Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
Why not just buy this little guy instead? Same price, low miles, only ten years old, intentionally designed to be that size, and it's even kinda cute. Come to think of it, I ought to buy my wife one of these.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Lab grown meat, if it can be made cheaply and to taste indistinguishable from the real thing, would be an immense scientific achievement that would improve billions of people’s lives.
I accept the premise here, but those two if clauses are doing a ton of work. I'm skeptical that either is plausible, but concerned that in the name of going green, governments will push them anyway. My preference would be for government to stay away from it altogether (aside from normal basic research that NIH and others fund), but if we're going to wind up with governments feeling the need to get involved, I'd rather they ban the slop than subsidize it. Note that scientists generally benefit from the same public optics issue - it's a "good" job, so pouring money into questionable endeavors is pretty common.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
I know being tall has been incredible for me, I have my charms regardless, but even average men are often hard countered by women setting 6' in their bio, or even implicitly in person or social settings (though women are certainly not the best at gauging it, hence so many guys who are 5'10" getting away with, they just recognize "tall").
Anecdotes being anecdotes and all, but I my personal experience makes me believe this whole thing is just wildly overrated. I'm just a bit over 5'8" and this has literally never been a problem with women. I have never met a woman I was romantically interested in that seemed even remotely put off by my relative shortness, including a couple hookups that were a shade taller me than me. Height is certainly an advantage, but it seems more like an advantage in the same way that social status, income, good looks, and physicality are rather than just a categorical one. I'm sure my predilection for dating petite women has helped on this one, but I really do think that treating height as an insurmountable obstacle has more to do with coping and excusing other personal failings than anything else.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds?
For the strict vegans, the objection really does seem to be that it comes from the incorrect kingdom. They don't eat mussels or honey, for example. Veganism doesn't hold to some consistent morally coherent standard, it's a quasi-religious practice where the lack of high-quality human food is sort of the point. I think this is what you're getting at in the next paragraph; I guess we're going to find out how much is about not wanting to eat cute fuzzy animals and how much is about avoiding food-sin.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22d ago
How do you feel about esoteric finishing and blending though? Things like what Barrell and Bardstown have done have produced pretty interesting results. I don't want Seagrass all the time, but when I do, it's really good.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
...how fucking hard making great whiskey is and why MGP is such a dominant force.
Hilarious that there are people that want to skip out on MGP because they don't like sourced and finished whiskies. More bottles for me!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Yes. Seatbelts are an excellent idea and I wear mine. Demanding that everyone do so is stupid and intrusive.
Opposing safetyism doesn’t mean ignoring risk-benefit, it means that you’re against treating safety as an overriding priority in all cases.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
14d ago
On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line.
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent. In my experience, the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports. If your proverbial skill points were more intellect than charisma, you might get shit from your buddies about it, but I really doubt the framing of the highly competent being routinely bullied.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22d ago
Absolutely. I do like rum in general, but Foursquare was a gamechanger for me as someone that's mostly a bourbon guy (Scotch and Irish whiskeys are great too, but I have more bourbon than all other liquor bottles put together). They retain all of the tropical flavors that I love about good rums, but are really expertly aged. I think we have about 5 bottles and I've never been disappointed. The ones that simply have years for names have probably been my go-to favorites - 2008 had a panna cotta sort of taste to it that was just fantastic as a dessert. They're probably my favorite thing for the porch on a hot day because they fit the vibe.
I think the real rum guys are less in because it doesn't have any of the funkiness that you get with Jamaican pot rums and such, but if you're coming from whisky in the first place, that's a feature rather than a bug.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
OK, then my answer is that I would not pay an extra $15K to get a chopped-up Mirage instead of just buying a used ForTwo.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
FWIW, I thought it was fine. Your point was lucid, I appreciated you pushing Walt on the matter, and while you did sound a bit charged, it didn't come off as pointless belligerence to me.
I once again find the solution to be localizing the matter. There is something that is vaguely grotesque about industrial-scale slaughter, even for those of us that don't find anything morally objectionable about. Nonetheless, I know farmers and butchers, and they aren't particularly bothered by their work, and I think it's precisely because they're sufficiently close to it and doing it on a sufficiently small-scale that they're confident that the animals were humanely raised and slaughtered. Yeah, it's quite literally bloody and grisly work, but no worse than the same operation conducted on a deer that you've shot and killed. I wouldn't go so far as saying that I like gutting and skinning an animal, but you get on with it and it's not that big of a deal. I've done worse to mice as a research scientist, I did feel bad about that, and the marginal number of ruminants required to feed a family is a hell of a lot lower than the number of cute fuzzy animals necessary to do immunology.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do.
Lots of things are both simple and psychologically difficult. There really isn't any good reason for a couple making six figures to be broke, they literally just need to elect to spend less than they make, and presto, they won't be broke. And yet! Really though, for any individual, it actually is that simple and straightforward if they're capable of recognizing their own impulses and acting to break the autopilot actions that are causing them to be broke and fat.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
24d ago
If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter?
Maybe. We don't have that counterfactual available to us, but I don't think it would be crazy to say that parents bare some degree of responsibility for providing their homicidally deranged child easy access to effective murder weapons, whether those are vehicles or firearms. I would hope for proportional approaches to the degree of ease, efficacy, and likely use as a weapon for a given implement. Firearms are probably the single most effective tool readily available for targeted violence. Cars are actually pretty high on the list as well and I think it's generally very bad that we treat vehicular fatalities with less seriousness than other negligent homicides. When we get down to something like knives, there is no plausible path to parents preventing their homicidally deranged child from acquiring a kitchen knife, but it's also unlikely that they'll succeed in killing four people on a rampage with said knife.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
Amish exist more than they live
If this were so we would we see more suicides
Without commentary on the Amish specifically, this isn't true. Animals don't really kill themselves much. Lacking introspection is a good start for not killing yourself.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
Any opinions on Paul John whisky? I occasionally look at it on the menu at my favorite whiskey bar or on the shelf with the other less common countries and want to try it, but have never pulled the trigger.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
If I could find a bottle, I'd be drinking Old Forester 1924, but alas, I cannot find a bottle.
As it is, we're headed for the first really warm weekend day of the year and I strongly suspect that's going to entail an afternoon on the porch with some Foursquare rum (I think I have a few pours of Nobiliary left) and a cigar.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
I'm not arguing that a ForTwo is a particularly good vehicle, I'm saying that getting a 30 year-old chopped up Geo Metro to simulate a ForTwo is a stupid idea.
With regard to a ForTwo relative to a Mirage, it is simply inconceivable that you're going to save enough money on gas to make up for the initial price difference. If someone wants a cheap, economical two-seater, a $4K used ForTwo is a legitimate option, a new Mirage isn't a competitor to that in any meaningful sense.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
Such acts are heinous, I simply really liked his course simply because it teaches you that life is not just unfair but everyone is out to get you, not actively, but they would likely fuck you over if they could so you should learn to embrace life that way and develop models that make you less susceptible to getting fucked over (being a lothario vs being a monogamous guy).
I cannot overstate how much this doesn't match my experience even the slightest bit. Living life like this sounds absolutely miserable. Even if I thought that it would somehow lead to a great deal of success to believe this, I would reject it anyway because I don't want to walk around with a chip on my shoulder, believing that people are likely to screw me over. The vast majority of colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, friends, and casual acquaintances that I've been around have been collaborative, pro-social people that are happy to put in a little extra effort to help me out and I'm happy to return the favor to them. The number that have screwed me over is miniscule, and they were people that I plainly disliked from the start, not backstabbers that I never suspected.
Anyway, the fights look great. I'm also looking forward to plunking down and flipping between those and a couple NBA games.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Energetics are less of a problem with cattle than vehicles though - they're not particularly efficient, but they're capable of growing literal tons of high-quality nutrition by simply eating grasses that grow naturally. While this is apparently not as cheap as CAFOs currently (although I'm not clear on how much of that is a product of corn subsidies), there's something to be said for the ability of someone without expensive equipment and sterile lab conditions to produce excellent meat via naturally occurring inputs and a herd of cattle or bison grazing. You can afford to waste a lot of energy when the energy is being produced by the sun, processed by plants in a field, and reprocessed by ruminants.
We'll see. Cell culture media isn't cheap though. For the time being, I suggest exercising a lot of skepticism about what the financial inputs for lab-grown tissue are if someone claims that it's actually quite cheap.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Who made this argument?
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
This is not an accurate retelling of economic conditions, but rather is a skewed worldview based on partisan priors.
While granting that the swiftness of the changes is almost certainly not a product of material changes on the ground, I think the claim that the view of the economy is purely partisan rather than driven by legitimate differences of opinion is doing too much work. People are capable of projecting forward a bit and considering what they think is likely to happen. They're going to be partisan because they have actual policy preferences that drive their partisan voting preferences. When Trump wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that there are about to be corporate tax cuts; Republicans think this is good and Democrats think it is bad, so they answer accordingly. When Biden wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that he'll do things like try to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to people that don't want to pay their student loans; Republicans think this is bad and Democrats think it is good, so they answer accordingly. When people are asked about "the economy" they're certainly answering with vibes rather than trying to do some quick calculus to try to figure out what the current rate of change of GDP per capita is, but I don't think they're obviously wrong in doing so.
Oh, sure, I accept pretty much without question that genuinely tall girls are right out. They don't want me and I don't want them. Nothing personal. That just doesn't eliminate enough of the pool to really be much of a problem.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that height isn't a distinct life advantage, just that it's a sliding scale rather than categorical. Being doomed to date women that are mostly median height and below isn't really much of a problem. Like a number of other things in life, the good news is that if you get it right even once, you're all set anyway.
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