JulianRota
2yr ago
Yes. There are professional Soccer leagues in America. I'd bet money that the number of blue-collar workers attending any of their games is effectively zero.
JulianRota
2yr ago
How sure are we that it was an actual explosion though and not a high pressure burst? I would think they'd look fairly similar to the untrained eye. I'm not sure anyone with serious expertise in distinguishing these things through whatever types of sensor data we have to examine deep underwater events has weighed in. God knows there's no shortage of actors and commentators who'd love to declare that it's definitely an explosion and definitely caused by whoever they hate the most.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Not at all, in fact it's fantastically rare. I think it's just another example of the thing where only ridiculous and outrageous stories of misbehavior get written, upvoted, and shared. The vast majority of them work perfectly fine basically all the time, but nobody tells stories about that.
I live in a decently nice condo building with a board that does maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade of common areas. They all seem perfectly reasonable and competent, and nothing dramatic has ever happened as far as I know. They're all up for re-election every year, but board meeting attendance is fairly low and virtually nobody ever runs to challenge any of the existing officeholders. They seem more barely able to muster enough man-hours to take care of all the things that they ought to than to have a ton of extra time to hassle people over random stupid stuff.
It's been my experience in real life that nobody I've ever met in person had this sort of thing happen to them. Basically everybody in real life will look at you like you're crazy if you express an opinion that it's likely enough to happen to take precautions against. I think that's a much more reliable measure about how much of a risk something actually is than how often you see stories about things on the internet or in the news.
JulianRota
4mo ago
Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.
JulianRota
6mo ago
I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities, but I'd like to hear something more specific than just we should go faster or we should skip trials. Which trials are we skipping, how are we dealing with the effects of skipping those trials? In my view, I've been trying this whole conversation to get out of you exactly what specifically you want to do, ideally something more generally applicable than, we did this specific bad thing during Covid, let's not do that. I mean, yeah, that's technically true, but how do you generalize that beyond, we should put better people in charge?
The mind boggles a bit trying to come up with general principles for addressing pandemics that would apply well to both of, let's say, Covid and Aids. If you can come up with some that don't just reduce down to putting better people in charge, by all means, let me know.
I am aware of what Human Challenge Trials are. Randomized Controlled trials are what we're already doing. I've got no problem with Human Challenge Trials, sounds like a good idea to me. It's at least a specific and actionable proposal. Liability might be a concern, but that ought to be solvable with waviers or some minor legislation. It's a relatively modest modification of current practice. It would likely result in full market availability somewhat sooner, though probably not dramatically so. The number of people accepted into such a trial would likely be modest. Though I gather you seemed interested in much more dramatic changes? Operation Warp Speed as it was actually executed produced far more dramatic timeline reductions just by bureaucratic optimization. Certainly nothing wrong with going even faster yet, but no need to forget what we actually did accomplish.
Another thing I'd note is that medical technology continues to advance incredibly fast. As far as I know, this was the first time in history we had a vaccine candidate ready for trials within weeks of the target viruses genome being isolated. That's freaking amazing! Can we come up with ways to get it verified and out to the public even faster than we actually did? Probably! But let's not beat ourselves up too bad, this stuff is all pretty new.
JulianRota
6mo ago
It's not a matter of cherry-picking. It's simply stating that things are clearly good or bad.
I think it is. A possible reasonable alternative system is, no Government agency exists to approve medical treatments, instead, several independent organizations (possibly including a Government one) make recommendations based on their own criteria, but individuals are free to take what they want. In such a system, those one or more organizations are already set up, and people are used to making their own decisions and taking responsibility for them. I believe that basically nobody thinks that way now. I don't think you can just overnight in a crisis switch to the regulatory framework of that system and expect people to change their thinking overnight. It is perhaps telling that no country in the world currently works like this.
A lack of willingness to take responsibility for my own medical decisions is not my opinion at all. I am fine with doing this myself, but it is my belief that 95% of American citizens are not prepared to do this. This is based on observations of how they actually behaved during the actual Covid period. Which gets me to what I really want to object to:
This is one of the most common failure modes, perhaps even a typical mind fallacy. Because you think, in your situation, that you wouldn't want to take it, you think that no one would want to take it (or you think they'd have obviously wrong preferences, since they don't match up with your own).
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth or assuming what I think. I already said I would personally be fine with taking responsibility for my own decisions. I think it's the American people, and the people in pretty much every other country too, who are unwilling to do this. You may disagree that they think like this, or dislike it, but don't tell me what I think personally.
If we did allow people to take any treatment without testing, warned them hundreds of times that it was untested and anything could happen, and it turned out to be a disaster with hundreds of thousands of casualties, I would be any amount of money you care to name that they would all scream their heads off at the Government for allowing it to happen, vote them out of office, probably storm the gates of all the Pharmaceutical companies and lynch people, etc. Roughly 10 people would say, oh well, they did warn me it was untested, guess it's on me. If watching how people behaved during Covid didn't convince you of that, then I don't know what to tell you.
We're also talking pretty vaguely here, why don't you spell out exactly how you envision your ideal system working?
JulianRota
6mo ago
First off, I agree that, in my overall estimation of the disease and results, the vaccine mandates were a terrible idea.
In the larger picture, I want to agree with the overall Libertarian idea that it would be nice if we could both have individuals not be legally barred from taking any drug a company felt like selling at their own risk, clinical trials conducted and evaluated by one or more independent entities, and individuals can choose to pay attention to or ignore the recommendations of any of those trial entities on their own when deciding which drugs to take. But for better or worse, we're so far away from that world in the way our society currently runs that it's just not viable to cherry-pick one or two things from that world and try to just apply to them to ours.
The mandates certainly exacerbated the problem, but I think even without them, allowing such a vaccine to be let out into the world with no trials at all would still potentially be a monumental disaster. Who would take such a vaccine in a world with no mandates at all by anyone ever, including private entities free to choose their own policies? The Covid-maxxers, of course, the ones so radically terrified of it to be hiding indoors, wearing multiple masks, etc. They would jump to take it as soon as possible, as many millions of people did in fact do once they were released. And what then if it turned out to be far more dangerous than Covid itself, or even helped it spread faster, as quite a few drugs have in fact been discovered in trials to actually do? Now that would be one hell of a mess.
In any case, I don't know much offhand about animal drug approval process. A little googling turned up that the FDA claims to regulate regular drugs and medical devices for animals, but not vaccines for them, which apparently falls to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They seem to have a FAQ page about it. I found a PDF of "New Firm Informational Packet for Live and Inactivated Vaccines", and the process listed there sounds broadly similar to the process for human drug and vaccine approval. I'm guessing it's probably somewhat faster than the approval process for human drugs, but not dramatically so.
JulianRota
6mo ago
I've got a Windows 10 desktop, a custom build. I'm still pretty happy with that. Microsoft hasn't done anything I find too obnoxious yet. My setup is apparently not compatible with Windows 11, which I'm not that enthusiastic about anyways. I legitimately have no idea what I'm going to do if Microsoft ever does truly EOL Windows 10. I'd probably have to buy mostly new hardware to get Win 11 compatibility, which I'm not very enthusiastic about, or try another full switchover to Linux, which I'm also not enthusiastic about.
I also have a moderately high-end Chromebook for a personal laptop. I'm quite happy with that right now. IMO, the Manifest V3 being terrible thing is mostly ridiculous ultra-nerd rage. I installed uBlock Origin Lite, and it's just fine. You have to enable "complete" filtering mode on a few sites for it to work properly, but that's no hassle. It has a few less features than "full", but I never used those anyways. My impression is that V3 is more about a legitimate desire to lock down more tightly what extensions can do, which is probably necessary considering how many extensions have gone abusive, rather than an evil plot by the big ad giant to shut down really good ad-blocking. Same thing as the old plain C extension interface IMO. Everyone wailed and moaned about how terrible it was when I think Chrome first went over to prioritizing Javascript-based extensions. But eventually everyone came around to the viewpoint that the C extensions system was a security and compatibility nightmare that could never be fixed, and it's not really a good idea to give extensions that much power anyways.
Anyways, enough of a rant on that. I've never seen issues like you're describing on my Chromebook. Might be because it's a higher-end model, I think like $600 or $700 or so. I do like my nice high-res screens. I don't know if the somewhat higher price kills your motivation entirely, but I think the low-end hardware might be more of what's behind your issues than the OS. You might get the same sort of issues at that price point no matter what OS you use. It's still cheaper than Apple hardware, and more capable too - mine has a touchscreen and a 360-rotation hinge so it can become like a big tablet. More storage space available makes the Linux environment work better too.
I do have an Apple laptop for work. It's okay I guess. Apple seems to want to lock you into their world a little too hard for my tastes though. It's mostly avoidable on MacOS devices, but I don't really see enough of an upside to pay the premium for their hardware.
Naturally along those lines, I'm not much into iOS devices, so I use Android phones, which I'm also mostly happy with. Well, I'd like to have better Adblock experience for mobile, but nothing much else does any better, and I never liked using the web on mobile that much anyways. I've played with the custom ROM stuff off and on, but I gave it up as IMO they're all too janky and unreliable. It's more important to me that my phone be as close to 100% reliable as possible rather than have the latest and greatest of everything and best features etc.
I did try Linux on the desktop for a while. I gave that up also, as I found it too finicky and prone to random breakdowns and malfunctions on updates. Yeah, I can fix the problems, eventually, but I'd rather my personal computer Just Work than be a puzzle to solve every few months. I think that was around 10 or 15 years ago though, so it's possible it's better now. I wouldn't bet on it though. Try it out if you want, but be prepared for that kind of pain on a regular basis. Both Windows and ChromeOS have great Linux environments that IMO give you the best of both worlds.
JulianRota
6mo ago
Non-fiction I'd say. Is Troubles Fiction even a thing?
That is the sort of thing I'm more interested in, thanks!
I have read about things like that going on. It seems to be a great truth that, if you as a rebel group do a sufficiently good job at booting out the Government and getting people not to trust them, then you now become the Government. People will start coming to you to resolve petty disputes and enforce order, whatever they consider that to be, and if you do a decent job at it, then you're just that much more powerful.
I'd read about the militias on both sides often spending a lot of time extorting businesses, and often even cooperating with each other on who got to shake down who, despite being technically at war with each other. Also at least the outline of reorganizing the RUC into PSNI, supposedly now with more Catholics. The efforts to integrate the schooling sounds very interesting too, though I don't know where to read much about that. It seems like the separated schooling must have been a big factor in keeping the communities split apart enough to create such a conflict in the first place.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Interesting, I didn't know that! I'll have to take a closer look at how his career progressed.
At the point I'm at, I've been thinking, this is a pretty good autobiography, but I haven't yet seen anything that I would expect makes anyone think, wow I really want this guy to represent me in DC. Though I see it starting to go in that direction already with my last day's reading.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Maybe! I've lived in or visited several big cities, and never seen or heard of things like that though. It seems more plausible to me that things might be more like what Maiq described in what I guess you could call "dead cities" - the medium-small cities that used to be thriving, but all of the industries that were there left for various reasons. Most of the decent people with good life potential also left due to the lack of good jobs long before things got bad. The resulting downward spiral leads to a pretty bad place.
But then, those places are not exactly havens of progressivism, and I don't think any blue-affiliated people are going to decide to move there, which was the point of this whole thread.
JulianRota
8mo ago
This sounds super weird to me. I did entry-level competitive cycling on a college team for a few years, and have never heard of that being a problem for anybody. Even with plain flat pedals and ordinary shoes, your foot shouldn't ever slip off. Maybe you're trying to pedal way too fast or have some kind of weird foot motion or position or something. The axis of your toes on your foot should be roughly directly above the axis the pedal rotates on.
Pedals with straps to hold your foot on are indeed a thing, as are various types of "clipless" systems where your shoes lock in and only come out with a specific twisting motion, but they're only really beneficial for allowing you to exert force on the pedals on the upward stroke. If your foot is coming off the pedals, you should fix whatever issue is causing that before you do an equipment change.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I've never been a real heavy voter, I write a lot more than I vote, and I don't write as much as some. I suppose I feel like I don't enjoy the process of considering "does this comment deserve an upvote or not, does it deserve it more or less than some other comment", and such things. I probably do less than a dozen votes a month I guess. I kind of suspect there's a lot of heavy voters who write little to nothing as well.
I tend to upvote things that really stand out enough to think, I'm glad somebody made that point. Sometimes I upvote things that I think got beat up too hard or aren't popular enough to get a lot of upvotes due to the actual position being argued being not that well liked here. I don't really downvote much, even if I'm disagreeing with somebody, unless what they're saying is really over the top low-quality, though that often gets modded too.
I'd more tend to leave judgement to the masses in any argument I'm in. That's whose sake I'm really arguing for anyways. Getting at least some votes either way is a nice sign that somebody is at least seeing the discussion. I tend more to just not continue if I think the discussion is too low-quality to bother and nobody is watching rather than throw a bunch of downvotes around. Or of course if we end up basically agreeing and it doesn't feel like there's more worth saying.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I started driving at about 15, the normal age for it in the US. IMO it still is much more tiring than the amount of time and the actual physical activity would suggest. I'm not really sure about improvement - it probably has somewhat, but the extra mental strain is still there.
I do still like to stop every few hours when driving longer distances. Partly from mental strain, partly from the physical part of stretching and moving around. Also for bathroom, snacks, food, gas, etc.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I've bought and sold several properties in multiple states and am friends with a few realtors. I've never heard of either happening.
JulianRota
11mo ago
So far it appears he was only grazed, and nobody else around was hit, which is a really bizarre outcome. A clean miss or a solid hit is far more likely. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I guess more information will come out in the next few hours, but it feels pretty scissor-y already.
JulianRota
11mo ago
In terms of accusations / insults, past Dem nomination fights were bloody but that didn't really spill over into the general. And we're still months out, elections take around a month in some nations. In terms of throwing up procedural / legal issues, I doubt that's too big of an issue.
What I'm talking about is, most of the discussion has assumed that both Biden and Harris agree to step down voluntarily. What happens if one or both of them don't? Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation? How long would that process take, and how sketchy would it look?
If anything like that happens, I would presume the Dem party leadership expects it to all happen behind closed doors. If it ends up taking months and has at least bits of it leaking out into the public, well, it looks pretty banana-republic to me. Though maybe not necessarily more so than all the other stuff that's happened over the last 8 years? Maybe the voters won't care that much if they manage to get somebody young and confident in there somehow, or maybe not.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Intros? Haven't seen many of 'em, but you're welcome to. Post away by all means!
FWIW, I've tended to think we're probably doing fine just as we are actually and not to sweat too much over periodic variability of CWR comment count. I think it's probably a good thing that even our more real-world famous posters don't advertise the site much, as it would probably draw in a lot of low-quality posters who break the rules, make more work for the mods, make the experience worse for current posters, etc. I think people who make good-quality posters are more likely to find us on their own. How did you end up here?
I think Motte-style debating is usually a good template, or good practice, for discussing such topics as trans-ness as a new religion with potential adherents who are otherwise close to you. Avoid sneering and weak-manning, but point out real risks and challenges. Like to what extent is the excessive enthusiasm about the topic encouraging young people to take more radical measures that they're not really ready for, some of which will have life-long consequences.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.
However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.
I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I guess I'm somewhat lucky in not having many issues with serious or chronic pain. I did get my wisdom teeth removed, and I don't think I was prescribed or took anything particularly strong for that, but I don't recall very clearly. I had to get a root canal a few years ago, and I do remember that hurting pretty badly the next day. I had been prescribed Tylenol with Codeine, which I took and worked pretty well at dulling the pain, but left me pretty zonked out. Definitely not something I had any interest in taking if I wasn't in serious pain. I think I only took that for 1 or 2 days, and the pain was mild enough after that that I didn't bother.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Perhaps that was a bit over-stated. I think it has a little truth, but more qualified, like that something that vaguely resembles that may happen to like a single-digit number of people, not anywhere near even a whole number percentage of everyone who's ever possessed such content. And "coming to the attention" would look more like far-left activists being majorly annoyed at you for some reason and digging up things you've wrote or sold somewhere to make a case about how bad you are. It may not be super common, but such things occasionally do end up becoming prosecutions, often including an extra step passing through a "mainstream" activist group.
If you're looking for an actual case, the best example that comes to my mind is Paul Miller. His prosecution was on weapons charges, for laws that are pretty commonly flouted and rarely prosecuted on their own, reportedly at least partly thanks to the prompting of the ADL (though he wasn't exactly doing himself any favors either). None of the documentation mentions any particular radical literature, though it would be a little surprising if he didn't actually possess any.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Have you been prescribed facial corticosteroids by a dermatologist?
Yes I was, and I have kept using it and getting fresh prescriptions for I think like 15 years. They kept talking about "skin thinning", but nothing noticeable happened to me. They kept making me try other things, but nothing else worked (I don't remember most of the things they got me to try unfortunately). Personally, I'd rather take my chances with "skin thinning" than live with terrible itchy flaky skin on my face. I actually found that chart I linked when I was thinking about trying to order some prescription stuff from one of those sketchy overseas places that doesn't need prescriptions because I was getting seriously tired of them trying to push other things that didn't work on me. I didn't go through with that because all I could find was the ridiculously strong class 1 ones that might actually do something bad, but it did give me the idea to try the weaker OTC class 7 stuff since it's basically the same thing, just less potent. That seems to work, so I figure I both solved my problem of keeping my skin decent without dealing with annoying dermatologists and also somewhat went along with their fears by going with a weaker non-prescription version.
Obvious disclaimer, I'm not a doctor at all and haven't examined you, if you follow my example you're doing it at your own risk. I'd say try it for a week though with the OTC stuff. If it doesn't work, you're no worse off. If it works a little, consider trying to get some of the stronger versions by prescription. If it works great, then you get to decide if having something that actually works is worth possible long term risks of skin thinning. It sounds like mainstream medical advice hasn't exactly served you that well anyways.
JulianRota
1yr ago
In my opinion, the first "good" / exciting part is the stolen credit card deal, which on my Kindle shows as page 67. It's a bit of a slowish start, with the exciting bits gradually getting more common as the story goes on. I wouldn't be surprised if some people would rather skim his long-winded explanations of things. But I think there's plenty of crazy and exciting stuff going on by the final third or so of the book.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Haven't read Anathem, but I did really like Reamde, Seveneves, and Cryptonomicon.
Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.
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