Crowstep
9mo ago
The choice to move away from ugly modernism (which should be considered separately from suburbia) doesn't really exist. If 99% of all new buildings in every city are ugly glass boxes, then your only option is to move to the diminishing number of places with no new buildings. But of course, these places are crazy expensive due to the massive demand from people who want to live in beautiful places (including, naturally, so many the architects that refuse to build beautiful things).
Crowstep
9mo ago
I've been wearing Lacoste Essential since I was a teenager. I've never found one I like as much since.
Crowstep
9mo ago
Did he say anything about Jews other than the 'barren white and Jewish elite' thing when talking about Sarah Palin?
Because he is half Ashkenazi and has married a Jewish woman. They have only one child together, of course.
Crowstep
9mo ago
My girlfriend showed me that you could release the vacuum by prying under the lid with a knife. I can't believe I didn't know that was an option until then!
Crowstep
9mo ago
I thought his mother was Jewish, but I must have imagined that as I can't find anything online about her.
Crowstep
9mo ago
sperm donor
From the perspective of a committed genetic determinist, I think these women are making a rational decision.
The disadvantages of single motherhood (for the children) stem mostly from being the child of the kind of man who would abandon his children (and the kind of woman who chooses such a man to father her children). If your intelligent, conscientious friend can secure the genetic material of a similarly intelligent and conscientious (as well as tall and sexy) man this seems like the better option for her than perpetual spinsterhood. Sure, she'll be disadvantaged by not having someone to help her raise the child (both the dad and his extended family) but if the mother has enough money, she can just pay for good childcare.
I actually tried becoming a sperm donor myself, although I was turned down because my donation didn't freeze well. Apparently there is a shortage in the UK since the donation banks don't pay their donors and because they allow the kids to seek out their genetic fathers once they turn 18, which puts a lot of potential donors off. As is often the case, the free-market solution produces superior outcomes.
Crowstep
9mo ago
Richmond
I like it. I think I'd prefer it more if it were a little less explicitly political though. More 'rich elites telling the working man what to think' and less 'boo fat welfare moms'. The Epstein island line already feels dated.
The guy has a great voice though, and 'living in the new world, with an old soul' is a great line.
Crowstep
9mo ago
One thing I have noticed when looking up GDP per capita statistics is that many countries seem to have a peak and then decline between 2008-2011. This gives the effect of flat GDP per capita for the last decade or so in many places.
My question is, is this an artefact of the strength/weakness of the dollar relative to the country's currency? For example, the World Bank lists the UK's 2022 GDP per capita as $45,850, the same as it was in 2006. Yet, measuring in GBP (inflation adjusted) seems to show actual (albeit uneven) economic growth between 2006 and today, from £30,800 to £32,900. Certainly not strong growth, but growth nonetheless.
Basically, is measuring GDP per capita in dollars really the most objective way to measure economic growth?
Crowstep
9mo ago
Feature suggestion: buttons to add text hyperlinks. Whenever I'm on mobile I try to add them with parentheses and I always seem to mix up ( ) and [ ]
Crowstep
9mo ago
It's fascinating that something like that exists. I love the idea, it just seems crazy that people might pay $150 a year to join a forum without seeing what it's like first.
I'm guessing most new members are referrals from existing members?
Crowstep
9mo ago
I guess you might be trolling, but if you're not...
You know that 'white' and 'rich' are not synonyms right? East Asians are wealthier than Europeans in (more or less) every country inhabited by both groups.
Crowstep
9mo ago
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Crowstep
9mo ago
If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.
Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.
Crowstep
9mo ago
'Eat more and move less' doesn't actually work. We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work. If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term. Just Google 'long term weight loss study' and you'll find pages and pages of evidence showing that even among the small number of people who successfully lose weight, almost all of them gain it back. Dieting and/or exercising for weight loss does not work. Cruelty is pretending that fat people lack the moral fiber necessary to lose weight when actually, nobody can do it (barring a tiny number of outliers).
We do not control our appetites, we do not control our metabolisms, we do not control how our body partitions nutrients. We can temporarily override our appetite and consciously try to burn more calories through exercise, but ultimately the body's lipostat wins. Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control. If self-control were really the issue, then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.
Or, it could be because we introduced massive amounts of an agricultural waste product into our diet in the mid-20th century that doesn't have the same nutrient profile as anything humans have eaten in our evolutionary history.
Crowstep
9mo ago
We've had government guidance about eating for decades. The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently (eat more carbs, replace animal fats with seed oils, eat less red meat) obesity trends ever upwards. People have obediently replaced butter with margarine and lard with canola oil based on the spurious idea that this would protect them from heart disease, and yet people have never been fatter.
The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?
Crowstep
9mo ago
You're not really addressing the argument I'm making. If weight loss is simply a case of choosing to eat less and choosing to move more, why does all the literature show that dieters regain their weight in the long term? According to your model, they must be choosing to lose weight through dieting and then choosing to regain more than they lost? Why do people who lose significant weight have permanently lowered metabolisms, and burn fewer calories than we would expect for their size? Why did the entire planet suddenly start getting fat in the 70s?
Calories in, calories out isn't a prescription for weight gain or loss, it's a description of it. It's like someone asking why the bar gets full on Saturday night and responding with 'more people enter than leave'. You're describing weight gain, but you're not explaining why it happens.
Look at this chart, what do you think caused the massive inflection?
Crowstep
8mo ago
I think you should try for a third. As others have said, an increase on a small number is still a small number, and the potential upside of another child sounds like it would be worth it for you.
I'm a big supporter of Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis. Essentially, he argues that the way infants acquire language is by understanding messages in that language, and that adults have the capacity to do this as well. Instead of practicing grammar or memorising vocabulary, the adult learner's focus should be on getting as much input as possible that is at or slightly above their level of understanding. This YouTube video gives a good overview of the principle.
In practical terms, this means watching lots of easy videos, listening to podcasts etc in your target language. Then gradually increasing the difficulty as you understand more. Crucially, in order to avoid your mother tongue's sounds and grammar 'getting in the way' and cementing bad habits, speaking should be left very late. You want to get a good model of the language in your head before you try producing it. Reading should also come quite late to avoid the learner subvocalising incorrect pronunciation.
Fortunately, for Spanish this is very easy. I've been subscribed to Dreaming Spanish for a few months now and it's amazing how quickly my comprehension is improving. I've been combining this with some easy podcasts (Cuentame, Chill Spanish Listening Practice, Un Dia en Espanol). I was considering writing a post about language acquisition so I may do this later on, but for now I'd recommend looking at Dreaming Spanish's method page to get an idea of what it entails. There's also an active subreddit for it.
Crowstep
8mo ago
So I guess that's equivalent to watching Spanish videos with subtitles, which is fine. That said, Dreaming Spanish advises against doing it too much as it can cause your listening to lag behind your reading.
Crowstep
8mo ago
One of the counter intuitive things about this method is that it's subconscious. You don't need to actively try to remember anything, only to understand the meaning of what's being said. Your brain then builds a model of the language in the background.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.
Crowstep
8mo ago
There's no dedicated site like Dreaming Spanish for other languages yet (although they do plan to branch out in the future). There is the Comprehensible Input Wiki for lists of YouTube channels etc. You could also try searching Reddit as I'm sure the question has been asked a lot for your target language.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.
I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.
What exactly does it mean for an advance in science and math to not be useful for technological advancement? Aren't they all part of the same messy ball of human understanding?
What specifically would we be giving up?
More options
Context Copy link