DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
That one is going to be hard. On our very first date, she made it amply clear that her "things ranking" went as follows:
- Sleep
- Chocolate
- the idea of Antonio Banderas in the 1998 mask of Zorro.
I have finally made it to #3, toppling Banderas, but she would totally dump me before giving up sleep or chocolate.
But yeah, we've gone from a bar of chocolate to a couple of squares of dark chocolate. So there's progress.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
haha, that's the thing. She's already doing most things right. Eats salad for all lunches, walks a lot, works out regularly.
But she has a fatal love for chocolate and eats like shit when travelling. And she has been travelling A LOT.
I actually think it will be a lot easier for both of us to stay a decent weight once we move in together. But long distance has made that especially hard.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode
I regret to inform you that a straight man would never speak such a sentence.
You don't put sugar in your food if its missing salt. Unless you irrationally love sugar.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
I and my girlfriend have been putting on some weight lately and we've struggled with constructively helping each other lose it. We've both been wondering how to communicate : 'you're not unfit or fat, I still find you attractive, but a few pounds off wont hurt' to each other. (We've both started hovering around 25 BMI)
She's supposed to meet my parents by the end of the year. Turns out Indian parents are a great excuse. Indians are famously direct in calling fat people fat. So, that's been a good excuse to start actively pushing each other to lose weight without your self-esteem being shanked every time. 'We aren't losing weight for each other, we are doing it for the glaring eyes of society'. Both us are intelligent enough to know what's going on, but somehow the lie still functions effectively.
Tech lad that I am, I'm still learning how to balance soft-landing so your loved ones don't feel attacked vs proving direct feedback to avoid passive aggressiveness. It's getting better, but it's some verbal IQ gymnastics for sure. Also, timing. Timing is everything.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
She says he lied about asking for a kiss. Why is she more credible than him?
have you ever won anything and celebrated ? You can barely hear you own voice. Now imagine that at WC scale in the greatest moment of your life.
You think in that moment, he went : "May I kiss you on the lips, deeply while shoving your face into mine mademoiselle ?" Ofc not. I would doubt his statement even if she corroborated it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
To add to this, the Spanish women's team was already very unhappy with the Spanish federation.
They were in open protest before the world cup, and won by ignoring their coach's instructions and with half the 1st team 'exiled' from the squad.
Vilda and the federation have been under fire for nearly a year over failing to create a professional environment for the team. A group of 15 players sent individual but identical emails in September 2022 asking not to be called up until certain changes were made, including Golden Ball winner Aitana Bonmati. The players' complaints reportedly included insufficient preparation for matches, including travel arrangements and a limited amount of staff, as well as coaches who restricted their freedom during camps.
The federation and players held discussions last winter and spring over improving conditions, which led three of the 15, plus three who publicly supported them but did not send the emails, to eventually be included in the World Cup squad.
The federation continues to back Vilda despite the complaints, with president Luis Rubiales saying on Thursday that the coach has "forgotten the people … who wanted to destroy him." The official account for Spain's women's national team also posted a photo of Vilda kissing the World Cup trophy after Sunday's final with the caption "Vilda in."
They won despite Rubiales (who put his weight behind the coach). He was the villain in the story even before the kiss. (Yes, the team was that absurdly strong. Sort of like a USA NBA team)
The previous post annoyed me. It was written by someone who went looking for a culture war angle, and came out with the least charitable interpretation of the whole thing, just so it looked like SJWs had gone too far.
Some men deserve to cancelled. (or at least fired for gross incompetence)
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
The US President is a small part of the overall military-industrial complex. Additionally, a politician is never to be taken on their word, let alone one on campaign trail.
There will be back channel conversations and there will be back channel promises.
The US wants to pressure Taiwan into spending more on its own military. It wants Taiwan to give the US better assurances because the US holds the cards. By making your support of a nation conditional, you can extract far more. As long as the power differential stays similar and Taiwan remains fundamentally opposed to the CCP, the US can continue being a bit of a hard-ass ally.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
India would risk antagonizing China further
India and China are already political enemies. They are economically tied to the hip (with India being the more dependent one), but none of the products consumed by India from China are essential (food, clothing, infra). The Indian populace also hates China, so assisting US in a US-China war would be aligned with all of India's interests. The economic hit received by India will be harsh, but the popular hatred for China is a good mechanism for allowing people to productively suffer through it.
There is little left over for war
A US-China war is a world war. Pakistan will mobilize in Gwadar for Hormuz and India will move as a counter balance.
India will help block Chinese shipping
India won't need to block Chinese shipping, because US is going to unilaterally sanction anyone who takes in Chinese shipping. But if it comes down to it, India will move to secure its neighborhood.
India's conflict with China is at their land border in the Himalayas
And why would India not leverage a US-China war to recover areas of Aksai-Chin that would block the Karakorum highway ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Still remember the day I "came out" as atheist in my Hindu family and they just shrugged it off as if it was no big deal. I even had an angry 'neo-atheist' phase for a couple of years before realizing that Hinduism just sort of accepted Atheism at face value.
My mom was like, "I need you to visit for festivals, be a good person and just join your hands with the family every once in a while. You can talk to whoever you like in your own head, just don't get angry when I ask my Ganpati to bring you good luck." Hell, I thought my dad was irreligious my whole life, until my mom told me he was deeply religious, but he did not feel worthy of praying to ask a God for good luck ! Turns out he'd pray by himself daily, just in non-visible spaces.
Hinduism is funny that way. It's lack of scripture allows it to be something and nothing at the same time. Yet, when it is around, you can tell. If a group of heterogenous people strongly self-identify under a common umbrella of Hinduism, then who am I to disagree ?
Indians abroad are "culturally religious", without any true belief.
This is an unfair accusation, because it quietly defines religion from an Abrahmic lens. Being culturally religious is what Hinduism is all about. Both Dharma and Karma are defined within a localized context of your profession, family & conditions. So, it is hard to have any uniform optics for Hinduism. If a person lives a Dharmic life with an awareness of Karma, then they're Hindu. Even if it has no ties to a specific God.
Yes, I understand that this means a person who performs Hindu actions with Hindu intentions, will be Hindu irrespective of which religion they follow. Hinduism doesn't require mutual exclusivity in tribal associations. As the head of the RSS (India's largest political Hindu organization) says, "If you are born in India, you're Hindu. You can be a Muslim-Hindu, Christian-Hindu or an Atheist-Hindu. Just gotta align your intentions and actions. A lot of spiritual atheist rationalists appear pretty Hindu to me.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Do you have a good CoPilot guide ?
I use it with VSCode, but I feel like I don't use it to the fullest of its abilities. It pretty much just serves as a worse GPT-4 for me.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Baldur's Gate, like all the RPGs that came before it is Trans-humanist, or as anyone without blinders would tell you : "Escapist".
RPGs allow you to be anything, and they mean that ! It's done with full recognition that it involves escaping from your identity, enjoying the exoticness of something different, and then, hopefully, returning back to the person you actually are.
The gender of your character in a computer game has never been an issue. When you are playing as a Venomous Zergling or the living representation of electromagnetism, then playing big-tiddy ginger stops saying much about your gender.
In that sense, if I had to assign a CW tag to it, Baldur's Gate is drag.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Thanks ! That's much higher quality than anything I could find after a cursory search on the open internet !
Sounds like there is no immediate reason for alarm when it comes to trans people and child sexual abuse. At least, no more than the average person.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose
Note, Asian religions are almost atheistic and don't give you a particular purpose either. Moksha and Nirvana hardly sound like an appealing motivation. Yeah, let's aspire towards nothingness. It's a hard sell.
As an atheist who derives his atheism by disassociating from an Asian religion (Hinduism) , I struggle to understand why followers of Abrahamic religions think that religion is essential to purpose or motivation.
Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist
Yeah. That was still true when I was brought up in a religious household. Would you say that practitioners of Indic religions (hinduism, buddhism, jainism) similarly confuse you ?
drugs will surely make you more happy.
Do they ? In the short term sure, but it's pretty hard to find consistent happiness through drugs or idle consumption of any kind.
Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
Haven't enough atheists done this already? We have decent stack of atheists around the world, who have thought deeply about life and continued to feel motivated to live well till their dying day. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
I'd say, was openly claiming to be trans or dressing visibly as the opposite sex at least 1 year before being caught..... is a start.
- How many of the people caught for child abuse, were trans ? (photos make this super easy)
- What percent of trans people in power (small enough number so should be checkable) have been caught child sexual crimes ?
Some phenomenon are impossible to ignore, even without adequate data. Philosophy and culture commentary youtubers being trans (or trans adjacent) is one such case. I was already exclaiming "why are all pop-sci left commentators trans?", and then Philosophy tube and Jim sterling also turned out to be trans. There's something going on there, for sure.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Do the stats on trans people being child abusers pan out ?
More specifically, I am talking about MTF trans people getting into positions of power or supervision (however small, but still) and taking advantage of it for child abuse or sexual crimes in general. The plural of anecdotes is not data, but more than a few anecdotes of a statistically unlikely combination absolutely raises alarm bells.
No value judgement here. Want to start with tallying the numbers first.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Never ask a white nationalist or a social justice warrior the race of their partner, as they say.
It is a 2 way street.
A black/brown man would never tolerate the sheer vitriol the comes out of an angry SJW's mouth. Similarly, the only people who truly find a white supremacists skin to be 'superior' are poor people-of-color who find whiteness (and the American passport) to be a proxy for status.
That being said, we can totally infer some weird revealed preferences about the sexual fantasies of these kinds of people.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Because Americans go to the grocery store once a week. They need it to stay soft and tasty for 1 full week. Thus the sugar and the whole lot of other stuff in it.
suburbia wins.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
There are surprising synergies (I promise the word works in this context) in scenarios like these. You have to start with understanding what metric the consumer optimizes when there are no limitations.
Health and Palatability have always been counter to one another. When given a choice, people have chosen Palatability. So the consumer maximizes palatability until they reach a point where their health falls off a cliff (and sometimes they keep going even after that).
So far, the food industry has worked with this limitation. Create the most delicious food, but stay under a certain calorie limit. If you think that 2000 calorie Cheese-cake-factory pasta was the limit.....hoo boy are you in for a ride. If the new drugs allow us to move the needle on the point where health falls off the cliff, then we are not going to necessarily see healthier people. We might just see unhealthier (and even more palatable) foods while people more or less stay in the same weight bracket. Portion sizes might go down, but calorie counts might stay the same. People might start having Bubble tea / liquid calories with every meal.
When fundamental limitations of industries go away, we often see the culture change dramatically. Once that happens, older intuitions on what industries worked well together and which were in conflict do not work anymore.
What I AM worried about, is drug dependence. If your eating habits only work in a world where you regularly consume these drugs, then you'll never be able to cope without them. Even worse, if the world is built with the assumption that everyone consumes them, then it will be especially hard for a drug-avoider to sustain themselves in that culture.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Man, you learn something new everything. Who could've thought that 'fresh bread at Costco' had such a story behind it.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Can you share the general region you grew up in ? Super interested. I am trying to build my own list of good neighborhoods in the US.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.
Why not both. Nothing stopping family, friend and jobs from being in a city.
single monthly Costco run
I was being unfair. Costco is amazing. But a single monthly run vs Costco being your only weekly / twice-a-week grocery store are very different things. A monthly costco trip is a perfect SUV rental / 1 car household use-case.
I live in a townhouse in the suburbs. My kids could walk to elementary school. We walk to ice cream, groceries, and a couple restaurants. I can get on my onewheel and get a loaf of fresh bread in about fifteen minutes.
Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Greenwich
Greenwich is also in the "WTC <-> Times Square" region. Greenpoint is in Brooklyn. You're correct that the densest parts of Manhattan are overwhelming in an alien manner, where someone who hasn't grown up there will find it too intimidating.
Funnily enough, having grown up in a 'nice residential part' of the arguably densest city in the world, I feel a similar 'hell on earth I need to escape' feeling when I walk through a sprawling maze-like suburb.
it appears that 1K square foot condos in the area are seven-figures
A 1k sqft house will be around 800k in prospect lefferts gardens today. But it is also one of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of Brooklyn. It was closer to $500k just a few years ago. Not cheap, but reasonable for the region. Especially given that NYC prices are destined to hold stable. Remember, a public school teacher or a blue collar worker in NYC can easily make around $80-100k. (Subway drivers & Public school teachers make ~90K), so it is not too bad.
Pretty much no one that currently resides in Denver is envious of the New York lifestyle.
This is a fallacy. No one wants to turn any city into NYC, because that's impossible. No place is NYC.
The goal is to make urban down towns less hostile. Take a 500 acre downtown circle and strip 2 car lanes from the all roads there. Add high-frequency bus only lanes & bike lanes that run within that small zone. Replace parking lots with missing middle-housing. Put large parking lots on the highway approach to this area. There, you just made your urban hellhole an urban paradise, provided more housing, and car owners aren't any more inconvenienced. Maybe move downtown Denver closer to downtown Miami in scale.
The goal to make suburbs less Hostile. To remove a few yards and add a few triple deckers. You'd expect it to look like Seattle's recently developing Wallingford/fremont neighborhoods than NYC. The suburban houses are still there, many yards are still there. It is still quiet, has good parking and feels safe. Or even Portland Maine. Both are perfectly walkable, bikeable urbanist darlings. There is even good bus connectivity within the main urban area.
Urbanists suggestions for rural areas are similarly in-keeping with the needs of a rural town. Northeastern villages are fairly walkable and cycle-able too. See Lincoln NH.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Have you been to NYC and gone beyond the "WTC <-> Times Square" region ? NYC is amazing and a lot of your complaints don't seem to apply to the rest of the city. I understand why you'd dislike the "WTC <-> Times Square" region. Even those who live in NYC hate it.
This is what non-expensive middle-class residential neighborhoods look like :
And I didn't even mention the actually amazing residential neighborhoods that are more upper-middle class like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope, Clinton Hill or the waterside parts of Jersey.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.
It's like saying that Pandas & superior to Orcas because because they do well in Chinese captivity. Well, the entire Chinese captivity system was an unnatural system created to facilitate the conservation of Pandas. If you are going to compare to animals, then maybe evaluate them outside of a system hand-crafted to benefit one of them.
Why would someone want to solve suburban problems in a city. A city should not have suburban problems at all, emphasis on 'should'.
American suburbs appear great, because honestly, American cities are forced to suck. Even the best ones : 'NYC and Boston' have to be the unrivalled centers of the world to rise above the quicksand that is the American system. Other cities, are straight up terrible. Cities should have city advantages. If the streets are unsafe despite sufficient density and transit, then nothing is going to convince parents to let their kids be independent. If residential and commercial areas are zoned far away from each other, then you can't ever grab groceries 'fresh on the way back'.
What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.
Yes-ish. Suburbs are perceived to be higher status because it allowed people to have big families, better schools & lower crime. But, what about suburbs enables any of those 3 things ?
Safety : There is safety in numbers and it hard to commit to the most common crime (car crashes) if you aren't interacting with cars as much. NYC has a lower homicide rate than the median American suburb. American cities are only unsafe because American city police does not enforce crime the same way suburban police would.
Schools : Wealthy places have better schools. When cities are able to self-select for wealthy people like suburbs (Somerville, Newton, Brookline), they have great schools. If anything, cities have access to the best talent and should have better schools as a result. Boston Latin, Stuy High and Bronx Science are 3 of the best schools in the country and they're all in big cities despite much lower property taxes.
Big families : This one is tricky. In an era when most people won't be having more than 2 kids, I can't see why a house needs to be bigger than a 4 bedroom apartment. If anything, a safe city allows your kids to be independent and therefore allows the parents to have more kids without a proportional increase in required work. It is also much easier to setup babysitting when your kids can hang out in a large apartment lounge area or a neighbors house in the same building.
And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.
Well, she is currently living through her 'Europe' phase. I can hardly blame her for wanting to try out great food while travelling through Europe.
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