domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
clo
21hr ago
It just comes down to appreciating the small things.
I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I've had the pleasure to observe some of the senior programmers at work who are deeply in the hole and have hundreds of dollars worth of specialized coffee equipment at the office just for the sake of getting a slightly better cup.
This strikes me as insanity, but over time I've learned to appreciate both the ritual that they go through and also the massive chain of events that led to that equipment being developed, built, procured, the coffee being sourced, grown, packaged - all of it.
Working in logistics has given me a deep appreciation for how the supply chain works at all, given how much of a mess it frequently is. All for the sake of delivering these small miracles we don't even think about.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
Wanderer got there first, I think.
Lower-case 'black lives matter' is a mother statement. Nobody's going to argue that the lives of black people don't matter except the most egregious and nihilistic of racists. The phrase 'black lives matter' is even entirely consistent with believing that black lives are worth less than white lives - if they matter any amount above zero, the statement is true.
Capital-letter 'Black Lives Matter' refers to a movement that makes specific, potentially false claims around police violence, structural racism, and so on. I fully sympathise with not wanting to endorse those claims, since many of them are false. But I don't see how naming the movement constitutes endorsing it, no more than saying the words 'Human Rights Campaign' implies that I agree with the specific, potentially false claims made by the HRC.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
Claude tells me it's basically 'self-sustaining fusion reactor +++' since you have hundreds of tonnes of high-temperature, enriched mercury and lithium in there too somehow being restrained by a material under intense neutron bombardment. It needs months and years of sustained neutron production to work.
Probably easier to do the 'we made like 6 atoms of gold in a particle accelerator' thing in a lab.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)
I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".
SnapDragon
21hr ago
I'm reminded of the Obamacare debacle, which still fills me with rage. People (correctly) pointed out that women pay more for health insurance, and (incorrectly) said that this was an unfair "woman tax". It was politically brilliant, reframing the fact that women live longer as a societal injustice - against women! And it was 100% successful; Obamacare made gender-based pricing illegal, and now every man in the country is subsidizing the health care of every woman in the country. Forever.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
Southerners who didn't care about good food.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
Rape is more sensitive, I guess.
Especially with regards to CSA, it definitely leads to a lack of clarity at times. If someone tells me "oh, Alice was abused as a child" it can be pretty tricky to decipher if they're telling me her parents used to beat her, or that she was groomed by a creepy uncle - even when I am actually intended to take the hint by the speaker (as distinct from them deliberately obscuring the facts to protect Alice's privacy).
IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.
edit: I didn't remember correctly after all. Apologies! Sucrose is a disaccharide, essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose bonded together. Enzymes in the mouth partially break down some of the sugar but most of the breakdown occurs in the small intestine, where the glucose and fructose are then absorbed into the bloodstream. High Fructose Corn Syrup contains free monosaccharides that can be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine. Once in the bloodstream, glucose can be directly utilized, assuming the presence of insulin, production of which the free glucose will stimulate. Fructose, OTOH has to be processed by the liver, and doesn't stimulate the production of insulin or enhance the production of leptin. As @sarker has helpfully pointed out in reply, HFCS actually contains similar amounts of glucose and fructose, so the key difference there is that regular sugar still needs to be broken down in the small intestine before it can be metabolized. Rest of original post follows.
Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
No_one
21hr ago
Maybe you should give it a try, no? I mean, same tribe, even vaguely similar social circle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
21hr ago
Yeah, I recall it was an explicit point among some pro-choicers to “own” the abortion activism in the aftermath of Dobbs. Maybe the larger ecosystem has rejected that take. But it was a thing at the time, and I respected the candor and straightforwardness of the view. I get that the point is “women should have the right to choose” and that it’s not “abortion is the greatest thing ever!” but the shift has been from “safe, legal, and rare” to “safe, legal, and none of your damn business how rare it is.” It’s more of a change in tone than a change in view point.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
I'd argue "passed away" is a more precise term than "died". "Passed away" means died peacefully. If I get a call that tells me my father passed away last night, I instantly parse it as: ah, he died in his sleep, guess age caught up with him at last. If the call instead tells me that my father died last night, I'm as likely to imagine that he had a car accident as anything else.
No_one
22hr ago
No, he's not wrong. They were generally older. The youngest girl ever mentioned was 12, and seeing how they were generally older, she probably looked older than she actually was.
Girls start puberty, on average, around 11 in late 20th century America. So, odds are, while this was obviously very wrong that she was not, biologically, a child.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
I get the "marriage equality" thing, but honestly I'm fine with that term too -- if you believe gay marriage is meaningfully different from straight marriage, obviously you think it's unequal, and should be so legally,
Well, one sticking point is that it used to be a major conservative talking point on the topic of gay marriage that the word "marriage" means "a man and a woman getting hitched", exclusively, fundamentally; that so-called "gay marriage" is not marriage at all, and granting queers the use of that word even with a qualifier is already surrendering half the battle. Precisely analogous to the anti-trans contingent's reluctance to use a term like "trans woman".
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
Firstly, unless you're a complete nihilist, "black lives matter" is a true statement. So's "blue lives matter", and so's "all lives matter". The controversial ideological position behind BLM's name is the claim that white cops don't believe black lives matter and are consequently shooting innocent blacks left and right. Conservatives believe that this is baseless slander, that most cops value human lives as much as anyone without racial discrimination, and that the supposed spree of extrajudicial police killings is an illusion at best, a deliberate lie at worst. Nobody except a few mad edgelords disputes the literal meaning of the words "black lives matter". The implicit BLM claim of "black lives matter, and yet white cops are racist and don't believe that", meanwhile, is so contextual that simply saying the name "Black Lives Matter" does not, in any conceivable way, constitute parroting that claim out loud.
More salient, however, is the fact that while "black lives matter" is technically a "message" with a "direct plain meaning", the same can hardly be said of the words "george floyd". You are not endorsing any particular idea by mouthing or writing those syllables, except that there was a human being by that name involved in the event at issue, a truth-claim which I… hope you would not deny as a matter of objective fact.
That second bit is making it especially hard to take you seriously.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
A lot of really really unhealthy eating amounts to "not thinking about eating." Just eating whatever.
The moment you start thinking about anything relating to eating, it's a huge upgrade over not thinking.
You can get just as fat off cane sugar as hfcs, but if you refuse to eat hfcs you'll at least reject a few things at the 7-11, and sometimes you won't eat something you would have otherwise eaten.
FlailingAce
22hr ago
Congrats! I got interested in the financial independence/retire early (FIRE) movement after I left college (because I really didn't enjoy my job). I'm much less strict about it these days since I'm married and have a new career I love - for instance, we just purchased an unnecessarily large dream house - but I'm still looking to retire in the next ten years or so.
the last several years my investments have appreciated more than my yearly income
tantalizing close
My man you have already arrived. A while ago in fact! Relevant post from my favorite FIRE blogger.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22hr ago
Not exactly a question, but definitely small-scale (or niche) and probably not a good topic for the main thread:
Pope Leo has granted an exemption for a parish in Texas to continue the Traditional Latin Mass
Early this year, the Diocese of Charlotte, NC issued, then delayed, a reduction in the number of locations for the TLM. The open secret is that the Vatican probably told the Bishop "slow your roll, guy!"
Is this enough evidence, now, to develop some cautious optimism about restrictions on the TLM easing?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
22hr ago
Interesting. I keep a picture in my head of how everyone looks. Probably wrong but I'll never know.
faceh
22hr ago
Define "Substantial."
The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target.
Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
No, I'm agreeing. I'm pointing out how going FULL Hermit mode is really the only way to mitigate certain risks created by having people you care about enough that you'd pay lots of money to avoid them getting hurt.
Realize that in several countries, kidnapping for ransom is a big business.
You should not live in such countries if your goal is to keep your 'fuck you' money. This is not an excuse not to have a family, just a vector by which you might get fucked in spite of having the fuck you money.
phailyoor
22hr ago
Yes I agree. Shame on the government forces that allowed open air drug markets in major US city centers, released drug dealers over and over again after arrest, and turned a blind eye to public drug consumption in the middle of the sidewalk and at bus stops.
phailyoor
22hr ago
Yes, I understand the distinction, but the issue is that I may want to mention that activist organization without mentioning the idea that is conveyed by the words in the name of that organization. That idea may be unrelated entirely to the relevant actions of that organization, yet by writing the words in the name of the organization, you have brought that unrelated idea into the discussion, whether you or the other readers want to or not.
Of course, this doesn't directly address the issue of saying the name of a certain individual who was linked to the 2020 riots. That argument is somewhat more complex.
Turniper
22hr ago
I don't really think that's true though. It's not a substantial risk factor. Acting rich is far more likely to make you a target than merely prudently investing a modest amount of wealth. The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target. Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
phailyoor
22hr ago
The names "Human Rights Campaign, "Justice Democrats" or "Freedom Caucus" don't convey any message at all, beyond possibly giving an inaccurate idea of what the organization does. You can't say "human rights campaign is false." It doesn't say anything in particular about human rights or campaigning.
On the other hand, the words in the name of the organization do have a direct plain meaning. A meaning that is direct and can be argued. It's certainly possible to argue that "[words in the name of the organization] is false" or "[words in the name of the organization] is true."
Yeah that's a good description. Tragedy hasn't impacted me or the people around me.
More options
Context Copy link