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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2238 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 8, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Throwback T-saturday*

I've developed a burgeoning, if still nascent, interest in the IRA. I was reminded of a post from ancient times. Mcjunker's quality contribution on The Ins and Outs of the Kilmichael Ambush where, a week after Bloody Sunday in 1920, the IRA hit the Brits with unprecedented lethality in an orchestrated ambush.

Maybe this topic or post isn't so much fun, but I figured one or more interested parties might not have had a chance to read a dusty old effort post. I felt like I rediscovered it, enjoyed reading with new old eyes, and thought to share.

  • If only this was some flavor of Tsar related it could be Tsar-turday. First one's free, folks.

If Tsar-bell doesn't ring and Tsar-cannon doesn't shoot, what doesn't Tsar-turd do?

Doesn't stink?

This brings to mind a What? Where? When? question that's much funnier than it has any right to be.

Одно иностранное слово ты знал
Везде, где возможно, его ты писал:
Забор ли, стена ли, ограда...
Но больше всего ты оставить мечтал...

(finish with a slightly modified literary quote for the last line).

Doesn't flush

There are some fun similarities between Cicero’s Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90bc), which is a treatise on rhetoric and memorization, and the Passion narrative in the gospels. Cicero explains how to craft the most memorable mental scene, one that can be recalled with fidelity in the future:

since in normal cases some images are strong and sharp and suitable for awakening recollection, and others so weak and feeble as hardly to succeed in stimulating memory, we must therefore consider the cause of these differences, so that, by knowing the cause, we may know which images to avoid and which to seek.

If we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.

All normal stuff. Now the examples he provides next:

A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset, are marvellous to no one because they occur daily.⁠ But solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom, and indeed are more marvellous than lunar eclipses, because these are more frequent

We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introdu­cing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.

These elements are all explicit in the Crucifixion:

  • the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)

  • the crown

  • the purple cloak

  • the disfigurement (“many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind”)

  • the blood (the beating, scourge, then crucifixion)

  • the comic effect: the irony of the actual king being mocked as a fake king

  • all the things which Cicero mentions earlier, combined (and the usual subject of sermon): base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable

The crown and robe are also brought into the narrative in a very peculiar way in John:

Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man”

The word behold here is ἰδοὺ, can be is translated as see!, or look!, remember! and similar interjections. Essentially a call to pay attention.

the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)

Please specify, which manuscripts of which texts?

In the early Greek manuscripts of Luke

τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος / tou heliou eklipontos— “the sun was eclipsed.”

https://www.textkit.com/t/luke-23-45-eclipse-or-darkening/15248/4

Footnote A here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023%3A45-47&version=NET

Luke 23:45 tc The wording “the sun’s light failed” is a translation of τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος/ ἐκλείποντος (tou hēliou eklipontos/ ekleipontos), a reading found in the earliest and best witnesses (among them P75 א B C*vid L 070 579 2542) as well as several ancient versions. The majority of mss (A C3 [D] W Θ Ψ ƒ1,13 M lat sy) have the flatter, less dramatic term, “the sun was darkened” (ἐσκοτίσθη, eskotisthe), a reading that avoids the problem of implying an eclipse (see sn below). This alternative thus looks secondary because it is a more common word and less likely to be misunderstood as referring to a solar eclipse. That it appears in later witnesses rather than the earliest ones adds confirmatory testimony to its inauthentic character.sn This imagery has parallels to the Day of the Lord: Joel 2:10; Amos 8:9; Zeph 1:15. Some students of the NT see in Luke’s statement the sun’s light failed (eklipontos) an obvious blunder in his otherwise meticulous historical accuracy. The reason for claiming such an error on the author’s part is due to an understanding of the verb as indicating a solar eclipse when such would be an astronomical impossibility during a full moon. There are generally two ways to resolve this difficulty: (a) adopt a different reading (“the sun was darkened”) that smoothes over the problem (discussed in the tc problem above), or (b) understand the verb eklipontos in a general way (such as “the sun’s light failed”) rather than as a technical term, “the sun was eclipsed.” The problem with the first solution is that it is too convenient, for the Christian scribes who, over the centuries, copied Luke’s Gospel would have thought the same thing. That is, they too would have sensed a problem in the wording and felt that some earlier scribe had incorrectly written down what Luke penned. The fact that the reading “was darkened” shows up in the later and generally inferior witnesses does not bolster one’s confidence that this is the right solution. But second solution, if taken to its logical conclusion, proves too much for it would nullify the argument against the first solution: If the term did not refer to an eclipse, then why would scribes feel compelled to change it to a more general term? The solution to the problem is that ekleipo did in fact sometimes refer to an eclipse, but it did not always do so. (BDAG 306 s.v. ἐκλείπω notes that the verb is used in Hellenistic Greek “Of the sun cease to shine.” In MM it is argued that “it seems more than doubtful that in Lk 2345 any reference is intended to an eclipse. To find such a reference is to involve the Evangelist in a needless blunder, as an eclipse is impossible at full moon, and to run counter to his general usage of the verb = ‘fail’…” [p. 195]. They enlist Luke 16:9; 22:32; and Heb 1:12 for the general meaning “fail,” and further cite several contemporaneous examples from papyri of this meaning [195-96]) Thus, the very fact that the verb can refer to an eclipse would be a sufficient basis for later scribes altering the text out of pious motives; conversely, the very fact that the verb does not always refer to an eclipse and, in fact, does not normally do so, is enough of a basis to exonerate Luke of wholly uncharacteristic carelessness

But in the above, it seems to me copium to interpret that word as other than a real eclipse in the context. The natural reading is that it was an eclipse, which is why Origen went so far as to say enemies of the church inserted the word in to scandalize the church among the intelligent

A sort of problem is that the “marred more than any man” bit isn’t in the gospels, it comes from Isaiah 53. And if you’re dealing with a person who was crucified, the beating and the crucifixion would be part of the story whether or not you’re trying to create a memorable scene. Just like the ending of Hamilton being played for drama, this doesn’t change the fact that the historical Hamilton actually died in a pistols at dawn duel with Aaron Burr.

I’m not going to suggest that the prose of the text wasn’t written to highlight certain parts of the story to appeal to people reading the story. But I think the claims of skeptics that the story must not be true because it matches a rhetorical style is a bit too far. The story was told in a way that appeals to Romans of the first century.

I’m not necessarily pointing to invention here, though the similarities are pretty shocking. Re: the line from Isaiah, that’s true, but the second half of Isaiah is sometimes referred to as the “fifth gospel” because of its prophecy of the Messiah (according to the theology). In any case, it is still hundreds of years older than Ad Herennium.

But Ad Herennium was the most important book on rhetoric in the Middle Ages, which likely means it was esteemed around Christ’s time. So it’s not impossible that the authors used the go-to manual on rhetoric to emphasize certain aspects of the event. I suppose a more literalist reader can just as well say, “of course God would author the real events in line with the best rhetoric and memory advice; the only new info here is that Cicero had some Godly wisdom about rhetoric”.

I’m not demanding a literalist view of the Bible, in fact it’s a naive reading. But I don’t really think it’s a problem to suggest that certain events were highlighted or downplayed by the author to be more memorable and appealing to the audience they were writing for. It’s a narrative story, and any story humans tell will highlight and downplay elements to make the story appealing or to make heroes look better or villains look worse. I don’t find the early church reading the Bible with the kind of literalism that modern evangelical fundamentalists use in interpreting the text. Not that they don’t believe the Bible and the stories in the Bible are true, but that they are not literalists insisting that everything described is absolutely meant to be literal.

As bars go, I had previously found this one by serendipity, it's next to a barber's, and close to my bus stop. I've grabbed a pint there once before, and was inclined to make it a regular feature because the drinks were cheap and the music decent. The last time I was here, I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman with severe OCD, and we bought each other a round. Everything else about it seemed bog standard.

Today, I flew into Edinburgh, and caught a very long and stupidly expensive bus back home (it cost as much as two-thirds of a EDI-to-London flight) and decided I might as well grab another drink. I walked in: business as usual, but the bartender was new and exceedingly tall for a woman. Or perhaps the back of the bar was elevated, I've seen that before.

Then two gents, one of them in a wife beater showing off a whole bunch of tattoos, went up to the counter next to me. His buddy draped himself over his shoulder, and asked, in a very lispy voice, why his darling wouldn't dance with him tonight.

A rainbow flag the size of a mainsail hung above me. I had somehow missed it on every prior visit, which suggests either a) I'm catastrophically unobservant, or b) the flag has grown, like a well-watered plant, since my last appearance.

A person I had classified at a distance as “cute girl absorbed in phone” spoke to the bartender, and the timbre recategorized them instantly.

I might very well be the only heterosexual person here, on a Saturday night. Oh well, I might not swing that way, but the drinks are still cheap and the music the kind of Valley Girl pop that I find mildly nostalgic these days. I've frequented worse. I genuinely don't mind the decor, and now I'm pretty confident they must make killer cocktails.

After writing the above, I took a proper look around. There are more Pride flags than bottles of booze. I might be going blind in my old age, or the two hours of sleep in as many days is catching up with me. My bed beckons, but so does the cheap booze.

I might very well be the only heterosexual person here, on a Saturday night.

Hey you got pretty lucky! From what I hear the average gay bar is mostly filled with straight cis women nowadays, and I’ve even seen middle aged women and their (perfectly straight looking) husbands at drag nights.

It seems that there's an intentional scheme to mitigate this in my parts, you can see my followup post in the CWR thread for more.

How's the health and safety compliance look?

I saw a viral tweet this week of white guys doing roofing work, and I couldn't get the glaring OSHA violations out of my mind.

Of course, the dirty little secret is that basically no roofing company is compliant, but these guys aren't even trying.

The roofing guys are insane, I've seen a roofer dismantle and rebuild a wooden rooftop freehand just balancing on a wall walking around with NO harness or anything, they seemed to just not care.

Framers do the same thing setting trusses, when nobody's looking -- it's pretty safe actually, and when you think about it there's not really a useful place to anchor a harness at this stage of construction.

My dad used to tell me that when he worked as a roofer, he was told "If you fall, you're fired before you hit the ground."

When I worked with him, it wasn't roofing, but we occasionally had to go up on high places, and the things he would do absolutely horrified my acrophobic ass. I'm talking ladder propped up on top of a ladder on top of a slanted second story roof. Zero safety precautions.

I don't see any exposed flame near the flag. That's the only potential issue, if the queens don't stop grinding on each other.

Holy fucking shit

Right as I write, one of them mentions that the fluorescent lights are heating up the drinks to unpleasant levels. Time to call the fire department, or the police, due to impersonation of Royalty.

I was complaining vociferously about my experience with Ryanair last week. I remain convinced that if Ryan was an Airbnb host, he'd meter the usage of TP rolls, and put surge charging in place after serving you coffee (paid for from a vending machine).

I wasn't willing to make the same mistake twice, so I decided to opt for EasyJet. When I'd been going through the miserable queuing process at EDI, I could tell that their end seemed much nicer - almost as many staff as passengers, and the passengers didn't seem ready to die.

I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed. By providing basic competence, they've left Ryanair in the dirt. Their website correctly identified that I was under no legal or regulatory obligation to present visa documents or get things stamped while flying domestic. The very fruity gentleman watching over the queues was quick to inform me that since I had completed online check-in, had my boarding pass, and wasn't burdened with check-in luggage - I could just head through security.

Everything else was perfectly serviceable. The plane was actually next to the terminal: a brisk walk, no buses cosplaying the Black Hole of Calcutta. The furnishing on the actual craft was spartan, but didn't make you feel like you needed wet wipes before taking a seat.

Even the disembarkation was oddly pleasant. As we landed in a torrential downpour, a flight attendant, who shared a certain demographic profile with the man from the check-in queue, announced over the PA that he hoped we would enjoy the beautiful weather here in “Paris”. It was a small, pointless, and therefore delightful injection of whimsy into the gray proceedings. I think it even worked. The rain stopped, and moments later I was helping a cluster of elderly French tourists who had upended their luggage trolley, a task which I found myself performing with genuine good cheer.

10/10 experience, will fly again. Ryanair won't be getting any more of my money as long as I have a choice in the matter. EasyJet lives up to its name, Ryanair buries the bar beneath the floor and charges you the burial fee.

We're planning a trip to Greece. Where should we go beside the obvious Parthenon / famous sites / etc?

If you're fond of history, the Georgios Averof basically soloed the Turkish fleet during the Balkan War right before WWI, and is now a floating museum in Athens.

You know, if you happen to be staying over/on a weekend, I could probably nip by from the UK and say hi. It's not a very long flight, and I wanted to see a bit of Greece myself.

What's your itinerary?

Patmos is off the beaten path, accessible by ferry, and for me at least had some religious significance. The small shrine of St John is pretty touristy, or seemed so 35 years ago. Of course I'm not sure how the recent fires have affected the island.

When you see some genuinely unimpressive ancient ruins, possibly Sparta itself, read this text from Thucydides:

For I suppose if Lacedaemon [Sparta] were to become desolate, and the temples and the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak of their numerous allies without. Still, as the city is neither built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is.

Who all is going? Would the group have more fun at a museum, restaurant, beach, boat, walking in a city, hiking?

Absolutely recommend Meteora.

what's there?

Bunch of Monasteries carved into tall solitary cliffs. It's one of the most incredible visual spectacles in the world.

Not a lot, but google image search it and you'll see why.

Unexpected follow-up to my 2023 post:

As you probably know if you are an American, under the MUTCD (Manual of Uniform Traffic-Control Devices), generally speaking:

  • The longitudinal lines that separate lanes traveling in the same direction are white. (§ 3B.06 ¶ 01)

  • A double solid white line indicates that crossing the line is prohibited. (¶ 12)

  • A single solid white line indicates that crossing the line is discouraged. (¶ 06)

  • A broken (dashed) white line (12-foot segments separated by 36-foot gaps) indicates that crossing the line is not discouraged or prohibited. (¶ 05)

  • A dotted white line (3-foot segments separated by 9-foot gaps) separates a through lane from an auxiliary lane that will diverge or end soon. One might say it indicates that crossing the line is encouraged, so that you don't accidentally get stuck in an auxiliary lane when you want to be in a through lane (or vice versa). (§ 3B.07)

The dotted line was not made mandatory until the 2009 edition of the MUTCD, so roadway authorities still are in the process of updating existing stripes. The project that I described in my 2023 post included a large interchange, in which I changed quite a few existing stripes from broken to dotted. After the project passed out of my hands and into the hands of the bigwigs and the Construction people, I largely forgot about it. We had to draw up a several-sheet addendum, because the pavement recommendation had expired and the updated version was significantly different; we had to draw up a one-sheet change of plan, because the Structures people accidentally told us to pave over a bridge that shouldn't be paved over; and the project's resident engineer had some questions regarding (1) utility coordination and (2) whether a bunch of cooking oil that had leaked from a restaurant's dumpster into the roadway would negatively affect the pavement treatment's adhesion to the existing surface. But that was it.

Fast-forward to this week. The project presumably was completed a while ago, though I don't recall specifically when. The project area is quite close to my office, but I never had any reason to drive through it since completion—until today, purely by chance. As I drive, I think to myself: "Hey, where are all the dotted lines that I drew on the plans?"

  • The resident engineer is supposed to ensure that the contractor adheres to the plans. But apparently he dropped the ball here.

  • After "substantial completion", the resident engineer is supposed to call the designer out for a field visit so that the designer can approve the work for "final completion" or point out any problems that need to be fixed before it can be approved. But the resident engineer never did that, either.

It presumably is way too late for this error to be fixed, so I don't know whether my boss will bother to explain the situation to the resident engineer's boss. But at least it isn't my fault.

As you probably know if you are an American

This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2501/

I don't think it's presumptuous to assume that most Americans understand what road markings mean. (Insert joke about the drivers in your least-favorite state.)

My state's driver manual:

  • Explicitly mentions double solid white lines and broken white lines.

  • Doesn't mention single solid white lines (outside of the separate context of shoulders—MUTCD § 3B.09), but they're pretty rare, outside of (1) construction zones, where they typically are accompanied by "stay in lane" signs anyway, and (2) intersection approaches, where changing lanes is forbidden under state law, as mentioned in a different part of the driver manual.

  • Doesn't mention dotted white lines, but IMO an attentive motorist (or new motorist and former passenger) should have noticed the growing prevalence of these lines over the past decade.

I agree with you, although I've never seen double white lines and thought any solid line was "do not cross". Still, I know that white lines separate traffic going the same way and yellow lines separate traffic going the opposite way, and the significance of dashed versus dotted lines.

I don't know if I've ever seen double white lines outside of an airport runway.

I recently just went on an 11.5 hour road trip.

The only time I can recall seeing them is on the tolled express lane of I-85 in Georgia.

@self_made_human, it's been a couple of weeks since we had that AI discussion and you agreed to run a couple trials for me. I apologize for not getting to it sooner, but I had some big idea that I was going to find representative examples for each category and see how well it did, and update the algorithm to be more precise with regard to how I actually do it manually, but I of course didn't have the time to spend and it fell by the wayside. So I'll just throw out two releases to get you started for now, for which the suboptimal algorithm is irrelevant:

  • The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love

  • Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat

I'll try to post some more that present different challenges to see how the model handles them, but these two highlight something that the free models of ChatGTP seemed to struggle with.

To make things easier, these are both American releases. So you don't have to look back, here are the instructions:

For major label albums released circa 1991 or later, an official street date should be available. This gets first priority. If a release date is provided by a reputable source such as RateYourMusic, Wikipedia, or 45Cat, use that date, giving 45Cat priority. If a reputable source only provides a month of release, use that as a guideline for further research, subject to change if the weight of the evidence suggests that this is incorrect. If any other source purports a specific release date, use that date, provided it does not conflict with information provided in reputable sources. Other sources include other websites, Google search results, and message board comments. For US releases from 1978 to the present, use the date of publication from the US Copyright Office website if available. For US releases from 1972 to 1978, use the date of publication from the US Copyright physical indexes, images of which are available on archive.org, if available. For releases prior to 1972 or are otherwise unavailable from the above sources, determine the "usual day of release" of the record label, that being the day of the week that the majority of the issues with known release dates were released. Be aware that this can change over time. If no information is available regarding the usual day of release, default to Monday. If ARSA chart data for the release is available, assign the release date to the usual day of release immediately prior to the date of the chart. (ARSA is a website that compiles local charts from individual radio stations). If ARSA chart data is unavailable, assign the release date to the usual day of release the week prior to the date when the release was reviewed by Billboard, first appeared in a chart, or was advertised in Billboard. If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date (ARSA will almost always be earlier unless there was a substantial delay between release and initial charting). If neither ARSA nor Billboard data is available, use a similar system with any other trade publication. If no trade publication or chart data is available, determine the order of release based on catalog number. Assume that the items are released sequentially and are evenly spaced. Use known release dates (or release months) to calculate a reasonable date of release based on available information, including year of release (if known), month of release (if known) and usual day of release. If none of the above can be determined, make a reasonable estimate based on known information.

The following caveats also apply:

For non-US releases, domestic releases often trailed their foreign counterparts by several months. Any data derived from US sources must take this into account when determining if the proposed estimate is reasonable.

If the date of recording is known, any estimated release date must take into consideration a reasonable amount of time between recording and release based on what was typical of the era. For independent releases, dates of release from Bandcamp may be used provided they don't conflict with known information (i.e. sometimes Bandcamp release dates will use the date of upload, or the date of a CD reissue).

It didn't take me very long, since my first attempt at using o3 seemed to produce good results. I'm sharing the full conversation below, and it seems to be reasonable to me? You're the expert here, so you should be able to tell if o3 has mucked up.

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6896665a38088191a35a94848d57c05d

To summarize:

o3 claims that:

The Turtles – “Grim Reaper of Love” (White Whale WW-231)

45Cat lists May 1966 for the U.S. single.

Billboard ran a Spotlight Singles review in the 28 May 1966 issue. Per your rule, with month known and no label weekday documented, assign the Monday of the prior week: Mon 23 May 1966. ARSA has it on the 10 Jun 1966 WLS survey, which fits late-May release then early-June airplay.

For the other release:

Cash Box 5 Jul 1980 shows the LP as the No. 1 Most Added at AOR, which implies servicing that week. Your rule puts street on the usual label day in the week immediately prior. I assign Monday, 14 Jul 1980. Calendar check confirms Monday.

It is worth noting that o3 ran into some operational difficulties. It desperately wanted to try and paste search parameters into a search engine on a site, but the interface I'm using doesn't allow it to. There is, in fact, a product called Agent by OpenAI that can control a mouse and keyboard, and which could plausibly do that.

o3, per the messages, is now asking me to go ahead and look up the song on the site if suggests, and is happy to examine the results.

I also ran something known as Deep Research, also by OpenAI in the background.

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6896678a10508191b7076b3377144bec

To summarize, this ends up with a release date of Monday, June 6, 1966 for GRoL. For FTH, it claims that "reasonable estimate is June 30, 1980 as the official release date"

I also tried Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4.0 Sonnet (the latter is good, but not the best).

Gemini:

Here are the release dates for the requested titles, based on the provided instructions:

The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love

The release date for The Turtles' single "Grim Reaper of Love" is determined to be Monday, June 13, 1966. The song was released on the White Whale record label in May of 1966. It first entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Saturday, June 18, 1966. Following the provided guidelines, in the absence of a specified release day for the label, a Monday release is the default. Therefore, the release date is assigned as the Monday of the week the single entered the chart.

Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat

The release date for the Henry Paul Band's album Feel the Heat is estimated to be in mid-1980. The album was released in 1980 on Atlantic Records. The single "Longshot" from the album charted on the Billboard Bubbling Under The Hot 100 in 1980. Another major Atlantic release from 1980, AC/DC's Back in Black, was released on a Friday. Without a more specific charting date for "Longshot" or a Billboard review of the album, and without access to a comprehensive Atlantic Records release schedule for that year, a more precise date cannot be determined from the available information.

Claude seems to have struggled the most:

For GRoL

Current Best Estimate: Without access to the specific Billboard chart entry date or copyright records, and knowing only "May 1966" from reputable sources, I would default to Monday (per your rules) in May 1966. Given that it was their fourth single and became a chart failure, it likely entered charts in late May or early June 1966, suggesting a release date around Monday, May 23, 1966 or Monday, May 30, 1966.

For FTH:

The search results confirm it's an Atlantic Records release from 1980, but specific dating information wasn't retrieved in the available searches.

I personally checked one of the PDFs o3 found, and it seemed to support its claim. Let me know if any links are broken in the share chat, or if you'd like me to try something else (such as manually search and share results with o3)

So these are some curious results, and mirror the issues I was having with the models I tried. For Grim Reaper of Love, it does correctly not that 45Cat lists a May 1966 release date (which every model was able to do), and also correctly notes the May 28 Billboard review, which it was the only model to actually find, since most of the others just defaulted to the first date charted. The curious issue is with the ARSA data. It did indeed appear on the WLS June 10 chart. However, this was not the earliest chart it appeared on. That would be the May 9 KBLA chart, and the prior Monday would be May 2. The even more curious thing about it is that the single appeared in 35 charts documented by ARSA prior to the June 10 WLS chart, so I don't know why it would have picked that one. This is, I guess, somewhat of an improvement; the only other model I tried that even claimed to use ARSA data was Grok, and it simply made up entries that didn't exist! The most interesting thing about this, though, is that it didn't actually follow the instructions. Maybe I could have been a little more clear, but the instructions said:

If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date

Maybe I should have specified that I wanted the earliest date, which would have been the date of the May 28 review, making the correct date based on the data the model actually used to be May 23, 1966. Then again, I thought I specified early that the month of release given by 45Cat and RYM should take priority, so even if this wasn't clear, it should have preferred the May date. In any event, it didn't get the correct ARSA date, so this counts as a fail.

Moving on to Feel the Heat, US Copyright data gives a publication date of June 16, 1980. Maybe this was the search engine it was trying to use, but it nonetheless didn't use it. I give it props for using Cash Box, which I don't even use that much because the available data is fragmentary and not easily searchable (or at least it was when I started doing this a decade ago), and it does point to the correct issue. However, it runs into the same problem of following instructions when it was told to use the date preceding publication but inexplicably picks a date after the date of the issue. Honestly, there must be something up with the pro model, because the free ones I tried didn't seem to have any problem following instructions, and at least gave plausible dates based on the information they had. Here I get two dates that are not only incorrect, but don't actually follow the rule. I had high hopes for this but at this point I can only consider it a failure. If you're interested in running this further, I can try to make the rules a little more explicit and find some other releases to test how it can do different things, but suffice it to say my opinions of AI capabilities haven't appreciably improved.

Thank you for taking the time to look into it yourself! All I did was copy and paste your prompt and egg the model on. It might be interesting to try the Agent mode, either on this prompt or a new one. I do have access, and I can try it when I get the chance.

What is it gonna take for you play underwater hockey?

I need help getting new recruits and keeping them around.

and keeping them around.

I think that's the issue. You will have a hard time recruiting when they know you intend to keep them underwater.

You joke, but the underwater rugby team is much more successful at recruiting and in that sport you can hold people underwater.

For keeping me around? Same as most other team sports: charismatic coach, fun team mates, good built in social scene. Do you regularly go out for drinks/dinner after practice? Are your team mates... normal? I stopped kickboxing and BJJ because those attract a type of guys I can't hang with, in large numbers.

For starting? Convince me this is either more fun or a better workout than football/basketball/handball. Since I like the look of the classic swimmer physique, I'm already predisposed to believing the workout angle. Maybe stand next to your most broad-shouldered-and-slim-waisted team mate while recruiting.

Also, how's the learning curve? Am I going to be useless for the first year? That's no fun, I'd rather run after a ball if that's the case.

Going out after practice is difficult, but I try to make it happen. The main options are Hooters or Denny's.

My own charisma as a coach is hard to judge. People thank me for the coaching and give me compliments, but that could just be politeness.

The people that play are often eclectic. Usually smart people, it's an interesting team sport because you can't easily communicate underwater, but it's absolutely essential that you help your teammates.

Being in shape and able to swim well helps a lot. If you can't do those things but keep playing you will become a good swimmer and at least a little in shape. I've seen and coached people up from 'cant reach the bottom of a 7foot pool with flippers' to 'can swim most of the pool length underwater on the bottom'.

There are three different learning curves for the sport:

  1. Fitness and water agility. Being an athlete and good swimmer helps this, but coming out to practice consistently also helps
  2. Positioning and team play. Being in the right spot for passes or stealing the puck from others. People that have played other team sports like basketball, or soccer pick up on this stuff better. But just being smart helps a lot.
  3. Stick/puck handling. It's possible to do drills and rush to get much better at this. It is very satisfying when you have these skills. They are the least important of the skills though. You can be pretty bad at these and still be a great player. If you are good at these skills you can be a lazier player. They allow you to maximize the benefits of the other two skills.

With a new player I teach them these things:

  1. How to get down to the bottom easily
  2. Pushing the puck along in a straight line
  3. Turning around with the puck
  4. A simple push pass.

There are usually a few things to correct with each of those. If someone can get to the bottom easily the other items are pretty simple to teach.

We are short on players so just last week we had a brand new player being legitimately useful and scoring a goal against people that were trying to stop him. He is somewhat of an exception. Almost like a track star that played soccer for the first time in a rec league and just ran past everyone even while they sucked at dribbling.

A good athlete or swimmer can be ok at the sport within a few practices. They can be good at it in a year. A person could find the sport their freshman year of college and be selected for an international U23 team by their senior year. That is not an outlandish tale, that is one of the guys I play with.

The learning curves are there. It can take time to get good at the sport. As much time as it takes to get good at any sport, and in some cases less time, because there is less competition. But no one has ever heard of the sport or played it. Meanwhile everyone learns other sports in elementary school. Where they can get the boring basic stuff out of the way. By the time they get to highschool they can choose to play on a team where everyone has a minimal level of good fitness, understanding of the sport, and a basic to intermediate level of experience in the specialized skills of that sport.

Er, where are you located? That sounds just ridiculous enough to interest me.

Northern Virginia, USA.

But the sport is international. Best place to be is New Zealand, where its a high school sport. Best place to be in US is Lake Tahoe where Elon Musks' billionaire cousin is building a super team and paying people to live and play there. That last part might sound like a joke, it's not.

I think I binged Twin Peaks maybe 3 or 4 years ago when it was on Netflix? Then rented Fire Walk With Me on Amazon, and purchased the bluray for The Return.

You really feel the gap where Lynch wasn't involved in season 2, but when he comes back he absolutely fills the show with a presence you couldn't put your finger on, but could feel the absence of. Then The Return cranks that quality up to 11 and is a massive impressionistic mind fuck.

I've seen analysis that try to distill was Twin Peaks, and especially The Return, are "really" about. And then I've seen the rebuttal where you need to shut the fuck up and let the feelings and impressions the show creates wash over you. Don't try to reason what it's about, intuit it.

I really should watch Twin Peaks again, it's probably one of my favorite shows of all time that I felt I got the most out of. And you're right, it's spiritual message is very much looking into the darkness of the world and choosing love anyways.

Sorry if I disappoint you but I don't have all that much to say about the particular experience of me as a meditator watching Lynch.

I liked Twin Peaks a lot though. Haven't watched it post-insights, it's a long time ago, but I remember being both deeply touched, and amused. He does seem to get the attentive viewer into a subtler form of mind and emotion space, I guess?

I found the movie Inland Empire pretty fascinating. It seems to get you into what it would really be like to be inside the experience of the traumatized person. Not sure how to describe how he does it, but I vaguely remember that no other movie did it quite like that one did.

Oh man, Inland Empire was something else! I've seen it described (I think) as a journey straight through the subconscious, and it's a good analogy. Like a series of dreams, it meanders through its scenes, some seemingly furthering previous scenes, others jarringly discordant on the surface, but regardless of the relationship of each scene to the next, there's a constant symbolic undercurrent that propels the movie forward. I can see why it's not for everyone, given that I felt it was a little too long (which, tbf, may have been because I was watching it as part of a larger David Lynch retrospective) but it was still quite an experience. If I happen to find another screening of it at some point in the future, there's a good chance I'll catch it again, as I will with most of his work.

A bit ago I finally pulled a box off my shelf of shame and played Hands in the Sea, a game about the first punic war. I kickstarted it forever ago, then kickstarted the second edition upgrade kit, then I moved, then I lost touch with the friends I usually played those sorts of games with. I marked this game as received on Kickstarter in October of 2016, and it finally hit my table July of 2025. Jeeze.

I originally took an interest in the game because a respected wargame youtuber, I think Judd Vance, was going around saying it was one of the best games he'd ever played during playtesting with the designer. It takes the deck building system from A Few Acres of Snow, widely but perhaps unfairly panned for having an unfixable OP strategy, and fixes that as well as improving on it in nearly every way. I never played A Few Acres of Snow on account of it's poor reputation, so I can't attest to that personally. However, I did greatly enjoy it.

If you've played a deck building game, the central mechanic might not be alien to you. You have a starting deck of cards, you draw five, and you get to take two actions. Where it gets wargamey is that the actions are all printed on a player aid, there are about a dozen of them, you can pick any action you want, and the cards mostly provide resources to accomplish them. Broadly there are two types of cards also, territories which you either start with or conquer, and then also personnel like legions, commanders, traders, etc. I won't bore you with a detailed rules breakdown, but generally you'll be conquering territory, trying to fuck up each others lines of supply through naval fuckery, and racing towards a set of military and economic victory conditions.

I played the game with my brother who is back in state. It went well, and I couldn't help notice how differently we try to learn a game. He wanted to try each different action and learn how it worked. I just learned a subset of them that I thought would make a good strategy, and clobbered him. He kept trying, and failing, to ask AI rule questions, I looked them up on BoardGameGeek. That said, it probably would have been a close game if the random events didn't hand me several absolute coups.

Yes there are random events. You roll a dice to see which player they effect, and some are weighted more towards Carthage or more towards Rome. Unfortunately this provided no assistance, and my brother playing Carthage just got absolutely hammered. The first few random events cost me some money and cards. Then for the rest of the game my brother ate shit. He lost his entire fleet to a storm, losing his singular advantage over me that he was really beginning to punish me with. Then he lost a heavily fortified town that was holding the line in Sicily to a rebellion. A town I quickly scooped up before he could react.

He tried to pull his game out of the tailspin it was in. But curiously enough, the game's length is determined by how many times Carthage goes through their deck. So the more he tried to optimize his deck to combat my strategy, the quicker he was running out of time to execute, as the game can only go 12 turns. Also, I was scoring way more points than him during the scoring phase of each turn, which was pushing me faster and faster to an absolute victory. In a way, it was a mercy killing the way that accelerated his loss.

So, all in all, I really enjoyed the experience. But I did win a crushing victory, so of course I would.

Well, that was fast.

I got a second game of Hands in the Sea in last night! We switched sides with me playing Carthage. I came out the gate swinging, cut off Roman supply out of Italy using my starting fleet of warships, recruited some cavalry to raze their colonies while I had them bottled up, and just generally kept the pressure on while I leisurely expanded. Won in 4 turns with an automatic victory based on being more than 25 VPs ahead during the scoring phase of a turn.

Rome's biggest problem was with supply being cut off, they could start a battle with Syracuse (which is a vital supply point in Sicily), but they couldn't reinforce the battle to win it which requires supply lines, until they disrupted my naval blockade. They wouldn't need to destroy my fleet, they'd only need to build at least one warship, and then contest control of the blockade. That's enough to re-establish supply for reinforcing a land battle. After they take Syracuse, they'd have a local supply point on Sicily and could have ground me down with their legions. Unfortunately, Rome was caught flat footed by the dire consequences of being out of supply, and instead of building a fleet and contesting control of the waters, spent time recruiting legions they couldn't send, and pursuing deck optimizations that lacked actual bite in the conflict. There was an attempt to finally break my blockade, and it bought Rome a single turn of supply in Sicily. But it was insufficient, and I sank their fleet in short order. By the end of the game Rome was drawing their entire deck into their hand every turn... without having valid or meaningful actions they could use all those cards on. Alas.

We're already planning another rematch, where I will probably take Rome again and need to resist the strategy I just absolutely dominated with. Wish me luck.

Saw The Lychee Road last night and enjoyed it a lot. The ending drags a tad but it's a solid bureaucracy thriller and I'd give it an 8 or so

Why do you think it has relatively low scores on IMDb etc?

Like 3 reviews one of which is very random

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - I'm Gonna Booglarize You, Baby (1972)

During their 1972 European Tour, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band appeared on the German TV show Beat Club. This song is quite the performance, even by Captain Beefheart standards. Some of the other tracks took multiple takes for various reasons, but they nailed this one. It sounds like chaos until the 3 guitarists and the drummer hit the groove. I would make some of Beefheart's vocalizations my text notification on my phone if I were more tech-inclined.

I was surprised by someone I work with occasionally who I know only by their very ambiguous first name. For years I had assumed they were some kind of Southeast Asian in terms of descent, they could have been Indonesian or something. They have a half English, half American accent and grew up between the two countries but are originally American by citizenship.

Today we spoke about ourselves for the first time and I found out their parents were from a South American country, with a very Hispanic last name. They were and are just indigenous. I guess I have encountered so few ‘pure’ native Americans that the combination of tan skin and Asian features just fit immediately to SEA in my mind.

I always thought Dr Nick in The Simpsons was Asian. It happens to the best of us.

Some backgrounds can really, really trip up even fairly educated and informed expectations. Take Guyana- South American English speakers, 30% Caribbean black types, 40% South Asians, 30% mixed or indigenous.

Knew an East Asian looking woman with a Hispanic looking last name, but an accent that only sort of seemed like a Spanish accent. Then met her white friends that she went to college with that all had the same accent.

Felt more comfortable asking them and finally got the obvious answer to her origins I should have realized sooner: Brazil.

Global Latino belt strikes again

Anyone up for a motte fantasy football league? I know we have some NFL fans, and we all love making bets and predictions.

I'd be down as well

I’d be in

Let’s use Sleeper and try for 12t and SF

But I’m open to anything - anything except using any other app but Sleeper tbh

It’s a gambling filled abomination of an app now but it’s still 10/10 for fantasy imo

I'm up for it, though I'm concerned that enough of you fuckers the fine Mottizens that are graciously volunteering in this very thread are deeply steeped in the knowledge of Pennsylvania's football teams to prevent me from scooping up later round bargains. Speaking of which, I fully reserve the right to draft a defense in the 9th round or a kicker in the 10th, and in fact to fuck up my entire draft because my other league is a full PPR league with 6 points for QB touchdowns and no kickers.

I'll play, but only on the condition that we gat at least ten people, including the following:

  • The guy who drafts Patrick Mahomes way too early
  • The guy who loads up on tight ends
  • The guy who drafts big names from five years ago way too early, and acts like he can't believe they're still on the board
  • The guy who drafts the Ravens defense in the 9th round
  • The guy who drafts the consensus best kicker in the 10th round (used to be Janikowski, more recently Justin Tucker, who knows this year)
  • The guy who drafts an inordinate number of Steelers (or whoever the hometown team is)
  • The guy who drafts someone who will be bagging groceries two years from now because he had a 79 yard run in the preseason
  • The guy who takes fantasy football way too seriously but nonetheless ends up drafting an awful team
  • The guy who fucks up his entire draft because he thinks it's a PPR league when it isn't, or vice versa

This last one happened in a league I played in a few years back and the results were hilarious. He had drafted a bunch of wideouts and practically no RBs and didn't realize we were in a standard league until the 7th or 8th round. He then started frantically drafting every questionable RB available to make up lost ground, and was offering desperate trades the week afterwards to correct his error. He ended up almost making the playoffs, but the full-blown meltdown was unforgettable.

The guy who drafts big names from five years ago way too early, and acts like he can't believe they're still on the board

Zach Ertz is still good goddammit. Can't believe I picked him up for free last year.

The guy who drafts Patrick Mahomes way too early

I might actually change my team name to that in the league I've been in for 8 years, because it's kinda true.

It's only kinda true and not literally true because he's my keeeper.

The guy who loads up on tight ends

I am in this post and I don't like it.

The guy who loads up on tight ends

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I wanted to show my boss which diagram type I had in mind, but I forgot its name and couldn't describe it to Google. In the end, I had to search for came in a fluffer.

I am glad that I remember they're called Sankey diagrams, and thus have managed to avoid this particular indignity.

I'm glad I remembered them as "Napoleon in Russia" diagrams. Finally, my university days were good for something.

There is a very well-known robust cellphone case manufacturer. There is also a gay furry porn website. One is known as Otterbox. One is known as Otterlocker. I'm pretty sure you can guess what happened, here. And boy was my face red.

I've also had to consider very carefully what image edit tools to recommend, because I have a go to, and it's pretty robust if not the best GUI. But I also can't tell randos to install GIMP on their home computers without ending up on a list.

One is known as Otterbox. One is known as Otterlocker. I'm pretty sure you can guess what happened, here

The gay furries got some new robust cellphone cases?

“Well, golly, I like the leopard-pattern wallet but where’s the rest of the fursuit?”

Heh.

I always just thought of it as the Napoleon diagram.

Ever since the halcyon days of early 2020, where some yahoo dared us rationalist corona panickers to buy puts on cruise companies, I’ve been trying to recreate this missed opportunity (turns out, it wasn’t priced in).

Ozempic’s been getting a lot of good press in rat circles. Leaps calls on novo nordisk/eli lily?

If it makes you feel any better, one of my university housemates loaded up on cruise line puts, he timed it well (somewhat) as the price did indeed drop further after he bought the puts.

However, due to the implied volatility being so high when he bought them, he still managed to lose money overall despite buying puts on a stock that fell after he bought the puts (as the IV also dropped over the same period).

I've never felt bad about not being an options degen after witnessing that lol

I don’t know how your friend managed that; In the original thread, the OP of little faith had given the put he dared us to buy – CCL was trading at 42, the 30 put a year out was 1.35. The next month the stock fell to 12 ; so that ‘s 13x, then it fell even further to 8, before rebounding, so if held till expiration, 7x.

Lol, options are so much fun. They will fuck you 99.99% of the time. But the one time they dont... your broker calls you on January 27 about that Gamestop $10 call you bought 6 months ago on the advice of some idiot degen who's math actually penciled out. "Dude... you gonna exercise or what?"

I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.

Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.

There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.

Man, I genuinely do not understand the intuition that drives people to think that there must be a catch to Ozempic. You are doing better by couching your claim in terms of likelihood, but even then, I think this is misguided.

The universe is cold and uncaring, but it isn't actively malevolent. There is no law of physics that demands some kind of equivalent exchange here. Sometimes we just get lucky.

Biology has homeostasis, but homeostasis can break, and it can also be reset.

Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment.

What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.

If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.

homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full."

This is a reasonable concern, but I think it might misinterpret what homeostasis is trying to do in obesity. The obese state isn't a healthy, well-regulated system that semaglutide is mischievously disrupting. For many people with obesity, the homeostatic system is already broken. Their bodies are defending a pathologically high set point for weight, ignoring satiety signals that should be firing, and managing insulin poorly.

Think of it less like a functioning thermostat that you're tricking, and more like a thermostat that's already broken and stuck at 90 degrees (Fahrenheit, I hope, if that's Celsius then turn off the oven) . The house is sweltering, the air conditioner is running itself ragged, and the occupants are miserable. Semaglutide comes along, and it isn't just put a bag of ice placed on the temperature sensor to fool it. It seems to actually repair the sensor.

If I hadn't been awake for 48 hours, I might have linked to a recent paper that semaglutide reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by 50% even in people without diabetes. You can look that up. You might even simply read Scott's deep dive on the topic.

Semaglutide is a miracle. Such mundane miracles are rare, but they do happen. Penicillin was quasi-miraculous, but even in this age of people sweating bullets about super-bugs, antibiotics save far more lives directly than they take.

I don't know about the advisability of taking the long on your short, but I'd probably benefit from taking the opposite end of a normal bet instead of trying to convince you. I strongly expect to make money on that 1:1 exchange if that were somehow feasible.

What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them?

There's a common religious belief that suffering is holy and morally required. You see this a lot with Catholics in particular. They will lecture people with claims like "quitting smoking using nicotine lozenges isn't really quitting smoking". Somehow results don't count, it's the suffering that's important.

Also in modern society the left expresses purity through diet.

Additionally believing that fat people are gross because they are sick and unhealthy doesn't jive with a lot of modern views. You aren't supposed to be weirded out by people's medical conditions.

So the view that obesity is a moral failing is popular. This has the added effect of letting healthy weight people feel morally superior.

The idea that a medication can safely reduce appetite is jarring. That implies that their feelings of moral superiority were unjustified and kind of immoral.

What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.

The drugs don’t care about morality, and I don’t see it as immoral to want to fit into a wedding dress. But if it comes to light that there are serious side effects, then the FDA is going to tighten the regulations on who can be prescribed the drug because a 19 year old trying to lose 20 pounds to fit in a dress should not be taking drugs that have serious side effects that far outweigh any benefits she gets from losing those 20 lbs. if she ends up with a permanent injury to her digestive tract, or a heart condition or something along those lines, it’s tragic.

Such risks might be worth taking if the person in question is obese enough to have the choice of risking those problems or dying if they don’t lose 200 pounds. We do that all tge time with other problems. My grandmother was on blood pressure medication that was slowly making her blind. The alternative was she has a heart attack. Blindness is bad, obviously, but when compared to a heart attack, not intolerable.

If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.

Yes, and having blood pressure go too low is dangerous in its own right. This is why I don’t think it’s going to be prescribed as often as people think. The use case depends on how bad the person’s obesity is, both in absolute weight and in the difficulty of losing tge weight. Depending on the costs it might be much lower than what people are expecting. And as such I think touting ozempic as a miracle cure for obesity is vastly overselling it.

My expectation is that ozempic will mostly be a last resort drug used much like gastric bypass surgery is today — reserved for serious cases of morbid obesity.

antibiotics save far more lives directly than they take.

How antibiotics take lives, except allergic reactions and antibiotics overuse/misuse reducing their effectiveness?

Overuse or misuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections, which can spread to people who weren't even on said antibiotic. They can ruin the natural balance of the gut microbiome, causing Clostridium difficile infections. As you've mentioned, some unfortunate souls get nasty allergic reactions which can kill them from the anaphylactic shock. I'm talking about all the ways they can cause harm, with no carve outs.

Edit: They can also be hepatic enzyme induces or inhibitors. If not planned for, this can cause overdoses or underdoses of seemingly unrelated drugs.

My mom found out she was allergic to penicillin as a little girl, when she had anaphylaxis. Fortunately she was ok and it hasn’t affected her life much.

But also yeah, antibiotic side effects can be real. It beats pneumonia, but uncontrollable diarrhea and stomach upset isn’t fun. Took me a while before I was back to normal.

They can ruin the natural balance of the gut microbiome

oh, I forgot that one, thanks!

hepatic enzyme induces or inhibitors

and was not aware at all of that, double thanks!

Overuse or misuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections

I tried to cover this with "overuse/misuse reducing their effectiveness"

Well, the lipostat theory would suggest that the obese already suffer from disrupted homeostasis via leptin resistance. Under that paradigm, GLP-1s are more akin to insulin for diabetics than more tolerance-building substances.

Good point. All the hyped anti-aging drugs haven’t panned out either. Because things very very rarely do, and it’s good to always keep in mind that nothing ever happens. I hadn’t really considered it here, because like most rats/transhumanists I tend to pattern-match every criticism of ozempic, or of a hypothetical anti-aging drug, with a kind of moralising, small-minded complaint - ‘it’s the easy way out’ , ‘it’s unauthentic thinness’, ‘aging/dying is a part of life’ etc – I immediately dismiss.

I’m not going to say it’s impossible that this one is the one, but I think as far as putting money down, I’d wait a year or so to see if the hype is just hype or if it’s real, or if there’s not going to be issues with side effects making the product only “worth the risk” for people who are either going to lose several hundred pounds or die. If the product is only going to be used on the population of people who weigh 300+ lbs, that’s a much smaller customer base than if it can be used by every woman looking to lose ten pounds to fit a swimsuit or wedding dress. If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer

At this moment in the US there are far more people with obesity than with cancer.

If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer

There are a LOT of morbidly obese people. This would still be a major customer base.

My wackiest theory is that when a drug like semaglutide comes out that essentially everyone wants, the government should be able to nationalize the patent for licensing, and in exchange the drug developer gets a one-time Get Out of Liability Free Card, where if they have a drug go wrong they can just get out of Liability for it.

This would lower drug prices, improve drug availability, and encourage labs that are producing good products to take risks; all things we want to do.

Don't live in the past. There are always new, major opportunities in each cycle. Few developments are ever fully priced in, if you are somewhat quick on the trigger. Market efficiency is to a significant degree a myth.

Depends which version of market efficiency you're talking about.

I just spent quite a while at work doing research for a legal case we're doing where proving the semi-strong market efficiency hypothesis is a profoundly load-bearing part of our argument.

We'll know what the judge thinks in like, two years lol

Novo Nordisk's glory days are behind them

It's true more people are waking up to GLP-1s, but there's more competition in the pipeline than ever, In my view, Novo and Eli seem awfully close to getting into a price war.

Also, the rest of the planet is nowhere near as lucrative as the US and the US might be close to tapped out. There's also attacks on the patent regime (might be lost in Canada which might be a backdoor into the US) and also the borders seem quite porous to gray market sources entering the country. Why not? The same Asian labs that produce it for Novo/Eli can just do additional shadow runs and ship directly to US dealers. It's the same money for them but 10% of the cost for US consumers.

The future looks bright if you're a fatty. Not so great if you're pharma. It's actually a bit alarming, since even with GLP-1 boom the pharma industry has plummeting ROI https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/163939433/preclinical-prioritization

Novo Nordisk's glory days are behind them

All the pharma companies’ chart look like that though. I’m not sure these drugs and their implication have really arrived on the street. Cremieux makes a good case for regeneron, I’ll add it to my scattershot leaps package.

There's also attacks on the patent regime (might be lost in Canada which might be a backdoor into the US) and also the borders seem quite porous to gray market sources entering the country.

I’m going to go with the nothing will ever happen heuristic. I’m not really concerned about risks like that since these are deep oom calls, the stock(s) either blows up or not, I’m not trying to conserve its value.

Court opinion:

  • A person is being investigated. Twelve minutes into a "custodial" (at the police station) interview (with Miranda rights having been read to the suspect), the following exchange takes place.

Suspect: Would I be able to call my lawyer?

Detective 1: You can, yeah.

Suspect: I got, uh, Lou Savino.

Detective 1: Do you want to continue this interview or what do you want to do?

Suspect: I want to continue it but I want my lawyer present.

Detective 1: Ok. So then we have to end the interview.

Suspect: You have to end the interview?

Detective 1: Mmm hmm. If you want your lawyer here, we have to end the interview.

Suspect: Will he be here today or no?

Detective 1: Probably not. Lou Savino is a very busy man.

Suspect: Yeah, I called him this morning before I left Delaware.

Detective 1: If you want him here, we’ll end the interview.

Suspect: You can keep it going.

Detective 1: Are you sure you want to do this without a lawyer?

Suspect: Yeah, because I got the right to remain silent, right?

Detective 2: Sure.

The interview then continues.

  • Several months later, the suspect is charged with various crimes. However, the trial judge suppresses all statements made by the defendant after the exchange recounted above, and the appeals panel affirms. According to the federal supreme court, once a suspect in police custody has requested a lawyer, he is not allowed to revoke that request until either he gets a lawyer or he leaves police custody and then initiates a new contact with the police. After the then-suspect said "I want my lawyer present", the detective should have ended the interview immediately, or at least should have disregarded the then-suspect's later statement of "you can keep it going".

Court opinion:

  • In year 2021, the mayor of Philadelphia issues an executive order (1) declaring Juneteenth a city holiday and (2) renaming Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. A coalition of Italian-American organizations promptly sues, alleging that this executive order not only is the latest in a string of anti-Italian discriminatory actions perpetrated by the mayor, but also is a usurpation of the city council's exclusive power to declare city holidays.

  • In year 2023, the trial court rejects the coalition's arguments. The city charter grants the power of establishing holidays to the city personnel director, who is a member of the executive branch under the mayor.

  • In year 2025, the appeals panel reverses. The city charter grants to the city personnel director, not the power of establishing holidays, but merely the power of establishing employment regulations regarding holidays. The power of establishing holidays is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the charter, so by default, in accordance with state and federal practice, it inheres in the legislative body—the council. Therefore, this executive order is a usurpation of legislative power. (This analysis applies to substantive holidays that are days off for city workers. The mayor still may declare temporary, symbolic holidays that have no effect on anybody.)

In year 2025, the appeals panel reverses. The city charter grants to the city personnel director, not the power of establishing holidays, but merely the power of establishing employment regulations regarding holidays. The power of establishing holidays is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the charter, so by default, in accordance with state and federal practice, it inheres in the legislative body—the council. Therefore, this executive order is a usurpation of legislative power. (This analysis applies to substantive holidays that are days off for city workers. The mayor still may declare temporary, symbolic holidays that have no effect on anybody.)

Somewhat similar to the history of MLK Day in Arizona.

In 1983, then-president Ronald Reagan signed the bill that made Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday, the first to commemorate the life of an African American, according to the U.S. Senate website. Three years later, the Arizona House of Representatives created a bill to recognize the holiday. One vote defeated the bill, but nine days later, Gov. Bruce Babbitt issued an executive order to create a paid MLK holiday.

Subsequent governor Mecham gained national attention several days after his inauguration by fulfilling a campaign promise to cancel a paid Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday (MLK Day) for state employees. The holiday had been created in May 1986 by executive order from the previous governor, Bruce Babbitt, after the state legislature had voted not to create the holiday. Following the creation of the holiday, the state Attorney General's office issued an opinion that the paid holiday was illegal and threatened to sue the incoming governor over the cost of the paid holiday, as it had not been approved by the legislature. Despite the issues of the legality of how the holiday was created, Mecham replied to comments from civil rights activists and the Black community after the cancellation by saying "King doesn't deserve a holiday."

The decision turned to the voters in 1990, when two separate ballot measures for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday were put on the state ballot, according to the Pima County Public Library. Both measures failed to pass, once again drawing outrage and boycotts against Arizona. Notably, the National Football League stripped the state of its right to host the 1993 Super Bowl. Musicians refused to perform in Arizona.

The loss denied Phoenix a projected $200 million in revenue. An agreement was made that Arizona would host the 1996 Super Bowl, with the condition it passed a referendum to celebrate the holiday.

The holiday was finally inked into state law in November 1992. Voters passed a Martin Luther King Civil Rights Day holiday, making Arizona the last state to formally install an MLK holiday

At the close of the hearing, the suppression court granted the motion to suppress the statements Stevens-Reddy made after he invoked his right to counsel. It found that his invocation of the right to counsel was clear and unequivocal; his words after Detective Gallagher told him his attorney would be unavailable were equivocal; and his interaction with detectives after he asked for an attorney and was not re-Mirandized “may have been voluntary, but it certainly was not knowing and it was not an intelligent waiver. ”

Too retarded to understand his rights, courts give him a mulligan anyways.

And right they did. The police shouldn't get away with doing unlawful shit just because not every citizen has a law degree and keeps up to date with mountains of caselaw.

I'm not sure that literally not understanding the meaning of words (like silence) qualifies as the same type of stupid as not keeping up to date with mountains of caselaw. Dude literally insisted he was going to keep silent as he proceeded to just keep talking anyways, while repeating that he was being silent along the way. That's just retarded, not legal. If anything it's the poor cop that got hung up on mountains of case law. Supposedly he was supposed to re-mirandize the suspect after the suspect, by a technical definition, "reinitiated" the encounter.

If I were the mods I'd punish darkly hinting harsher than whatever it is you are afraid of being banned for.

Fair

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