5434a
4mo ago
Started Generation F by Winston Smith, from the short-lived era of blog-turned-book behind-the-scenes public sector exposés. It's partly "if only you knew how bad things really are" but so far it's been let down by its shallow analysis. For example the author questions why the number of supported housing units expanded so rapidly under New Labour? Answer: Because "it became easier for parents to offload their children into State care". Leaving aside how that puts the cart before the horse it also begs the question of how New Labour and more importantly their backers and supporters benefitted from this change, and this coming immediately after a brief accounting of his workplace's state-funded running costs.
The characters are very two dimensional too, boiling down to little more than interchangeable pastiches standing for male resident, female resident, coworker, and lower/middle/upper management.
On the plus side it's not shy about critiquing the poor/negative outcomes of the system the author finds himself working under.
5434a
3mo ago
I'm merely asking if puberty blockers fit into that previously-used-without-objection definition. My conclusion is: yes. Do you disagree?
I don't agree with the definition. It would classify a child being prescribed puberty blockers as an on-label treatment for precocious puberty as being chemically castrated.
5434a
5mo ago
Degree of veracity aside (a small motte in a giant bailey) Alex Jones essentially doesn't care about pollution or about frogs, or about gays. His call to action isn't that we should lobby our governments to fund environmental monitoring agencies, it's that we should send him $200 for a one month supply of proprietary pressed corn starch pills. If anything the gayer the frogs get the more money he can make.
5434a
11d ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
This thread smells of "there's a law I disagree with, therefore all law is illegitimate".
5434a
1mo ago
Arrange an event and invite the people you want to get to know better.
The main ingredients are an easily understood distracting activity or two that promotes interaction (cooking/eating, watching sport on a screen, simple table games, whatever suits you and your group), somewhere to rest and an informal atmosphere.
If you don't want to arrange something yourself look for similar low stakes events around your area and ask if they're thinking about going, then if they're open to the idea suggest meeting there.
5434a
4mo ago
Where are all the other assassination attempts that they caught?
There was the second attempt two months later where the Secret Service caught that guy on the golf course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Donald_Trump_in_Florida
And this list of other stories I don't remember even hearing half of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Donald_Trump
11 incidents in 9 years.
5434a
5mo ago
It's a bad metaphor. There's a house, a master, his tools, and the objective of dismantling. Whatever those stand for either the tools are powerful enough to produce a house and defend it from attacks to unseat its master and dismantle it, or they're not. Metaphors-lawyering about which bits are powerful and pertinent or not, and when, and how, for who, all just undermines the metaphor.
It's a counterculture koan. It's purpose is to make you think about The System and sound wise while doing it.
It's ironic that by analysing the phrasing we can neutralise the text. The very tools that the writer used to build this house...
5434a
26d ago
you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases
I don't see any mention of figures but there was the first regulatory approval of an AI-based law firm in England last month. https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/garfield-ai-authorised/
Law, medicine and finance are large service industries with notoriously steep fees that would gladly peel off a few billion to become more productive and competitive if they were allowed to. People might be slow to pay for image slop and virtual waifus but they'll happily pay up for things that matter. Will it scale to offset the expense of running the AI server farms? I don't know.
5434a
2mo ago
Middle and upper class have more money to spend on means such as gifts, concealment, etc. More opportunities too as the same resources grant greater agency. The only defecit is in motive as they potentially have more to lose.
5434a
5mo ago
Me too but the conspiracy theory isn't about pollution or frogs. The conspiracy theory is that I wouldn't be gay if the government would leave me alone.
5434a
5mo ago
There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.
In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions wrong right.
It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.
5434a
5mo ago
This is why I hate the whole idea of "grading on effort." You either got the right answer or you didn't. You either accomplish a goal, or you don't. How much effort you put in is completely and totally irrelevant!
That's exactly why I suggested goals that are trivially attainable, but ironically I suspect you dismissed them because they're too easy and thus not worth the effort. I'll explain my reason why:
If you never achieve your goal despite your efforts it means you were pursuing an unachievable goal, which is a failure and a tragedy and waste, and that's naturally very depressing.
I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal. The feedback of failure is what alters the chemicals, and generates the low mood that influences a person to withdraw, whereupon they end up getting less daylight, less exertion, less socialising, etc etc. This is actually rational. Your biological substrate is compelling you to stop wasting its energy on something you/it demonstrably can't achieve.
You can force that away by tinkering with antidepressants and forcing yourself out there, and maybe that kickstarts the process, but it's skipping the most important step which is letting go of, or at least setting aside the goal that you repeatedly failed to achieve and recalibrating your ambition towards something more attainable. Then you have a new reason to get up and get going, because then you can get a successful outcome, and when you get the outcome you get the sweet conscious satisfaction plus the accompanying unconscious mood boosting chemicals. Or maybe you fail again, and the cycle resets, and you try something different until you find something that does deliver success.
Which means nothing if I don't actually get there
TLDR Go somewhere else, get somewhere else, and discover whatever the meaning is of getting there instead of the meaninglessness of not getting where you're not getting.
5434a
6mo ago
There are many alternatives.
You are asking about how to deal with demotivation. The implication is that you require some motivation to alleviate the feeling that you're too old and everything is pointless.
You have existing goals and you are losing time. You can choose to advance toward your goals or you can choose to remain static.
ending it all.
Stop thinking about ending and think about completion. "I'm stuck on level 7.2 and Mario has stopped moving. Should I throw my Nintendo in the bin?" No, just plug the controller back in.
5434a
6mo ago
That link is a handy demonstration that breasts of any size large enough to count as breasts will be prone to the appearance of sagging. It goes with the territory of growing fat tissue with little more than dermal tension for structure, and after the fat has finished rapidly developing at puberty to a bigger or smaller degree the skin gradually catches up to accommodate it.
All else being equal I personally prefer natural/saggy breasts over pert breasts with surgically circumscribed nipples.
the whole page is called "breast lifting without scars"
If that's without I'd hate to see the page with.
5434a
6mo ago
I also disapprove of the internet style of malformed basic grammar like "a fail" or "that feel". It starts off being used with various degrees of irony in international online chatboxes and ends up with BBC current affairs presenters using it unironically. Beyond The Motte itself society should have higher basic standards than internet pidgin. We don't have the excuse that we don't know any better.
Unless there's some way of cloning it your phone number is effectively locked to a single SIM card, so if you want either handset to receive phone calls to your number it needs to have that SIM inserted.
Hmm, just looked it up and apparently there are ways of cloning a SIM. You could look into that, I stopped at the search results page. SIM cloning is usually done for illicit purposes though so I'd expect it to present additional unexpected difficulties even beyond the incompatability you found trying to use a T-Mobile SIM in your Nokia. It almost certainly won't be supported* by the networks and their vendors though so unlike the T-Mobile/Nokia you can't just take it into a shop and ask them if you can try before you buy.
Wifi and 4G are the phone's means of connecting to the internet. Turn them off and you'll still have cell tower service for plain phone calls and SMS texts. You'd have no email, no browser, no doomscroll apps, no internet dependent notifications, but your "offline" apps will still work (things like the camera, timers, alarms, step counters... maybe maps? GPS will still work but it depends if you have the map saved locally for offline use).
I don't know what your skill set is like, and I've never done this, but I think an IfThisThenThat app should be able to do what you want with some simple rules that add up to "If it's between 5PM and 5AM then switch off wifi and 4G", or "if GPS is not [at the office] then switch off wifi and 4G".
*By "not supported" I imagine it could likely raise a flag of suspicious activity if two devices show up using the same SIM card simultaneously. One at a time would okay, but then that defeats most of the purpose of not having to swap the SIM between them.
5434a
8mo ago
The problem is you'll have to physically swap over your SIM card every time. Actually, now that eSIMs are a thing I wonder if it's even possible to bounce between handsets in the way you're looking to.
If all you want is offline time then it's a lot easier to just switch off internet connectivity. You can probably get an IfThisThenThat app that could automate regular online/offline times. A quick search suggests it can be done natively in iOS.
5434a
7d ago
Can somebody classpill me on contraception? Class considerations on this are utterly foreign to me beyond "back street abortions with makeshift implements and voodoo herbs = desperate and/or ignorant" and "rhythm method = Catholic".
5434a
7d ago
Can you give us some more details about what the set and setting was for the session?
5434a
2mo ago
I think the cutter was new as unlike everything else in the tool case it was spotlessly clean and wrapped in what looked like a factory applied shrink fit rubber cover that unavoidably tore a little when I carefully took it off, so I assume it was its first outing. Good tip though, I probably wouldn't have thought of that. Any suggestions for a non-dedicated cleaner? I've got isopropyl, mineral spirits and a degreaser that I use on my bike chain.
5434a
2mo ago
Had my first go at using a (borrowed) router today. Need to rig up a ghetto method of deflecting the dust as my lower half looked like a pine-y snowman and there was practically a radiation style shadow behind me after profiling one small piece. Good results otherwise after one quick test piece to better dial in the motor speed and pace of cut to avoid the unanticipated scorching. Far more productive than my one attempt at making a round over using a file but like most power tools despite it's undeniable productivity and accuracy it's not a "nice" tool to use.
Found some crafty YouTube ideas for converting it into a router table too but that's for down the line when I own my own, for now I'm just interested in getting this project structurally finished before the end of the month.
A post-birth abortion is an oxymoron, like a post-birth miscarriage.
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