JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I thought about doing 8/16 IF but that's quite hard to fit in my schedule. Looks like 10/14 is working OK for me so far, and it fits well, but if it becomes not enough I could try to go to 8/16.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Yes, Mr. Ivanov, Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander, Alex, Sasha, Sanya, Shura, Shurik, Ivanych, etc. are all the same person, depending on context. And using the wrong one in a wrong context may be a major social faux pas too. Unless you grew up with it, it can be a bit tricky to guess, especially that some diminutives have very little obvious connection to the full name, and some of them are also non-unique. You just have to know it.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Something like:
V9135XA: Hit or struck by a falling object due to an accident in a canoe or kayak
I'm sure is a lot of fun to marvel at, but working with this system practically might be challenging... "So you say you were struck in the head by a falling object, my first medical question would be - were you per chance in a kayak at the time? How about a canoe?"
JarJarJedi
1d ago
The reverse side should have the picture of the autopen.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
In July, I did my routine vitals checkup, and got some bad news. High glucose levels (110), high HA1C (5.7), abnormal lipids and liver function tests. Of these, the glucose part has been most worrying, since I have genetic predisposition to diabetes duer to family history, and that's not fun. I talked to the doctor and he said basically you can lose weight or we can give you a bunch of pills, your choice. So, I decided to take some measures to reduce my weight and sugar intake and see how much it can more the needle. What I have done:
- I've been eating pretty cleanly already, but I excluded all added sugar products pretty much completely
- I stopped all snacking, unless it's nuts, cheese or beef jerky, and only do those 1-2 times a day in small quantities
- Stopped all sweets altogether (with rare occasional exceptions like birthday, etc.) including no sugary fruit
- Stopped all high-carb foods - no bread, pasta, etc.
- No alcohol (again, with rare exceptions like birthday or social occasion with friends - which came out no more than once a month)
- Made an IF routine where I only eat anything between 10am and 8pm, outside of it I only drink water or tea
- Exercise routine - at least 3 gym days (15 mins cardio, then 45 mins to an hour resistance training) plus 1hr martial arts 2 times a week
- In addition to that, walk with the dog 45-1hr daily
This wasn't very hard to maintain - I am missing the sweets a bit, but otherwise I just needed to be a little more organized and regular with what I was already doing. Just required to keep in mind and reminding myself that I need to keep to the routine. It does include eating less varied diet than I used to and forgo some culinary pleasures, but it doesn't become intolerable (fortunately, my wife is a good cook and is very supportive).
This week, after 3 months of this routine, I got the new tests. The glucose is back into acceptable range, HA1C is 5.4 - well within normal range, liver function normal, lipids are still abnormal but much better than before. And I lost 20 pounds. I am happy with the result and plan to continue with the same regimen with another 3 months, and get my weight close to my ideal range (which requires losing another 10-15 pounds). After which I plan to slowly relax the routine and re-introduce some stuff like occasional bread or fruit and see if I can maintain the lower weight while allowing some more tricky items in - my wife is also a good baker, so some temptations are definitely there. So far I'm optimistic about this.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
There's a bunch of nonsense right here.
"The cult of action for action's sake,"
Of course, our guys only topple statues, set fire to district courts, attack the police, smash windows of the stores, burn down gas stations and loot supermarkets only after deep intellectual reflection. While their fascist goons are taking actions just out of base animalistic instincts, because they are uncapable of deep thought - otherwise they'd already be agreeing with us, as any reasonable person who is not a fascist does.
How can one take something like this seriously as a "definition" of anything? Of course exposing the vacuous nature of such intellectual pretense can be called "anti-intellectualism", but this is bullshit - these people have no right to usurp the mantle of "intellect" and use it to cover their vapid nonsense.
"Appeal to a frustrated middle class,"
So you're saying, taking into consideration the interests of a group of voters who are about 3/4 of the voters, is something that "fascists" do? Congratulations, every single politician is a fascist now. This can't be serious, of course every political movement in a democratic country would consider interests of the middle class, and in every welfare state a lot of middle class is frustrated because they bear the bulk of the burden of maintaining the welfare state, while not deriving a lot of benefit from it. The only movements that would not are the ones like communists which would rather see the democratic regime overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat installed - there would be no stinking "middle class" there!
Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual
This is literally THE leftist slogan. "People united" and so on. When I was in Soviet school (long time ago), I had to memorize a ton of poems about how an individual is nothing and the collective is everything. And it's the opponents of MAGA that had been consistently trying to suppress individualism and unapproved viewpoints for decades now.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak."
This can be applied to any anti-establishment movement. People say the elites oppress them? "too strong!" People say the elites are morally corrupt and decadent? "too weak!" Here, every movement attacking the establishment - even obviously oppressive, corrupt and decadent one - is now "fascist". That's not a definition, that's a smear.
"Disagreement is treason"
This is especially poignant now, when the Left actually just murdered a person whose only life's business was publicly disagreeing with them, and massively agreed this is a good thing to do and needs to be done more. I mean, without that I could spend some time on explaining how the left had been repressing dissent for the last decade, but I no longer need to. They are literally, as a movement, enthusiastic about murdering people for disagreement.
"Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat.
That's another nonsense - who defines what's "hyping up"? You take your enemies actions seriously? You are "obsessed" and therefore a fascist. You are passionate about human rights and injustice? "Obsessed" again. This is literally how late Soviets suppressed the dissidents - they just declared them mentally ill, because obviously only a mentally ill person can be obsessed with proving USSR is an oppressive dictatorship with no freedoms or human rights.
This of course is especially great when we know now that there are organized networks and institutions working to achieve exactly the goals the "conspiracy theorists" said they want to achieve - a fundamental transformation of Western society and imbuing it with values radically different from the ones it used to have. If you notice any of that, you are obviously a fascist.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I addressed this in another comment - because when the system had been initially created, IRS wasn't supposed to have most of the information - at least not routinely, they could get a court order or such if they have reasonable suspicion you're cheating, but otherwise they wouldn't have the full picture. Since then, a lot changed, and now pretty much everything is reported to the IRS. But the system is still arranged as if IRS doesn't have the full picture, even though it does, and since now there are massive companies built essentially on tracking what IRS has and re-implementing it in a user-friendly way - and the IRS itself does not implement any user-facing interface to it - we have barriers to change. IRS would have to budget some investment (not large on the scale of federal government, but not insignificant in absolute numbers, probably tens of millions of dollars at least, maybe more) to implement a user-facing system that could be efficiently used by taxpayers, and the incumbents would lobby very hard against it, claiming this already exists as a private solution (which is true) and the feds squeezing out private business is unacceptable (which is usually true in general, but in this particular case is not, but they can make it look true).
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I don't know how it is in Sweden, but in the US I am not a big entrepreneur but I have to take into account, beyond my salary:
- Freelancing income - plus expenses, plus SEP IRA linked to that income
- Income from bank deposits
- Income from stock (is taxed differently from above and has a myriad rules like short/long term, wash sales, etc.)
- HSA
- IRA
- Local tax deductions
- Mortgage deductions
- Charity deductions
It became a bit simpler recently when standard deduction had been raised so most of these deductions aren't worth itemizing anymore, but before that I had to deal with it all. Obviously my workplace has no idea about any of it and can't deal with it. Some of them (like taxing income from bank deposits) can be done by the banks, but other stuff can only be properly calculated by somebody having the full picture, i.e. the IRS. Oh yes, and for many of those the actual tax level depends on my income. And not just plain income, but modified adjusted income (real term) - to calculate which you need to check a couple of dozens of rules on which parts are "modified" and which are "adjusted", and all of it depends on all of everything else, pretty much.
And it's not pocket change either - if it's not done right, the difference can easily be hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars even for mid-tier income like mine. IRS could calculate it all (well, except state taxes which is different rules in every single one of them) - but nobody else, realistically, could do it without me giving them all the data and them recreating what IRS has from scratch. Which is what H&R, Intuit and such are charging the money for.
And to be clear here - my taxes are very simple, comparatively. People have massively more complicated tax situations that I do. I'm still in the DIY zone, people with more complex taxes just hire somebody to do it for them, because there's no way a layman can figure it out.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
Now that's mostly the case, but the roots of this system were actually in minimizing governmental intrusion into private life. In order to calculate your taxes for you, the government has to be aware of a lot of things you are doing. Now, you would say this is true anyway, and you'd be right. But the way the system was designed initially, that wasn't the case - the government was supposed to know what you report to them, and no more. That, of course, went out of the window long ago, but the system remained. Thus the idiotic situation where the government has all the data about you and your business (unless you take special steps to hide it, which are mostly illegal by now) but they are now allowed to use this data to calculate your taxes, so you have to do it by yourself. Then they will be allowed to use the same data to catch you if you're cheating. For me, as a software developer often dealing with, by now, decades-old code, this is a common situation - the system started with one set of assumptions in mind, they changed, but rebuilding the whole system from scratch is too inconvenient, so now everything works in weirdest ways that make no sense anymore.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
You know why. Because Hamas started the war with Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then those waters are a war zone. There's nothing "humanitarian" in the selfie flotilla though - there is no single thing that they could benefit any humanitarian cause in any way. Of course, they are certain kind of "aid" - but to the Hamas leadership, intent on inflicting damage on Israel, but these people are the furthest thing from a "humanitarian" possible.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
More like was escorted to the port of Ashdod and predictably deported. As far as I understood, no significant amount of any "aid" had been found anywhere on the flotilla. I guess the real aid was the friends they made on the way.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
The funny part is that this set of people is almost identical to the set of people that think America is irredeemably evil and everybody from a less-developed country is automatically morally superior to every American by the virtue of not being tainted by the evil that thoroughly permeates the American society.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me.
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth? I mean, that all statements you believe in are objectively true, and for every statement you can determine (if it's logically possible, let's not get into paradoxes here) whether it is true or not, and that determination would be the objective Truth? If you think so, you are either an avatar of God, or have a giant ego and are fooling yourself. If not, then there must be statements that aren't true and yet you think they are true. But you probably don't spend each available moment of time to find out which those are and correct them. You are fine with it being, more or less, as it is. For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't think this is what Christian faith is about (obligatory note: I am not a Christian and have no authority to speak for them). There are some people in it that do that, but it's in no way an universal requirement, at least to my extent of observing many Christians.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I'm increasingly skeptical about this whole "lying to yourself" business. The reason is, we lie to ourselves in so many ways. Sometimes because we are ignorant (and the reality being so vast, most people are ignorant in a real lot of subjects), sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes because it's too hard to face the unadorned truth, sometimes because the truth would be detrimental to what we want to achieve, or maybe because it's more profitable to believe something other than the truth. Is it really that huge a deal doing it one more or less time, or this is just an inflated ego speaking - "they may have fooled those idiots, but they are never fooling ME!". And then he goes and buys stuff and drinks stuff and eats stuff because the TV told him so (one of the ways, not a personal observation).
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I do not say it's necessarily always good to be fooled. I'm just saying maybe sometimes it's not that bad, if the beneficial outcome is worth it. And also maybe when people say "I just can't let myself be fooled" it's something else than the insatiable lust for truth is speaking. Because they must know they are letting themselves be fooled already in so many ways - at least if they give themselves a time to think about it. I can imagine a person that goes radical "no fooling ever, for any reason, I'll always get to the ultimate absolute truth in every matter" and lives a life like that - but that would not be what one calls a normal life, and would likely be very unpleasant to be both in and around it.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
No, more precisely, having no access to the benefits of US welfare state is equivalent to slavery.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
The resulting one is pretty massive too, if it were twice as big I'd probably never even tried it because there's no way I could finish it. So far I'm about 1/3 in, and he already talked a lot about how his science career sucked, unlike his writing. Given that I had always been his fan and yet was never sure (or interested, to be honest) about what he did as a scientist, that's not a surprise.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Well, yeah, how do you think things worked at that time? Or, to be honest, in any other time until maybe 20th century when industrial warfare had been invented and private atrocities no longer interest anybody? Of course if you have a small clan that needs to survive, you need to make friends of bigger clans and destroy other small clans before they destroy you. I'm not sure though on the details - which part of Abraham's story you interpret as "then running off with all their shit"? Abraham did try to make friends with the Pharaoh (who was really into his wife, and you can guess what powerful people did to lesser people who had undeservedly pretty wives - if you don't, the Bible has some chapters on that too), but I don't see any mention of any, let alone, all their shit being lost as the result. Other episodes don't seem to match either.
I think the only part where "then running off with all their shit" is appropriate is the Exodus story - but the first part "ingratiating themselves with wealthy and powerful people" is no longer true - by the time, Jews were slaves, so not much ingratiating were happening.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
I, Asimov by, predictably, Isaac Asimov. Some biographies and especially auto-biographies bored me, but this one is not the case. The author clearly is writing about the subject he is deeply interested in, and is not hiding it at all (I'd even say flaunting it), and yet it remains an interesting book. Asimov being a pretty standard prosperous New York secular American Jew, with all cultural and political stances that follow from that, there are a lot of things for me to disagree with him about, but I think it's still a very illuminating and interesting book.
Also, Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World - the topic is pretty obvious from the title. Not too much new there in general, but the details are fascinating. Those early explorers were really wild, and it's insane how dangerous and close to suicidal their exploits were.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
eating chicken feet, dog meat, or any kind of organ meat
I'm not really surprised about the other things, but I've heard from many sources the dog thing is rather exaggerated and not that common or culturally entrenched. I mean, for me it's like one of the most known memes about Koreans but I always thought it's being quite far from the actual situation. Have I been wrong?
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest.
All the rioters. The FBI was able to find every last person who walked around Capitol on Jan 6 - using the phone data, bank records, informants, whatever it takes. They spared absolutely no expense or effort. I want the same for leftist riots. I want all of them, but at least ONE of them. For literally NONE of them I have seen this level of zeal to get to the people who did it. The people who get prosecuted are some that were as stupid as set the actual police car on fire and be identified while doing it. If they did something lesser, or weren't identified immediately, nothing happened. I want the law enforcement to do their fricking jobs. That include finding the specific people. It's not my job, it's theirs. And these people aren't exactly hard to find, I think. They are probably trying to burn down the ICE building right this night.
You act as though there are tens of thousands of people out there who the police know committed crimes but who aren't being arrested for political reasons.
Yes. There are tens of thousands of people out there who we all know committed crimes - we have seen these crimes committed, sometimes in live stream by their own comrades - and they are not being arrested. Moreover, they are being supported, protected, financed and encouraged. By all their party from the Presidential candidate down. I want it to stop. This is not what happens in a healthy society. Some criminals may get away, sure. But having widespread violence for 10 years now and substantially nobody being prosecuted for them is s symptom demonstrating that the whole system is deeply sick. If I see the level of zeal, effort and results that we have seen on Jan 6 protestors deployed against the violent left, then I will believe it is starting to be fixed. And yes, I am acting as if I want this fixed. Because I do.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
You know, one can gain a lot of wiggle space by alluding to secret thoughts of Trump and imagining what he really thinks based on tortured interpretations of some words (like, if he thinks destroying a monument to some person might be bad idea, that means he actually embraces the single worst thing they ever thought and those of everyone they ever associated with, because that's totally how people work). But when you go out and say Trump did not condemn white supremacists while he did, I personally heard him do that, and there's a lot of recordings of him doing it - the game is over. There's no longer any pretense that you are interested in finding any kind of truth or revealing anything in the vicinity of it. It's pure partisan manipulation, and can be only seen as such.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot
The one FBI has constructed pretty much out of the whole cloth? There was not ever any danger, and Trump is completely free to condemn any Democrat politician - especially given as they actually tried to put him personally in jail on ridiculous charges, and did the same to many of his followers.
Paul Pelosi Attack
The whole story is beyond ridiculous, the guy is a full blown nutter, but somehow is made to be an ideological crusader for the right.
It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does
And he did it. And the Left still continues to lie for years that he called Nazis "fine people". Still lies about it. Because it doesn't matter what he does, he will always be accused of something, even if it's a complete fabrication.
This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks
And that's still not enough for you, somehow.
But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
What, he should have made a solemn vow never to criticize Walz again? Did Walz made the same vow when Trump had been shot? Did any of the Dems do anything like that, or did they keep calling him Hitler and threat for democracy that must be removed by any means necessary?
As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right,
Because the whole "insurrectionist" thing was a total bullshit - unlike, for example, the kind people of Portland and Chicago right now, even the most unhinged of them never strayed beyond what has been seen many, many times in many, many leftist protests. Of course the right pushed back on this bullshit - which did not prevent the FBI from unleashing absolutely horryfiying suppression campaign, where every last grandma who stepped for a minute into the Capitol was prosecuted harsher than if she were a Mexican drug cartel boss. If anything was demonstrated by this very well, it's the fact the FBI actually can squash any group or organization they want like a tiny insect, and the fact that the violent left had been performing their activities largely unhindered, starting with 2017 inauguration riots, through Covid/Floyd violence wave and now to the massive insurrections in major Dem cities - is not happening because they lack the capacity to make it stop.
But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate?
Did he ever told anybody he would like to murder his opponent's kids? No? Well, bye.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative.
What's "the narrative"? I certainly think that Biden had been absolutely horrible. I don't have legal education enough to see if he could be plausible charged with treason (probably not successfully), but I think he certainly did not have mine or The People's interests in mind even in those rare moments he was able to keep anything in mind. And certainly whoever was running the autopen in his stead - which must be some kind of serious crime, though I again don't know how to properly call it - did not. Do I want Biden on the gallows? Shit no, what would it give me? I don't even really want him in jail, he probably wouldn't be able to even understand what's going on. But I wouldn't mind seeing in jail some of the people who were running the clown show. But much more important is to do everything possible to undo at least some of the harm that they inflicted on the country and the society. If believing all that makes me an "idiot" in your eyes, so be it, it's not my problem.
For me, the important part wasn't the late breakfast - I did it all the time anyway - but the absence of late dinners and snacking. Looks like I got some substantial calories there without even realizing it. I am still not sure whether it's the timing aspect or the fact that snacking had been substantially reduced - because I now rarely feel hungry enough mid-day to snack. But it seems to be efficient and does not require constant attention and exercise of willpower like specialized diets and calorie counting I did before required - which I think was the main reason why I could never maintain them, attention is a limited resource, and I have a lot of better things to spend it on. With this, it's simple - if it's in the timeframe and I am hungry, I eat. If it's not, I don't. I don't bother with calorie counting or anything, and the foods that are in exclusion list just aren't in the house in most parts. If I go out occasionally, I may be tempted to eat something "bad", but that so far doesn't seem to happen frequently enough to matter.
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