
What I do is start with a conservative range of motion, and then after several reps the pain-free range of motion increases a bit. I continue until I can do the full range of motion pain-free. Usually the pain comes back after a while, but it gives me short-term pain relief and probably accelerates healing.
Not sure if this works as well for the upper back, but it's worth a try. Generally you want to use the injured muscles ASAP to increase blood flow to the injured tissue, rather than just resting it completely.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
- Carol of the Bells
- O Holy Night
- Mary's Boy Child
I guess the latter two work better as solos, though.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
People who really care about anti-semitism are 1) Jews 2) wokes and 3) boomercons.
And with #2, it turned out to be negotiable.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
What are you talking about? It takes 30 years to pay off a 30-year mortgage. Low principal and high interest is no worse than high principal and low interest, if the monthly payment is the same.
And according to the chart linked by /u/atelier, the average monthly payment had been going down in real terms until last year.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
On an intellectual level, most people on the left (in the broad sense) have bought into a harm-based model of morality. Since most people have very little need for intellectual consistency, what this means in practice is that they rationalize all of their moral intuitions by convincing themselves that the things they don't like are harmful. Hence "words are violence."
Bestiality grosses most people out. But in order to give themselves license to support banning it, they have to convince themselves that it's inherently harmful to animals. Non-vegetarians have to convince themselves that it's more harmful to animals than killing and eating them.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
This would have to be a defect in mitochondrial proteins that are coded for in nuclear DNA, right? The mother obviously doesn't have the disease, or she would never have lived long enough to reproduce. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother without recombination, then it can't be carried in mitochondrial DNA, unless it's a de novo mutation.
Many (most?) mitochondrial genes have migrated into nuclear DNA, so an autosomal recessive disease could explain how she was able to inherit the disease without either of her parents having it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
AFAIK Mizrahim don't have especially high average IQ (as I understand it their lower average SES is a point of contention in Israel), so they don't really count for purposes of measuring the size of Israel's Jewish talent pool. I also wonder about self-selection of Israeli Ashkenazim. Maybe they didn't get the cream of the crop?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars
This is a feature, not a bug. This is what money is for. Imagine that we have a semi-capitalist system, where you're paid based on the marginal product of your labor and investments, but everybody's preferences are weighted equally when it comes to production and distribution of goods and services. Under such a system, money would be worth about as much as Reddit karma, and there would be no reason to work.
The weighting of preferences according to how much money you have and are willing to spend is not a drawback of capitalism—it's the main reason capitalism works better than socialism.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
It's the "safe edgy" meme!
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The impression I seem to get from the internet is that lawyers are all miserable alcoholics who wish they had become software engineers.
20 years ago, my girlfriend's CS professor told me I should quit working at Microsoft and go to law school because that's where the real money is. I almost did it, too, until I found out that you have to work like 80 hours a week for years to make partner and start making said real money. Tech is best for smart lazy people.
Interesting guy, though. He taught theory of computation, but I don't think he actually knew anything about software engineering. I can't believe he's still alive; back then he weighed at least 300 pounds and had recently had a stroke.
"Deaths of despair" are confounded by increased use of opioids on an outpatient basis and the subsequent crackdown (leading addicts to substitute more dangerous alternatives), followed by the fentanyl boom.
Also, the other ideas OP mentioned are confounded by mental health care becoming more fashionable, greater awareness, greater access to mental health care due to increases in income, changes in insurance coverage, etc.
Finding an objective measure of mental health that's been tracked reliably over time is a very difficult problem.
IMO Angus Deaton, the guy pushing the "deaths of despair" narrative, is cashing in his Nobel credibility to push an ideological narrative that is at best one of multiple hypotheses consistent with the available evidence.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
As someone who is smarter than the average academic and chose to go into industry, this is how I've always thought of it. A lot of leftists have an ideological hatred of industry, or at least think of it as vulgar. So they just stay in academia forever, if they can, even if they have to accept adjunct wages.
I had the grades and test scores to get into a high-ranked PhD program, but I wanted to go into industry, partly for the money, but partly because industry is awesome. In the years since, I've gained more respect for what academia could have been, while simultaneously losing respect for what it actually is. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck around for a PhD so I could do research, but if I had, I'd be doing research in industry.
This creates a vicious cycle, where the overrepresentation of leftists in academia allows them to make it less attractive to non-leftists, which further increases their overrepresentation, and now it's become so extreme that they've been allowed to enforce ideological tests for hiring.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
And interest rates were kept artificially low for 14 of those years.
I see this claim a lot, and it's based on a misunderstanding of what the Fed actually does. If the Fed tries to lower interest rates below the natural rate of interest and hold them there, we get inflation. Now, not after 14 years.
What the Fed actually does is help markets clear faster by targeting the natural rate of interest, i.e. the rate at which the amount of money people want to lend is equal to the amount other people want to borrow. This results in savings being efficiently channeled into investments. If the Fed sets rates too high, there are excess savings that don't get borrowed, causing a recession. If the Fed sets rates too low, it causes inflation.
The fact that inflation was unusually low in the 2010s tells us that the Fed was more or less correctly targeting the natural interest rate, or even a bit above it; the natural interest rate may have actually been negative in the early 2010s.
The huge spike in inflation in 2021 was not the chickens coming come to roost after 14 years of artificially low interest rates. It was the result of a sharp increase in the money supply that made the early rounds of QE look like anthills, combined with excessive stimulus, and pandemic savings burning holes in the pockets of middle-class consumers.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
What's the problem? You made a lot of economic contributions while taking back little in return for a long time, and now you have a surplus accumulated. By deferring your consumption, you allow the diversion of resources towards investment, which improves productivity and makes workers better off. The wealth you enjoy now is the fruit of your past labors. This is everything working exactly as it should.
A small minority of people get to skip the first part, because their parents deferred consumption to the next generation. It's not fair, but it's not really a problem. They're not hurting anyone, and their accumulated capital benefits workers, again through higher productivity. Seize the accumulated capital and give it to the masses to spend on present consumption, and that will divert resources away from investment, slowing economic growth.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Communism mainly hates people for things that they can change about themselves (being rich, being capitalists, being landlords, etc.), whereas racism hates people for things they can't change about themselves.
This is why communism is worse than racism. Hating people for their virtues is worse than hating people for morally neutral properties like race.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The scaling also heavily favors low earners:
For an individual who first becomes eligible for old-age insurance benefits or disability insurance benefits in 2023, or who dies in 2023 before becoming eligible for benefits, his/her PIA will be the sum of: (a) 90 percent of the first $1,115 of his/her average indexed monthly earnings, plus (b) 32 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $1,115 and through $6,721, plus (c) 15 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $6,721.
Social Security has great returns if you earn minimum wage your whole life, and terrible returns if you consistently cap out every year.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I'm not sure if this is Thomas's, but an originalist interpretation of the Commerce Clause would invalidate pretty much all federal regulation of intrastate activity. The Commerce Clause only gives Congress authority to regulate interstate commerce, not anything which might conceivably affect interstate commerce.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Even if we interpret this as a Constitutional requirement that an appointed Senator be a resident of the state, it would be trivial to work around. Newsom could have had her move yesterday and appointed her today.
That said, this was almost certainly a drafting oversight, and Newsom is acting contrary to the spirit of the law. Seriously, there are a million black women in California. How hard could it have been to find one who would reliably vote with party leadership? Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?
Oh, also it helps if you spend a decade learning Japanese first, but not as much as you might think.
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