MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
MollieTheMare
1d ago
The only (non-novelty) food I've had that made me feel physically sick from the spiciness was at an Indian restaurant. We were having dinner with a group of Indian classmates. I don't know if they told the waiter something as a form of hazing or if that was just the normal spice level. I'm pretty accustomed to spicy food, so I managed to eat it, but the next morning was slightly worrying.
MollieTheMare
1d ago
This is my personal average restaurant experience of the spiciness scales in the US.
| Rating | Thai place example | Indian place example | BWW example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🌶️🌶️🌶️ | Crying while eating (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) | Pray for your butthole Vindaloo (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) | Blazin'® or Wild® |
| 🌶️🌶️ | Ordered "spicy" with a majority-white group | Madras | Mango Habanero™ |
| 🌶️ | Labeled "spicy" with no waitress warning | Tikka Masala | Asian Zing® |
| White people: black pepper is too spicy | Not labeled "spicy" | Korma | Honey BBQ |
I skipped a bunch of the BWW spiciness scale, but everything below Asian Zing on that scale is hardly spicy, IMO.
MollieTheMare
2d ago
MollieTheMare
2d ago
Squat-morning master race—for that big booty lyfe.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
A pistol duel should really be saved for the final round. We really lose something by not having people fight a repeated set of running duels over decades.
As a young officer in Napoleon's army, Dupont was ordered to deliver a disagreeable message to a fellow officer, Fournier, a rabid duellist. Fournier, taking out his subsequent rage on the messenger, challenged Dupont to a duel. This sparked a succession of encounters, waged with sword and duelling pistol, that spanned decades. The contest was eventually resolved when Dupont was able to overcome Fournier in a pistol duel, forcing him to promise never to bother him again.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
An open call to make October the official month of fixing our poverty squats
Today I learned that SQUATOBER™ is actually a federally registered trademark of Sorinex Exercise Equipment, Inc. Though I suppose that means it should really be SQUATOBER®.
I have the following complaints about the official Sorinex programming:
- Insufficient predictability: It would be nice to know the workout at least a couple of days in advance, in case you have to shift it by a day or need to allocate extra training time.
- Limited progressive overload: There is an excessive emphasis on squat variety over getting your main barbell back squat stronger.
- Excessive frequency: It's not literally squatting every day, but somehow it's also not just a squat-focused, month-long program. There's not enough recovery to provide a truly near-maximal stimulus, but you don't even get the habit-forming benefit of literally doing something every day.
- It uses pure, arbitrary percentages: No consideration for differences in scaling, absolute load, age, recovery ability, or sex.
- It has excessive axial loading for an already squat-focused program: For example, today's workout has five sets of triples on deadlifts in addition to five sets of triples on back squats. At some point, back fatigue becomes more limiting than quad or glute strength, which is kind of ridiculous for a squat program. Five sets of near-maximal deadlifts is a ridiculous amount for an advanced, medium-sized male lifter. Pointless if they're far from maximal, for someone already squatting five days a week.
I do, however, kind of like the idea of novelty-themed training blocks for when your regular programming gets stale. PSA: there's still enough time in October to do a squat-focused cycle of Smolov Jr. this month, if anyone is interested.
We can't use the same portmanteau for this competing novelty program, though. I wonder if Squatoberfest Jr. is far enough away to be safe.
MollieTheMare
4d ago
I tried looking for the alleged person on OpenPowerlifting, but didn't find a record. So they may just be a general strength enthusiast rather than a powerlifter™.
Eyeballing the video (that is allegedly of her that @Quantumfreakonomics posted), I don't see a whole lot of the androgenizing effects of the special sports supplements most associated with deviant sexual interests. Namely, Tren and Dbol. That level of strength is also totally achievable according to my eyeball scales. Note that those are miscolored lb plates, not Olympic-style kg plates. So, a 365 lb deadlift. From the relative scale, she looks like someone who could make the 76 kg (168 lb) weight class, which would be an advanced deadlift, but not elite or requiring special supplements.
Edit: Studying the video more carefully. Based on the plate movement and bar bend, I think those might even be extra-wide bumper plates, in which case it's the [bar + (45 x 2 + 35 + 10) x 2 = 315], not [bar + (45 x 2 + 35 x 2) x 2 = 365]. Also, the real crime here is not loading 315 as 3pl8s-lamo, truly deranged.
MollieTheMare
8d ago
It was an extremely basic error, but somewhat understandable. I expect the average person on the street might be able to name exactly one WNBA player, and she did play for the Hawkeyes in college.
MollieTheMare
9d ago
Don't a lot of gainers contain maltodextrin to bulk out the carbs? Or is the idea that it's sufficiently water-soluble that a very thorough rinse with plain water afterward is enough to avoid having to brush and floss? I wonder if chewing some xylitol gum afterward would also be a reasonable substitute/addition. I assume none of that is as good as rinsing thoroughly, possibly waiting a while, then brushing when you can.
MollieTheMare
12d ago
I recently got over my various trauma-responses to the point where I was able to roll half of that into a six-month CD
Congrats, it can be quite scary.
While I know I could probably do "better" ...
Assuming you are U.S.-based, I see @Mantergeistmann has already suggested I Bonds. I think, under most circumstances, rolling short-dated T-bills into a ladder of seasoned I Bonds is slightly "better" if you are working a normal-length career, aren't maximally aggressively shopping introductory rates, are planning on keeping a full-year emergency fund, and are willing to replace low-real-rate tranches of I Bonds when reasonable. TreasuryDirect is still clunky, but it has slightly improved. This also has a slight advantage over rolling CDs, as it saves you from having to change banks every six months for the best rate. But, yes, on a modest emergency fund, the real difference is probably smaller than other choices, and you do have to get over the small personal limit and one-year hump for I Bonds.
MollieTheMare
17d ago
Someone gave a tool for estimating population size.
My highly scientific attempt at drawing a 5 km radius around the walkable urban areas of candidate cities:
| City | 5 km population (k) | Metro stops | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| NYC | 1,273 | 138 | Penn Station |
| LA | 550 | 29 | Pershing Square |
| Chicago | 543 | 64 | W Chicago Ave. × NW Ave. |
| SF | 619 | 42 | Christmas Tree Point |
| DC | 423 | 44 | Logan Circle |
| Miami | 379 | 37 | Miami River confluence |
| Boston | 545 | 93 | MA Ave. × Beacon St. |
| Philly | 524 | 44 | 30th St. Station |
| Seattle | 244 | 13 | Capitol Hill |
Edit: What we really need is someone with access to Walk Score to cross-reference it with the Global Human Settlement Layer using some kind of clustering algorithm.
MollieTheMare
17d ago
MollieTheMare
18d ago
I prefer the UK system, where the rules are made up and, on the basis of fairness, Wales gets an automatic city for each Jubilee. Unfortunately, they realized they also needed a more sensible taxonomy, which does ruin the fun a bit.
MollieTheMare
19d ago
the Aubrey/Maturin novels (which I wholeheartedly recommend)
comprehensive youtube video
This video does a pretty comprehensive job, probably 80%+ of the stuff that's not covered in the standard editions' front matter. Probably not AI, given the year, audio cuts, and the fact the guy shows the workflow in other videos. IMO not strictly necessary if you want to just jump in. You can just read the novels like the nautical stuff is Trek technobabble until the sailors explain the terms to Maturin through exposition.
Have you talked before about why some sort of sport rather than structured exercise doesn't work for you? I imagine the socialization is also good for us, even if it's not quite as structured in terms of full range of motion and progressive overload. Something dynamic. Maybe a racket sport, volleyball, ice hockey, etc?
MollieTheMare
23d ago
Interesting, they must have used a funny extrapolation. If you look at the functional form of Wathan’s methodology, it should produce a result strictly greater than the 100-rep result. Roughly 92 pounds in your example. But they do say it’s not very predictive beyond 10 reps, and @Forty-Bot is right: it seems much more predictive at 5 reps. My guess is that the relationship between 2–6 reps, inclusive, is tighter than for a true 1RM or anything beyond that.
MollieTheMare
23d ago
high-powered bow
Cries in Australian.
Otherwise fair enough. I'd still be more worried about distribution than production. I assume global energy markets will go nuts in a global scale war.
I have no particular love for gold as an investment. I think there is some evidence that people tend to find a default currency when faced with extensive barter. Have no idea what it would be in your scenario though.
And yes, I don't consider basic emergency preparedness irrational. Maybe not stocking three years worth of toilet paper, but like a few weeks worth of non-perishable food.
MollieTheMare
24d ago
I'm with you. At one point I suggested:
Very roughly, about 50% of a 1RM is a weight you can do indefinitely.
Where indefinitely is defined as rest-pause until form breakdown is so bad the rep is no longer recognizable as coordinated movement. I'm not sure how many people understood I was being serious there. For sure, I agree that serious willpower is involved above 10 reps.
MollieTheMare
24d ago
Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I'm struggling to understand how the electronic banking system goes down for weeks without taking out a bunch of other services with it, either from the same source of failure or in a cascade. For example, parts of the power and utility sectors, along with the exchanges and settlement mechanisms they rely on. I guess various executives could suspend trading for a while.
My expectation is that, by week two, we'd be talking about WROL/TEOTWAWKI-type scenarios, in which case I suspect your standard prepper goods (physical gold, booze, dried food, etc.) would be more useful than cash. Why would faith in the U.S. dollar be strong after its banking system had just failed?
Too lazy to go look up the methodology, but for what it's worth, normally your deadlift one-rep max is beyond what those internet calculators estimate it to be. They tend to be more accurate for squat and bench. Be prepared to not be able to move the next day, though, if you do a true one-rep max on deadlift. Bonus points if your nose starts bleeding and you pass out cold.
Edit: Well, my curiosity overcame my laziness. I'm pretty sure that this is the paper, for anyone interested. Assuming you use the Symmetric Strength Wathan calculator.
MollieTheMare
25d ago
No. My argument states that there must be some meaningful limiting principle if you want to argue affirmatively for non-voluntary euthanasia. No, I do not claim that you should abolish courts or wars under that theory. My claim, under that framework, is that those would be illegitimate without significant procedural safeguards.
MollieTheMare
25d ago
Yes, I find it quite plausible that a deontological defense, particularly one grounded explicitly in Christian moral premises, could be more robust than the secular-humanist sketch I provided here.
MollieTheMare
25d ago
Your argument makes a plausible case for suicide and euthanasia in general, but I think it fails to make a strong affirmative case for "non-voluntary" euthanasia. Nor does it really show that the initial secular-humanist sketch is inherently contradictory or wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous feature of your argument is that it risks introducing a post hoc intuition about what level of suffering is acceptable, relying on the benevolence and judgment of the individual decision-maker rather than establishing a stable social rule.
It also does not really explain why palliative care and the potential for future developments in medical care do not themselves weigh in favor of preserving life in the absence of an affirmative wish to die. Take, for example, spinal muscular atrophy in infants. Historically, this could involve extreme suffering, progressive loss of muscle function, and frequently death. But the arrival of onasemnogene abeparvovec produced a step change in our ability to treat the disease. Reasonable people might previously have concluded that such a condition was progressive, incurable, and perhaps rendered life not worth living. We now know that prognosis can be radically altered by treatment. Yet there remains an enormous social and financial cost to supplying such treatment. There would therefore be an obvious institutional incentive not to deploy a two-million-dollar-per-dose drug if we had already normalized euthanizing people with the disease.
It was perhaps a weakness in my initial sketch to use the term "net-positive moral utility," but once you invoke a Rawlsian-style transposition of positions, we can admit analysis from behind a veil of ignorance. It is not contradictory to emerge from that analysis with a framework that is liberal in nature and secular-humanist in outlook, but treats the relevant rights as ordered rather than fully commensurable. For example, you might conclude that the right to life has lexical or ordinal priority over the right to pursue the good life because revoking the right to life is irreversible, whereas suffering may be temporary and a person may later acquire greater opportunities to pursue the good life through developments in technology or medical care.
The key weakness in proposing that "fine-tuning" is the obvious method for resolving the tension in cases involving euthanasia of an incapacitated person is that the proposal still lacks an administrable surrogate-decision rule. It contains a projection problem, in which the preferences of a person with one set of capabilities are projected onto someone with another; it has not defined a stable limiting principle; it does not explain what evidentiary threshold should apply in cases of disagreement; and it does not explain the source or limits of the proxy's authority.
More generally, in this case, we have drawn lines around both incapacity and the age of the person to be euthanized. If I understand you correctly, you have already conceded that the infant is a person. If we allow rights to depend upon further distinctions within the category of persons, then we need some mechanism for protecting against institutional abuse and category expansion.
For an intentionally extreme example, consider the following. I do not endorse this view, and I am not claiming that your framework necessarily leads to it. I offer it as the sort of risk case from which we would presumably want a theory to protect us. A person seeks transition surgery from male to female. A central part of their conception of being female is the possibility of motherhood, but medical science cannot make that possible. The doctor understands this and believes that the patient will experience enormous and indefinite suffering even after surgery. While under anesthesia, the patient is incapacitated and unable to express a present preference for life. We would not therefore allow the doctor to substitute their own judgment about whether the patient's life is worth living for the judgment of the patient. Even if the doctor correctly predicts that the patient will suffer indefinitely, the doctor does not acquire the authority to conclude that the life is not worth living and then kill the patient.
The example is deliberately extreme, but analogous cases can be constructed around any number of classifications, a sort of general Lebensunwertes Leben. Once rights protection depends upon classifications and judgments of worth evaluated by third parties, the theory owes an account of which classifications are legitimate, who is entitled to make them, and why. The point of the coarse definition of personhood and the broad presumptions, such as a presumption in favor of continued life, in the original framework is precisely to protect the institution of human rights against those problems. Invoking "fine-tuning" therefore does not answer the original argument. It requires defeating the reason for adopting the coarse rule in the first place, rather than simply asserting that finer-grained balancing is obviously preferable.
Yes, the choice of table was a small tribute to the fallen.
My understanding is that he is throwing a self-described tantrum. I don't know if he will return. In that case, IMO, the most productive use of this time is if he is busy finishing his house project. There is also the slightly more disturbing possibility that he's in Australia.
A third possibility is that he had a spectacular crashout, for... reasons, and his story (mildly NSFW) is allegorical.
I suppose falling in (Culture) War in the most banal possible way is a tale as old as time:
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