big-city-gay
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User ID: 1772
big-city-gay
11mo ago
Because that post posits an extremely unlikely scenario where people can actually vote for RFK.
You briefly, very briefly, mention ballot access. As if that isn’t the whole shebang right there. Even if he has some groundswell of support, what’s the plausible plan to find those voters, get signatures, get signatures in a way that comply with the arcane bits of local election law, and then defend against the DNC’s very experienced legal teams that know exactly how to stifle ballot access?
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I'd like to drop a link this thoroughly researched and footnoted article about metabolic adaptation.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/metabolic-adaptation/
This doesn't immediately support or refute the 300 calorie a day delta here…but it's within the realm of plausibility that when an obese person loses a lot of weight, their system down-regulates non-exercise activity thermogenesis by somewhere in that range.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
That's too much “Great Man of History” analysis. I think Disney was boned no matter what.
- Huge amounts of Disney’s revenue came from linear commercial TV, which is dying, and big tentpole franchises like Marvel, which—no matter how brilliant of a creative team you hire—are going to get tired at some point.
- They get plenty of cruise line and theme park revenue, but if you jack up the prices and/or degrade the service quality too much with nickel-and-diming with Fast Passes, demand shrinks.
- It's incredibly hard to change the institutional culture of a company that is that big and that old.
I doubt the DeSantis thing or the board room drama doesn't really mean a damn thing, versus the economic and cultural flow that's adjusting to a giant surplus of entertainment that's available everywhere all the time whenever you want it. Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago, and now it's time that everything else gets shanked too.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here.
Understatement of the millennium.
People will say “humanity needs to become an interplanetary civilization to avoid extinction”, even though Mars…
- Has far less gravity
- A thin, inhospitable atmosphere, with no plausible way to make it thicker
- No magnetosphere
- An unknown amount of geothermal energy, but presumably far less than Earth, and you'd have to drill way deeper to get at it
- 44% less available solar energy than Earth, and that's the best case scenario, as what's atmosphere it as kicks up horrifying black-out dust storms for major portions of the year
The idea Mars would be some outpost of a catastrophe on Earth is farcical. We could fuck up the ecosystem good and proper, and at least Earth would still have gravity and a magnetic shield—we have absolutely no ability to create a sustainable biosphere on Mars.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
But you're right to point out that the important thing here is the change, the increase - why wasn't this as big a problem thirty years ago?
Wait, in the Senate? Did you never hear of Strom Thurmond?
The Senate is a bizarre institution, and extrapolating…anything…from an N=100 dataset is folly. Once you’re in the Senate, it takes a LOT to get you out of the Senate, as seen from this list. There’s only 2 Senators from each state, and once you’re in you immediately accumulate a huge amount of power but then also pretty much vote along party lines, and unless you do something truly wildly insanely wrong, your state party has no particular reason to kick you out.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Hell of a reach to say the President can micro-manage admissions at private colleges.
While almost all universities receive public funding in some fashion…Harvard, Yale, MIT, those are private institutions with great big investment funds. They aren’t government schools—the executive can't just unilaterally say that private colleges have to consider your Presidential Fitness Test scores.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
So you’re proposing recreating the mid-century Chicago political machine, but on a national level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_politics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine
There…are a few issues with that concept.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Perhaps this is a sign of really good public speaking that he can be aggressive in one venue and come off compassionate in a different venue.
Or perhaps it's the sign of a grifter who views the circus of the Republican primary as a nice platform to set up himself up for a cushy consulting and lobbying gig, and he flip-flopped because it's good marketing to the base.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I ask because there are a few really remote college towns, and if you've never been to one of them you might not understand just how isolated it can be moving there.
Welcome to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a truly notable research university with a rich history of computer and materials science, located in the middle of fucking nowhere.
I don't even understand what the culture war aspect of "spousal hiring" is here. Yeah, there are a lot of land grant universities in the United States, they're in the boonies, so they create their own economic ecosystem around them to support the families of the faculty. And that's…bad? Good? Who cares?
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Ugh, you try to finish while rolling. Good luck.
I have definitely had “a complete sex act” while on MDMA with no orgasm for either person. (Persons, honestly.) If you go at it for a long while, but you never, uh, seal the deal, but you still have that connection and intimacy, I consider that a sex act.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Yeah, that’s some thin gruel from a leaker.
I am sure there’s some elaborate game theoretical reasoning as to why he wouldn’t reveal in-depth details right now, but really, nothing on that materials science thing? Not even one truly specific claim? Nothing like…
-
Stable transuranic elements
-
Novel stable isotopes of known elements
-
Exotic baryonic matter/“strange” matter with some weird configuration of quarks
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New metamaterials. Hell, just claim “novel metamaterials”, which sounds super-scifi but then also plausible enough to make skeptics look up with interest
But no specific claims? Hmmmmm, Occam’s Razor time: we are being visited by alien intelligences across the vast reaches of space, or the guy is a nutter.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Compared to DeSantis? Yeah.
Trump is an omega-level asshole…but he can schmooze. He can work a crowd, and he can do interviews. I have seen no evidence yet DeSantis can do that. Have you actually heard him speak? He has zero charisma—none. Trump has a toxic, used car salesman charisma, but at least he has it, whereas DeSantis is an awkward blank.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
On the one hand…yeah, this is endless horse race nonsense. Gotta churn up page views and eyeballs, let’s make up some Trump vs. DeSantis drama.
On the other hand…a lot of Florida lawmakers endorsed Trump. Which is part of a growing drumbeat of stories that DeSantis is really quite the unlikeable asshole. A very loud drumbeat. A very, very loud drum beat with lots and lots of anecdotes that DeSantis has terrible people skills, and with very few stories of how he’s a swell guy.
I don’t know. Everyone seemed to like DeSantis when they knew his policies…but now that he’s more in the public eye and people can actually hear his voice and see how he interacts with people…dude doesn’t have a lot of charm, and Trump, god help me for praising Trump, but Trump does have a certain rakish charisma.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Ha, I knew I was risking that comment…but I am about to turn 40, and I don’t remember Chernobyl, so I think it’s right up there with dancing the Charleston now.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
First off, safety: it's true that nuclear has a much better safety record so far, but nuclear seems to have the potential for black swan disasters in a way that coal is not.
It feels like that, but the number of direct, identifiable deaths from nuclear power plant accidents is tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
Fukushima, which is the big one in living memory for most people, killed, directly…one person. Maybe. Arguably.
Now, scale that way up, and who knows. Maybe there is a big black swan lurking out there, but it’s hard to predict that…and it’s hard to predict how a more mature nuclear reactor industry could design systems that are much more fault tolerance.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Mr. Beast was recently the subject of…I hate to say “cancel culture”, it’s rapidly become a thought-terminating cliche…but he was the subject of a recent cancel culture overreach that was possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
The awful radioactive naked singularity that spawned this cancel being…
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/10/mrbeasts-blindness-video-puts-systemic-ableism-on-display/
…an article which posits that there is no such thing as disability, and all people are valid, and it’s charity porn to cure blindness, because how do we even know the “cure” will work?
A truly, shockingly stupid take, given it’s cataract surgery, which obviously works.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
This is actually a really interesting question that sounds superficial. Because what is “best” for humans, and how do we know that, and can we possibly map that to animals?
In particular…Labrador Retrievers. They have a mutation that really, really, really makes ’em hungry chonkers. But does that mean they “want” to eat? Do they desire it? Does it make them fulfilled, whatever that means for a dog, or does that just make them not starving?
And, is it “best” for them to get a lil’ fat? Even if their blood calls out for it, they also want to fetch and fetch and fetch, which is hard when the pounds are packed on, especially when it’s hot outside. And, they are extremely prone to hip dysplasia, which extra body fatness can make far worse.
I don’t particularly have answers. But it is fun to consider.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Except for that bit in the Sermon On the Mount.
And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Oh please that was the lowest…but barely.
I suppose it’s a bit cherry-picking to point out the lowest p-value, but all of the subjective observations were in that teeny tiny range.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:
The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants. And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”. (And even the blink rate isn’t actually display in a table anywhere.)
And, it’s the least blinded study I could imagine. The authors quite obviously knew they were looking at white or Asian babies, so there’s a huge potential for bias…up to and including pushing some of the babies harder.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I was musing as I walked through a fairly rich neighbourhood of Toronto today
Canada has a huge Ukrainian population. It’s rather centered in Prairies, and not the GTA, but it’s possible that they actually might have real ties to Ukrainians?
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I honestly thing the Ansari Incident was a turning point for Me Too—as in, that’s when it jumped the shark. For the briefest of recaps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Ansari#Allegation_of_sexual_misconduct
I am woke. I am rather sensitive to lack of consent. But…girl, “Grace”, if you think that a date like that is the “worst night of my life”, then oh sweet summer child. That is nothing. He was a tad too forceful about wanting sex, and he chose a wine you don’t prefer. If you think that’s awful, if you think that’s misconduct by a man, oh my, we have such sights to show you.
Such vapid, trivializing stories like that made Me Too look like a tempest in a teapot, or a flake in a snow globe. That is the most comically candy-ass incident, that is nothing, nothing compared to what lurks out there in the dark, and what preys on truly disadvantaged women.
CNN is rumored to be suffering serious financial issues
I don't know if that's a "rumor". Well, I suppose the specifics of how CNN itself is doing is slightly a rumor.
But the stitched-together shambling corpse that is Warner Bros. Discovery is objectively in terrible shape.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cash-flow-debt.html
NYTimes has done some fantastic reporting on the gamma ray burst of stupid that caused all this nonsense with Warner, but, paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/business/media/att-time-warner-deal.html
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Yawn, sorry, who are we talking about? That dude who used to be the president or something? Didn't he go to jail or…something…hey look a squirrel!
They're letting him back on because we've already moved on. Trump was super fun to beat on when he was in the news, but that's in the past now, and we are bored with that. He didn't get any juice from announcing his campaign, we've got some hot new conservatives and liberals to fight over, Trump is boring, hey look a squirrel!
Culture has no attention span. He is back on because nobody gives a shit—and the social media zeitgeist is now all about TiTok, and none of this tired old Boomer bullshit plays on there.
Peoria, Illinois also feels like that. I've done urban decay photography around there, and I didn’t feel so much unsafe as…spooked out. There’s a certain “hollowed out” feeling to small-ish Midwestern rustbelt cities where even the criminals have ghosted away, and there’s just the dusty bones of long-dead businesses and echoes of decay.
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