Mewis
11mo ago
Every military is like this to some extent. Few enough major wars are fought that nobody really knows whether Taiwan, China, Korea etc. will hold up in a hot war. Just look at Russia's performance and how one of the most feared military machines turned out to be mostly hollow due to decades of rot.
People think of the Chinese government as being hyper-efficient and centralized. It's not. The central political committees have limited power to set policy for the rest of the government - because there is just too much of the latter to efficiently control. That's why China builds huge ghost cities or spaffs billions on totally unfeasible BRI initiatives. This is not to say that the PLA suffers from the same dysfunction. It might do, or it might not - just as in January of 2022, nobody knew, even in Russia, that the Russia military was so severely unready for war.
Mewis
11mo ago
If you live in the US, the stakes in losing a war are actually pretty low - it amounts to a loss of international prestige and face. So sure, it seems fairly reasonable for someone to care more about domestic politics than about power projection in the Middle East or whatever.
Mewis
11mo ago
For various reasons, mainstream economics focuses on keeping inflation at a low rate, rather than trying to deflate back to some specific price point. It is more likely that this will be resolved through wages growing and catching up with prices.
I know close to nothing about econ, but I always hear deflation talked about as if it's this terrible thing.
My layman's understanding is that deflation is considered very bad because it often goes hand in hand with economic contraction or recession.
Mewis
11mo ago
Exactly. Grocery stores don't make vast profits. The market is very competitive, and even if they chose to run with no profit at all, it would only shave a few percent off your bill.
Mewis
11mo ago
Even from the perspective of Christianity, scripture isn't a magic spell and Bibles aren't totems - it shouldn't really matter who reads it.
Mewis
11mo ago
Would you say that semaglutide makes a large difference? Personally, I've never had much of a problem just eating less - I'm losing weight now, and without counting calories or being particularly strict or doing much cardio.
Overall I look ok and muscular in clothes, but kind of unimpressive naked.
Regardless of what you see on social media, most people, even people who are in shape, do not have visible abs, assuming that's your barometer for 'impressive'. Plus I think abs are fetishized too much. Simply having a flat stomach and a slight taper to your torso is enough
Mewis
11mo ago
After some crawling around in a muddy field at work, my lower legs have swollen up and are fairly painful. I think this is probably some kind of insect bite allergy that will resolve in 1-5 days, but it's still very annoying, as much because I don't want to wear trousers in summer. But hey, my left calf doesn't look so small any more!
Mewis
11mo ago
Whats that phrase again, play stupid games and win stupid prizes? Unless those women were coerced with cattle prods into stepping into the ring, they made the eminently stupid move of embracing their fate instead of boycotting or bowing out.
So they should just jettison their entire career and passion and identity to make a point because someone found a way to bring a gun to a knife fight?
Mewis
11mo ago
In sports, the actual physical achievement is just the cherry on top, a certificate of accomplishment, a badge you can wear and show off, but which you only get for putting in the work, but the actual thing is about the work itself.
This isn't what sports is about at all. Sports IS about the physical achievement - Usain Bolt doesn't train harder than other people, but he still gets medals, because the medal is for the physical achievement, not for how many hours of your life you can sink into training. And wouldn't this be an argument in favor of women's sports? Women can train just as hard and obsessively as men. But the point is not the training but the result.
Mewis
11mo ago
It was on grass and it looks like I have bites on both legs. Plus, I've had this before, I had a tick bite last October that made my ankle swell up, and I've had it before on my arm. I'm not worried or anything, before it cleared up in 1-5 days.
Mewis
11mo ago
I mean, if you're strangling someone to death, I think that they would flail about whether they're a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'.
Mewis
11mo ago
This is kind of what asylums used to be, or were supposed to be - fairly nice open-air warehouses where people were encouraged to do a little bit of gardening or knitting to keep them minimally occupied, and otherwise drugged or sedated into docility.
Mewis
11mo ago
As Hoffmeister noted in his post on the topic, if Penny has posts like many on here indicating that he thinks the homeless are subhuman scum that need to be cleared off the streets, we will know soon. This is quite likely where the story will hinge. Prosecution will aim to portray him as "looking for a fight" and looking for an excuse to hurt or kill someone.
Stuff like this generally isn't admissable as evidence (it wasn't in the Rittenhouse case, for instance). The fact is that idle words made weeks or months in advance are not the same as intent or premeditation.
Mewis
11mo ago
Very few people play professional basketball. Finding a relationship is something considerably easier and something the majority of people can do - though it has become more difficult in recent years. In addition, professional sports are inherently competitive - there are a fixed number of slots on teams that people fight and compete for. Whereas the number of relationships is elastic.
I understand your frustrations. I frequently wonder if I will die alone. I believe that I am very unattractive, have an unattractive body (despite going to the gym), and have a repellent personality. On the other hand, other gay men, when I interact with them, often show interest in me and compliment me and often seem genuinely surprised at my lack of romantic success. Though I know my thoughts are irrational and it's wrong of me to have them, I've never been able to control them.
But people make durable judgments about us from still photos of us interacting with friends, or two seconds of video…
I don't think this is true. Do you judge others so quickly?
Mewis
11mo ago
In practice, I think that the way that the NHS squeezes doctors and nurses is a false economy. The result is staff shortages, the importation of less competent doctors and nurses from the third world, and the flight of talented trained medical staff for sunnier climes with better pay. It's of course, entirely typical of our politics - see immigration, housing, infrastructure. Saving pennies today to end up poorer than Poland by the end of the decade. The UK was once, I remind people, on track to be richer per capita than the United States.
Mewis
11mo ago
Been trying out this KB Pentathlon thing. For time reasons, did a half-pentathlon with 16kg today which felt hard but manageable to put after my usual lifting:
Clean 60/60
Clean+Press 30/30
Jerk 56/60
Snatch 47/54
Push Press 60/60
503 points total
Jerk and Snatch are the hardest ones, I haven't done them before last week so my form is pretty awful. Snatch also gives me some lower back pain towards the end. Cleans and presses I've done before so they feel fine. Even the half gets me out of breath, though.
Weight is down from 90kg to 84.4kg over the past ~6 weeks. Not bad when I'm not counting calories or restricting myself from eating anything in particular. A little bit of strength lost on bench and OHP, but squat and deadlift feel great. Next week is probably going to be a deload because it's going to be really rough at work.
Mewis
11mo ago
If you are choked, you will stop breathing, and if you stop breathing for a duration, you will suffer brain damage. If your breathing does not restart, you die. It may have been that after the choke ended, Neely was too brain damaged to be resuscitated, which makes sense since most accounts indicate he was choked for a pretty long period of time (10 mins, definitely enough to kill someone).
Mewis
11mo ago
I doubt that BG is worried about his energy bill being too high given that he's spending tens of millions on having another house.
Mewis
11mo ago
It's kind of ugly from above, but most people live in houses, they don't hover forty feet above them. If you're in it, it probably looks pretty nice.
Mewis
11mo ago
In the west, stronger beers do exist - double and triple IPAs are probably what the middle class here are familiar with. In the UK at least, there is (or was) stronger stuff aimed at lower-class alcoholics, like White Lightning (8% cider that came in an enormous 2l bottle). But these sorts of drinks have a really strong negative connotation. They're associated with binge drinking, alcoholism, and poverty, and have mostly been squeezed out by regulation. But the fact is that there is little pride in Anglo countries in smashing down high alcohol beer. Kiwis will boast of their 'crate-punch' records, but drinking nine liters of 4% beer is a test of your stomach and bladder capacity as much as your liver, and the day drinking retirees that haunt the Wetherspoons of England nurse Doom Bars and John Smiths - thick ales and stouts that are low on alcohol and price. It's not that there's no appetite for strong drink, but for that, you want spirits and cocktails. I think the root cause is just that beers become quite disgusting over a certain percent of alcohol.
Mewis
11mo ago
The 4-5% norm holds true in all Anglo countries (NZ, AUS, the UK). As far as I know it's about the same in Europe - Kronenbourg is 5%, Beck's is like 5% as well. It's nothing to do with Prohibition.
Mewis
11mo ago
This is a ridiculous stance to take, not really that far removed from 'you survived the last round, therefore you should continue to play Russian Roulette'. No less ridiculous because European governments went to unprecedented lengths to shield households from energy price increases, instead choosing to borrow money to subsidize energy imports and, when they weren't enough, putting the squeeze on heavy industry.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.
None of which matters - you need electricity to flow all the time. Of course electricity demand is low right now - it's 20 degrees outside and the sun doesn't set until nine pm. Renewables are nice to have to supplement the grid, but that's all they do. The fact is that the diminishing returns on building additional wind-solar capacity increase the more you have of it, because you're getting more energy on days like today (when you don't need it) and nearly nothing on days when you actually want it.
Mewis
11mo ago
Negative predictions do take into account human responses - in fact, negative predictions are often made specifically to engender a human response. The fact that European governments went to great lengths to avoid an energy crunch doesn't prove that the energy crisis was a phantom.
Mewis
11mo ago
We have less short term resilience but more over the medium and long term. If you have foods from 100 different countries in the supermarket, well, something is going to happen in one of those countries most every year. But then, you have 99 other countries who can step in and try to fill the gap.
When you say short and buff, what exactly do you mean? Because I know short guys (about 165cm) that get laid and form relationships, and they don't look like Jeff Nippard, nor do their wives or girlfriends look like Jabba the Hutt. Nor are some of them particularly rich or successful.
It could be that only morbidly obese women have signalled interest in you - since you claim to have autism, it could be that you're not picking up on signals from normal women, or that you're failing to signal your own interest, which is something you have to do with women.
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