SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I was recently wondering why the orders of magnitude for units of length, volume, and mass don't line up. 0.001m^3 = 1L = 1,000g, for water at 4°C. Why aren't they defined such that 1m^3 = 1L = 1g? If we leave the liter as is, this would require redefining the meter to be equal to a current decimeter, and gram to a current kilogram.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Parties are private organizations, though. They can just disregard the Colorado primary in deciding which candidate to back in the general election, can't they?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Is there something serious there for Biden to answer?
Biden refused to collect interest on student loans for nearly three years, and tried to outright cancel them before the Supreme Court told him to cut it out, and then he immediately got to work on trying to do it again.
In a sane world, the President unilaterally misappropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off his base would be clear grounds for impeachment and prosecution, but we don't live in that world, so I guess they're going to try to tie him to his son's shenanigans.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Are they socialist left, or just feminist left?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Wasn't ye plural?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
To whence
This is even worse than "from whence!"
Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.
Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.
So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The Law of Merited Impossibility wasn't what I was thinking of, because it was definitely a sequence of assertions, shifting over time as earlier stages become untenable. The Narcissist's Prayer is much more similar to what I had in mind. The name doesn't ring a bell, but maybe that was it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
My understanding is that cognitive skill development is fairly specific, and that research into far transfer from games (or anything) to unrelated cognitive tasks has pretty much been a total bust.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Most people here will be familiar with the "This never happens...actually it's a good thing!" sequence. Is there a name for this? I feel like I've heard a name for it before, but I can't remember where (probably here) or what it was.
Also, does anyone know where this was first described?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Oh, also it helps if you spend a decade learning Japanese first, but not as much as you might think.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
I did some work with a textbook ~20 years ago, but never got very good and basically forgot everything.
What really helped me was working through the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck. It's a deck of several thousand sentences, with cards having Chinese on one side and English on the other side. I did both Chinese to English, as well as Chinese to English to help with production.
It also has audio recordings of the sentences. What I did was listen and repeat as many times as it took me to pronounce a sentence correctly from memory at natural speed before moving on to the next card. This is key, IMO. Early on I would often have to repeat longer sentences 10-20 times to get it right.
I used the Chinese Grammar Wiki to figure out grammatical patterns I didn't understand.
This made me really good at pronunciation and speaking at a natural speed. Unfortunately, it didn't help much with listening. I'm working on that now with podcasts while walking to/from work. I'm going with 大鵬說中文, but it's not suitable for total beginners. I've heard good things about ChinesePod, which covers a broader range of ability levels.
Also, make sure you understand, in terms of where you need to be placing your tongue, how to pronounce the phonemes not used in English. X, j, and q are kind of like English sh, j, and ch, but they're pronounced with the tip of your tongue down below your lower incisors. Zh, ch, and sh are like English j, ch, and sh, but with the tip of the tongue curled slightly upwards. R has extensive regional variation, so just try to imitate it and it will probably be close enough.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The link has expired. What was it?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
And we're judging the hell out of your browser history.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while.
I don't know exactly what's wrong with your back, but two-handed kettlebell swings have actually really helped when I've tweaked my back, as I do every five years or so.
What I do is start with a conservative range of motion, and then after several reps the pain-free range of motion increases a bit. I continue until I can do the full range of motion pain-free. Usually the pain comes back after a while, but it gives me short-term pain relief and probably accelerates healing.
Not sure if this works as well for the upper back, but it's worth a try. Generally you want to use the injured muscles ASAP to increase blood flow to the injured tissue, rather than just resting it completely.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
- Carol of the Bells
- O Holy Night
- Mary's Boy Child
I guess the latter two work better as solos, though.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
People who really care about anti-semitism are 1) Jews 2) wokes and 3) boomercons.
And with #2, it turned out to be negotiable.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
What are you talking about? It takes 30 years to pay off a 30-year mortgage. Low principal and high interest is no worse than high principal and low interest, if the monthly payment is the same.
And according to the chart linked by /u/atelier, the average monthly payment had been going down in real terms until last year.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
On an intellectual level, most people on the left (in the broad sense) have bought into a harm-based model of morality. Since most people have very little need for intellectual consistency, what this means in practice is that they rationalize all of their moral intuitions by convincing themselves that the things they don't like are harmful. Hence "words are violence."
Bestiality grosses most people out. But in order to give themselves license to support banning it, they have to convince themselves that it's inherently harmful to animals. Non-vegetarians have to convince themselves that it's more harmful to animals than killing and eating them.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
This would have to be a defect in mitochondrial proteins that are coded for in nuclear DNA, right? The mother obviously doesn't have the disease, or she would never have lived long enough to reproduce. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother without recombination, then it can't be carried in mitochondrial DNA, unless it's a de novo mutation.
Many (most?) mitochondrial genes have migrated into nuclear DNA, so an autosomal recessive disease could explain how she was able to inherit the disease without either of her parents having it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
AFAIK Mizrahim don't have especially high average IQ (as I understand it their lower average SES is a point of contention in Israel), so they don't really count for purposes of measuring the size of Israel's Jewish talent pool. I also wonder about self-selection of Israeli Ashkenazim. Maybe they didn't get the cream of the crop?
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars
This is a feature, not a bug. This is what money is for. Imagine that we have a semi-capitalist system, where you're paid based on the marginal product of your labor and investments, but everybody's preferences are weighted equally when it comes to production and distribution of goods and services. Under such a system, money would be worth about as much as Reddit karma, and there would be no reason to work.
The weighting of preferences according to how much money you have and are willing to spend is not a drawback of capitalism—it's the main reason capitalism works better than socialism.
Huh?
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