TIRM
1d ago
Deleted by author
new
Oh come on. This used to never happen and now it's multiple times per week.
To some degree some long COVID is psychosomatic. It correlates strongly with political ideology and a minority of people reporting long COVID have no COVID antibodies.
Being sick weakens you. So to some degree some portion of people have long COVID. But also I think many (most?) people suffering from long COVID are imagining it. They truthfully feel down or slow. And they blame it on COVID. But COVID is an unusually mild cold to most people and given that some of these long COVIDers never even had COVID, I think there is much hyperbolic doomerism about it decoupled from the facts.
At this point I doubt long COVID exists in any significant portion of the population, outside of some trivial sense that getting sick makes you feel worse for a while.
TIRM
9d ago
Let's consider forbidding this bad behavior. Whatever they're doing with this post and delete game, it isn't in good faith.
TIRM
10d ago
Deleted by author
Hmm. Should posters be allowed to delete top level posts like this? It isn't great behavior.
TIRM
15d ago
I read political news and vaguely have some sense that he is famous for his corruption. But of course the media lies like the lying liars they are. Maybe I fell for their tricks.
But as a terminal political news addict, I refuse to personally review the evidence in this state-level impeachment case. I will bow out of that task and also not take back any claims regarding the power of naked partisanship. Which this might be.
Or maybe the prosecutors were such bumbling morons that only all Democrats and a few select Republicans would lower themselves to performatively vote guilty. And the other Republicans who voted to acquit were honestly voting their conscience.
I guess that's possible. I'm not so invested in Texas state politics that I will be critically evaluating the primary sources.
TIRM
15d ago
Ken Paxton acquitted:
On one hand yes. But, only Republicans voted to acquit and a mix of Republicans and Democrats voted to convict. I accept this as a display of partisan power rather than a display of innocence.
The old joke that a politician in a majority district could only lose if they were caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl comes to mind. Corrupt partisan supported by most of his fellows. Nothing more or less.
The fact that some Republicans turned on him is a black mark, but ultimately irrelevant.
TIRM
16d ago
Yeah. He speaks clearly and as far as politicians go looks great. The media would give him a great tail wind. Why shouldn't he take a chance at the presidency?
TIRM
17d ago
I like the comedy of the UC Santa Cruz graduate student union wildcat strike of 2019 and 2020. They illegally wildcat striked against their recently approved union contract that most of them voted against, but was forced onto them by union leadership getting other UCs to approve it. So a majority of union members at all UCs approved it and UCSC union members cannot negotiate a new contract just for them. The dean's office correctly stated that would be illegal and there will be no negotiation with the graduate students. The union approved of a contract against their will and that is what they shall get.
TIRM
17d ago
I think the real answer might be America has the National Labor Relations Act forcing management-union interaction to be adversarial. None of this German style working together. That's illegal in America.
TIRM
18d ago
Interesting. I nodded along thinking "yes, I've also been a bike owner in California". Sorry to hear the rot has spread.
TIRM
18d ago
I don't agree with this framing. This could be applied to smear any and all defensive actions as "defecting".
This means that a gazelle fleeing a cheetah is "defecting" against the group since that cheetah is going to eat something today and it is merely a question of which gazelle is unusually slow and unlucky.
An all purpose argument against self preservation proves too much. But as you mentioned, the rate of victimization being a conserved quantity is not necessarily true. If we advocate running away from cheetahs, we could hope that it eventually starves to death. Or whatever incredibly strained analogy applies to real life human predators.
TIRM
18d ago
I ran a tool that removed cortana, but an update restored it. Microsoft aggressively pushes regular security updates, which is good. Those updates sometimes undo my custom changes and restore the inferior default settings.
TIRM
19d ago
A couple examples:
Modern Windows pushes searching using the start menu search bar. Which could have been a valid design choice. But I search for something on my computer and instead it gives me a bunch of Bing web results mixed in. If you accidentally click on one, it opens Bing in Edge.
I recently had to run some Python scripts using command line. I wanted to open a Python session in command line to do some simple testing. A trivial task I am familiar with. But this time when I typed python into the command line it opened the Microsoft store to download Python. Which is strange because I already have Python. After a bit of Googling I found an obscure setting to uncheck to make command line work the way it always has instead of opening the fucking Microsoft store. They broke basic obvious functionality for truly no benefit. And the settings are hidden so deeply in a scattered mess of settings windows that I can only restore basic functionality by Googling and reading a bunch of forum posts. I await the day that an update reverses all of my settings choices and I get to do this all over again. Looking forward to ads in my start pane and a crippled command line.
In an excess of fairness, I'm going to shout out Windows Terminal It is a really good command line program. It actually cures most of my complaints with TMUX. This kind of handy functionality should be Microsoft's norm, not a rare pleasant surprise.
TIRM
20d ago
for those Catholics who care
So far I've resisted the urge to accuse people of being crypto-Protestants. But if some "Catholic" faction splits over this, I'm welcoming them to the Protestant brotherhood. Sedevacantists are Protestants in denial in my opinion.
TIRM
20d ago
I was more or less going to type out your comment. Why would anyone easily assert that cleaners are net negatives? Talk about a claim in need of serious justification.
TIRM
27d ago
As a white American they look very different to my eyes. Give me a large group of Chinese, Koreans and Japanese and I'll (almost entirely correctly) sort them. Koreans and Japanese look different, despite very recent common ancestry.
TIRM
27d ago
They dramatically publicly executed the cook for the previous presidential guards? Why? There's retribution and then there's senselessness.
TIRM
30d ago
When that film came out I recall historians claiming that it was wildly inaccurate. As a matter of historical fact: the last day of Jesus's life did not occur as depicted in that film. It's not a documentary or factual historical reenactment.
Crucifixion was a really painful and drawn-out way to die. So that was approximately correct and of course believed by Christians. But the wildly exaggerated scourging and out of control Roman soldiers was fictional torture porn for torture porn's sake.
TIRM
1mo ago
Kids under a certain age still aren't permitted to watch R-rated films in theatres without a gaurdian so far as I'm aware.
I believe that is company policy and not law in America. Back when Passion of the Christ was in theaters they let kids in and the explanation was there's no law about R rated movies, just corporate policy that they may change on a whim.
Also what a movie to let kids in. Passion of the Christ is torture porn.
This argument presented is these people are buying formerly rented units, so those units are now forever denied to future renters. And also people occupy more square feet per person when buying than renting. And NIMBYism prevents significant amounts of new units, so we aren't going to build to make up for the loss.
Things just get a bit worse for renters. They get to fight over fewer rented square feet of living space.
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