DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
11mo ago
Adding BCAA powder makes it very easy to get down and there are some potential health benefits.
DradisPing
11mo ago
The ALLMAX Aminocore BCAA flavors have all tasted pretty good to me. I've only tried the fruit punch and a key lime flavor they used to have.
I got some random BCAA powder at the drug store once and it tasted awful.
I find if you go to a supplement store they curate the flavors a bit so you don't get anything awful.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Numbered lists in HTML are an interesting feature. They were added very early. They've been in a state of "clearly done wrong but not so wrong to be worth fixing" for decades.
DradisPing
11mo ago
I've been mulling over how Fallout 4's depiction of the Institute was surprisingly insightful given how the scientific community reacted to covid. It might be a little too silly for some.
I've been thinking of doing an effortpost on the problems with the Trump indictment to see if there are any counter arguments I'm not aware of.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition?
Modern architecture has two things going against it... first schools reward "creativity". So all of the grads from the top schools with top marks like to make buildings that are a little zany.
The other is competing preferences. Locals don't particularly care if their city hall looks like every other city hall. They just want a distinguished looking building for city hall stuff. However architects enjoy travelling and looking at unique buildings. So they have a bias towards weird.
Imagine if every city mayor had to buy all their suits from designs proposed by respected graduates of top fashion schools. Inevitably the mayor of Cincinnati would end up in a hot pink suit with rhinestones simply because that was the most normal looking option offered.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Having a stable relationship with Russia (and prior to 2014 that’s what they had, it was colder than we wanted, but we got along well enough) is far more valuable than anything we could get from Ukraine.
It wasn't actually stable. The interventionist wing of us foreign policy has wanted to oust Putin and take control of Russian & Ukrainian resources for a long time.
There were articles written in 2008 warning about how US foreign policy was going to lead to a Ukrainian civil war that would be followed by a Russian invasion. They State Department didn't stop, they pushed forward.
The 2022 Russian invasion was expected. What wasn't expected was the failure of the sanctions. They expected to crush the Russian economy and insight a revolt to oust Putin. It didn't work and now they're winging it.
DradisPing
11mo ago
As for motivation—what makes you say Trump branded as anti-war?
He's very vocal about how force should be responded to with force, those comments were in that context.
In the 2016 primaries he caught a lot of flack from the neocon wing for speaking out against "stupid wars" and calling Iraq a mistake.
In office he resisted pressure to go into Syria, he sent Jared Kushner to negotiate the Abraham Accords, and he attempted to negotiate peace with North Korea.
For further proof John McCain hated him.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Cable (standardization orgs) that suck. Is there some Chesterton's Fence thing, here, or do these people just not know how to count?
USB naming is confusing on purpose. They need to inform highly technical users what the situation is, so there needs to be naming. However laptop manufacturers don't want the average user to notice that the ports haven't been updated to handle the highest speeds.
Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation? Is anyone doing anything on the forefront of this field? Book fraud?
Short answer, no one one is doing anything about elder fraud.
So at the dawn of wide spread telephone usage a social decision was made by the government. They'll train people to trust phone callers and to counterbalance that they'll introduce wire fraud laws and aggressively prosecute phone scammers. Long distance fees would prevent things from getting too out of hand. The scammers would likely be fairly close, international phone scams would be cost prohibitive.
However long distance fees came way down, which put a strain on the FBI. Then the telcos built up systems to allow internet calls to come in as local numbers. It made sense, it was the most straight forward way to do things.
But now American elders are vulnerable to scammers from around the world.
There are a lot of organizations who could do something.
Scammers operate companies openly in places like India. The State Department could come down hard on them in various ways. Make it difficult to get financing, block the employees and owners from ever entering the US, many other options. But DOS has a global empire to run and doesn't particularly care about the elderly in the US.
Telcos could do various things... Improve caller ID so that it's useful. Run a warning message before letting an internet originating call in.
But they aren't going to do anything unless the feds make them.
The biggest problem is due to the international nature of the problem. Cracking down on foreign scammers who go after old white people sounds vaguely racist to the modern liberal. Arresting a few as part of your job is probably OK, but anyone who dedicates their life to solving the problem is clearly a cryptonazi.
DradisPing
11mo ago
The woke left's belief system includes a gnostic spiritualism with specific metaphysical beliefs. That's why they do the #TransWomenAreWomen #TransWomenAreWomen #TransWomenAreWomen chanting online.
The idea that being male for years permanently changed them is unacceptable.
Conservatives don't really care about women's sports either. However they've noticed certain things about the woke left's response to trans women in sports.
Fallon fox was fighting 10 years ago. In that time the woke left has been unable to come with a coherent response. They can't just admit that a transwoman cracking cis women's skulls in the ring is bad, it would be acknowledging that their beliefs are wrong.
The transwomen in sports pits woke ideology against some of it's strongest allies -- white women in college.
Naturally conservatives are going to keep poking the issue with a stick. There's no downside and it's fun.
DradisPing
11mo ago
What's historically unprecedented is that so much of culture is owned.
It's natural and even desirable for writers to reuse existing characters. The audience doesn't need to be introduced to them and you can get on with the story.
Traditionally writers used gods, demigods, saints, historic figures, etc.
Nowadays everyone is locked down by copyright and trademarks. Studios like that. Re-using old characters is also good for keeping out foreign competition.
It's hard to imagine a new Star Wars (the original) or anything like it coming out today - a big, bold, truly original vision with a budget.
The original Star Wars had a relatively low budge for the time. No one else was pushing VFX at the time so Lucas could recruit top talent cheaply. Also he understood the technology and built his script around cool shots that were possible.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Covid hit NYC. All non-essential surgeries in the country were then cancelled.
Many hospitals in other parts of the country found themselves no major covid outbreak and no elective surgeries.
The nurses had fuck all to do. So they made TikTok dances.
DradisPing
11mo ago
There's the first important issue: California property tax laws are insane.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Under Proposition 13, the annual real estate tax on a parcel of property is limited to 1% of its assessed value. This "assessed value" may be increased only by a maximum of 2% per year until, and unless, the property has a change of ownership.[15] At the time of the change in ownership the low assessed value may be reassessed to complete current market value that will produce a new base year value for the property, but future assessments are likewise restricted to the 2% annual maximum increase of the new base year value.
So your property taxes can only increase by 2% a year from your date of purchase. As a result anyone who has owned a home for 10+ years is locked into property taxes far below what they'd pay if they'd move.
So there's a strong incentive to never sell. A retiree might think about selling their house and downsizing, but while they'd get a lump of cash their property taxes will be significantly higher for the rest of their lives. That affects calculations.
Other issues benefitting SF...
The weather is quite pleasant and unique. Many people are heat bugs and dislike it. But it rarely rains in the summer. The weather never gets muggy. It never really gets cold. Sort of year round light jacket weather. There's a big market for that, and there are only a handful of cities like that in the world.
Demographically it's 78.8% asian & non-hispanic white. That's extremely high for a rich costal city in the US.
Really the biggest downside to SF is the incompetent management of the drug addicted & mentally ill homeless population.
It's never going to be a party town, but it's going to be a desirable place for the wealthy and bookish to live for the foreseeable future.
DradisPing
11mo ago
His main home in Medina, Washington is surrounded by trees to the point that it's hard to see the buildings. He likes privacy and doesn't feel the need to build anything that screams "look at my house".
I suspect the bland exterior was a deliberate choice. It probably makes him feel safer.
The pool is covered in those photos. There are pics of the interior under a former owner here: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-04-24/report-bill-and-melinda-gates-buy-43million-del-mar-home
DradisPing
11mo ago
The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production.
Can you expand on this? What's the evidence?
DradisPing
11mo ago
'Technology' in primary education is only to facilitate a shift to online learning materials that schools now must subscribe. It's a grift by educational publishers to increase reoccurring revenue and provide make-work jobs for Education post-graduates.
That's basically the history of common core.
DradisPing
11mo ago
You're overestimating online hard righties.
Groups like the Aryan Brotherhood are mostly just prison / drug gangs. That's why you get otherwise confusing gangs like the Nazi Lowriders who are neo-nazis plus hispanics. They do commit hate crimes but they also filter out anyone too obviously crazy or incompetent to join their criminal organization.
A lot of the neo nazi stuff is there to make sure that the gang members are permanently excluded from lawful society and thus fully committed. A guy with a faded "Arizona Meth Dealers" tattoo could probably still get construction jobs if he just shrugged it off as "I was an idiot when I was younger". A swastika? Not so much.
So Discord neo-nazis are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. There was one Atomwaffen cell that was made up of a man in his mid 30s and a 15 yr old high school student. You're probably assuming the man in his 30s was running the cell. You'd be wrong.
So based on their behavior and proven competence I'm confident in saying that a lot of them don't realize that their Discord conversations aren't actually private.
DradisPing
11mo ago
That would make sense, but there's a lot of competition in the market and women do discuss skin care a fair amount.
If your thesis was true, you'd expect poor white women who went without an expensive skin care routine to have better skin in their old age.
That doesn't match what I've seen.
From what I've seen more expensive products do produce better results. I used to work in Canadian politics and there was a sharp salary division. Hill staffers got paid crap. Ministry staffers got paid well.
When a girl moved over to a Ministry it was obvious. Her skin was noticeably better after a few months. Long term it holds up. Although UV protection seems to be the bigger split.
DradisPing
11mo ago
People convince themselves that lobster tastes really good because it's high status. It's expensive to bring live lobsters inland, so it's naturally pricey. Also there's the whole ritual of killing it right before the meal that makes it seem even more fancy.
Also it's one of the few foods where it's socially acceptable to dunk every bite in melted butter.
People just like having a high class way to eat melted butter.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Aaron Swartz is a tragedy. It's one of those cases where he was getting screwed because his lawyer didn't understand how to run a political case.
Lawyers understand the courtroom and how to strike deals with the prosecution. So naturally they want to keep the fight in the courtroom and avoid upsetting the prosecution more than necessary.
They didn't understand that Swartz was much more sympathetic to a lot of fairly powerful people than the academic publishers trying to protect their exorbitant pricing for research that's often publicly funded.
So his lawyers were telling him to keep quiet so they can make a deal, while the publishers were pressuring the prosecutors to make an example of him.
If he had made an aggressive public plea with details of his situation then all of the Silicon Valley tech people Obama needed for his 2012 election campaign would have gone to the Obama campaign and said "he's just a well meaning kid who made a mistake, cut him a deal or I won't support you".
Swartz would have just gotten probation at worst. Instead he snapped under the stress of the aggressive sentences prosecutors were demanding and killed himself.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Here's one that's related. The reason for the intense fight over Trump asking about citizenship on the census was because accurate citizenship information would make some current service locations illegal.
Spending federal money on social services for illegal aliens was banned in the 80s. Courts ruled that so long as the office was serving >50% citizens the service was legal, and also they weren't allowed to ask about citizenship at the location.
There are almost certainly things like federally run dialysis clinics in parts of California that serve less than 50% citizens, and they'd need to be shut down if there was ever an accurate count.
DradisPing
11mo ago
Multiple women moving to jobs that had worse hours. They were probably eating better.
DradisPing
10mo ago
I'd say that in most cases hyperbole is the point. They are sick of arguing and just trying to insult you by likening you to something unambiguously bad.
DradisPing
10mo ago
Part of the issue is that Shakespeare is public domain so anyone can do whatever they want with it.
Tolkien products are all licensed. These race swapped cards mean that fans will never get a card game with a book accurate Aragorn.
Additionally activists tend to see these swaps as permanent and will demand black Aragorn in all future adaptations.
DradisPing
10mo ago
Twitter used to be very permissive with their api. They had a deal where they worked with Y Combinator to start a bunch of startups based on their api. They cut that off years ago to monetize.
I'll start with the less loaded question, immigrants are attracted to areas with a lot of economic growth because they want to land their dream job. In the midwest there's no construction boom for working class immigrants to work in. There's no flood of nouveau rich craving exotic restaurants. There are no high paying engineering jobs to attract high skill immigrants.
Basically to an immigrant the midwest is bad weather, a foreign language, and limited job prospects. There are plenty of other cities on earth.
Now for the more controversial section.
"Nonwhite" isn't the relevant metric. Columbus, IN is only 2.1% black. 12.5% asian in 2020. 5.6% asian in 2010. Asians don't drive down housing prices in general and their increasing numbers imply that there are white collar jobs hiring in the area.
Poor blacks don't cease to be poor by moving out to the exurbs. They just get to be poor with long commutes.
Those inner city neighborhoods have a lot going for them. Plenty of infrastructure. Many social services. Close to jobs. They're highly desirable apart from the demographics.
Partly. Nonblacks have to choose between pricing them out or moving farther away.
Gentrification involves various programs to move the poor blacks out of inner cities to blue collar suburbs. Liberal whites move in to the newly vacant areas. Blue collar suburbs get stuck with crime and race riots. The residents then flee to more distant exurbs.
A good example is Ferguson, MI. 70% white in 1990, 70% black now. There were serious riots in 2014.
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