FiveHourMarathon
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Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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FiveHourMarathon
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20hr ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone.
Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?
To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.
Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.
These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.
FiveHourMarathon
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20hr ago
This is a fair characterization, though I'd note that "Committing a crime" is a broader field than "drinking alcohol in the park."
Probably your third example is most apt. Carrying a firearm to intimidate others creates a very broad category of potential violations. Especially in a 2A unfriendly jurisdiction, it's a constructive ban on carrying a firearm in a holster. What constitutes intimidating someone? What constitutes "carrying a firearm to (for the purpose of) intimidating others?"
FiveHourMarathon
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20hr ago
I'm honored to be summoned.
Assume I know that what I really need to do is eat less, exercise more, and be happy. I agree.
But I'm now in a place I want to solve problems with money and convenience instead of hard work.
I'd view this formula more as a process: Spend Money To >>> Make Things Convenient So You Can >>> Eat Less, Exercise More, Be Happy
Target places in your life where you can use a little bit of money intelligently to improve your life outcomes, and don't be ashamed to spend it. Buy books, spend a little on going out in the right places, don't be afraid to buy a more expensive item when it's the right one.
Fitness wise, Home Gym Master Race is for me. I'm aware I could have bought about 1/5 of the things I have purchased and stuck with them, I don't really need a rack and barbells and kettlebells and a landmine and a moonboard and a rowing machine and an AirDyne bike. There are people who got fitter than me without most any of that. I often go months, or even years, barely using different items. But I come back around to them when I'm in the mood. Rather than having a barbell and forcing myself to stick to it even if I'm hating it, when I get bored of one thing I switch around. I climb for a while, then switch to working on my deadlift, then try to hit a KB pentathlon, etc. Obviously I'd be better at any one thing if I stuck to it, but I don't know that I would stick to it.
As for supplements for working out/QoL, if you're done breeding you should probably skip the minor leagues and just get on TRT at some point. I've fooled around with supplements and will probably continue to, but I'm aware that I'm nibbling around the edges while leaving the big money on the table. Because of that breeding thing, mainly. I did find that Collagen pills tended to help with minor finger injuries from climbing. The biotin in them also causes hair growth/health to improve, but for me it only seems to impact the unfortunate areas of hair (nose, pubic) rather than the ones I'd actually want.
I will say on a prior recommendation from TheMotte, I ordered a shit-ton (for me) of Modafinil online, and I've found it super useful in that I can just decide not to sleep one night, or power through a day when I didn't sleep the night before. I take half of one pill, 50mg, before an all night party or when I'm spending all night reviewing contracts. This happens maybe once a month, but when it does it's a lifesaver. But that's just me, I happen to have the opposite of whatever the alcoholism gene is, so the risk profile may be different for you if that doesn't hold, I know some people online report problems with it but they're using it a lot more than me.
FiveHourMarathon
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2d ago
It also relates back to the tendency for Rats to engage publicly in performative utilitarianism, which seems to be the order of the day among Pro-Israel supporters to begin with.
FiveHourMarathon
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2d ago
Describing the approach the communist leaders adopted towards their enemies as "identity politics". As I and many others use the term, "identity politics" refers to politics based on immutable identity characteristics (race, sex, caste, ethnicity etc.). It appears that (with the possible exception of the aristocracy, depending on how hereditary privileges worked at the time), none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description: kulaks can sell their land and immediately become non-kulaks, industrialists can sell their factories.
This doesn't really hold within the Soviet system.
First, birth-class was not so easily washed away for many. It was probably true that a lower-class Kulak could slip into the category of Laborer easily enough by divesting himself of his goods, but he would not have the option of selling them for cash, he would need to donate them or otherwise expropriate himself while carefully avoiding accumulating anything.
Second, the Soviet system did not entirely allow people to renounce their prior statements. If you were once a Capitalist, and made any public statements to that effect, it was difficult if not impossible to "convert." You might succeed, but you might fail, you would never be truly safe.
Consider the Duc D'Egalite:
In 1792, during the Revolution, Louis Philippe changed his name to Philippe Égalité. He was a cousin of King Louis XVI and one of the wealthiest men in France. He actively supported the Revolution of 1789, and was a strong advocate for the elimination of the present absolute monarchy in favor of a constitutional monarchy. Égalité voted for the death of Louis XVI; however, he was himself guillotined in 1793 during the Reign of Terror. His son, also named Louis Philippe, became King of the French after the July Revolution of 1830. After Louis Philippe II, the term Orléanist came to be attached to the movement in France that favored a constitutional monarchy.
FiveHourMarathon
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6d ago
No sense in being ashamed. I also don't think you have to totally reassess your summer. However, you need to consider easing into extra training volume or new training loads. That means not going all out, or even moderately hard at first. Your body is going to stop moving optimally before you can't move a weight. Usually that means compensating somewhere else when a weaker muscle gets tired, and something gets tweaked.
So at this point, I'm pretty confident that it was nothing, in that I'm feeling fine now. Nevertheless, I'm going to be extremely careful for a few weeks yet, so I'm altering my fitness plans somewhat. I'm going to drop the planned Kettlebell block, and move to focusing on Yoga and Climbing for the next month.
The foolishness started with going to the driving range and getting the bucket of 105, because the pricing was such that the first 35 went for $8, the next 35 were $4, and the last 35 were only $2. It seemed foolish not to buy the large bucket, even though I knew I hadn't golfed in months and should go smaller to get back into the groove. Then I compounded it by having lazed around having coffee and making love in the morning, and as a result trying to cram the other things I had planned that day into too little time, so while on my to-do list the driving range and the pentathlon were morning and evening, and in practice they were less than an hour apart. It was pure stupidity on my part.
FiveHourMarathon
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7d ago
Minnesota won, so it doesn't matter. If they lost, it would be a big deal, but they won, so it's ok.
I've told my wife that I have no real desire to be in the room during the birth. It feels like the ultimate nightmare version of standing around awkwardly around pretending I'm helping the plumber.
FiveHourMarathon
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7d ago
I have no idea how you'd go about testing any of this.
You'd have to create an artificial metric for the importance of a news item, then measure for how many weeks it was front page news in a basket of prominent newspapers, then how long it was a prominent feature item, and how long until it disappeared entirely. How long did the Ukraine war stay on the front page every day in the WSJ and NYT and LA Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, vs how long did the Yugoslav wars stay on the front page. Various Israeli-Palestinian crises probably provide a relatively 1:1 comparison, as would mass shootings, or sex scandals.
But I suspect you wouldn't see stories stick around all that much longer. Rather, I think this perception might be the result of the multiplicity of content outlets that can be labeled "news" today. There's a long tail of websites putting out content every day, posting something, trying to get views. As a result there are always going to be dead-enders pursuing stories that have long dropped out of the mainstream news outlets.
There's also fewer actual reporters, fewer gumshoes knocking on doors and calling people on the phone and going to public meetings and digging into old files chasing actual stories. From the Times on down but especially below, newsrooms have died. Reporting new stories requires actual reporting, commenting on and remixing and reiterating old stories doesn't.
So you have content clickbait farms like Slate and Jezebel and TheAmericanConservative and a hundred websites that are even lower tier. And they've all got a dozen or more writers, and one of them might just have a hobby horse that he keeps putting out a shitty little article about every week or so, and that's a constant drumbeat of stuff about something everyone else has given up on.
So take a current Current Thing. The Kendrick Lamar vs Drake Rap Beef, and the associated accusations that Drake is a creep/pedo. Right now it's popular and fun, everyone is talking about it, the Dodgers are playing Not Like Us during batting practice, somebody shot at Drake's house, but two weeks from now it'll probably be out of the news. But you might have one writer who stays on the Drake is a Freaky Ass Nigga' beat, and just from sheer multiplicity of writers you can keep posting the same story over and over again, and it might feel like it stays "in the news" longer.
FiveHourMarathon
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11d ago
I broke 1000 pages on War and Peace. I'm going to dump my thoughts about Tolstoy afterward, the way he plays with the question of what is real and what is fake, the concept of society and the layers of power and importance, are fascinating.
My tablet book for boring public meetings is Stranger in a Strange Land. I commented a couple months ago about how after reading Dune I suddenly realized half of A Song of Ice and Fire was ripped off from Dune. Now I'm reading Stranger in a Strange Land and realizing that half of Dune is a straight rip from Heinlein. A specially trained Psychic young man who founds a religion, along with his loyal Water-Brothers, to overthrow a corrupt and sclerotic government. For the most part though, the book is rendered a historical artifact by how it was written. It's set in the near future, and we've reached Mars, but is filled with Mad Men era businessmen and Chandler-esque gumshoe reporters calling secretaries 'Toots.'
Fascinating factoid from the introduction by Heinlein's wife: the germ of the story came from a SciFi magazine Time Travel gag issue, a fan wrote a letter to the editor where he said he had traveled through time and seen next year's issue and here were the Authors and the Titles of their pieces. So the magazine contacted the authors and asked them to write a short piece with that title. Heinlein and his wife dreamed up the outline of Stranger and it expanded until it morphed into a novel, he wrote something else for the magazine.
I also have my old copy of Shogun sitting on my nightstand, between the series and a friend reading it I'm looking up and referencing passages constantly.
On audiobook, I'm listening to Numero Zero by Umberto Eco. It feels at halfway mostly a shorter version of Foucault's Pendulum, with the same theme of the fake accidentally becoming real, so if you like Eco but want something short and punchy it's great. I adore Eco, so even a knockoff is worth it. Sort of like Hemingway with The Old Man and the Sea vs The Undefeated. It's got everything I love about Eco: it's fun and light, easy to enjoy, while also having a ton of depth and intelligence to it. I'd highly recommend it.
Request: a while back someone on here was reading a long book and posting a series about it on Irish history around the IRA and the Easter Rising, what was the book? I can't remember.
FiveHourMarathon
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11d ago
Ok that sounds amazing. I need to find this book.
FiveHourMarathon
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15d ago
Stupid thing I did this week: injured my lower back after following a driving range session with a kettlebell workout. I'm ashamed both of the fact that activity level was enough to cause an injury, and that I was stupid enough not to realize that level of activity would cause an injury. It is improving over a few days, no big deal, and I'm hopeful it's nothing, but I need to reassess my plans for the rest of the summer and that pisses me off.
FiveHourMarathon
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18d ago
In my own ethical view, it depends on the store.
I don't generally view our obligations to corporations to be the same as our obligations to individuals. A small business I would not cheat. A corporation has already stated that it will act to maximize profit, screwing me in the process if necessary or just beneficial.
FiveHourMarathon
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18d ago
I might overcorrect towards giving people some grace on these things, because I can't imagine ever talking to my wife like that, it's so far outside of my experience that I don't want to assume I know what people are thinking. I know many people have more contentious relationships than I do.
FiveHourMarathon
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18d ago
So the argument is, if not for religion my life would be even worse?
FiveHourMarathon
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20d ago
there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis.
I found the perfect metaphor for this scenario after yesterday: the Falcons drafting Michael Penix Jr. 8th overall, after signing Kirk Cousins for huge money in the offseason. All the possible outcomes are bad scenarios for the Falcons. If Cousins is good, Penix never plays, and they wasted the 8th pick, with which there is no question they could have drafted someone at 8 who could help Cousins win. If Cousins isn't good, and Penix actually plays, then they've wasted $45mm/yr for the years they should be benefitting from the cheap Rookie QB contract, undermining the team they could build around Penix if he's good enough to get picked 8 overall.
It's possible that this all plays out fine, and the Falcons are good despite it. Like the Niners and Trey Lance. But they're betting against themselves somewhere. They're either spending $45mm/yr because they're worried they might whiff on the 8th overall pick. Or they spent the 8th overall pick because they were worried they have whiffed on the massive free agent QB contract. The scenarios where things actually work are worse than they would be otherwise.
FiveHourMarathon
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20d ago
I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets?
It's pretty obvious to me that influencers pushing Right Wing trad values should have happy marriages, and if they don't it's a significant blow against their credibility. This is just personal, I hold the old fashioned view that if a person can't practice what they preach it throws significant doubt on their system.
FiveHourMarathon
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20d ago
...So "they" made him take the Benzos?
FiveHourMarathon
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20d ago
Do we have any information about the divorce? Anything that would indicate that this makes sense? I'll cop that I have no idea who this is, so maybe it's obvious.
I googled briefly and all that came up was a bunch of hit-piece articles and reddit discussions of them, which all aired grievances that ranged from the cringe-inducing (he didn't show up to the birth of his kids) to the maybe-horrible-but-probably-just-a-bad-day (ring video of him berating his pregnant wife for taking the car when he needed it or something) to the milquetoast and probably exaggerated (workplace gossip that he was sending around pictures of his penis to other male staff).
The divorce appears to have been filed immediately after the birth of their twins.
I find it far more likely that YouTube personalities typically are already, and nearly always become, obnoxious people to be around. Jordan Peterson is sort of the Platonic Ideal of watching the degradation of a human being exposed to too much culture warring in real time. From this to this in just a few short years.
FiveHourMarathon
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22d ago
Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races... many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable,
These aren't necessarily contradictions in terms. There was widespread belief in a much more nuanced and fine-grained set of racial distinctions, the idea of a "white" race as opposed to a German/English/French race, or a white race as opposed to a "race of labourers" and a race of aristocrats, is developing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many at different times have said that the black and white races contain, in due proportion, the capable and the incapable. Or one could believe that blacks are dumber than the English and less organized than the Germans, but smarter than the Irish and more moral than the Jews.
Gross white racial superiority is largely a modern innovation.
FiveHourMarathon
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23d ago
The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.
FiveHourMarathon
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24d ago
It's absolutely brilliant. One of the most uncomfortable reads I've ever had. Resonates so completely through the ages.
FiveHourMarathon
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24d ago
He was absolutely correct and the hip bookstore employee who recommended it to my wife should get the other half of her hair shaved off in public for this.
FiveHourMarathon
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24d ago
The whole book just felt like a thesis length version of "But I have already drawn you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad..."
FiveHourMarathon
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25d ago
I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.
In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.
I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.
It can cause your sperm count to drop and ending treatment doesn't necessarily fix the problem. One very much wants to avoid the roller coaster of needing fertility treatments to increase the sperm counts that you made low.
It's also philosophical for me, in my mind for a citizen it doesn't make sense until one is late 30s early 40s. In the same way that I'm much more ok with plastic surgery in older women than in younger women. An older woman is taking a shot at improving what is likely to be a bad hand, a younger woman risks messing up her best years. "Done breeding" corresponds in my mind with "I've done everything I'm likely to do without TRT, and am likely hitting my physical decline phase."
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