pigeonburger
8mo ago
My province caps THC at 30%, that is generous for flower but is too low for concentrates to make any kind of sense. Ultimately people consume more of the less potent stuff to compensate, or go find the potent stuff outside of the legal market. That's how it's been for me when I was partaking and letting my tolerance build up. I could always reach the same level with flower than with, say, THC crystals, I'd just have to chain vape for 3 hours to get there (easy with the degenerate setup I had).
pigeonburger
8mo ago
And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?
There's three interpretations in my head of what that could be, and considering what the Biden admin has been doing and how it's likely to be exactly the same people in charge under Harris, there isn't really any doubt which one it is.
Crypto traders and users want the governments to protect the ability to use and trade cryptocurrency by keeping the knee off the neck of the industry.
The crypto industry wants governments to give clarity as to where it will intervene and where it won't, so that the industry can finally know where and how they will be allowed to operate.
Governments wants to make the cryptomarket as "safe" and regulated as regular finance (and by doing so, kill opportunity in that market for the plebs).
pigeonburger
8mo ago
I'm looking at it from the opposite perspective of someone who's on the ops side that has to look at resumes and gives interviews, but I would definitely consider 10 years of development experience as a plus for a sysadmin; to me that's someone that would be much more comfortable than your average sysadmin with scripting, and who will get infrastructure-as-code much more readily.
I work with a lot of devs and there's a lot of things that sysadmin experience can bring to development. There's a lot of debugging steps that your experience can have you breeze through: connectivity issues, permission issues, policy issues, etc...
pigeonburger
8mo ago
It's not all about impressing the boss, you need to make a good impression to your coworkers of being a reliable worker. And if you do user/client facing work, to the users and clients. If my employer wants to hire a person for me to work with my first thought will be to go in my head through the list of people I've worked with and see if there's one that I would like to work with again that might be up for a change of scenery.
That overbearing paean was at least a genuine, defendable pro-Trump case; it was a steelman of very strongly enthusiastic support. As opposed to OP here who made a post to see if people would even upvote a strawman if it was pro-Trump.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
posting polemics about how only Trump will save us is allowed
I am pretty sure the point being made is the opposite, and the quotes and references are on-purpose bad just so they can point at this post and complain about how it's all dumb Trump supporters here.
For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.
The talking heads (and social media) were reporting on the water main yes. Then the next day people started pointing out that no one called for any plumber for this, it turned into "there was a toilet overflowing". Giuliani got hold of the video of the arena when this happens, at that time, a couple of poll workers corral everyone to the door and have them leave, talk on the phone, then pull a batch of ballots that had been kept under a table earlier in the day and run those in the counting machines with no supervision from any poll watchers. The SoS said that there was a state observer present, but by his timeline he was only there one hour after the counting started.
The Federalist has a pretty good breakdown of what happened in Georgia.
I don't really care what the official excuses are after, when you create that big an appearance of impropriety, you have to go way above and beyond to clear it after. I've had the training to work elections in Canada and the whole thing was extremely clearly made to avoid every appearance of impropriety; No ballot box was ever to be opened without the observers present, you did not let it out of sight until the counting was done, no one was to be left alone with the ballots, you weren't to touch the ballots without being sure the other parties' observers' see exactly everything you were doing.
Ultimately, the most compelling evidence against is that the people who investigated this and claimed there was nothing weird or fraudulent, the Governor and Secretary of State, are Republicans, but that's flimsy considering how many Republican politicians would have gladly defected on Trump if they thought they could get away with it (if they thought they would be giving the killing blow to Trump's political career), just so they could get back to business-as-usual.
Whenever I hear people say that lawsuits couldn't find proof of fraud, the problem is that finding proof of fraud is almost impossible. But there is a lot of proof that the local election officials made deliberate efforts in multiple states to make sure that it would be impossible to catch fraud; which is as damning as finding the actual fraud and the public realizes that. If someone is seen going into a room holding a knife, methodically turns off the security cameras on their way in and then the next day someone else is found stabbed in that room, people know what likely happened. But that does not reach the point at which a judge feels comfortable overturning official results.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
The american equivalent would probably be a "Smart Alec" or "Smart Aleck"
With a "living" IP, I would agree, but I think the main problem with LOTR is that its core fans consider it to be "dead" IP. JRR Tolkien was the writer, and outside of reorganizing and cleaning up his notes and drafts for publishing, fans don't (well, I don't, and I assume most others are like me) think anyone is allowed to fill more than the the tiniest gaps in JRR Tolkien's writing. LOTR was verbose enough that the gaps that were filled by the movies were small enough to not feel insulting. The Hobbit could have been a nice single movie with very little filling in required, but they HAD to stretch it to 3 movies and so HAD to stretch the gaps and fill them in, which fans hated. But the material Rings of Power is adapting is a couple of pages written at the zoom level of a history textbook. Making anything substantial out of it, let alone tens of hours of television, requires filling in a lot. Especially if you consider the studio needs to bring in recognizable characters from the movies to keep interested those who didn't read Tolkien but liked the movies.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Our defence procurement is addicted to buying only the most expensive technologies in tiny numbers and then modifying or changing requirements to cause even longer delays before they enter service.
Yeah, though I would argue subs is the one asset where it makes sense to put a lot into a few examples of expensive technology, especially if we're talking nuclear submarines. This is because once a nuclear submarine leaves port, it could be almost anywhere. Its potential is felt by your enemies even in its absence, because they cannot confirm its absence. So one nuclear submarine on patrol has the psychological and deterrent impact of many submarines.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Here in germany, we call the kind of person who can't help but point out wrong statements no matter the relevance nor the unwiseness of antagonizing the talker "Besserwisser" (literally "betterknower"). Both me and my wife are like that, which can make family life sometimes difficult.
In France this is a Monsieur Je-Sais-Tout, here in Quebec we call a Ti-Joe Connaissant.
Also, in most regions, the alleged "natives" had displaced, up to and including full genocide, a different group that lived there before. The entire concept is just ridiculous.
To begin with, is there specific date at which we should start feeling bad about history happening the way history always has? I can buy arguments for "within living memory" but that's not what's being applied here.
I think his main issue is the interview format in general. He's good at rallies because he controls the entire conversation there. He's also good at one-on-one discussion because he'll just overwhelm the person and schmooze them and it usually works very well. But when talking to one person for the benefit of an audience, neither of these work. If he schmoozes the interviewer that does nothing for the audience and if he takes control of the discussion then it looks like he's evading questions. Simply having a conversation on another person's terms, or at least as equals, seems very difficult to him. I can't stand hearing him in interviews.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Perhaps, but the Simpsons started not too long after the lowest point of nuclear's public image (Chernobyl), so it's likely the only direction it could take was up from there, and I would think it possible that support for nuclear should have risen higher and faster if it was not for The Simpsons.
The feminist example was one brought up by my wife: women who earn celebrity exploiting themselves in ways that they later write oh-so-thoughtful-thinkpieces with all the right feminist verbiage self-victimizing and finding all the ways that the thing they made money off of was horrible; conveniently right around the time when they can’t exploit their ill-gotten hotness anymore.
I wouldn't need to go that far, to me the obvious one is the Hollywood Me Too movement. It was a masterful effort to frame the situation in a way that was maximally charitable to the women. What from one side looks like "actresses being forced to have sex with sleazy producers in order to not be blacklisted from the industry" looks a lot like "actresses getting roles by sleeping with producers" if you look at it from the perspective of a struggling would-be actress who maintained her integrity and rejected sleazy producers. Sure, I imagine most of them didn't go proposing sex to these producers to get jobs, but they didn't walk away in disgust (until the Me Too movement); Hollywood needs actresses in movies, if all of them refused to sleep with sleazy producers, actresses would still be hired and movies would still be made. People who stayed in that industry and put up with sex pests because they were "afraid" of losing paychecks higher than the average person has to retire get very little sympathy from me.
Anyway, to your main point; like with Pascal's Wager I don't think there's any "meta level" you can hide insincerity from omniscience. Sincerity requires your whole mind and soul to be behind it. You can't plan when you'll sincerely convert because if you only convert because of your plan then it's not sincere. If there is no real regret for your past, if you look at it fondly like it was the good times and now you're just doing the upkeep to not pay any price for it, then you're not being sincere. The sincere convert truly regrets what he did, he hates what his sin did to his soul and dreads having to account for it after his death even after his conversion. Everyone else is not going to fool an omniscient god, they're just fooling themselves.
Something like Rings of Power was based on an IP in hibernation since 2003 on the film side. There was no fatigue. Yet they did the same diversity stuff.
Sorry, kind of hijacking your post to talk about LOTR.
It was in hibernation since 2014, if you consider The Hobbit part of the IP (and I would). I don't remember them doing the diversity stuff with that trilogy, and they did make money, despite making definitely lesser cultural artefacts than the LOTR movie trilogy and pissing off core fans. I could see them being worried about not being able to please the core fans no matter what they did with Rings of Power and so are trying to reach for new audiences and I wouldn't blame them.
Core LOTR fans (me included) would have gotten annoyed at any invention of the adaptation that's not from the books. Tolkien is hard to adapt, the 2000s movies were little miracles. The Hobbit could have been adapted properly, if it had been done BEFORE the LOTR, but then it was stuck and couldn't both please the studios and the fans because they couldn't possibly release something less hype-worthy than the previous trilogy, it had to at least match the spectacle of the LOTR, or exceed it. So they had to do the neat, short and sweet children's story great violence to turn it into something that was meant to feel like a step up from the LOTR. After that though, anything new would have to work off much less in-depth material than LOTR. Outside of a few short stories that don't really fit within the context of the existing material (and as such less interesting to adapt for producers that want to build on top of the popular IP they paid dearly for) the rest is written mostly like historical records than narrated fiction. That requires much more extrapolating to adapt.
For what it's worth, I've been watching RoP. It's not terribly woke the way it's been made out to be; it's got errr... multiracial fantasy races and girlboss warrior Galadriel, but other than that, it doesn't shove any woke messaging into its story. Its failings are more mundane. A paucity of likeable characters, not knowing what to do with some storylines. Season 2 just ended and it's remarkable how little happened in it compared to season 1, it felt like there's one story thread they wanted to advance and just juggled with all the others to keep them in place.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
And to be clear, the answer to pretty much all of these conundrums is the same, it's something everyone in politics knows, and everyone savvy outside of it knows, but that cannot be said out loud or else you create gigantic weak spot for your enemies to attack. It's that politics is in large part a competitive team sport and to get anywhere in it sometimes you just have to put being a team player ahead of personal beliefs, truth or your constituents. Of course the moment any politician admits it his opponents will jump at the chance to lie that they're different "Well, I would never put my party before my constituents!"
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Trump has forced his own side at large to confront similar conundrums.
This kind of thing is not a result of Trump being uniquely bad for the Republicans, it's a result of a partisan media using this tool, forcing to confront conundrums, in a single direction.
A fair media would at every opportunity, at least as often as they ask Republicans about the 2020 election, ask every Democrat how it's somehow acceptable that the sitting president be, at least for months, months during which the rest of the world keeps happening, as senile as the man everyone saw in Biden's last debate.
And that's just one example, you can find gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements for every politician, and if not you can find people they've endorsed or publically approved of that have such gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements that you can then put the politican's nose in. You can find far-left terrorists that are close friends of Obama, an honest to goodness Klan leader that Biden considers "a mentor", for the same Biden a record of voting against the progressive politics he now claims to espouse,etc... These are not liabilities for these people not because they have been satisfactorily answered, but because the mainstream media shield them from these questions instead of asking them. If they crop up in right-wing media, the mainstream media will rush to write excuses and rationalization (often as "fact-checks") for them.
Of course, Trump generates his fair share of those conundrums, but I don't see him as unique this way. The volume at which people are asked to defend them is a function not the amount or heaviness of these conundrums, but of who holds the microphone.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
With a partisan media on their opponent' side, Trump supporters believe that anyone they can get through a primary that isn't actually working mostly for the other side will be cast in a way that scares the hoes. Trump's affectations are protecting him, they're not liabilities. In MMORPG parlance, he's a tank; he's such a big juicy target that his opponents can't help but focus all their fire on him, but he's also uniquely good at shrugging it off.
If Trump wasn't their number 1 obsession, and Vance was the most important target they had, couch fucking insinuations would be some of the least vile things the media would be saying about him.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Yes, and Soviet human intelligence was the best there was. The west kept up by dominating in turn on signal intelligence.
Israel is dominating its opponents on both.
I mean just yesterday former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the head of Iranian counterintelligence was found in 2021 to be a Mossad double agent (alongside about 20 others in the unit). The head of counterintelligence! Pardon my swearing, but the one guy whose job it was to find spies was a fucking spy himself! Assuming it's true, and I don't see why it wouldn't be as it's massively shameful for Iranians to admit it, it's an absurd level of superiority and dominance Israel is showing. Israeli intelligence is so ahead of them that Iranians were unable to meaningfully vet that ONE guy at the top of the pyramid.
No, then you're just defending your allies.
In practice, modern geopolitics consider "targetted" missile strikes as below the threshold of declaring war. As are spy games, assassinations, sabotage and the arming of proxy militant groups or rebels.
As long as Iran stays under that threshold, retaliation from Israel is likely to stay under that threshold too. The danger zone though is that mass civilian causalties is above the treshold, and can happen accidentally (or parties can differ as to what qualifies), so as the rough play intensifies so does the risk of being dragged into something bigger.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
All the sources I find call it a ballistic missile strike
pigeonburger
8mo ago
What are the implications of this for further war? For nuclear action in the area? Other countries getting invovled?
From what I read the strike appears to have been largely ineffective? For possibly the largest ballistic missile attack in history to produce, as of now, zero causalties, it's a striking display of how utterly powerless Iran is comparatively. If I were Israel I'd just laugh and invite Iran to keep wasting its missiles this way.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
I hate any store with self-checkout that does not disable those scales. They seem to have been designed with the assumption that you will not ever want to reorganize the inside of your bag as you put stuff in it. I end up having to bother the attendant every 2 items.
Hi, time travelling me! Long time no see, 17 years I think?
So yeah, I was in the same situation, almost exactly. Well, not the psychiatry and therapy and medication; I had self-diagnosed myself with depression instead. I lived with my mother, flunked out of college twice (through not showing up), worked a minimum wage job. I was very afraid to tell my mother when I flunked out the second time. I don't know exactly why, but I'm pretty sure it's not ADHD. I just don't learn well in a classroom environment. It bores me, to litteral sleep. I learn almost exclusively through exploration and experimentation. I can certainly concentrate for long period of times when I'm learning that way.
So I went with your option 2 (except for the therapy, psychiatry and medication). Told my mother. Obviously she was angry and worried that there would be no doors open to me without a degree. I went searching for a job with what I had (high school diploma and unfinished college degrees). It took me a week. I managed to impress a recruiter in a test enough that she recommended me for a job as helpdesk for a major law firm. I was self-taught IT tech (tech runs in the family) and my first unfinished degree was in desktop publishing, which had trained me to use Microsoft Office to a very high level of proficiency. Turns out not too many people have the skillset to support legal secretaries in their work. A year later I moved out of my mother's place. My career was built from that job and the contacts I made there, I've never been without work since then. I'm now working for a consulting firm, selling my services to clients who need a senior sysadmin.
Anyway, I can't say for sure things will work out the same for you. Maybe I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time with the right skillset. I can't even say that not having a college degree made anything more difficult, I guess I'm probably never going to be considered for a job in government or education, but outside of that, it just isn't that much of a factor in IT once you have experience. But I guess what I can say is that as long as you have marketable skills, and can find a way to bypass HR filters (networking, going through recruiters, pitching yourself directly to the people you would be working under), college is not mandatory for a succesful professional life.
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