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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   2227 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 3, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is the right way to talk about the size of a programming project?

I recall someone in a thread a while ago making a dismissive comment about amateurs with AI boasting about how many lines of code they've written, which I think was either referring to me talking about my own vibe-coded project or possibly Garry Tan boasting about 37k LOC per day, which does seem slightly excessive.

I know that less is more, efficient code is better than lengthy code and that AI tends to leave a bunch of comments in there too... but how can you measure the complexity of a project in any quantitative sense besides lines or just outright KB/MB? I'm not a 'real' software engineer but it seems like once you have 134 files and 3.4 MB of code, you can't really count functions in any useful way, what else is there but lines and size?

This is a really hard question, because not all lines of code are created equal. A line of Haskell or Scala can be far more dense than a line of say, FORTRAN, and God help all of us if we start talking about Perl.

The comment below about cyclomatic complexity is a good one, especially in conjunction with line count. Internally at work, we also talk about how compressible code is as a mostly-serious joke. It's actually not the worst rule of thumb. If your 3.4Mb of code compresses down to a 5kb zip file, you don't have 3.4Mb of code - you have 3.4Mb of copy/paste.

As an old guy, I've always held that every line of code is a liability. Every branch is a new set of tests that you have to write with a new set of expectations to figure out.

There's cyclomatic complexity which, while not perfect, is better than raw counts. It tries to measure the number of decisions the code has to make rather than how much of it there is. You can game it by artificially breaking up conditionals, but it's much less dependent on personal style than just counting is.

I usually people hear their projects called "small, medium or large." There's not a hard definition. Small projects can be comfortably worked by one person. Large projects probably need at least a team, maybe multiple. Medium projects probably need a small team.

Probably when you talk about project size you need to be more specific. Larger projects tend to:

  • have more consumers
  • change slowly rather than rapidly
  • be deployed as multiple services
  • have multiple experts who know sub-systems, rather than one expert who knows everything
  • have long release cycles, requiring batched testing approaches

These are not caused by "high LOC." Perhaps I'm describing "(poorly written) enterprise software." But these are still things people sometimes mean when they talk about "large project" or "small project."

Any metric would be opposed because it would allow direct comparison of a human, an LLM, and a centaur. If one's work is evaluated only qualitatively, than there is room for argument, as there is no rigourous dispute resolution criteria.

It is like with teachers, who prefer that results on standarized tests by their stuents not be thought of as valid criteria for evaluating how good of a job they are doing.

Does anyone here work in the IT industry? Would anyone happen to know of anything someone can do to get a leg up potentially become full time during an internship (Network Engineering).

I have run several tech companies and worked in some high performing team. My experience is more software development than network engineering but the two are similar.

Employees often overestimate the importance of technical skills. We need a few really technically competent people but most just need to be able to do their job. Many technically weak people have succeeded in the industry. Even productivity requirements are often not that high and as long as you are producing something on a regular basis you are fine.

My main issue with devs is the inability to think. Developers who get assigned tasks and only focus on those tasks going away always cause problems. Your job is not your assigned tasks and the goal is not to clear tasks. Your team has some higher goal. Maybe it is a new feature, maybe the company wants to build new infrastructure and increase network load 10x. Maybe they want to get some compliance certificate. You need to keep the actual goal in the back of your mind and question what you are doing and ensure that it is aligned with the actual goal.

It is mindboggling how many in tech have worked on a product for years and have zero clue how it works, what the clients are, what the product road map is or the what the value of what they are working on is.

Lets say you are working for a company that makes software for dentists. Some people will work on the booking flow for months without really having any sense of how the booking goes. Instead of actually thinking through things words like booking, patient or dentist become abstract words. For example a sentence like "A dentist can only work one shift a day", becomes "A zongzong can only wingwang one zong per wang". It is some obscure businessrule that they have memorized but has no concrete value or meaning.

Taking responsibility for the network is key to succeeding. Feel a sense of ownership over it. It is your job to ensure it is doing its job and that it is improving. This doesn't mean going rouge and doing your own thing, it means asking questions, coming with suggestions, finding better ways of doing things and protecting the interests of the users.

Find someone who's been around the block to take you under their wing, ideally a striver and/or middle manager. Endear yourself to them, but don't be cringe.. They can help you get promoted, find a better position in the company as they advance in their career, or help you get your foot in the door if they leave for a better place.

You obviously need to demonstrate competence, but you already know that; that's table stakes. And the other suggestions to seek out opportunities to demonstrate leadership, find a niche to fill that's being undeserved/overlooked by more experienced engineers, etc. are great. But don't forget that an internship is also 50% about figuring out who is socially compatible with the team. So be friendly and helpful. Chat with your coworkers. Find potential mentors and take them out for coffee to ask questions and build a rapport. Bring in snacks for the office every once in a while. By the end of your internship, you want half the office forgetting you're not a permanent employee because you just feel like a part of the team. At that point, not giving you a job will feel like firing you, and the question shifts from a "why" to a "why not." Worst case scenario, you now have a stable of amazing references who are happy to reccomend you to friends at other companies who may be hiring.

The answer is really quite simple: you have to show promise. Demonstrate that you know newer stuff that existing engineers might not be aware of, that you are willing to do more stuff than the average intern, that you are quick on the uptake.

Don’t underestimate the importance of soft skills and “reading the room,” still. I’ve seen competent people get passed on all the time, and usually by the idiots supervising the interns. That said, IT and infosec really is a “team sport” with a lot of interdependencies between its members.

“Standing out” is also more than simply “knowing the answer” to certain things. Having an approach that’s otherwise “custom” to who you are is something that adds great flair to your professionalism, because lots of other people beside you will have the same standard knowledge base that you do. We’ve all gone through the same courses and same certs. There’s great importance in differentiating yourself.

IMHO knowing stuff is less important than being quick learner and communicate well and be generally pleasant to work with. My experience with interns (software not networks but I think it's pretty similar) had been that nobody really expects the intern to know everything, or even a lot. But if we see a person who's actively learning and advancing, who can be relied on to deliver on the task that is assigned and maybe even go a little beyond that, and who is generally nice to work with - then people would seriously think about permanent hire. A lot of companies are always looking for good people, and it's a perpetual problem that it's hard to know if somebody is good from a few interviews. If you know somebody already, and know they've got potential, the lack of experience and knowledge can be excused - people learn new things all the time, as long as the person got basic fundamentals and good brains, most of the stuff can be learned. Especially now that you can ask LLMs to do a lot of leg work for you.

It depends on the company, really. When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the answer was "be somebody's nephew" or "be a hot co-ed".

If you can't manage that, my best advice is to "show leadership". Find projects that might improve revenue or reduce costs, find out why they haven't been done yet, and write up a proposal to your internal mentor if the reasons don't torpedo any solution you might have.

These are all things that generalize to every industry and typically fall under the rubric of “networking.” One of the most important lessons I give to those who ask me around the time they hit the labor force is “work has the exact same politics as high school.” You’ve got your kiss asses. You’ve got your dick riders. You’ve got the lazy people. And then you’ve got those who actually do the work. Figuring out a way to ingratiate yourself with whatever the in-group is, is part of the game you play in any workplace situation, and it requires you to be observant.

Be careful when it comes to being indispensable. People will inevitably take the work you do for granted in you let them and if you draw attention to yourself and become pigeonholed as “that guy,” you can turn the things that make you into a good worker into a liability that gets you into trouble.

Perhaps not a small question, but I'm curious if folks here have dealt with depression/anxiety and if so, how have they turned it around or alleviated symptoms?

Looking mostly for success stories.

My recipe:

Reduce shit life syndrome. Gaining more money and thus security helped.

Lots of trauma treatment, mostly done on my own with guided meditations. This helped with the above point. Not relevant for most people, but really relevant for some.

Meditate for significant durations every day. Attained supramundane insights.

Good diet, good supplementation (omega-3 etc, which really helps, strong support from research)

Regular exercise, even if it isn't much.

Cut bad people out, subtly controlling narcissists etc. Quality > quantity, definitely.

Solve whatever sleep issue you may have. Important point. Sleep is crucial for repairing and rejuvenating body and mind.

You still seem to have a lot of reactivity & emotional difficulties based on our other interactions here bud. I'd recommend you look into emotional work for that. Joe Hudson & his Art of Accomplishment stuff is great, especially for folks who have meditated too much without any focus on the heart.

While I agree with both you and Scott that people who have supposedly been guided by meditation to transcend the self do not seem to show the godlike serenity one might expect, I don't think that this is a very kind or helpful way of putting it.

Stopped drinking coffee and alcohol for a year (also did two periods of 6 months).

Exercised heavily.

Meditated (poorly - but I tried).

I’m still anxious here and there but just normal life stuff I think. Never been depressed however.

Long term I believe gut health and mind health is very important too - ie having a good diet.

If you don’t know what living without anxiety feels like, or you don’t remember, take a Xanax or Valium several times a month. All of a sudden seeing what your goal is, and what life can be like, is clarifying.

It is not like I ran a trial, but there are a couple of things that correlated with a vague feeling of "now that I am thinking of it, I am doing mentally better than I was 5 years ago".

  1. Physical exercise. Dunno what was your baseline, mine was quite low, so modest improvements felt like a lot.

  2. Got a few appointments with a MD and a prescription for SSRI.

  3. Got a hobby that is more fun than phone / social media / the internet. Perhaps it matters that I am doing creative stuff and "accomplishing" something, but probably it's just that it is easier to replace social media habit with something else than just cutting it down.

What’s the hobby?

Anything.

Learn to fish.

Exactly so, exact details are highly idiosyncratic. I suppose for me, what I picked is a form of creative writing.

(Now available on Substack.)

I appreciate that some of the below may seem obvious to the point of coming off as condescending, but the reason obvious advice is seen as obvious is because so much of the time it really works. I will be limiting myself to lifestyle choices you can do yourself without interacting with a healthcare professional or therapist. Ranked in order from most to least importance/effectiveness/relevance:

  1. Don't self-medicate: Alcohol, weed, whatever. All of it has to go. If you're already drinking so much that going cold turkey would trigger DTs, then you'll have to wean yourself off it slowly; if not, then you must stop drinking completely, immediately. Not even a glass of wine with dinner "for the antioxidants". If you have any drink in the house, pour it down the sink today. If you have weed in the house, destroy it. Don't give it to a friend to hang on to until you think you're in a better headspace: destroy it.
  2. Intense cardio exercise: By far the single most effective antidepressant I've ever tried, and I've tried many. I only got into running during Covid, and after a few weeks I found that going for a run (>=5k, or 3 miles) several times a week did wonders for my mood and energy levels. Having struggled with depressive episodes for many years, I was kicking myself for not trying this one sooner. But if you're going to try this, take it seriously and invest in a proper pair of running shoes and synthetic socks (the latter may not seem as important: believe me, it is, perhaps even more important than running shoes if you want to avoid nasty blisters). It may be a few weeks before you start to notice any change: give it time. (The last sentence applies to everything.) Regular cardio exercise will also help you to fall asleep more easily (see point #4).
  3. Eat, but don't eat shit: Some depressives lose their appetite; others eat their feelings. (I fall into the latter camp.) If you're in the former, you must make yourself eat even if you don't want to, so set alarms on your phone reminding yourself to eat at regular intervals. If you're in the latter camp, resist the temptation to eat shitty fast food/junk food: in addition to being bad for your body, you'll experience a comedown when the sugar rush wears off which will make you feel even worse than you did before you started eating. Conveniently, the solution to both "not eating" and "eating like shit" is the same: stock your kitchen with nourishing, healthy snacks that require minimal preparation (so you won't have the excuse of "I'm too tired to cook, I'll just [order a pizza]/[eat nothing]"): as Scott notes (Ctrl-F "2.1.2"), nuts are particularly well-suited to this purpose. Go to the supermarket and buy a few different kinds of nuts and several kinds of fruit. When you feel up to cooking again, eat plenty of green vegetables. Cut out junk food entirely: no ice cream, frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, fizzy drinks (incl. energy drinks). If you must drink caffeine, tea or coffee without sugar.
  4. Stick to a regular sleep schedule: When you're depressed, all you want to do is lie in bed all day and take endless naps. Force yourself not to. Don't drink any caffeine after noon. Stay awake till nine PM, at which point you put your phone away and don't look at it until the following morning (disable Wi-Fi and mobile data so you won't receive notifications). From nine–ten PM, read a physical book, not a Kindle or e-reader. You will probably not be in the mood to read a book, and derive no enjoyment from doing so: do it anyway. At ten PM, close your book and try to sleep. Stay in bed with the lights off until your alarm goes off. If you wake in the night (or can't get to sleep in the first place), resist the temptation to look at your phone, not even for "five minutes". Ideally, use a dedicated alarm clock so that you can leave your phone in another room, or at least out of reach of your bed. Even if you have trouble falling asleep, sticking to this routine will make your body associate the period 10 PM–7 AM with darkness and restfulness, so that when the insomnia passes you'll be out like a light.
  5. Minimise your phone usage: Once a day, go for a walk for at least an hour. Don't bring your phone with you. "But I need Google Maps to find my way—" you'll find your way home. Leave your phone at home.
  6. Socialise: My mother is significantly more introverted than I am and prefers to work remotely as much as possible. Nonetheless, she compared going into the office with working out: she dreads doing it, but never regrets having done so afterwards. No matter how introverted you are, or how much you "hate people", human beings are social animals, and there's a very good reason why solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment. We are meant to socialise, not just with the handful of people we call our loved ones, but with people we don't know very well, people we hardly recognise, people we actively dislike. The modern world makes it far too easy to isolate oneself, and just about anything you want can be ordered to your home without leaving the comfort of your bed. You must fight back against the luxuries. Don't apply for fully remote jobs. If you have a hybrid job and your boss says you only have to come in one day a week, make yourself go in two days a week; if he says two, do three. You won't want to do this, and you'll feel exhausted by the end of your morning commute, and you'll be dreading going in the night before. Do it anyway. It's no accident that the worst period of most people's lives in the last few years (including mine) was Covid. People told themselves that the reason Covid sucked was because they couldn't spend time with their friends and loved ones, and they couldn't go to gigs, and they couldn't go to the cinema. All of that is true: and yet, not going into the office and spending time with your colleagues (even your annoying colleague who types too loudly and chews with his mouth open) also had a negative impact on our moods and quality of life, even if it didn't feel like that, even if we told ourselves that fully remote working was the one silver lining to this awful cloud. It's not psychologically healthy to roll out of bed at 8:59 AM; it's not psychologically healthy to have nothing preventing you taking three naps a day (or more); it's not psychologically healthy to be able to crack open a beer at 5 PM on the dot, every day. There are people for whom Covid lockdowns and attendant fully remote working had no material impact on their lifestyles and quality of life. These are not psychologically healthy people.
  7. Don't use social media: I feel like this one is self-explanatory, but it would be remiss of me not to include it. Uninstall Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. from your phone. If you have friends you keep in touch with via any of these platforms, get their phone numbers so you can keep in touch via WhatsApp or similar. If you have an Android phone, uninstalling YouTube is a bit circuitous and you have to enable developer mode: do it, it's worth it. By "social media", I'm including LinkedIn: if you're looking for a job, then depending on the industry LinkedIn may be pretty much unavoidable, but at least limit your usage of it to your computer browser, and don't install the app on your phone. ("What if I get a message from a recruiter when I'm out, and I don't see it until I get home?" – an hour's delay in responding to a message is not going to make or break you landing your dream job. You know it, I know it, let's not kid ourselves.) The Motte doesn't have many of the worst features of social media, but it has enough of them that requesting the mods to temporarily ban you for a few weeks couldn't hurt.
  8. Don't watch porn: Some depressives lose their sex drive, some don't. If you're in the latter camp, don't watch porn. It will make you feel worse in the long run.
  9. Don't read the news: I don't care if you think you need to in order to stay informed on current affairs, or if you think your depression is an entirely logical reaction to how awful and unjust the world is (admittedly, the latter rationalisation is more common among left-leaning people than the kind of user who tends to frequent this space, but it's easy to unintentionally blackpill yourself). Don't read national or international news of any kind. Local news printed in an actual newspaper is probably okay, but if you want to read something, your first port of call should be a fictional book. When you're depressed, no hypothetical situation exists in which reading the news will improve your mood.
  10. Don't overthink: There was a period during Covid in which I was routinely self-administering depression questionnaires to myself (I'm not going to tell you what they're called, because then you'll start doing the same thing). It will come as no surprise to you that constantly asking myself "Am I depressed?" inevitably made me feel more depressed and anxious than I would have otherwise. The goal is not for you to wake up one morning and think "I don't feel depressed anymore": the goal is for you to wake up one morning and think "today I need to do X before lunch and then I have Y after lunch and I mustn't forget to do Z in the evening". Your mood shouldn't be something that you're consciously aware of: constantly asking yourself if you feel good or bad is a recipe for making yourself feel bad.

I have not followed all of the above advice consistently: I still drink too much, I still eat too much fast/junk food, my sleep schedule is far from consistent, I spend far too much time looking at my phone (including social media) and so on and so forth. But even following some of the above advice some of the time, my mood, energy levels and so on are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were during Covid, which in turn were leaps and bounds ahead of my worst depressive periods in 2015-17. For large chunks of the latter period, I was drinking too much, eating mountains of shitty fast food, never exercising, staring at my phone for hours, smoking weed several times a week, watching too much porn, taking naps whenever I could and shutting myself off from the outside world – and this was while taking antidepressants (in addition to antipsychotics, some of the time). We can play the chicken-and-egg game all we like, but what would it accomplish? Even if doing these things didn't make me depressed, I have little doubt that they exacerbated my depression. I still have days where I feel down, but they're nowhere near as bad as my worst days.

[This concludes the "advice" portion of my comment.]

To get philosophical for a minute: there are many people in the West who purport not to be religious, who purport not to believe in souls or Heaven or Hell or the rest of it – and yet many of these people still reflexively, unthinkingly adopt a worldview which is implicitly dualist. This comes out in many forms (per my recurrent hobby horse, "I don't believe in souls, I just believe that everyone has an innate gender identity unrelated to their physical sex and knowable only to themselves"), but perhaps the most common is a conception of mental health as something wholly uncoupled from their bodies and what goes into (and out of) them; mental illness as a disease of the mind, not a disease of the body. But we don't have minds: we have brains, and every mental sensation we feel is ultimately a set of neurons firing inside them. It therefore follows that all of our moods (incl. mood disorders) are ultimately products of i) our underlying neural architecture; ii) the mechanical processes our bodies undergo (digestion, hydration, cardiac exercise etc.) and iii) the sensory stimuli we experience*. Small children have to consciously learn the causal relationship between eating and needing to defecate the following day; even many adults don't drink enough water and wonder why they have headaches and feel nauseated all the time. And a great many adults have this implicitly dualistic conception of moods as things that just happen, independent of ii) and iii) above. (The more scientifically literate will simply overweight the role of i) while downplaying ii) and iii) to the point of complete negligence, insisting that their propensity for negative moods is just "how they're wired" or a "chemical imbalance".)

What all of my recommendations have in common is that they are designed to force you to recognise the importance of ii) and iii) in determining your moods. Scrolling on Instagram and watching porn will make you feel worse, regardless of your underlying neural architecture; eating healthy food and exercising will make you feel better. It is incredibly easy to rationalise away your depression as solely the product of i) and deny utterly the role that ii) and iii) play in determining it. I know a girl who has been diagnosed with depression and is taking antidepressants. What kind of lifestyle does she lead?

  • She doesn't have a job (her parents pay for everything) and hence has no responsibilities to speak of
  • She's in college but could hardly be said to be actively applying herself, and routinely sleeps in late and misses her classes
  • She doesn't appear to know how to cook, and eats shitty fast food for every meal
  • She never exercises, and with her slowing metabolism the latter two points are starting to become obvious
  • She drinks too often, and too much
  • She stays up late every night and sleeps in the next morning
  • She never reads books, and spends hours watching Netflix or scrolling on her phone
  • She doesn't have a boyfriend, but will often go to the pub, get drunk and let some man take her home and have his way with her, never to hear from him again

Is she "here for a good time, not for a long time"? No – every time I see her she moans about how depressed she is. Gee, I wonder why?

Sometimes this failure to draw reasonable causal inferences is the result of denial or motivated reasoning (e.g. the alcoholic who pretends not to know why he always feels depressed the morning after going on the piss) – but in other cases, people appear to have so totally internalised the idea of "mental health" as something distinct from "physical health" that they simply don't recognise a connection between the things they do and how they feel: bad moods just happen to them, for no reason. This was made most apparent to me in Theodore Darlymple's magisterial piece "The Rush from Judgement", which ought to be required reading for every would-be doctor, therapist or social welfare: so many of Darlymple's patients appeared to believe that they felt depressed because they suffered from a medical disorder, and simply failed to join the dots with the fact that their lives were depressing (as @self_made_human calls it, Shit Life Syndrome): if you don't have a job, are dependent on the state for everything, have no interests beyond watching TV or going to the pub, are in a relationship with a man who doesn't respect you and who hits you – is it any wonder you feel miserable all the time? Moreover, Darlymple prescribing these women antidepressants would not come close to addressing the root cause of said misery. If they wanted to not feel like shit all the time, they had to change their lifestyles – they had to change ii) and iii).

Darlymple's patients are extreme cases, but that failure-to-join-the-dots, that conception of bad moods and negative thoughts as things that just come upon you for no reason in particular (as opposed to the inevitable outcome of the mechanical processes your body undergoes, the sensory stimuli you take in and your underlying neural architecture) is something that afflicts even the educated and gainfully employed. I very much doubt Phoebe O'Brien attributes any of her negative emotions to the fact that she spends hours every day staring at her phone – it must be the "rise of the far-right" that's got her feeling down. Yeah, sure.

To clarify: am I saying that everyone who eats right, gets enough exercise, sticks to a proper sleep schedule and uninstalls Instagram will feel pretty much okay most of the time? No – I'm not denying that one's underlying neural architecture plays a role in one's mood, merely arguing that people overweight it relative to the other factors. And I'm sure someone will have a counter-example of a high-earning CEO who ran five miles every day, stuck to his macros, was 100% teetotal and still killed himself. But these counter-examples inevitably remind me of the obese people who talk about how Dr. So-and-So completely overlooked that Patient Such-and-Such had a tumour because they were convinced that Such-and-Such's health problems were caused solely by his weight. Mistakes can happen, on the margin, but the existence of people who eat right, get enough exercise, don't use social media and still feel depressed should not blind us to the fact that the average person doesn't eat right, doesn't get enough exercise and uses social media too much, and that most people would feel happier if they improved their diet, exercised more and used social media less.

*Really a subset of ii), but it's such an abstract framing that it's easier to understand if you uncouple them. "I saw a photo of an OnlyFans model on Instagram, which caused neurons to fire in my brain and in turn triggered a surge of blood into my penis resulting in an erection" is hardly an intuitive way to frame that sequence of events, even if it's literally true. It's mechanical processes all the way down.

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this.

I've been in a bit of a depressive spiral for the last few days and this post really helped.

Not at all, I hope it helps.

It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.

Good post, even if I studiously ignore most of the lifestyle advice for myself. For what it's worth, the antidepressant effects of exercise are significant (g of - 0.63 when walking briskly, which compares favorably to both CBT and most antidepressant drugs). Even better, you can capture the majority of the benefit with about 2.5 hours of brisk walking a week. I knew that living so far from the bus stop was doing something for me, that isn't just wearing out my shoes.*

*I don't think it did anything for me, but defer to RCTs over the anecdotes of a very lazy man

I don't think it did anything for me, but defer to RCTs over the anecdotes of a very lazy man

To be fair, it could both do nothing for you and also be very effective for the average person. Now you can claim hipster points for not being like the great unwashed masses.

To be fair, it could both do nothing for you and also be very effective for the average person.

And that is precisely what I said, so I'm not sure what your point is. I'd rather have had bog-standard uncool depression instead.

I was trying to make a joke, since you said you defer to the RCTs as correct over your own experience. But whatevs, joke didn't land I guess.

Sorry dude, I'm the one who is very sleep deprived. Not your fault, and looking at it with a coffee in me, I understand the riff.

Don't self-medicate: Alcohol, weed, whatever. All of it has to go. If you're already drinking so much that going cold turkey would trigger DTs, then you'll have to wean yourself off it slowly; if not, then you must stop drinking completely, immediately. Not even a glass of wine with dinner "for the antioxidants". If you have any drink in the house, pour it down the sink today. If you have weed in the house, destroy it. Don't give it to a friend to hang on to until you think you're in a better headspace: destroy it.

Interesting! I have had substance issues in the past but feel I'm in a decent spot now... albeit I do drink a tad more than I'd like. Why so teetotaling here?

Luckily am already doing a good bit of these... the biggest ones I struggle with are diet, and overthinking. Good advice overall. I appreciate the detailed overview, definitely highlights some areas where I could be doing more.

I tend to think that it ties in with the Socialization point. Drinking at home alone is generally pretty bad for your mental state in my opinion, and ditto any other drugs. I would even agree with pouring out any alcohol you have at home. Drinking with a bunch of friends or at a bar is mostly pretty good, presuming you are capable of not overdoing it. Even going to a decent bar by yourself, where you are getting out of the house, and maybe have the opportunity to chat a little bit with a bartender or some other customers, or maybe possibly even make a friend or two, overrides the negative effect of the drinks and even of some not super great food.

I'm not sure where it belongs on an ordered list, but I think there should also be a point for taking care of yourself and your spaces. I mean like, take a shower every day, shave, trim nails, get regular haircuts, any other standard grooming tasks that apply, put on fresh clean clothes every day, that are in good condition, no holes or stains or whatever. Do it every day, no matter what, whether or not you're feeling great or planning on going anywhere. If you don't have any decent clothes, go buy some. Do laundry and wash the dishes regularly too. Whatever space you live in, vacuum, mop, dust, scrub, and otherwise tidy up regularly. Not necessarily every day or perfectly, but don't let anything get too dirty. Make your bed every day, put away dirty laundry, clean up half-finished projects, etc. Fix any broken stuff around the house too. Generally take care of everything along those lines. This creates a reasonably nice and clean space you can take a little pride in all the time. It helps you see and feel that you're not completely falling apart. It's nice, positive work to do that keeps your mind off of all of the negative influences listed above. And if you get a unexpected urge or invitation to go out and do something, or have friends or family over, you don't have the automatic excuse of looking like a slob or your place being a disaster area, you can just do it.

Drinking with a bunch of friends or at a bar is mostly pretty good, presuming you are capable of not overdoing it. Even going to a decent bar by yourself, where you are getting out of the house, and maybe have the opportunity to chat a little bit with a bartender or some other customers, or maybe possibly even make a friend or two, overrides the negative effect of the drinks and even of some not super great food.

Better still would be to go to the bar but stick to non-alcoholic beers, but I agree that the benefits of socialising with your friends would probably outweigh the costs of drinking a few alcoholic beverages.

Your latter paragraph is so important and I'm kicking myself for not including it in my original comment. Forcing yourself to take a shower, comb your hair and brush your teeth is absolutely vital for pulling yourself out of a slump, as is keeping your living space clean and tidy.

Why so teetotaling here?

"Not drinking" makes for a good Schelling point. Notorious alcoholic and drug addict Matthew Perry (RIP) claimed that he can choose whether or not to have the first drink, but having had the first drink, every subsequent drink is entirely out of his hands. I don't believe this and agree with his interlocutor that he does have a choice about whether to drink the subsequent drinks: as Bryan Caplan would say, if Perry had one beer, and somebody put a gun to his head and told him they'd shoot him if he had another one, I'm sure he could summon the willpower to stop there. But that preamble aside, for most people, if you have one drink, the temptation to have another will be much greater compared to if you didn't have any. And two drinks turns into three, three turns into four, and before you know it it's the following morning and you're feeling like shit, much worse than you felt before you started drinking. Hence, the most effective way to prevent yourself from drinking to excess is simply not to start drinking in the first place, and not trusting yourself to have the self-control to only drink in moderation.

Disclaimer: I still struggle with depression and anxiety, very much a work in progress.

Me from two years ago would absolutely hate this answer, but therapy. I found a really good therapist focusing on CBT and exposure therapy, who made sure to explicitly affirm he's working within my values (e.g. I told him there's a certain level of stoicism I refuse to sacrifice in the name of healthy communication, and that it is important to me as a man that I project a feeling of security toward my loved ones. Once he understood this was a value thing, not an anxiety thing, he enthusiastically embraced it and adjusted his treatment accordingly).

Sure, most of the stuff he works woth me on is fairly basic and readily available for free online. There are dozens of self-help CBT programs, complete with literature and worksheets. But for me, a therapist offers two things self-study can't:

  1. a good therapist calls you on your shit and keeps you honest in a way that is almost impossible to do on your own. We're so good at lying and rationalizing to ourselves that you really do need an impartial outside party who is both able to recognize when you're doing it and willing to bluntly call you out.

  2. meeting regularly with a therapist is good for accountability and consistency in the same way a personal trainer is. It's a lot harder for me to break a public commitment to another person than a private commitment to myself. As I slowly build up my good habits, I've been tapering off my meetings, but the extra accountability was super helpful, especially during those early stages where I had no good habits and little motivation to build them.

If you're not able/willing to start therapy at the moment, my best advice would be that inaction and isolation are the ultimate enemies. The best way to deal with anxiety is to run headlong at whatever is causing it, preferably accompanied by trusted friends, over and over again until it doesn't scare you anymore. In my case, my depression is mostly downstream of the maladaptive coping mechanisms I've developed to deal with the anxiety, so this is also the best way for me to deal with depression. I've never had any luck with the pharmaceutical options I've tried (all zoloft did was make my dick stop working while I was on it), but your mileage may vary.

I had a sort of mild depression my whole life, that would sometimes escalate to above mild. Felt like I always had a reason for it for a long time. About a decade ago life was going stupidly well. I was getting married, had a good job, lots of friends, etc. And I still felt kinda like crap. I reached out to Scott and he pointed me to his old article Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression. Followed his advice and just talked to a regular doctor. They were able to prescribe me a low dose SSRI. It helps. The mild depression is gone most of the time, and instead of occasional escalations to above mild depression, I'll have rare escalations to just mild depression. I'd say it has been a success story.

In my case, theater was a lifeline. I do better socializing in structured environments, and after graduating college and having my then-fiancee leave me, I went into a pretty terrible spiral that caused me to withdraw from society.

Theater gave me an environment where everyone was there for the same reason, and I didn't have it in me to be social, I could just privately run lines or something. At the same time, the nature of being on stage forced me to interact. I made a bunch of lifelong friends that way, and it gave me a real chance to crawl out of the hole I was in.

Depression: I think a major factor was having a job where I had to put on a fake face. The mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. Smile, and it will trick the treacherous mind into being happier. Though, that job also involved organizing stacks of heavy boxes, so it was simultaneously good exercise and a constant source of satisfaction for my 'tism tendencies.

For anxiety, the only solution I know if is to brazen through. Exposure therapy. IME, it really doesn't take that much.

Yeahhhhhh I have worked in sales and marketing my whole career and I think that is a big contributor. How did you get out of that situation?

I was saying that job was the solution. It wasn't sales, but the social pressure of not acting like a moody bitch at random customers (and instead getting to solve problems and generally make them happy with me) sort of slowly rewrote the offending part of my brain. Actual sales is not something I am a great fit for. I loathe upselling, and would rather autistically drill down to a clients actual needs, even if that's only a minor sale or even recommending them a different business that better fits their needs.

Luckily, that's been working out decently well for me and my small fiefdom of Globocorp.

I don't have any specific advice for someone who is experiencing depression/anxiety from working sales, though I think I get exactly where you're coming from. Maybe seek some kind of lateral move that involves more sorting than maximizing?

I’m the kind of guy that absolutely loathes customer front facing work, but I do it quite a lot, both with staff and everyone else; and they all tell me I do pretty well even though I don’t particularly enjoy it. My personality has always been more of the inward, thoughtful, mad scientist up in the high tower of the castle, thinking up crazy ideas. But the anxiety of dealing with people on the ground is almost always worse than the reality of it, and it’s a product of overthinking. The only way I’ve found to get out of that mode of thought is simply by doing the work, and you can see how out of register your anxiety is what the work that stands before you.

I suspect that my depression was, in hindsight, mostly due to a case of Shit Life Syndrome. Recently-ish, life improved and so did my mood.

However: I've written about my experience with a clinical trial for psilocybin. It worked wonders, even if the chemical didn't change the material aspects of my life or work. That was all the existence proof that I needed that I could be in a bad place, unhappy with how things were going, without necessarily feeling depressed about it. I've been on plenty of standard antidepressants, and they did fuck-all for me. That is not a general indictment of the class, the drugs aren't perfect, but they do work. For some people. Some of the time. NNT between 5-7. I feel this discrepancy in my bones, more than most psychiatrists do.

Then I dabbled with other substances, after my life got better. I would like to claim they helped, but the problem is that I was already feeling pretty good when I took them, and my main goal was to make the euthymia stick. It's been a month, and I'm doing well. I remember being terrified that I'd immediately relapse when I'm back to work, and that hasn't happened yet. Thank $Deity for that. If it does happen, I'm going to go see a psychiatrist and ask for IV ketamine, it's effective, particularly for treatment resistant cases like mine, and doesn't have the memory-loss issues of ECT.

And hey, if you need more tailored advice, DM me.

I have done a bunch of drugs recreationally, including a ton of psychedelics lol. Not tooooo interested in those, though perhaps I am overdue for another trip. Has been a few years.

$Deity has helped me quite a lot but yeah, I think a lot of it is refusing to change my life circumstances. $Deity has told me that before, now that I think of it...

All I can really say is that it's easier to treat depression and make lifestyle changes than the other way around, particularly for moderate to severe depression. At least that's my personal experience, there's enormous heterogeneity here.

I think you’ll get better results on the Wellness Wednesday thread, friend.

Yeah but I hate posting in em so late. Maybe I'll repost next Wednesday.

So, what are you reading?

I'm getting interested in Ellul. Also about halfway through The Handmaid's Tale. Can't say it has really moved me yet one way or the other, but it seems to be moving towards something. It vaguely occurs to me that some of the undertone of resentment might be intended for readers like myself, but I can't quite figure out what precisely it is angry about yet. Hopefully it will be something that I can use.

Finished He Who Fights with Monsters 12... I liked it, did we really need to introduce trans pronoun norms to a whole universe?

Started Red Rising. Been many people who have raved about it, I should have seen it was young adult, but I wish someone would have warned me It's Hunger Games for Boys. I don't hate it but I started to see where it was going and got a little annoyed. I hear things shift for the latter books.

Had a long drive on the weekend, so Dresden Files' White Night kept me company. The series keeps to deliver, though this one was a bit lower stakes, comparatively, than the previous ones. The only serious arc advancements were that we now know how Thomas is surviving, Lash is out of the picture, after managing to teach Dresden to play guitar, of all things, and Marcone becomes a baron which I am sure will play out later somehow. A lot of unanswered questions - like what Cowl has to do with it and where the immortal super-ghoul army came from and why nobody knew about that even existing prior to that.

Also finished Howling Dark and Demon in White. Hadrian's transformation from a hippie to a superhero by the end of it is pretty much complete, now I am expecting him to do something with it.

Also, have been re-reading Father Brown stories. They never get old.

Baneslayer: System of Nil Book 1 by Tim Paulson. 3/5, mostly because the MC is progressing unbelievably fast by defeating mobs that are much higher than his own level. Normally I'd probably dip out on reading the larger series but alas, I bought 5 of them on Kindle Countdown Deals so as long as it stays decent, I'll probably continue to read it. Alas.

Just finished The Doomed City. It was good, but I feel like it could have been much better without the expedition plot- treating the turning point as the climax of the novel, with the philosophical commentary over drinks or in editorials, would have avoided the dragging and trippiness of the expedition.

To start Man Eaters of Kumaon.

I liked the expedition - it expands the world and shows there has been a lot of stuff going on that the City dwellers have no idea about and are basically beyond their comprehension. But I didn't like the ending too much... Too close to the dreaded "and then he woke up and it all was just a dream".

Agreed that the ending was quite bad. The expedition dragged. It was an acid trip. But most of all, nothing happened, it was merely a framing for philosophical rambling. There could easily have been philosophical dialogue over the problem of governing the city by the post turning point elites, in which something actually happens.

BTW, has anyone read Roadside Picnic?

I of course read it, many times, but if you intend to read it in translation, I have no idea about how good they are. This is an example of a good ending btw. The whole setup is kind of standard "weird sci-fi" thing - aliens, artifacts, zombies, everything of that sort - and pretty enjoyable by itself, but then the ending totally kicks it all out of the water and makes you just sit there and scratch your head, wondering.

Finally finished A Canticle for Leibowitz during the week. Slow, but worth the effort for the ending.

Next up is Philadelphia Fire.

UPDATE: Read the first few pages of Philadelphia Fire and didn't like it. Will have to find something else to read.

Finished Gideon the Ninth. Such a fun book.

Made a trip to half-price books for an excellent haul. Various Vlad Taltos novels, the first five Amber Chronicles, the next Aubrey/Maturin, and. Uh. Gulag Archipelago. There’s got to be something good in that pile!

Gideon the Ninth was an extremely pleasant surprise. Harrow the Ninth less so. Hoping Nona the Ninth can bring it back.

I read Zelazny about fifteen years ago, and I was so struck by his prose. Very sparse, simple, and efficient. I loved it.

Just started the Mage Errant series and I've blasted through three books. It's a light, fun read, though a bit too redditor for me to truly love it.

though a bit too redditor for me to truly love it.

That gets worse. There's a point where the very redditor author seems to realize the, let's say, meta-social implications of his worldbuilding and has an on-page freak-out about it.

...okay, now I'm morbidly curious. I'm just not sure if I want to slog through 7 books of reddit to get to it.

Spoilers for Mage Errant. General spoilers, @ThomasdelVasto should avoid mousing over, but for anyone else it's general worldbuilding stuff, not specific plot points. The magic system basically lends itself to an Archmagistocracy, rule by individuals who are personally powerful on the level of armies. It's essentially Great Man theory of history, the magic system. The political landscape is literally just "which archmage, lich, or superpowered monster lives in this area, and thus rules it." The main antagonist faction uses "tricks" to empower semi-disposable troops to fight above their level, but they're also the only thing remotely resembling a democracy that cares about their people on an institutional level. Somewhere around book 5 the author seems to have realized the implications of a small band of Randian Ubermen fighting off the vile forces of egalitarian institutionalism, and frantically retconned the main cast to try to backdate them as the mere product of having good supporting research teams, and you know, basically anyone could have done what they did with the right support network.

Actual plot point spoilers: And then the last book has an awkward villain-swap to a generic "steal the magic of others" raid boss monster that had minimal buildup. This is really glaring because the second to last book involves a detour to another world with a different magic system that is actually based on institutions and infrastructure and large-scale societal organizing, but the author clearly didn't consider any of this stuff when he was writing the first handful of books.

And if I recall correctly the author is an actual straight up SneerClub poster.

You are correct. What a shame.

...well. Alright, then. That certainly has a degree of hilarity to it, I will confess.

Thank you for the summery.

Don't ruin it for me. I'm gonna ride it out and do my best to ignore the redditor side of things.

Do you consider Israel culturally part of the West? Partially part of the West?

I've been thinking about this, and I think it's an interesting and not necessarily straight forwards question. I think secular Jews and those in the Reform tradition are undeniably Western; one of the core points of the Reform tradition was to integrate Judaism into Western Traditions and vice versa. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox I think are their own distinct, more ancient civilization. My answer to the above question is I think Israel is mostly Western, given the cultural roots of the Reform/Seculars, but not entirely.

Yes. I've had many Israeli friends, and many more Jewish friends who had lived and worked in Israel for a time. There are large parts of Israel where I'm confident that if you dropped me there, I'd navigate with no more difficulty than I have in any other Western city.

The existence of a large (13%) haredi population doesn't invalidate Israel's western status any more than the existence of a small (10%) Amish minority removes Lancaster County from modernity.

Yes, my definition of western is essentially a place I feel comfortable.

Israel has a mix of cultures, but the overall direction is generally Western, yes. There's of course Judaic part of the culture, which predates what we call modern Western culture by a couple of millennia (of course, it did not stay static for all that time too), so there's that. Even secular Jews are influenced by it. Paradoxically, Reform Jews may be the least influenced here. A comparison I liked about this - it's like being a non-religious person in a Catholic country (say, Italy or Poland) vs being a Protestant. If the former case, you may not be an actively religious person but still you play by the Catholic culture rules, in the latter, it's a different (though related) culture. The culture that Reform trends towards the most is the liberal woke culture. I guess that's part of Western culture too, it can be argued?

Do other Western countries have signs like this in public neighborhoods?

Yes, in certain places you could have it. Note that this (Mea Shearim) is in no way typical neighborhood in Israel - it is considered very odd and exceptional by Israeli standards.

Yeah, we get them next to the highway.

That’s not really what I was getting at. Public display of religious attitudes isn’t forbidden in Western culture, but different neighborhoods having completely different rules kind of is.

It’s becoming more common as our culture becomes less Western, but that’s the point

I'm pretty sure the Vatican has similar signs, as do some cultural sites (cathedrals) across the EU. Also occasional bans on specific types of garments: Switzerland bans face-covering headwear.

I've definitely encountered my share of "tourists go away" graffiti in a few EU countries with lots of tourism, which seems like the subtext of the sign there too.

You can just look up the signs at the entrance to the Vatican banning tank tops and shorts.

Orthodox Judaism is not older than Christianity- it's a branch off of ancient Judaism, yes, but one that developed in response to events that were arguably put in motion by Christianity and which aren't older than Christianity even if they weren't. Rabbinic Judaism is not the religion of the old testament.

That depends on what you mean by "Orthodox Judaism". As any tradition that is not dead, it changes constantly. Yes, modern Judaism (which is not a singular religion anyway, with all the Reform, Conservative, Hasidim, Misnagdim, Mizrahim, and so on) is not the same Judaism as it were in times of Judges or the times of Mishnah, but Mishnah itself is contrary to the previous tradition - it is written down oral tradition, which is a pretty fundamental change already. Things always change.

one that developed in response to events that were arguably put in motion by Christianity

That is a very questionable proposition, unless you mean it as "in the response to events that involved people, some of whom also been Christians". Rabbinic Judaism came about as a solution to absence of central authority and dispersed nature of Jewish diaspora. The starting point of it would probably be the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and then it developed with the codification of the Talmud since then. At that point, Christianity did not have much influence on the events. Later, of course, as Christianity became more dominant, it influenced a lot of events, which in turn influenced also the development of Judaism. But I don't think tracing the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism to Christianity in any causal meaning makes a lot of sense.

Also, of course, while Rabbinic Judaism is different than what came before - I don't think it's right to say it's a different religion. I am sure what early Christians practiced would be also different from what we find in modern Vatican or Russian Orthodox Church, but we still call it Christianity, don't we?

The basic confines of apostolic Christianity are old enough to be recorded in the New Testament- churches are organized by city, and the city’s church is headed by a bishop who ordains other ministers. Christians gather on Sunday and have Vice rules as well as mutual aid; they believe that Jesus Christ is a superior being who died and rose from the dead, and that this frees believers from hellfire and damnation, and that He was born of a virgin. They believe that God created in addition to the world also angels, and some of those angels went bad and seek to do us harm.

Old Testament Judaism was a priest-centered religion whose sacred rites were sacrifices. Religious authority was vested in a college of priests, and scholars played a secondary role. Rabbinic Judaism is a scholar-centric religion with very little role for priests and no sacrifices.

You are mixing basic religious dogmas (like "Jesus Christ is a superior being" etc.) with rites ("gather on Sunday", etc.) and with organizational structure ("churches are organized by city, and the city’s church is headed by a bishop"). The latter two of which is in no way shared by all Christian denominations (and we can have a long long talk about the first one but let's leave it aside for now). If you talk about basic dogmas, in Judaism they have not changed. If you talk about rites, they did change a lot (and continue to change - for example, there are prayers for state of Israel and for IDF, as you may imagine, they do not come from Mishnaic times), and so did Christian rites, and different Christian denominations have very different rites. If you talk about the organizational structure, it definitely changed a lot for Judaism - and is also diverse for Christians, some denominations don't have bishops at all, and for those that do, the roles vary greatly.

Thus, I think if we are allowed to say that the modern Christianity, in all its diversity, is the same religion that had been taught by Jesus and Paul, then we should be allowed to say the modern Judaism is the same religion that had been practiced by David and Solomon. And if we say those are different religions, then the question of "what is older" becomes rather arbitrary, because the whole definition of what is being compared eludes us.

Apostolic Christianity is meaningfully the same; it's totally fair- but not general practice- to make the claim that low church protestantism isn't. This is because it is recognizably within the same family as Orthodoxy and Catholicism, defined by trinitarianism, baptism, and a shared new testament canon. In contrast, the continuity of old testament Judaism is Samaritanism- which both calls itself, and is called by mainstream rabbinic Judaism, a different religion.

I'd say it's the Western periphery, like Russia or Turkey or Georgia and Armenia. Less Western than the US or even Mexico, more Western than Japan.

I like the Mexico/Latin American comparison. Those nations are a mix of clearly western populations, criollos mestizos, and pardos, and non-western populations, the unassimilated indios.

So in the spirit of small scale, what's for dinner tonight?

My wife was up tonight and made the following:

Regular onigiri with white rice

Pork-wrapped julienned carrots and green peppers with some sort of sour plum paste seasoned with salt and pepper. Sautéed so it was like a little roll of meat with vegetables inside

Some sort of kimchee vegetables that included celery sections. Was surprisingly good

miso soup (tofu, green onions, spinach)

tofu (kinugoshi or soft) in squares topped with thin sliced onions, sesame oil, and her family's soy sauce, which I'm told is noticeably different than that you can buy in stores

cucumber medallions and daikon radish and carrots pickled in some way

udon noodles topped with some meat and baby leaf lettuce seasoned in some way (I think the noodles were the main?)

I had all this with two very cold beers.

I imagine @Tretiak eating pizza topped in butter, how about the rest of you?

I was able to justify a big dinner after a 2 hour long bike ride.

  • Cajun Corn - a semi-proprietary cajun and taco seasoning blend suspended in olive oil and drizzled over whole ears. Wrapped in foil, and set on the grill right after dumping the charchoal from the chimney. Turned once every 8 minutes or so.
  • Jalapeno Cheddar Burgers - Along with the corn, I seared tomatoes, onion, and Jalapenos to prepare fresh salsa for Cinco De Mayo this week. In America at least Jalapenos are absolute wildcards when you get them from the grocery store. These were screamers, and I have a fairly high heat tolerance. 3 slices of Boar's Head yellow cheddar and the freshly ground prime 80/20 from the supermarket cooled things off a bit, but I actually also leveraged my BBQ slaw from 2 days ago to really tie the room together...
  • BBQ Slaw - I use a variant of Rodney Scott's BBQ Sauce, an eastern NC condiment, modified to have more smoke via chipotle chile powder and higher-quality vinegar as a base. Greek Yogurt, a touch of mayo, brown sugar, and brown deli mustard round it out. I've learned that trying to eliminate sugar in slaw is a fool's errand, despite my hating it as an ingredient in industrialized food.

I originally planned to do some roasted potatoes, but after 3 IPAs, I decided to crack open a bag of chips now that Frito-Lay has dropped the prices back to human levels.

Inspiring! Sounds great.

Yesterday's dinner menu: kotlety, vinegret, cabbage-and-bell-pepper salad, hummus, cherry tomatoes, pickled cucumbers. The links are just visual examples, I don't know the exact recipe - my wife makes it, and she varies it all the time. My wife is a great cook, I am truly blessed in this regard (as in many others when it concerns my wife).

Also had a can of stout with that, since it was a busy weekend and I wanted to relax.

looks great

Some leftover Japanese-style chicken curry and rice. I use the premade roux cubes but add a lot of additional spices, and my family recipe includes okra and coconut milk. Afterwards I'll prepare a big pot of black-eyed peas with ham hocks and collard greens for the week.

Meal wise, nothing fancy. I might make a sandwich. But I am currently working on some banana bread, which ought to be quite delicious.

Smothered chicken thighs with(what else!) long grain rice.

I ate leftover ham and green beans. Boring, but easy. The ham was extra from when I made Ham and Cheese Calzones, which we already ate half of and froze the other half and don't want to thaw just yet because that defeats the purpose. The green beans were free/leftover from my wife's job. My wife and I both don't like cooking very much, so we typically make large batches of good stuff (like soup or calzones) every once in a while to eat when we get tired of free work food.

Ham and green beans are solid. Green beans and purple -hull field peas were staple sides at lunch and dinner growing up

Just a quick snack at the moment. Lots of butter of course!.

That was before the two bags of Doritos I just ate, along with two Mountain Dews; :/.

How's the ticker? While dietary cholesterol is apparently not the bugbear it was made out to be for years, saturated fats are still considered a cause of atherosclerosis. Then there is the metabolic/blood glucose issue. Truly you should be studied.

I actually had a routine checkup about 8-9 months ago and all my lab values (including cholesterol) were taken. My doctor said my numbers were literally perfectly at the normal ranges. I’ve never felt unhealthy eating this way but I do feel anemic when I go off of it.

Are you dipping a mayo chicken sando into melted butter?

I always try and have our cook at work (bless you Alvin) saturate the bun and chicken in as much butter as possible but it becomes impractical at some point, because the bun then starts breaking apart; crumbling. So he’ll put the rest into a cup that I can dip the burger in. This time though he didn’t overdo buttering the bun too much I think. I added several salt packets to the meat before putting the mayo on, then dip the bun again in butter before I take a bite.

You belong in a museum.

He'll be well preserved.

Pulled pork that sous vided two months ago. Memphis dust salt, 24h at 74C. Today finished for half and hour at 150c oven.

Damn. Any sides?

Whatever fresh veggies were in the fridge.

I'm gonna say Ramen noodles, some spring rolls and a peanut butter sandwich.

I know I'm meant to pretend to have a 3 course meal here, but sometimes you're spending the evening alone and go for convenience.

Very true. I wish we could have peanut butter in my home, but my brood have allergies.

Damn right. Let us gentlemen of culture partake of our repast.

Probably making either a curry or a dal. Easy to heat up during the week when I don't feel like cooking. Also got a leek & potato pie on tap to make at some point, although I will freely admit I just use storebought puff pastry for the topping. I do need to learn how to make a proper shortcrust at some point, since I love meat pies & pasties, but that's sure as hell not a today thing.

Big pastry and meat pie fan myself. I used to attempt croissants and pastry dough in my youth but I feel it's not worth the effort when you can buy premade.

My MIL is cooking mashed potato patties stuffed with chopped wild mushrooms, which I consider a waste of effort. Frying some potatoes with the same mushrooms would be like eight times quicker and would taste better IMO. But she really loves the dish along with the rest of the terrible Soviet canteen-style cooking, so she gets to make it once in a while.

My wife is cooking us two a steak as well, so the dinner won't be so depressing.

Real personally gathered wild mushrooms? There are few poisonous ones in Soviet areas, but many poisonous ones with identical appearances to safe mushrooms in the US.

No, they were from the friendly neighborhood supermarket. All three species only grow in the wild, though:

  • Boletus edulis
  • Leccinum aurantiacum
  • Leccinum scabrum

I think the morels are pretty safe here. Wouldn't expect someone to stuff those into patties, though.

Sounds good to me. Steaks also sound good. The 和牛/wagyu beef most often sold as high end steak here doesn't quite do it for me. It's not bad but it tastes like an Alien's version of what a steak should taste like. That's heresy here to say aloud, but the best steak I've ever had (outside some tournedos de rossini) was in Alabama cooked on a grill at my friend's house.

Why is this heresy? The US is well-known worldwide for its love of grilled beef.

The heresy part is my lack of enthusiasm for wagyu. The marbling, which is what is supposed to make it so good, is what to me makes the texture oddly surreal.

We don't usually cook anything special on Sundays so I'm planning to try to make a version of this green pea pasta.

My eldest loves green peas and I've been on the lookout for a decent recipe that uses them that I could cook on a week night (I don't make new recipes I haven't tried before on weekdays). I was thinking about adding some stock and garlic but otherwise keep it pretty much the same.

I would totally eat. Green peas get a bad rap in Japan for some reason, but Farfelle, peas and canned tuna with some Italian parsley and garlic is a great dish as well.

A simple stew made with a ham that was on sale for $1.50/lb, cabbage, onions, the last of the garlic from last year's harvest, and some paprika and black pepper.

Sounds good! Any bread involved?

Not tonight. My usual sourdough takes two days to make and it all went to my family this weekend. My dad finished his chemo so we celebrated a little.

Best wishes to a successful remission. Never tried to make sourdough though it's a great sandwich bread.

For me this week was lazy. So, chicken enchiladas with ranchero sauce/Oaxaca cheese, made from a broken down rotisserie, and some steaks that were actually top blade short ribs just grilled to rare with potatos and creamed spinach. Both really easy when you purchase the rice/beans/potatoes premade.

Got more energy this week, so gonna try a panang curry for the first time, and then just do homemade buffalo mac n cheese and grilled chicken for the second meal. I usually just cook twice a week and get 8-10 servings out of each one. My wife gets fed catered meals at work, so her interest in cooking is pretty low atm. I tend to do all of it since I'm technically unemployed and I have the time.

Enchiladas sound amazing. So difficult to get good Mexican food here, although there appears to be a recent taco boom in Japan (they say メキシカンタコス/mekishikantakos to not be confused with タコ/tako or octopus) There's a place in Osaka that has a one-month wait to get in, but no taco is worth that amount of time for me. I'm biding my time for the interest to wane or Instagram to be glutted. And Oaxaca cheese! Couldn't find it for love or money in Kansai (possibly Tokyo?)

Oaxaca is great, but you can definitely replace it with low skim mozzarella in most applications. My mom is mexican, so I tend to make a whole variety of enchiladas on different occasions. My two true favorites though are probably the simple ones. Shredded rotisserie chicken, sour cream, a melty white cheese with good pull, wrapped in a corn tortilla, topped with either ranchero sauce or dona rosa mole + chicken stock + chipotle onion paste. I finish the red with shredded cheese and the mole with more sour cream. As far as I'm concerned, its simply the best easy weeknight casserole dish out there.

I would love to visit Japan eventually. We'd considered it for a honeymoon, but after doing Italy a few years ago my wife and I were tired of planning, so we opted for an Alaska cruise instead. We'll be leaving in 11 days :)

Is anyone else starting to freak out about the whole Hormuz situation? 13% of the world's oil, 22% of global LNG and a sizeable chunk of fertilizers is blocked. That means 13% fewer big machines running. That is a major decrease in the global economy. Yet markets seem surprisingly stable and people don't seem to be freaking out despite the impending cliff.

Is Trump actually crazy enough to cause a major crash in the global economy or is he willing to admit defeat and pull out? How bad will this crisis actually get?

Yes, but more about the ridiculousness of the ongoing situation than about oil shortages or whatever.

There you are, for some reason I haven't been seeing your posts recently.

I haven't been posting recently, I've been lurking. Most of the stuff going around is boring right now I guess.

There is no equilibrium oil price in the current political environment. If the strait stays closed, then the price will go up. But if the price goes up too much, then Trump will chicken out and do whatever needs to be done to open the strait back up. If the strait opens up, then the price of oil will crash. This means that there is almost no upside to speculating that the price will go above ≈ $125/barrel.

Wasn’t physical crude trading at 140$ just couple weeks ago? Not that I would speculate a serious amount of money into this, but Trump so far hasn’t proven entirely able to TACO even though he obviously really wants to. Iran and Israel have a big say in the events to come and both have strong hardliner factions which favour more escalation. It wouldn’t be an entirely unreasonable bet into an escalation spiral.

There were localized spikes to that level, but that’s different from a a global continuous price that high.

There are military options available to force the strait open if it comes to that. They won’t be easy or politically friendly to Trump, but they are possible.

What are these military options in your view? Are you talking about a land invasion?

I just cannot see how, in the case of a US military operation forceful enough to actually stop the blockade or break down the Iranian state, Iranians would not missile spam every single Gulf oil field so it does not even make sense to ship anything through the Strait anymore.

I have assumed things would get pretty bad when the amount of US military hardware moving to the region made this very unlikely to be a dud. So I did the reasonable thing and leveraged into some crude oil futures. So far I have been proven mostly correct in this with some decent profit, but not as much as I expected. I cashed in a bit but mostly HODLING to the moon because I believe even though Trump has realized he has massively fucked up, Iranians will not let this opportunity go so easily and they are a bit too high on their own supply, and the Israel state/lobby is going to do everything it can do to drag this into a bigger war.

To answer your actual question, no I don't think Trump is crazy enough to do that, but he seemingly might be stupid enough to do it anyway. Simply the strait staying shut for months without major fighting would be really really bad already. But things can escalate to a massive catastrophe if shooting starts again and oil infra is really blown up. So far it was mostly warning shots.

Also it is hilariously pathetic to start a war and kill half the leadership of a country in a rather treacherous way under cover of negotiations, only to start moaning about international law and "economic fallout is actually their fault" when they retaliate in the most predictable ways. I must admit I did not realize just that American right wingers are this idiotic, as I was too young during all the Bush years. These people really deserve what they will get in a couple years.

P.S. if you want to force yourself to learn and monitor the shit out of some topic, nothing like betting a modest amount of money in it. I have no idea how people can sleep at night with million dollar positions.

Not really. I got most of my feeling awful out of the way in the first few days, when we were bragging about lethality vs. schoolgirls. Now I just feel numb and annoyed.

Maybe if the economy implodes, I’ll have a better chance at finding a house.

Yet markets seem surprisingly stable

Not only are they stable, the global stock market (as measured by VT)—the aggregation of forward-looking, skin-in-the-game outlooks for the world economy—closed two days in a row for record highs on Thursday and Friday. This is on the tails of having just hit a then-record high about two weeks ago prior.

We're now up about 2.7% since before the war begin, which is a good return for a two-month span. On the country level, it has been well-demonstrated empirically (thus, confirming the theoretical expectation) that stock market returns are a strong predictor of future GDP growth, and the global stock market is just the collection of country stock markets across the world.

There are two separate issues you've mixed together. The increasing supply crisis. And your hate for the West, the US and Trump. Trump didn't block the strait. Iran did. Only putting blame and responsibility on Trump is a sign of bias.

There are two separate issues you've mixed together. The increasing supply crisis. And your hate for the West, the US and Trump. Trump didn't block the strait. Iran did. Only putting blame and responsibility on Trump is a sign of bias.

If I was your older brother, the appropriate response to this would be to grab your arms, give you a couple good whacks, and tell you to stop hitting yourself.

  • -13

You and @TowardsPanna - stop this. Engage in the question, not in petty bickering with each other.

Good thing your wish to engange in violence based on a pretty brief and innocent internet post is only a hypothetical.

The point is that forcing somebody to do something and then blaming them for doing it is petty and sadistic.

If somebody controls an important pass, and you slaughter their family and make it clear that you will continue to slaughter until you get unconditional obedience, then closing off the pass is the obvious and natural response.

Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably. Others seem to believe that Red Americans (as opposed to the hated Blues) can do no wrong and should be acclaimed throughout the world as the righteous God-Kings they obviously are - or else.

Nobody forced Iran to declare US a "Great Satan", build a vast collection of proxy armies, commit terrorist acts and pursue nuclear weapons, while openly declaring they are going to use them to perpetrate genocide. They chose to live this life. Now they are living the life they have chosen. Their choices led them to the situation where the only choices for their opponents would be either live under a permanent threat of nuclear attack or take measures to preclude this threat before it realized. Iranians had multiple opportunities to get off this train, instead they doubled and tripled down - because their apocalyptic ideology and their belief the West is weak and decadent and can be bullied if one is determined enough - mandated this strategy. Of course, the West did a lot to support that assumption, but this is not an excuse.

is the obvious and natural response.

As much obvious and natural response as shooting you is an obvious and natural response of a robber who is caught by you unexpectedly returning home in mid-robbery. Yes, it is obvious, and yes, it is natural for a violent criminal to resort to violence. I am not sure how you get from "obvious and natural" to "commendable and desirable". It is natural for a criminal to do crime. It is natural for a bunch of crazy apocalyptic cultists to behave like crazy apocalyptic cultists. How that "natural" is any good?

Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably.

That's empty rhetoric. Of course everybody believe their criticism it the most reasonable one. It does not make it so. You have to actually prove it, you can't just state it and then stand and expect everybody to go "oh, how couldn't we see it before, the is the reasonable one, it's all different now!" Just because you call yourself "reasonable", does not score you any points in the actual reasonableness. On the contrary, when you engage in rule lawyering and defend your criticism with arguments like "oh, you just lost the ability to be criticized and that's why you are not agreeing with me" one is tempted to conclude you do not expect your argument to be strong enough to stand on its merits, without supporting it with attacks on the opponent's mental capacity, instead of addressing their arguments.

While we're talking about relative morality and sibling relationships, Iran is, in my mind, the little brother who constantly flicks your nuts, talks about how they'll beat the shit out of you when they're older, and then runs crying to mommy (the U.N.) when you hit them back.

This is a crappy war we shouldn't have started, but I understand why it happened. I also have very little sympathy for a murderous theocracy so incapable of dealing with reality and so hateful to the average human that it's decided to go scorched earth at every fork in the road.

If somebody controls an important pass

Question: does Pakistan also control the Strait of Hormuz? It's within range of their ASBMs, so what's stopping them from threatening to close it every time they get into a scrap with India?

Maybe they are not insane enough for that?

Pakistan throwing missiles at ships crossing the Strait wouldn’t change the strategic calculations at all for India, and Pakistan would immediately collapse under the retaliation of the countries annoyed at its actions. So no, Pakistan doesn’t control the strait.

Iran forced the US military into an unfavourable ceasefire and now seems to be even coercing a peace treaty by doing the same, and so far they seem to be taking the punishment fine. So yes Iran is obviously the country with by far the most control of the Strait.

Nothing, I guess, if they really do have that ability. I would dispute equating "conducting a sneak-assassination of the entire leadership plus an extended bombing campaign, aimed at some combination of overturning the country's government + preventing them from developing weapons that might actually hurt their attackers" with "getting into a scrap". But yes, if India did that and Pakistan succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, I would naturally blame India.

The US is currently blockading the straight. The straight was open until Trump and Netanyahu started the war that brought us the completely predictable result of the straight being closed. The straight won't be open until they sign a peace deal with Iran.

I don't hate the west. I do hate wars that flood the west with migrants, stop oil supplies and cost a fortune. The wars in the middle east are anti west.

I beg you - it's the strait of Hormuz.

Yeah, it's a lot harder to find the gays of Hormuz.

Yet another consequence of the brutal Iranian regime.

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