JulianRota
7d ago
Never heard of that podcast either.
I try to make an effort to understand Russia's point of view enough to get an idea of why they think it's necessary to fight this war, and why they have shown such dogged persistence in it despite disappointing results of their opening moves and staggering casualty counts. I still can't see how they would think it's a good idea to start throwing nukes around now, especially at the other European powers. It seems to me like it would read to a lot of people as an admission that they are unable to achieve a result they consider favorable on the battlefield with conventional weapons, which isn't going to be much of a plus for their standing in the region. I also find it unlikely that there are any good targets in Europe for "tactical" nuclear weapons right now. It seems highly likely to me that any use of nuclear weapons against formally uninvolved NATO nations at this point would escalate to strategic use exactly as fast as pretty much everyone has always expected. I suppose there's no way to know what might change in the next year, but it's hard to imagine what could happen that would change that.
So yeah, I think it's just Russia supporters being all butthurt that they haven't been doing all that hot.
JulianRota
7d ago
Finished reading Andy Weir's Hail Mary, and I watched the movie too. I still think both were great overall, though the movie traded off leaving out some of the less important details and hamming things up a little for some amazing visuals. Not to spoiler things too much, but I think the ending does show Weir trying to get a little more into character development side of things, though it's probably still not his strongest point. The Sci-Fi is a little hand-wavy on the details of a few things, but probably no more than needed for future tech, and mostly does a good job of sticking to its own rules.
JulianRota
13d ago
I'm no expert either, but it strikes me as being 4 spotlights doing some kind of light show, and I'm assuming the shifting of the center point around in the frame is due to the camera moving around. It's hard to see the details you describe from that video, but I wouldn't be surprised if the cloud conditions as far as altitude and density made it reasonable for ordinary spotlights to look like that. I'd more wonder whether it seemed reasonable for there to be some event in an appropriate location to have a spotlight show like that.
There's also the obligatory nerdy gotcha that it stands for Unidentified Flying Object, so it is a UFO by definition if you don't know what it is, but that doesn't make it an actual alien spacecraft or anything.
JulianRota
17d ago
Is there a cost factor to it?
I'm near one of the stadium locations. I'm not really that into soccer, but I might be inclined to check out a game just for the novelty factor of it. But then, the cheapest tickets are currently ~$1400, plus probably a few hundred more in incidentals, like transportation, food, drinks, etc. That's a bit above what I'm willing to spend to check out something I'm not super into. Maybe like $50-100ish for that.
If you're not all pretty wealthy, that could generate some conflict over who's paying for who, who can really afford that, does anybody owe anyone else anything, etc.
JulianRota
21d ago
I've been reading Andy Weir's Hail Mary, since I liked Artemis. About 2/3 of the way through, and I think it's great! Good Sci-Fi, and the stakes are certainly exciting. I suppose the character development might be considered a bit weak, but eh, that's most Sci-Fi. The character does seem rather similar to the similarly isolated character from The Martian. It does also tempt me to make a more general post somewhere about nonlinear storytelling and how it's done well and poorly. Short version is, I think Weir's books are good examples of doing it well.
I also finished Day Of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Feeling a little meh about it. It's an okay story I guess, but it seemed a little predictable, and it feels a little tough to get into that universe.
JulianRota
22d ago
Perhaps it is a bit ideological. I would note in turn that widespread obesity is a relatively new phenomenon. I am not the person to know for sure exactly what change caused it, but clearly something changed in the last ~100 years to cause such widespread obesity. Maybe it's better to fix that, whatever it is, than for everyone to go on medication for life. Keto, or any other diet, may not be perfect, but I'm skeptical that there's anything worse about eating in a way more like some of our ancestors did than going on a medication that was approved for human use not quite 10 years ago. Where is the concern for what the long-term health effects of that might be?
I would ask in turn, do you think there is any possibility somebody's diet could be so obviously bad that they really should stop eating that, whether or not they go on medication as well? Like multiple 2-liters of sugary soda a day, multiple bags of chips, tubs of ice cream, etc? Do you agree with DradisPing's implication that it is completely impossible for anybody to lose weight and keep it off with dietary changes?
JulianRota
23d ago
From what I've learned, I don't think there is a universal dietary weight-loss solution. I think there's too much individual variation in how peoples' digestive systems work. Too many people have reported success with a wide variety of diet types, often ones that contradict each other. That's why I think any individual seeking to lose weight should try several and see how their body responds, like a month or two each. Try weight loss drugs only after you've tried several diet types and failed to make much progress. I think it's probably best to avoid the worst types of food even if you've decided to turn to weight loss drugs. Consuming tons of junk food and sugary drinks every day just can't be good for you.
For myself, I went on Keto, and it worked amazingly well for me. I started in about 2018 and was able to lose weight and have kept it off. I actually got a little bit too skinny for a while, and backed off to a more sustainable level. At no point did I ever actually cut calories, feel hungry, or lack energy. I feel more and more consistent energy on it, and several other minor medical problems seem to have cleared up too. Granted, I was never at the 350lb level, but I decided I needed to fix my diet when I had gained 10-20 pounds, not wait until I had gained 200lbs. I have met several people who have been able to lose hundreds of pounds with it though.
I will say again, and more clearly, I do not assert that this particular diet, or any other particular diet, will definitely work for everyone. But I did ask thread OP what, if anything, they had tried so far as far as their diet, not trying to sell them on any particular diet, since they didn't mention a thing about it. I do think it's best to give several different diet types a best-effort try before turning to weight loss medications.
JulianRota
24d ago
The good news for thread OP is, basically none of that is true at all. You really should engage with some of the things we've learned about diet and nutrition in the last 30 years before you opine so confidently.
The key trick with fixing your diet and actually losing weight is that you have to take the morality out of it. It's a science experiment, not a religious law. If you want to lose weight, you need to find a diet that works for you. Not working includes not being able to stick to it, feeling hungry, making too much effort, and not having enough energy.
Calories in = calories out is not true; it's a vast oversimplification of how hunger and nutrition work. You don't need to count calories and stick to a limit to lose weight. Most of the failure of many peoples' dieting is a religious/ideological devotion to these terrible ideas about dieting from the 1990s - that you need to treat it as a moral failure that you are not able to stick to an ineffective diet. That is only a road to feeling even worse about yourself and still being fat.
Still being hungry after eating is not some magic thing that happens for "whatever reason", it's a specifically engineered outcome. Many foods are deliberately engineered to not make you feel full so that you keep eating. Obviously you're going to not feel full if you gorge yourself on foods designed to make you not feel full! If you're doing that, in my opinion, you need to fix that before you go on fancy drugs. Exactly as if, if you're doing heroin, and it's causing bad things to happen to your body, you should stop doing heroin, not look for even more drugs to counteract the effects.
JulianRota
24d ago
What have you done as far as your diet? I have tended to think that diet is by far the most important thing in body fat level. It's hard to say much, though, without some idea of what your diet is like now and what, if anything, you've tried. But I don't think any level of physical activity can overcome a really bad diet.
I'm skeptical of weight loss drugs too. I never liked the idea of taking multiple drugs to counter-act each other. Similarly, this might be more of a personal ideology, but I never liked the idea of eating a terrible diet and trying to counter-act the body-fat effects of that with drugs. Why not fix the diet first? It may be another thing, though, if you've tried absolutely everything on the diet front and can't make any progress.
I agree about the armchair warriors bit. I do think their motivation for the war is much deeper and more fundamental and not really like Putin thought he could grab Ukraine all quick and easy and is now in over his head. Instead, I think the entire Russian power structure is existentially petrified of invasion from the West. It's all long memories about how horrifying Operation Barbarossa was to be on the receiving end of - this also fits in with how they talk about "denazifying" Ukraine. This is why they're willing to make incredible sacrifices to ensure that Ukraine remains in their sphere of influence. That also explains how there doesn't seem to be all that much discontent in Russia about how this war is going. I'm not super confident in my ability to determine exactly how much unrest there really is in Russia, but I would have expected to see more signs of it with how much of a grind this war seems to be for them.
On the IT side, I also discovered the Ukrainian scam call center thing - big article about it in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well. Apparently there's a ton of these call centers actively working to scam random Russians out of money and blackmail them into committing various petty, and maybe sometimes not so petty, crimes. Thinking from the Ukrainian side, it's understandable that they'd lean into that sort of thing and attempt to integrate it with their formal intelligence agencies to gain an asymmetric advantage when so many things are stacked against them. But then from the Russian side, that is a much more reasonable explanation for why they're cracking down so hard on the communication and messaging systems.
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