Mewis
1d ago
No offense meant, but it sounds like something is going on with her if she's gaining weight but doesn't want to talk about it. You should be able to talk about it, even if the conclusion you reach together is that she likes food more than being thin. That might be all that it is (and there is definitely a lot of shame in our society around excessive weight gain), but she might also be communicating some other difficulty. It's worth asking if there's been any emotional trouble recently, whether from family or work.
I don't think there's much to be gained in trying to psyop her this way. Of course, having a better body is it's own reward, but it might shift the dynamic in other ways. She might feel ashamed or insecure, and those feelings might cause resentment. That's the worst case scenario. I think it's unlikely that she'll be inspired to join in.
Mewis
2d ago
You are right that the US is very careful not to directly call for Putin's removal or a partition of Russia and it's destruction as an independent power. But I think that is what they seek, and it's what they work towards, and if Putin was to show any weakness, it's what they would work towards openly.
Mewis
3d ago
The idea that Putin and Russia are not under threat from the US axis is I think, not on solid ground. That's been demonstrated several times over the past twenty five years. Iraq, Syria, and Libya were not under threat from the US, until suddenly they were. Fundamentally, the US believes it has the right to direct the affairs of all the world, simply waiting for crisis and opportunity to strike.
This is not to say that Russia's aggression is justified. But the notion that the West is just minding it's own business is ridiculous.
Mewis
3d ago
I feel like two or three years ago it became weirdly ubiquitous in advertising. I don't really stay up to date with TV so I couldn't comment on that.
Mewis
3d ago
I don't know. Is a full blown war between Iran and Israel even possible? Does either nation have the capability to deploy and maintain a substantial force on the ground of the other, or is the worst that can happen a full air exchange?
Mewis
5d ago
I agree that it's very hard to tease out the direct impact of sun exposure from all the other things that come with it, but if that's really the case then clearly it isn't a big deal and it's definitely not worth shifting your attitude to favour indoor activities over outdoor ones.
I don't see that the struggle was fruitless. The way that black people were treated under slavery was abominable, truly awful, and was never justified by HBD.
Second, I think we're close - maybe within a generation - of having the understanding of genetics to very very quickly identify if a gap exists and close it through non coercive means like embryo selection. So I think you should be optimistic.
Mewis
15d ago
Surgeons and cosmetic surgeons aren't really regulated in the same way as drugs or other forms of medicine - if a surgeon and patient are willing to try something, they're allowed to do it.
Mewis
16d ago
Well, the more obvious answer is that there's more money to be made from King of Pop than Wacko Jacko, since the man himself is dead, but his music lives on.
Mewis
16d ago
Life is pain, but if you don't figure a way to understand life (including the pain) as having value/meaning/significance you're not gonna make it. That's the way I see it. Easier said than done, though.
Mewis
17d ago
Clearly, that exclusionary element is not needless - it serves a purpose or satisfies some desire. I think that desire is the desire for competition, just channelled into a single player game. I also think it's wrong to write off that very natural drive as snobbery.
Mewis
17d ago
I've never played the Souls games, so I'll take your word for it that they're not good. But if so, why are they occupy such a large cultural space? Obviously, because they are difficult - that extra challenge is clearly adding something that other actions RPGs just lack. I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.
Mewis
18d ago
It is in fact, technically difficult, because the productive middle class are the ones paying for those incentives, and you're incentivizing them ultimately to be less productive.
I don't think it's impossible, but we need to be honest about what this would actually involve - a pretty significant drop in living standards. Are modern political systems capable of steering such a course?
Mewis
19d ago
Expensive and politically unfeasible make it sound hard, not easy. Perhaps it would be better to say that it's simple - depositing a hundred thousand dollars in the bank account of every pregnant woman would be very simple, but also very hard.
Mewis
20d ago
The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical. We're not talking about the price of baby formula here, we're talking about six figure sums per person. And what you're essentially paying people to do is stay home, not work, and consume more. The better the program works, the more it costs and the less money you have to pay for it. And all this is also massively regressive if targeted at the middle class.
2rafa is on the right track here in terms of scale, but even big shovels can't turn the tide. You end up digging the earth out from beneath your feet. Do we really want to encourage parents to work more, and the childless to work less? Will young childless people sit still and let themselves be dragooned into working as nannies and cleaners for the fruitful and then taxed to pay for their own service?
And will any of this work? Low fertility is not a symptom of poverty, but of some of the richest societies to ever exist. Which then turn around and say - but not rich enough. Just a bit more money. can we really buy virtue, really bribe ourselves into having kids?
Low fertility is here to stay. It is a symptom of an industrial society that has refined every process of production except for human procreation. When we want cattle, we roll up our sleeves and make them. But human children are not even at the level of a medieval cottage industry. Maybe it's for the best that we don't see babies as commodities. But that is a choice, and it follows from that choice that we will not have very many of them.
Mewis
20d ago
That seems like poor policy. Even a pretty aggressive procreator is going to struggle to reach 4 21+ GC at 65, and it would in turn strongly penalise the family if the 21 year old grand daughters are forced into work and taxpaying instead of procreating.
Mewis
20d ago
I do like turn based strategy, but there's something totally repellent to me about games or media where every character is a bobblehead anime girl.
Mewis
22d ago
Sure, but Hamas doesn't simply want a change in management and a new name on the map. They conceive of Palestine as being essentially and exclusively Arab and Muslim - not all that different from Israel being essentially Jewish.
Mewis
25d ago
Some degree of sovereignty is needed, in which case you are no longer Mr Money, Private Citizen.
Mewis
27d ago
I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.
Mewis
28d ago
The more obvious point is that if we really end up facing such a disaster, we'll just geoengineer a solution. The only reason we don't pursue it now is piety, but it's hard to imagine billions of people just letting themselves die because the IPCC says it would be wrong to stop climate change.
Mewis
28d ago
Restaurants are if anything, a great example of competition keeping prices low. Most restaurants have terrible profit margins and many of them fail.
Other good examples of industries with high competition and crummy profit margins - airlines, supermarkets.
Mewis
28d ago
Again, the SHWs are a minority. But it's not clear what your point is. Weightlifting as a sport rewards and encourages people to get big and strong - and getting bigger, for a lot of people, will shorten their lifespan. That's the entire point. Having lots of muscle - as even the SHWs have - doesn't change that. The general trend isn't just that weightlifting is uniquely deleterious, but that all power sports are - cycling is nearly as bad, even though there are no SHW cyclists.
I simply don't really see any direct evidence that carrying lots of lean body mass, beyond a marker of general health and propensity to exercise, does anything for lifespan. Healthy men carry substantially more muscle mass than healthy women but live shorter lives. And if we take it as true that most people will maximise their lifespan by maintaining a BMI of about 18-23, well, it's pretty easy even for an amateur lifter to escape that range, and indeed it is encouraged by most people in the lifting community.
Your substantive criticism is that Olympic weightlifters are all massively overweight and fat. This is plainly not true and just a stereotype. Most weightlifters are in weight classes and actually stay pretty lean. They don't quite look like bodybuilders but they're pretty close. If you look up say, Li Dayan, he looks fantastic.
So whence the poor outcomes? Obviously, they're still too big. Li Dayan isn't going to Olympia any time soon but he's still considered overweight, bordering on obese.
Right, but the reason you don't want powerlifting advice is... Because you don't want to be humongous. Which is totally fair, but if you eat like a normal person and lift weights, you'll just look "toned".
Regardless, it's entirely possible to effect great changes in your physique just through calisthenics. I know some people who do calisthenics with incredibly impressive physiques.
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