jkf
1d ago
He does say that he doesn't actually bench press these girls, so I'm not sure the mechanics there -- I can certainly lift cooperative average-sized women (or children) off the floor by the waist (from a standing position) without using my legs much.
For a bench-press equivalent, maybe they could wear a belt with side-handles, and crouch over one's chest? It would be about like pressing a large kettle-bell, and no need for the woman to be also capable of a plank or whatever. I'm pretty confident I could lift >200 lbs this way, and I'm not as fit as I used to be -- I get the feeling this is a larger lady than he has in mind?
jkf
1d ago
It has the added benefit of ironically warding off accusations that I should go to the gym more.
I mean -- how much do you press anyways? I wouldn't actually get anywhere near 300 these days, but certainly well into fattie territory unless you also only like really tall girls. My current spouse I could have lifted when I was like 14, and she's pretty average height and weight.
jkf
1d ago
So far we've been beating CoL inflation, so the trend lines look good (even modelling the inevitable slowdown in wage growth with age).
You may be beating CoL inflation in some basket-of-goods sense; you may even have more than doubled your salary (starting from a pretty low number) in the last ten years -- but you still can't afford a house, and the average home price in Toronto has been quite consistent in doubling every ten years since well before you were born. How much more than twice your current salary will you be making ten years from now, that you will be able to afford the house that you can't afford now?
The best and highest paying jobs are in Toronto.
This is... mostly false? O&G in Calgary offices pay quite well. Not "Bay Street Investment Banker" well, but it sounds like you are not that.
Especially because I can always sell a Toronto home and move to Calgary later
You don't have a home to sell -- you can't afford one and your rent money is disappearing instead of being (partially) stashed away as equity. This is unlikely to change for you in the future.
I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance
Says the guy from Toronto
Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
"I like having fun, I can always have kids later" is... not a really unique attitude, but not a long walk from "I don't really want kids that bad".
Finally, all my friends and family are in Southern Ontario. Most of my friends live a 15 minute walk/5 minute bike from my apartment. If we moved 3000km to have a kid, we'd be completely isolated from everyone we know (which isn't a permanent issue, as you make new friends, but damn...)
And now you want to inflict this pain on your own (hypothetical) kid -- you need to break the cycle somewhere man.
jkf
2d ago
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not.
Somebody needs to spend more time at the gym! (it isn't that hard to bench press 300)
jkf
2d ago
And as a carrot on the stick in front of me, that answer changes to "definitely yes" come out household income increases another ~$50k annually, which is hopefully only a few years and job hops away...
A few years from now the COL in Toronto will have increased a commensurate amount, and you will be saying the same kind of thing.
If you want kids, you have two options:
- Vote different, and convince a lot of other people in Toronto to do the same -- at all levels
- Get the fuck out of Toronto -- Calgary is nice this time of year
jkf
3d ago
Signalling turns more or less all the time is probably good for this reason -- but you should not be changing lanes unless you capital-K Know that there is nobody in your path.
I'd much rather be in the habit of double-checking my 'blind' spots everytime I change lanes than be in the habit of signalling and then pulling right into the car next to me that I didn't check for if he doesn't take evasive action -- which seems like a pretty common freeway habit these days.
jkf
6d ago
Most popular youtubers are in some ways retarded hipsters -- it's not the end of the world. They also have a tendency to leverage their popularity (and their slack-jawed faux-excitement about formerly basic knowledge like carburetors and potato guns) into the marketing of crappy products -- it's nice that this guy is (trying to) make his crappy products in America, but that doesn't make his hour-long ad interesting. (and means you should take what he says with a grain of salt -- he is literally selling you something.
jkf
6d ago
Why would I want to watch an extended advertisement from a couple of retarded hipsters?
I went to their website and looked at their shitty scrubber.
Buy the product, not the story.
jkf
6d ago
You can't because they specifically need welded chainmail links and the other samples they tested fell apart. Pretty sure you don't have that lying around, and they also said that the chainmail was the biggest part of their BOM.
Actually I can -- I have wire, and I have a welder. Both are literally in my basement right now.
Anyways it doesn't sound like their chainmail was even made in America, so I guess I could buy some from the same coolies making theirs in India if I were pressed for time.
Or I could buy some lockwashers and weld them up -- this would probably cost five bucks or so.
They are making something seem like a big deal when it isn't -- they just don't have the market to set up a proper factory, so they are using the limited production run + marketing + high price model to make a buck. Similar to the dropshippers pimping crap on Amazon.
jkf
6d ago
I would probably use wood for the handle -- I do indeed spend enough time working with stainless steel that I have some in the basement, and the tools to shape it. (wouldn't be much if I used a wooden handle and just rivet the steel to it)
Do you think their design is stupid drop-ship style crap?
Yes - it looks like it would not be good at cleaning grills.
jkf
7d ago
It looks like a crappy scrubber to me, but if I were so inclined I could make a functionally equivalent thing from local materials in my basement (located in North America) for something like $2.00 USD BOM cost (zero to me since I'd have everything needed sitting around down there somewhere). Yes the chainmail links would take some time, but I don't think it would be a very hard 8 hour day? If I were on minimum wage this would be better than buying the thing from this guy!
So the problem is not "it's hard to make things in America", it's "it's hard to make stupid drop-ship style crap in America and sell at a profit without some kind of gimmick" -- like, IDK -- making annoying videos about how hard it is to make things in America.
jkf
12d ago
Now I hope the US starts addressing the scenario of "50 Chinese container ships loaded with drones" as a real thing not as Sci-Fi scenario like "what if Martians attack D.C."
Or "what if China sends unpowered high altitude floating platforms of indeterminate payload drifting over on the jetstream?" What kind of nutbar would worry about that?
jkf
17d ago
I’m not sure NYC has ever been safe in the last 50 years.
That's my point though -- NYC is now way safer than it's been anytime in the last 50 years -- and yet in the 1980s kids/young teens were taking the subway by themselves and roaming around pretty unsupervised. My cousin in another big city was notorious for getting lost by taking the wrong bus at around age 9 -- it happened to me once when I was with him, we were home hours late, and people were like "lol, yeah -- you shouldn't trust his sense of direction, good thing you found your way home".
Something has changed, and it's not that cities have become unsafe.
jkf
17d ago
Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s
...
When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity.
He's suggesting that NYC should be made safe again... like it was in the 1980s?
Cities are not fucking safe, yo -- navigating them despite that fact is what actually develops independence, courage and maturity.
(the country is not safe either, but in different ways)
jkf
18d ago
Yeah, I don't think you can go to 19th century European literature for a read on this, because non-upper-class children didn't really have free time, they were supposed to be working. Even in Oliver Twist, it wasn't that the kids were wandering around getting into random mischief and menacing society -- that was their job!
Looking at Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Great Brain, non-farm kids in late 19th c. America seem to have much more like what we might think of as a free-range upbringing.
jkf
19d ago
A heroin habit is also a fun thing to do, that imbues the junky with a sense of purpose and fulfillment -- I don't happen to agree that this should be illegal, but glorifying it is clearly not great for society. (or, objectively, the users)
jkf
21d ago
Hunter (or his associate) made to make it seem like Joe was intimately involved when he actually wasn't.
How do you know this though? Sure it's possible, but I don't see any way to tell whether it (or the alternative) is the hallucination.
Certainly not:
Republicans went over Joe's financial records with a fine-toothed comb and repeatedly found nothing.
What would they find? That's the whole point of "holding it" for The Big Guy -- if he gave it to The Big Guy, combing his financials could turn up some evidence.
jkf
22d ago
The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe
An associate involved in some of their dealings testified under oath that Joe was "the big guy" referred to as getting a cut -- maybe you don't believe him or whatever, but that doesn't seem like an hallucination to me?
jkf
22d ago
"Just trust me, bro" would at least have some meat to talk about in that the user might be expected to back up his opinions-- "just trust this LLM output" is intensely weak.
jkf
27d ago
I'm not so sure on "jabs" -- AFAIK this is good idiomatic British English, but much less so in North America. It feels like the sudden memetic adoption (particularly on the part of medical authorities, which I'd expect to use more formal language as a rule) of this word here in particular has something more behind it than brevity.
"Shots" of course I buy -- "getting the dog his shots" is a fine thing to say; "getting the dog jabbed" would be very weird (in North America). Doubly so if the speaker were my veterinarian.
jkf
27d ago
It's a good point that "I don't know anyone who died of covid" is not the only part of their personal experience that people will use to form an opinion on its severity -- virtually everyone has had or been exposed to covid by now, and if their experience was that the disease itself was no big deal, it's hard to reconcile that with a large death toll.
Like -- I don't personally know anyone who's died of prostate cancer, but I do know lots of people who've died of other kinds of cancer, so I'm prepared to believe that prostate cancer is a serious problem. If my doctor had said to me five years ago "hey, you've got prostate cancer -- this is a big deal, you might die" and I just... ignored it and it went away with minimal symptoms, I'd be less inclined to think that prostate cancer is a serious thing.
jkf
27d ago
The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
jkf
27d ago
Fuckin Boomers man -- the "annual % change" on your link flips positive (slightly) in 2009, 15 years before 2024.
Fifteen years into the baby boom was 1960, by which time births were well off peak and on the decline:
The OG Macintosh GUI toolkit was absolutely excellent -- a real revelation to a young programmer, and an intro to O-O done right in my case.
A port/replication of the application side of that would be an interesting OS project -- I doubt the codebase is available, but the IP issues (which led Windows down its monstrous path) should be gone by now, and it was extremely well documented.
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