oats_son
1yr ago
You guys got any dinner plans for this weekend? I plan on making teriyaki chicken again, now that I made it once, with TWICE the amount of chicken.
Also do people around you know how to cook? I work at a gas station on weekends and I think there's a fair amount of people that just buy easy dinners and cook those most of the time. This is in rural Midwest America, though. I think most of the younger generation is getting worse at cooking.
Wow! I did not know this either! Violence enforced humanitarian stances are something. I don't even know how you would go about fixing this...
I guess this is a life lesson that you should never let go of the death penalty. Just quietly stop using it if you don't like it any more.
Wow, I did not know. That is a very bad thing considering the conditions they live in now. It may be that only prosperous countries can afford to be humane. That being said, that's pretty early for getting rid of capital punishment, right? I wonder how many other countries could say that. Feels like we didn't start caring about people living or dying until after World War II.
Edit: Holy cow, looking at this map on this page is pretty shocking to me. How could so many non-European countries get rid of it? Looks like for South America, Ecuador was late to the party, if anything. Damn. Like I said, I think pretty much everywhere that's not western Europe or a Commonwealth country could probably benefit from the death penalty.
oats_son
1yr ago
So just taking a look at this leader that got busted out.
He was serving a sentence of thirty-four years in the Litoral Penitentiary for organized crime, drug trafficking, and murders.
Those are some pretty serious crimes. What I don't understand is why the prison sentence? This isn't the first time he's been busted and cartels are totally wrecking a large portion of the continent (and more importantly for Ecuador, Ecuador). Why not try him and execute him? I would think in 1800s America if he had done the same crimes he'd have gotten a short trial and a quick death. Are they worried about escalating a war between the government and the cartels, where both sides execute prisoners? Or are they really just trying to be humane here?
oats_son
1yr ago
I had this question once. There's some big writeup on it on /r/history, but to sum up, I remember the following: malnutrition could have reduced fertility, stuff like intercrural sex could have been more common, and the big favorite, they could have given birth and then left the baby to die on a hill somewhere.
oats_son
1yr ago
I also don't find most of them impressive. The vast majority of arguments against carbon dating have been totally poked full of holes years ago. But this particular book had a lot of work put into disproving each type. The author has a PhD in geology and has been working at this stuff for years, he no doubt believes it wholeheartedly and have been attempting to prove it his entire life.
That's not all to say he's right or anything. But I recently read that Scott article on his shuttering of the Culture War thread, where he states that you can take any view you oppose and there will be someone smarter than you putting arguments forward for it. That's who Andrew Snelling is to me.
This is the book I got from him, by the way. I just wish there was still some internet atheists madly disproving every creationist thing that gets put out. There isn't, because the evolutionists thoroughly won this one. I wonder if there will ever be another Great Awakening, or if Christianity will continue bleeding to death.
Does the young earth creationist publisher you know happen to be Andrew Snelling? I got a book of his once from a young earth creationist family member after I revealed I believe the earth is billions of years old, and while I of course disagree with the notion, I was quite impressed at the great length of the book, including several chapters spanning dozens of pages disproving every different form of carbon dating.
Nice analogy with trans advocacy.
oats_son
1yr ago
I sometimes wonder if I'm on the same planet as people talking about divorce statistics. Speaking of the divorce of my parents, my dad got really paranoid over time, stopped working, started drinking excessively, and kept getting into arguments over ridiculous things; the last straw was a big blowout fight with some light physical violence involved. I think people asking this question have a tendency to assume that all men that get divorced are just like them. Some women make really poor choices? Well, some men do, too. And it's hard to speak so broadly about all divorces. You couldn't reduce the circumstances that led to Raskolnikov killing the old woman to a set of statistics.
oats_son
1yr ago
If ID laws intended for minors also incidentally reduce adult porn usage, of course most conservatives will be completely fine with that, if not celebrating it. I'm sure some of them would want to implement more restrictions that also affect adults explicitly, but that's not the majority, and I don't think you'll see legislation doing that any time soon barring some religious revival.
oats_son
1yr ago
They're sincere, yes, and also it will have an effect beyond just theater. I'll take Reddit as an example, let's say that the lawmakers decide to require ID verification to view NSFW content. There will still be tons of porn on Reddit, but they'd have to search for something not tagged NSFW, which would eliminate the majority of mainstream porn subreddits.
If you want to say that that's not going to be terribly effective, I agree with you. People will definitely still be able to find pornography if they want it. There's more than enough untagged porn on reddit, and kids (really, we're talking about male teens and preteens here, right, so I suppose saying "kids" is a little misleading) asking for porn could get themselves into trouble, and there definitely would be teenagers asking for porn or where to find porn in this hypothetical. But it would dissuade a good amount because the low hanging fruit would be eliminated. And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.
oats_son
1yr ago
Thank God. One of my friends brought up that it was free speech and it was bugging me ever since. It's not really saying anything, or anything of value anyway. For a while I was thinking "Well, people defecating on each other on camera is extremely degenerate and doesn't seem like a societal gain whatsoever, but if you can't penalize recording it (an act of speech) maybe we could criminalize defecating on people even consensually, which would mean recording it would just be giving evidence of a crime. Because that's gross." I understand that that's totally a moral puritan take on it, but frankly I really have to agree with @FiveHourMarathon here. Porn is celebrated and it leads to activity like /r/GoonCaves, or people shamelessly diving deeper and deeper into their personal kink stuff and some people develop serious problems. Not to mention the porn language creeping into mainstream culture, like he says. Pretty common to see "step bro, I'm stuck" jokes, and various other references to porn star utterances. That being said, I don't see any way this legislation could work, really. It's a cultural problem.
Your citation of that law does also make me wonder if someone shouting the n-word similarly isn't protected.
oats_son
1yr ago
The right wing has seemed to gain some ground on the porn-being-viewable-by-children issue. North Carolina has passed some legislation requiring age verification for adult sites. I remember Matt Walsh at least advocating for this quite strongly. Not only that, but it's not the first state to do this; laws in Louisiana, Virginia, Utah and Montana also require age verification. Pornhub's response is to block access to its website in these states, stating the following:
“As you may know, your elected officials in North Carolina are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” adult entertainer Cherie DeVille said in a video message that pops up when users attempt to access the website. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
“The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in North Carolina.”
That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this. Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here. If any of you know anything about child safety tools currently available to parents for Android or iPhone, let me know. I'm sure there's a ton for Windows and Linux, and maybe macOS too. You could even get pretty scary and start talking about algorithms that determine if local files are porn or not.
There would certainly be some ways to skirt this, but as always there are ways around any law, really, if someone is motivated enough. Even with a border wall, some Latino illegal immigrants would manage to climb or swim around it, or get in some other way. Despite all the background checks in the world, one could choose to 3d print their own gun. When lawmakers create legislation, they're not counting on that legislation stopping everyone; just stopping most people is satisfactory.
However, none of that is on the table right now. What is on the table are these current laws; Virginia doesn't specify how the sites should verify that users are 18 or older, but others like North Carolina require an external commercially available database containing user age information. The porn sites check with this database and verify the user. At least in theory, if sites like Pornhub and e621 don't decide to self-immolate in response.
I think the arguments for this are pretty obvious. For conservatives, porn is pretty obviously bad for kids, and as that article says, over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad! Requiring some ID would at least nail the mainstream sites that they use. That alone could do a lot. And asking for this database isn't too much; we ask for IDs in various other contexts. Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind. And buying porn in person would require the same. I'm pretty sure you can buy tobacco online, though I do not know the method for verifying the age of customers.
But there's plenty of ammo for people to dislike this law, too.
- If you take easy access to porn away, some kids will chase it down elsewhere. Viewing a Pornhub uploader's video is very different from getting into a Discord chat and getting porn directly from a stranger. The latter would be almost impossible to regulate, and it's a lot worse for children. They could also go onto worse virus filled sites.
- The effectiveness of this does not seem to be very high. This is the internet. There's an incredible amount of sites out there and it's impossible to catch them all. And preteens and teens can be incredibly motivated in seeking out explicit content. Without parental oversight, this probably wouldn't slow down most kids. Legislation can't replace parenting.
- Database leaks could be a problem, depending on how that's handled.
- If this becomes a nationwide thing, for people who want to avoid databases for privacy concerns, it could get a lot harder than just grabbing ProtonVPN and going to town. Maybe it would be adopted internationally and you'd HAVE to sign up for the database. Having such a hurdle to something that is arguably a free speech issue would be frightening.
What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.
This appears to be the original link that I painstakingly spent several minutes of my valuable time looking up. (just kidding, my time isn't very valuable) https://www.themotte.org/post/476/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/93520?context=8#context
oats_son
1yr ago
I thought turning fat into muscle was a meme. Why do you think bodybuilders bulk and cut so meticulously? If they could turn fat into muscle, surely they would just bulk all the time?
oats_son
1yr ago
Some video games are very low effort. For instance, I have been playing Mother 3, and JRPGs in general do not require quick reactions.
Otherwise, a low-stakes TV show, or maybe put on some music and get a beer and just enjoy it for a bit.
oats_son
1yr ago
I learned to ride a bike as an adult a few years ago. Learning it was pretty much just falling off of the thing for two or three hours. I think it was just one day of that. The next day I got on it and was able to ride it, though not particularly well. It didn't turn out to be as hard as I thought. I hope it's the same for you. Good luck, but you won't need luck, just determination.
Bah! Meal kits. I understand there are a lot of positives, but always my impression is that the person getting it is too lazy to go shopping themselves and they end up paying a premium for it. That being said, the one guy I know who gets a meal kit gets quite the variety. I was jealous of the tonkatsu package he got this week.
Air fryers are great. Ours handily replaced the George Foreman grill we were using previously to quickly cook up some meat for sandwiches and stuff. The thing I like to do best with the one we have that's like this is just throw in a pork tenderloin with seasoned salt, but it's been a while since I used that one at all. I used the other one we have just last night to finish off some sausages that I had partially grilled, but had run out of gas in the middle of cooking.
All that to say: good purchase! Lots of utility. The one that resembles a toaster oven gets more use from me, just because it's basically a lower cost oven that costs less to use if you're cooking less food.
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