alchemist
1yr ago
Men seem to be willing to self-identify as women when it comes to prison, but yeah, otherwise it does seem more women -- I wonder if groups of men to to control that more aggressively than women?
alchemist
1yr ago
They seem to be painless. Speaking for fairly direct personal experience, you're essentially put to sleep, and then your heart stops. Direct witness reported seeing no distress (witness to Canadian euthanasia administrant).
alchemist
1yr ago
But she knew the path she was on was going to lead to hear death. At least in Canada, they ask you again before giving the final lethal injection, warning you there is no going back after it.
It seems she did successfully commit suicide, and in a way with a lot less terror than jumping off a bridge. Maybe (seriously) we should make people face that terror before they commit suicide (is that what you're proposing? "Show you really want it -- cut your hand off to prove it."), but I don't think so, personally.
alchemist
1yr ago
I've taken a beating, down 20-25% or so I'd say, mainly due to being seriously overweight in the tech sector (company stock), compounded by generally being tech bullish. I have some diversification, including some energy funds, so that's helped a bit, but not a lot. Still I'd gone up a lot over the last N years, so I can't really complain.
I have bought in a bit more occasionally on the way down, and considering doing more, but it will be slowly and carefully, no 3x ETFs you madman! For various tax reasons, it generally makes much more sense for me to buy single stocks now, which sucks (broad ETFs is the way to go!) so I'm looking at things like INTC, GOOG, APPL, MSFT, AMD, MRNA, BTI, BRK.B (those last two as counterweights to the tech heaviness).
alchemist
1yr ago
I think you could make an amazing adult series out of Malazan or the Black company, but the writing wouldn't be easy. The former is crazy complicated. The Lies of Lock Lamore could work too.
For kids ... I like someone else's idea of an animated series in the Harry Potter world. I haven't read them for a long time, but Dragonriders of Pern, Xanth, and the Riftwar saga seem good. A more modern source would be The Ranger's Apprentice series.
Apparently Percy Jackson was good, but very poorly done as a movie, so that would be an option too.
alchemist
1yr ago
Ha! I'll make sure to pass it along ;), but sadly, it does not appear that that is what they meant...
Is there a summary of that anywhere? I seem to have missed it. Was it something in the SciFi community?
*Thanks y'all, that was a wild ride.
alchemist
1yr ago
Doesn't that lead one to wonder: "How did the Patriarchy ever gain power?" Are men just better at organizing? Women were too nice? But doesn't that suggest general differences between men & women.
It's an incoherent (and inconsistent with science and trivial observation) viewpoint.
alchemist
1yr ago
Nice! And ha, that sounds like a weird variant of rubber-duck-debugging.
At least you know at least one user appreciates it!
alchemist
1yr ago
But can you believe what they say? In dating topics, the answer is usually "no," although I agree, I suspect men are over-estimating the attraction here.
alchemist
1yr ago
Really? It makes sense, so to speak, from an evolutionary standpoint, in that one male can impregnate many females, so a species can afford to produce a bunch of 'waste' men, as long as some turn out well. It's like VC investing in companies. Women, on the other hand, cannot be easily replaced -- if a tribe loses half its women, it loses half its next generation, more or less. If it loses half its men, it has labour and fighting problems, but no problems producing enough children.
There's also the detail that women have two XX chromosomes, but men have an X & Y. That's why many diseases hit men more frequently (e.g. color blindness), because they only need one defective X chromosome for it to hit. Similarly, if they get a helpful mutation, it isn't drowned out by the partner gene.
And for what it's worth, apparently you do see more male variance in the world, although I think in the mental domains it's not as clear-cut.
alchemist
1yr ago
Ha, I was just thinking the same thing! I'd love to only be done 10%. I'm around 25%; it has moved retirement dates out somewhat.
alchemist
1yr ago
My view from continental Europe -- Brexit has been pretty horrible for Britain, and the lies to sell it (buses claiming 400 million a week were being sent to the EU) have been unravelling, so people were pissed at Boris, which meant the small-but-insulting blunders -- e.g. having big parties while other people couldn't visit grandma -- were enough to oust him.
Truss came in and made stupid destructive tax cut promises that even people in favor of tax cuts thought were stupid, and no one had her back, so apparently she's on the way out too.
alchemist
1yr ago
Both, but they are separate.
Being obese is a pretty big hit (for most people, but there are always exception) to attractiveness. But the original point was how hard young women have it to be attractive, because they have to spend time and money on fashion, and doing make-up is hard, and not being fat is really hard. I was disagreeing with all of those, especially the last one, which is what caused this comment chain.
alchemist
1yr ago
The image on the login screen seems quite large -- I have a decent connection normally, but spent 20+s seeing it incrementally load.
Usually you can shrink images signficantly without much quality loss just be encoding differently, e.g. lower quality. I used imagemagick's convert with the following parameters quite successfully (to make 1920px wide image)
convert -quality 65 -resize 1920x> -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0
alchemist
1yr ago
Well, if you assume disproportionately many will come from the "young men" demographic (which does most of the crime) I would predict a considerably larger reduction.
alchemist
11mo ago
I thought that had to be intentional, and snuck in by the one competent writer on the crew. It was so blatant.
alchemist
1yr ago
You're making sense and The Blade Itself from Abercrombie is also a good grimdark world and trilogy.
alchemist
1yr ago
This seems like the strongest argument. Attraction isn't something that you choose, so you don't need to follow current year's obligations.
alchemist
1yr ago
"Selfish gene" comes from the eponymous book by Richard Dawkins, and centers on exactly that idea.
Religion is an interesting one, because I've just read a great book called "The Secrets of our Success", which talks about culture and inter-group competition, and religion seems a very effective way to strengthen cultural norms, and also to strengthen inter-group non-family ties, both of which are important for intergroup competition.
I'm personally still not a big fan, but it was interesting, and I do note a slide towards conservatism as I get older (although I think that's also the shift of the left away from liberality (of which I'm a fan) towards identity politics (of which I"m not).
alchemist
1yr ago
I tend to agree, but I think you may be taking them too much at face value. If they feel that attraction quickly, they'll also just say -- "I felt a deep connection, like we'd already known each other!" Maybe I'm just too cynical though, or projecting my own take on it -- i.e. I wouldn't want to jump someone I just found attractive, but if I found them attractive and felt something of a connection, I wouldn't need to to know them a long time to get physical -- that would in fact be part of 'getting to know them'.
alchemist
1yr ago
I agree it's a bit too much, but they don't have to be evil to destroy everything. I think many of them have good (if unexamined) intentions, at least at a surface level. I think they still tend to fundamentally destroy things, rather than make them better.
alchemist
1yr ago
Yes, it feels (ha) like there is an increasing war on meritocracy, and truth. And it also seems like it's having consequences, making the world worse for everyone.
I'll throw my 2c in the ring with "While it commits a number of the same flaws, RoP is way better than WoT". I'd give RoP a 5 or a 6 / 10 -- it looked very good (except for the armor, which, except for Galadriel's, looked like fake plastic armor you buy for your kids, IMO), and had some nice scenes (Adar, Elrond & Durin). I hard the Harfoots though, and for me the main problem is nothing really had consequences -- we just flowed from one set piece to the next. Also, the diverse casting wasn't too damaging for RoP, in my opinion, except for the Harfoots, where it really makes no sense.
WoT was a 2 or 3 / 10, where a number of "The Message" things really destroyed the whole story (and underlying system of magic and source of tension in the book).
I don't think I'll be watching Season 2 of either, unless the family makes me.
If Amazon is smart, they hurry Season 2 out, as I think otherwise most people will turn their back on RoP.
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