domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
MollieTheMare
4m ago
Sorry for the late reply, offline for the long weekend.
Cheap bike is fine for rolling around the neighborhood. Like I said l, I do think there is a pace for them. The short version is good metallurgy is expensive. The sub $500 "mountain" bikes from Walmart come with a warning not to ride them on unpaved surfaces. Making a mountain bike where it's light enough to be rideable but tough enough where you don't taco a wheel is surprisingly difficult. On the road you'll feel every Watt a cheap bikes cheap bearings rob from you, but for "city" rather than "road" riding it matters less.
Because cycling is only semi-weight bearing and has no or little exentric you generate less strain per unit power/cardio zone. Stimulus to fatigue is still good, but raw stimulus is lower. So for arobic fitness you might need to put in 50% more time than running for the same cardio benefit. For example, for the same VO2 max increase from x hours of preceved zone 2 work. If you have a good bike fit it will still be easier on the knees though.
FtttG
25m ago
It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime
Can you give some examples of things which were described as war crimes but which actually weren't?
FtttG
26m ago
My mum was reading that a few months ago, and I teased her that she was reading a book by an admitted climate-change denier.
FtttG
27m ago
The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich. Just as fascinating as Scott's review of it made it sound: I'm less than halfway through it and I already feel like I've learned so much. I've quoted so many interesting anecdotes from it to my girlfriend that she wants to read it as soon as I'm finished.
Corvos
29m ago
I apologise for misreading you. I come across the real article every so often and it irks me.
pbmonster
39m ago
Probably a lot of free variables in that problem. Press reports on climate modeling usually don't mention the gigantic error bars their predictions come with (especially for exotic long-horizon events like AMOC).
Also, -4°C was the average yearly temperature across the continent for a AMOC collapse. That doesn't contradict -20°C in winter in certain coastal regions (probably those most benefiting from Gulf stream heating right now) in the case of a full AMOC reversal.
But yeah, -20°C would be the end of agriculture. Let's hope for a worst case that is closer to... British Columbia.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
51m ago
(Hence the recent proliferation of militarist neocon feminist girlboss politicians all around the EU, for example.)
I'm not sure what this refers to. The two examples that come to mind, Sanna Marin and Kaja Kallas, were mostly elected for non-Russia-related reasons. Marin got his job due to internal Social Democratic party machinations, did this before the Russian invasion, and is not particularly militaristic for a Finnish politician. The biggest reason Kaja Kallas is in office is that her party, Reform, is Estonia's natural ruling party, and her father Siim Kallas was previously the PM (and Siim Kallas, in turn, got his job in the typical Eastern European way of having been a ranking CPSU member and making an advantageous switch to the capitalist side when the time was proper for that).
RenOS
something is wrong
51m ago
For me at least, my wife is really into it. Of course it shouldn't look completely uncared for and not too long, but generally she doesn't even want me to go back to stubbles, clean shaven is not an option at all. It's simply unmanly in her mind. Keeping a medium-length beard is also less work than clean shaven.
No_one
1hr ago
It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?
Tell me again where did the European citizen have a choice of opting out of green energy lunacy or immigration ? What choices do you have in the supposedly most free system out there?
No_one
1hr ago
I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting.
Americans, even pretty smart ones (e.g. eigenrobot ) earnestly believe their country's hegemony is good, proper and should be maintained indefinitely despite material reality. Is that not even more off-putting than wanting to preserve hegemony and actually doing something towards that aim?
No_one
1hr ago
I'm not arguing that it should do so, or that it'd have been the right thing to do, I'm saying that had they been serious about preserving 'freedom in the future lightcone' or however e/acc guys who are anti-China put it, they'd have had to do that.
If CPC preserves its current ways of picking elites which is go to Chinese MIT/Harvard etc, pick psychologically most promising students who have already been established are 99.8th percentile and put them on the party career track - it's probably going to end up as the least stupid form of governance ever devised.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
I heard -20C colder winters... ports getting fucked up due to ice... food production likely tanking.
pbmonster
1hr ago
I think a total AMOC collapse would result in a 4°C reduction in temperature in Europe - which nicely matches the total increase due to global warming! So I will go ahead and pretend that we (eurotrash) are safe, and in the perfect spot to ride out the climate catastrophe. Might even get a decade of good skiing out of it!
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
He did say "any other", though, which roughly matches with my impression. AFAIK it's also true that there are specific combination that are over-and under-represented, and white male asian female is extremely overrepresented.
Botond173
2hr ago
It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of the war but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
Westerners apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will always be easy. (Hence the recent proliferation of militarist neocon feminist girlboss politicians all around the EU, for example.) It never turns out great.
StJohnOfPatmos
3hr ago
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
This is completely true, and it's an argument against the point the original essay was making. The democratisation of art has diluted technical and formal criteria by dismantling traditional forms of gatekeeping - not some new-found elitism.
Poetry's downfall in particular which you mention seems to me to be suffering from a similar issue - our elites aren't reading anymore and have little meaningful exposure to the great classics of Western poetry. The Rupi Kaur-style of poetry is successful because it is extremely undemanding to read and easy to consume, perfectly fit for a society that acquired Ivy League Humanities degrees by using Sparknotes and summarized bullet points to interact with a Lord Byron poem. There is a stunning lack of snobbishness even in our most elite universities.
The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
I find the concept of a "golden age of art" overly ambitious and reductive, but it makes for a fun dinner party conversation. Your periodisation leaves out the entire Gothic period and the Renaissance, not to speak of Classical Antiquity and Ancient Rome, so I have trouble getting on board with it as the decisive high watermark of art. I also find much of the 18th Century to be a relative low point in the Western tradition of painting before 1900, but I think that's largely a matter of taste.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
3hr ago
If the train is a metaphor for direction the government is going, than I'm not sure that America is that different. If America's train is heading for a cliff, I also have no possible control over it or ability to stop it. That train also won't stop for me, and will happily drag me to my death if I interact with the door mechanism wrong or whatever the equivalent metaphor is.
The biggest difference I see is that Chinas train is piloted by a single conductor who appears to be sane and fairly smart. So I think that train will be safe until he dies, and then yeah, huge potential for disaster as a new pilot is selected and possibly a bad or evil one.
versus America's train, there barely is a pilot at all, and to the extent their is a pilot he gets replaced very often and the new one is selected by a people I don't trust, interacting with entrenched and sinister factions in esoteric ways.
At least until Xi dies, I think that the China train sounds like that safer bet.
Obviously I'm not going to move there, the American train is more luxury, and I've already paid for a nice cabin. But I'm not convinced our conductors are likely to be better than theirs.
FtttG
3hr ago
Every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. For July, these included World Friendship Day (July 30th), Nelson Mandela's birthday (July 18th) and World Chocolate Day (today). There's also International Non-Binary People's Day, which it will not surprise you to learn made me roll my eyes (the aforementioned member of the HR team had only just taken down the innumerable pride flags festooning the office for the duration of June, but apparently we need an extra day outside of that just for the they/thems). But what interested me was that International Non-Binary People's Day falls on July 14th, the same day as Bastille Day. There's an implicit hierarchy here, wherein the HR department are tacitly insinuating that non-binary people deserve international commemoration in a way that French people don't.
philosoraptor
3hr ago
Your math seems to assume they would only have lived one more year each. (If I understood it right, and if I didn't, it might be because most of the symbols seem to be missing...) Many were kids with their whole life ahead of them. It's 11 minutes per year they would have lived on average, plus other considerations of the sort self_made_human pointed out.
If you want to do things on a flood plain, surely you should be prepared for a flood. Better yet, manage the water so it won't flood. Flooding isn't akin to 'oh no this playground is too exciting, little Timmy might bruise himself, better make it as dull as possible' safetyism, it's a serious issue that destroys a great deal of property along with killing people.
I also submit that Los Angeles shouldn't have been burning down this year either. The US is supposed to be rich and this part of LA doubly so. Rich people aren't supposed to have their houses burn down. Clear away the flammable shrubs and have some water in tanks so it doesn't just run dry and people are running around tossing oat milk onto fires, as in one memorable case. LA couldn't be bothered to properly prepare for fires in a fire-prone area, couldn't be bothered to clear out vegetation, couldn't be bothered to pass the marshmallow test and paid the price.
I don't see why it's not cost-efficient to take these measures for a rich country. What else was the money going to be spent on, boomer welfare, fake jobs in medicine?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
I don't use and never have used apps for various reasons (mostly age) but this is a very detailed post of reasonable advice, good on you taking the time.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."
WW2 killed more people than any "act of God" in recorded history. I'd be more concerned about a nuclear exchange than I would about any natural disaster that's likely to happen during my life expectancy.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5hr ago
While I certainly endorse the principle, shouldn't the figures be much higher because the relevant population are people who even have to seriously consider the risk of drowning due to a flood? The risk of being attacked by a shark per capita is pretty low, but most people don't live next to an ocean.
TowardsPanna
5hr ago
That's a lotta books... :(
I haven't read Cialdini yet. I actually got it, read a tiny bit, but was hit with a moral concern that it's wrong to 'manipulate' people. I guess I should discard that concern, since everyone else who gets shit done is doing it.
Treason's Harbor - Stuck in Malta while their ship is refitting Aubrey and Maturin discover the place is infested with prostitutes, French spies and a geriatric Admiral that can't keep his hands off the help.
I'm still enjoying this series and I'm not even half way through. I hope the quality keeps up.
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