domain:web.law.duke.edu
MollieTheMare
10hr ago
The heavy things also have numbers on them, and if you keep doing it, you can watch the numbers go up.
The analogy I make to guys who don't lift but are into vidya is, it's like an RPG but IRL. (With a few exceptions) When you first start 2pl8 (100 kg) bench is like the first world boss. You'll get smacked down if you approach it without enough XP or skill. But once you level up a bit it just becomes random fodder you blow by in your warmups. You get to pick where to devote training/XP to, strength, size, endurance, etc. And have manna (recovery) you have to manage.
The inevitable regression does suck, but the meta is always changing. You'll see influencers go from "functional" training to pure strength. Then to bodybuilding/aesthetics. Then they'll pick up running. I suspect it's because one training modality does become stale when you saturate that attribute or regress. But having good general physical preparedness lets you transition to all sorts of things as your life evolves.
dr_analog
razorboy
10hr ago
On behalf of oil interests? Oh, you mean the part where Western nations invested in Iran to develop its oil infrastructure under a rev sharing deal that was considered mutually beneficial at the time only to then be seized by future socialists?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10hr ago
Again, very interesting and informative.
If I'm reading you correctly, my updated hypothesis has also been more or less invalidated. We aren't in a situation in which a meaningful percentage of blue collar (or any) careers create the demise of those who work in them. And from previous comments, we can also say with decent confidence that "disability grift" isn't a multi-billion dollar scam industry. Furthermore, with the amounts involved, there aren't really "disability queens" who are collecting thousands of dollars per month. It's an unfortunate group of mostly honest people who get a few hundred extra dollars to get by. Based on your comments on the end-of-lifers, it also seems disability insurance acts as kind of publicly-funded hospice care as well. Sad, but understandable.
Given all of this, I'm actually, now, tempted to think that system works about as well as a system like this could. It's inefficient, sure, but it feels like it's mostly doing a service to those in need (perhaps to an unsatisfying emotional degree) and without a disproportionate drain on public resources.
I'll make the humble request again to get your input on that.
If it's legal, it will become normalised. If it's legal to have AI-generated porn, and it's legal to make, distribute, and consume AI generated child porn, then by what rules or laws do you tell AI Pornhub "sure, fake me up some incest porn with barely-legal sixteen year old hot blonde twins but never oh never six year olds"?
Gay marriage is the ur-example here: we went pretty damn quick from "gay marriage will not affect you in the slightest, if you don't like gay marriage then don't get gay married" to "well now everyone surely agrees that gay marriage is moral and normal and only horrible monster bigots could ever have objected to it".
Porn is about selling what society considers taboo/shameful to those willing to pay for it. Blue clubs and stag movies were early versions, as were the jokes about barbers and "something for the weekend" as they would sell condoms on the side. Oral sex is shocking and depraved? Even prostitutes won't do it (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade where an early trial had a prostitute testify that he wanted her to perform certain unnatural acts)? Well we'll show it in porn because it's the shocking spicy act people want to see and then over time that leaks into the mainstream so that now blowjobs are now just another normal act people do.
AI kiddie porn is the most taboo? Even the AI-generated stuff? You don't want to go to the government centre to access it? Never fear, for the right money we'll sell it to you so you can consume it at home. And then it goes onto the mainstream porn sites. Because after all, it's legal and even the government is providing it for the MAPs at their centres!
HereAndGone
11hr ago
I know which of my values are the masters. I have no interest in performing a puppet show for some stranger's amusement. I'm perfectly fine with blitzing through the online survey trolley problems to be told at the end "well you are consistent at least, you horrible monster" because I know the purpose of such surveys is to persuade me around to their way of holding sacred values, and I don't care if I'm thought of as a horrible monster by a bunch that I consider evil idiots.
thejdizzler
11hr ago
I like this framing!
ZanarkandAbesFan
11hr ago
Do Hezbollah and the Houthis also do this?
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
Keep in mind that my analysis is based on the subset of people who applied for disability, and not the population at large. Further, blue collar workers with musculoskeletal problems accounted for 50% of approvals, not 50% of total claims. This number may actually be a bit high, since most of the death bed cases were sent to a special unit that I didn't deal with. As a proportion of total claims, I'd say they were no higher than 10%. For volume of total claims, the generally unhealthy accounted for the highest proportion, followed by psycho kids and complex cases. This is taking into account that death bed cases had enough volume to merit their own unit to expedite them, though since I didn't work there I can't comment on volume.
While I don't doubt that blue collar work is harder on the body than other work, disability isn't particularly common. In my current job, I defend industrial equipment manufacturers and contractors in products liability cases, and out of hundreds of cases I've handled, I've seen maybe three or four where the plaintiff was receiving disability, or had even made a disability claim, and this is for a subset of the population that worked industrial jobs for decades. You also need to take into consideration that while blue collar work is more likely to lead to legal disability, that likelihood is largely independent of whether it's likely to contribute to the underlying medical condition. People who work office jobs where they sit on their ass all day don't quit work and apply for disability because of bum knees, and even if they did they'd be denied. It's not that the jobs causes the disability so much as it is that the disability prevents them from doing the job.
FD4280
11hr ago
Hamas would have scavenged such a facility long before it produced anything. Rockets now or nukes later? The decision practically makes itself.
MollieTheMare
11hr ago
The cars I have driven the most:
- Mazda 323 (6th gen BF, 5MT), my first car. Interior was 100% 80s plastic including the seats. Supper zippy compared to anything anyone else in high school had. Surprisingly good rear visibility, probably because it was so short. Promptly riced then totaled by the guy I sold it to.
- Honda CRX (1st Gen 1.6i Si, 5 MT). Probably the worst example you've even seen driving. The previous owner didn't believe in oil. No AC. Had to parallel park it every night with no power steering. Poor rear visibility. I miss it dearly though.
- Toyota Prius (Gen2 XW20 "touring"). Probably the lowest total cost of ownership car in existence. Much safer and quieter ride for highway commuting than the CRX. Surprisingly spacious for passengers and cargo for the footprint. Very poor rear visibility. Possibly the pinnacle of transportation appliance.
- Subaru Forster (4th Gen SJ, post facelift, 6MT). The least soul-crushing family mid-sized crossover I could find. The last of the standard transmission "regular car" Subarus before they switched to exclusively CVTs so the electronic nanny could take over.
sun_the_second
11hr ago
Yes, this is one of the largest pieces of evidence in favor of their pragmatism.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11hr ago
I think you might be confused as to the purpose of a discussion board.
functor
11hr ago
Who claimed they were pragmatic? They have an ideology that is completely opposed to the western view of war and ruthlessly commit war crimes.
Tree
11hr ago
People’s go-to strategy to increase motivation is to make their life suck. Nofap is effective at that, pure loss with no upside.
Not my thing. Wouldn’t wish it on my worse enemy. Nofap makes you horny, obviously, but what isn’t said enough is that it makes you lonely, tense, angry, too.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
11hr ago
Yes, the happy chemicals after picking up the heavy things or covering a long distance makes me happy. The heavy things also have numbers on them, and if you keep doing it, you can watch the numbers go up.
sun_the_second
11hr ago
Always funny how the jews are simultaneously way too pragmatic and "insane", apparently.
I'm a bit of a dissenter on this one. I get the point; I really do. I don't want to be bombarded by every single little thing that happens. That said, from an objective perspective, I think there is a 100% chance that TheMotte will discuss a story that is this impactful and this close to the culture war. There is a 0% chance that it will not be discussed. This is not some random little news story that, if it's just not posted with a low effort comment, it'll skate by and never take up precious Motte real estate (which is the fate that I hope for with most of the random little news stories that the rules are trying to filter out). I felt the same way about the (main) Trump assassination attempt. (I will note that this is not some pet topic of mine; I almost never comment on Israel matters and would actually prefer less of them in general; I have not otherwise commented in this one, either. But this is truly a "C'mon" one.)
Thus, in my mind, the only question is how such 100% stories make it to the Motte. Speaking personally, it feels almost impossible to write a 'quality' top-level comment on it. There's not some ultra-unique take I'm going to have that provides an independent reason why I'm bringing it to your attention. What is the actual bar to clear? I don't actually know. Just fluff it up a bit, like you're re-reporting from a few sources? Seems weak to me. If we actually deleted these low-effort comments rather than just temp banning them, what would we get? Would this story just never get discussed? I doubt it. At worst, it'll end up in one of the links posts that are (allowed!) in the Transnational Thursday Thread, and then the entire discussion will blow up there.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
An alternate solution that has sufficed from time to time is a megathread. You can see how that works with, e.g., US election results. There's little point in making someone have to come up with the gumption to think that they're going to have some 'quality' TLC for the discussion to happen. Everyone knows there's a 100% chance that discussion is going to happen. It just happens to be that the mods know in advance that that's the case, so we don't have to have someone eat a ban in the process. They don't know that in advance for a major Israeli attack on Iran or a presidential assassination attempt. The dream would be to have some mechanism by which a topic is so obviously a 100% topic that it prompts the mods to say, "C'mon, this is obviously a 100% topic; just click this button, and it'll make a megathread, so no one has to eat a ban." Yes yes, this is not a trivial mechanism to design.
To not leave this comment without at least some suggestion that might be plausible, I'll at least try one. IF the community were to embrace some version of this "100% topic" terminology, we could just include an additional reporting option. We could report low-effort comments like this one with the report, "Low-effort, but c'mon, this is a 100% topic." If enough people report [EDIT: and it actually meets the mod-declared standards for 100% topics], the mods could then respond with, "Approved on grounds of being a 100% topic," rather than a ban. Paired with this, to discourage low-effort comments that only might be a 100% topic, I would also support locking/deleting the entire chain of comments that follow a low-effort TLC that doesn't get approved as a 100% topic. I think the resulting equilibrium would be a lot better than just having to have someone eat a ban every time for no real reason.
EDIT: Concerning the "first" incentive, why does that exist? I'd maybe guess it's because people think that whoever posts it first will get upvotes for whatever reason. Right now, I guess they trade that off with bans or something? We could develop a norm of just downvoting them. Make the report option say, "I have downvoted this low-effort comment, but c'mon, it's a 100% topic." Since the incentive to be "first" is so minor, this disincentive to be "first" will also be minor. At least, it'll be less harsh than eating a ban. You can do the needful, eat a -50, then actually participate in this and other discussion. And if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic, you eat the downvotes, eat the ban, and your topic disappears.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
We didn't have Lockerbies for a long time before that.
AstralMateus
11hr ago
I generally like Aella and her whole schtick, and have nothing but disdain for trad larpers reaching for 18th century vocabulary to describe her activities, so I was quite sad that she faced this treatment. (Not saying this as a simp either – I generally don't find white women attractive, and Aella is no exception)
Aella is profoundly not a "normal" person, in terms of her mental constituition, and her upbringing didn't help matters either. She's a misfit through and through, and even if the trads somehow brought back the medieval morality, she would likely not be able to live as a reputable woman (that era had prostitutes too, by the way, no one is ever getting rid of "degeneracy", despite whatever the puritans might think). Trying to force individuals like her to live according to your values is bad and cruel, although I would agree that there may be a need for a soft limit on advertising potentially dangerous alternative lifestyles as desirable. However, this limit should probably take some form other than 80 IQ groypers raising hell in replies, or self-appointed RW hall monitors (profoundly abnormal male nerds, who have at some point decided to LARP as a 1950s religious family man to save the White Race and Western Civilization, hoping that some day the act will become their nature) taking potshots in quote tweets.
Lizzardspawn
11hr ago
We haven't had Lockerbies in a while.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
11hr ago
Tell them that all that Catholicism and abortion banning in Poland gave it among the lowest fertility rates in the European Union and they just get mad at you because you're The Enemy
I recognize it is tangential snipe, bu the category of lowest fertility rates in the European Union in 2023 includes assortment of countries: Greece (90% Greek Orthodoxy), Poland and Lithuania (>70% Catholic), Spain (18% "practicing Catholic" / 38% non-religion = 15% atheist + 12% "no religion" + 11% agnostic), Italy (75% Catholic, 15% no religion), and Finland (60% nominally Lutheran, 33% believe in God). Nearly all of rest of the EU is also <1.5.
Poland disproves the notion that Polish-style Catholicism is the answer to low fertility. The other countries in the same club disprove the notion low fertility is easily explained with simple causal relationship with overall religious make-up of the country (yet in most of countries, it is often the most religious demographic subgroups that have highest fertility).
Catholics may have other arguments for the benefits of Catholicism than national fertility statistics, however.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
11hr ago
Try engaging in exercise that results in a reward at the end. I like walking for 2.5 miles (4 km; 5 miles (8 km) for the round trip) to the nearest Dunkin' Donuts or Chinese restaurant. There's also the pleasure of seeing all the different buildings.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
11hr ago
It does not appear to be truthful reporting. American officials took the unusual step of announcing on several occasions that America is not on board with the attack. The IDF is telling reporters that they are coordinating with America. Unless the journalist is lying about what the IDF stated to them: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-expects-operation-against-iran-to-last-for-several-days/
Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long
The “you’ve said something about Israel? — how dare you criticize every Jew in the world, I can’t believe you just quoted the elders of Zion!” that you see by the Israel crowd hasn’t been persuasive to normal people for many years, and has been used for decades. At this point it just signals your support for Israel. It is more dignified to just post the 🇮🇱 emoji.
Technically, my first car I owned was a "fancy German car", and even a Mercedes Benz... that was older than I was when I bought it, less than a month's wages as a part-time dishwasher, and about as unreliable as that combination sounds. Probably more a fault on the previous owner than the German Engineering, but even after a full fuel line purge and a new fuel filter, had to clean out the carburetor on a biweekly basis.
Since then it's been the typical Camry-or-nearest-neighbor that I'll buy heavily used, and then drive until the engine grenades itself (thank you Saturn timing chains) or the next oil change isn't economical.
I'm not a car person. It's nice to have something where the muffler isn't falling off, and I don't mind doing the elbow work for maintenance, but if the car's in decent shape I'll take a salvage title Hyundai or a Lesbian-Brand Hatchback as happily as a Tesla or a Big Fuckoff Truck.
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