johnfabian
2mo ago
Any tips for dealing with DOMs in the legs?
I find nothing works better for me than just walking it off. Yes it hurts but it gets the blood flowing. Eat extra protein and you'll be fine.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Yeah the writing has been a little less coherent, the satirical/comedic elements a little less tight. It's been a step down but not a massive one.
My biggest fear though was that they would just spool this out forever but the show seems to be quite forthright in charging through the plot.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Not that it wasn't coming eventually, but Germany also declared war on the US even though it was under no obligation to. And that is of course after adding the Soviet Union to the coalition.
johnfabian
6mo ago
he could very well be an upset midlife-crisis type too
johnfabian
6mo ago
It's not often you see a movie that has an entirely novel concept, especially as a courtroom drama which is one of the most done-to-death formats.
johnfabian
8mo ago
this was still a nail-biter of an election.
It wasn't as close as 2020 in terms of the number of votes, but it was still a margin of ~300k in the key swing states between a Trump win and a Harris victory.
johnfabian
10mo ago
I can commiserate. Last week I ran my first marathon (just a pussy normal one) and it took me a day and a bit to walk like a normal human being again.
I saw this as a another riff on a marathon I want to try some time. Would be fun to do with friends.
johnfabian
11mo ago
This felt less like a prediction and more like a lay-up. I couldn't see any other course of action for the Democrats.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Before there was a good (and widespread) understanding of what determined prices, trade seemed very little different from witchcraft.
How is it possible that a merchant will buy your wheat at a given price, but when he takes it to the city he sells it for three times as much??? What magick spells has he conjured?
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.
And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I guess it depends on how invested you are in American hegemony. Which if you are a westerner, or especially a non-American westerner, might seem like a silly thing to be rooting for. But you might not realize how good you have it.
If the US lets China take Taiwan, then much of south-east Asia probably reorients politically. The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. fall out of American orbit and into the Chinese sphere; on the other hand, India might seek a formal American military alliance. International waters are no longer guaranteed by the US Navy, and the costs of cross-oceanic bulk cargo increase massively. Major economic disturbances ripple out as markets realign; international computing and mineral markets take years to recover. South Korea and Japan become nuclear states in a matter of weeks or months; Japan rips up its constitution immediately. Australia prepares to be the bulwark of southeast Asia.
johnfabian
8mo ago
johnfabian
3mo ago
It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Neo-nazis frequently allude to "Hitler's peace offers"; vague claims that Hitler offered various enticements to the western allies after the fall of Poland, and later the UK after the defeat of France, to end this senseless and destructive conflict so the Aryan races could work together to defeat the communist menace.
There's a kernel of truth: Hitler wasn't particularly interested in fighting the UK, which he saw as a potential racial ally, and twice Hitler made mentions of peace offers to the Reichstag (in October 1939, and again in July 1940). There were no specifics described, nor did the western allies ever enter into peace negotiations, so any claims about specific terms (neo-nazis will claim Hitler offered to decamp from all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, for example) are nonsense. Nor did Germany ever seek to initiate peace talks either.
There was about a week in May-June 1940 where Lord Halifax brought up the notion of seeking a negotiated peace via mediation by Italy, but the Cabinet was decided against it. They thought that no terms Germany would offer would offer them a better situation than continuing to fight; in any case it was pointless to make agreements with Hitler because he had violated every international agreement he had ever signed.
johnfabian
10mo ago
It's not necessarily true that green parties are progressive/leftist; the one I'm most acquainted with, Canada's federal Green party, has always been sort of derisively referred to as "Tories on bikes" for its general conservative bent. It was going through an increasingly woke/progressive phase which resulted in longtime leader Elizabeth May retiring and being replaced by Annamie Paul (the first black woman to lead a Canadian federal party, everyone was constantly reminded) but that all fell apart when she tried to force all the Green MPs to make declarations of support for Israel. Now Elizabeth May is back in charge and things are somewhat back to normal. In Ontario the Green Party is emerging as a force among centrist liberals who don't want to vote for the corrupt PCs and Liberals.
I would say as a somewhat broad generalization Green Parties tend to fairly badly fail at their central purposes (a. getting elected and b. protecting the environment) which makes them vulnerable to hijack by outside causes.
johnfabian
10mo ago
All through my childhood the stories of people supposedly kidnapping or mutilating animals were all, as far as I know, fictitious. But it was a common enough type of rumour that you'd hear it every couple of years - yeah my friend says that his older brother found this dog that was all slashed up with a knife. They think some kid in the neighbourhood is doing it.
That being said the next neighbourhood over from me in Toronto is currently dealing with an actual teenage catkiller at the moment, so this particular story has finally had a proven example for me.
johnfabian
10mo ago
Just as a related thought, not tied exactly to your point, but I also subjectively feel like since the advent of smartphones, the quality of driving has dropped sharply; and I wonder if this is supported by evidence. I don't know if there's anyone tracking the frequency of, for example, someone failing to turn left when they get the left-turn arrow, because they're watching their phone instead of the light; and how many quality life-minutes that's costing society.
At least in Toronto the number of hit and runs had doubled in the five years leading up the pandemic. The speculation is that these are mostly distracted drivers on their phones or other screens. The incident cited in the article where someone was hit sequentially by two vehicles both of whom fled is awful.
I can't imagine things have improved since then.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Yeah, you have to be a bit careful because the nature of these sort of things make it hard to pin down a certain number (especially because some methodologies include prevented births), and then you have another layer on top of that where partisans for whatever group will use that ambiguity to play Genocide Olympics. This of course ends up in deliberately misleading blogposts and youtube videos and wiki edit wars.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This doesn't really get at the heart of Soviet casualties - it might be true that in attacking a certain specific fortified position the attacker will take more casualties than the defender, but in a modern war where armies have great strategic mobility and the combat power of a given corps/army/army group etc. is sourced from vulnerable rear areas, an attacker that has the initiative has the potential to achieve lopsided victories. This is what the Germans did to the Soviets in 1941, and likewise what the Soviets returned to the Germans in later 1944-45. A third of the German war dead (1.5 million) came in the final four months of the war when the Soviets were able to fully turn the tables and inflict disproportionate losses on them.
The purges had left the Red Army in a state completely unfit for fighting a modern war, and so the Red Army was essentially almost wholly destroyed twice: first in June-July and then again in September-October 1941. From that point on it was such a desperate struggle for survival that the Soviet Union essentially had little time to try to rebuild or improve its institutional knowledge with respect to fighting a modern war. Every element of Soviet warfighting was massively deficient, essentially up until the operational pauses in early 1944 where after they had recovered enough territory (and suffered such horrendous casualties in the process) that they were able/forced to devote serious time and attention to overhauling their approaches to all elements of the war.
johnfabian
9mo ago
Yes, but Sicilian/pan pizzas are very easy at home with no specialist equipment
johnfabian
10mo ago
have you seen Black Mirror? There are a few episodes which brush up against this
johnfabian
10mo ago
civ 5 still has a very active multiplayer community playing lekmod
johnfabian
11mo ago
Finished the books I was reading about Augustus and the Peloponnesian War. Now I'm reading The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham (he co-wrote The Expanse). Finished the first part and was pleasantly surprised. Enjoying it quite a bit.
More numerous than any other individual combat arm? Generally, often yes. But in modern professional armies they don't tend to approach a majority. How things might actually play out for conscription-based armies which train most conscripts as light infantry remains to be seen though I suppose.
For the UK (and the Commonwealth countries which largely followed their military organization during WWII) there were two very important deciding factors which relegated infantry to a lesser size than the artillery. Most importantly was the scale of losses during WWI: politically, demographically, economically, whatever lens you looked through they were so high they could not be repeated. That inevitably meant a focus on greater firepower and heavy weapons rather than having infantry carry the burden.
Less importantly aside from the brief fracas in France the initial major land fighting the Brits did was in North Africa when the Germans were roughly on par with the in the air and the desert allowed for fluid maneuvers. This meant more losses to rear-area personnel and so they carried more men and got a higher proportion of trained replacements. This ended up adversely affecting British and Canadian forces in Europe because the decline of German air power and operational maneuver greatly reduced the risk to non-infantry combat arms. There was a persistent shortage of infantrymen throughout 1944 and 1945.
It is important to note that this wasn't some crazy or ineffective idea: artillery was in WWII, like all other modern wars, the main killing power on the battlefield. Certainly if you read German memoirs they are constantly bitter about the total dominance of Western Allied artillery (and air power). In Normandy there was frequent complaining about it being a "rich man's war" because of how badly the Germans were being outshot. Allied artillery command and control was also significantly more sophisticated and was a huge advantage.
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
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