domain:npr.org
fribble
1hr ago
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult?
I rode my bike a lot. It became my primary mode of transportation over COVID. I rode it to the store, for exercise, anywhere that was less than 3-5 miles away by roads that didn't completely freak me out. And I had a couple mile route that I did pretty much every day I didn't have an errand to run. I still wouldn't say I am comfortable in terms of riding in traffic or on unfamiliar roads (identifying and dodging road debris or potholes at speed makes me nervous) but I am comfortable with signaling and stopping and starting. I don't feel like I am constantly at risk of randomly falling off my bike. OTOH there is no way I would ride on a mountain bike trail or even do a more than 10 mile ride on a nicely paved surface, so you may be looking for different advice.
Templexious
1hr ago
Cheap labor doesn't entirely explain it. There are thousands of Mexican, brazillian, eastern european, africans, and phillippine developers they could hire. And they could keep them in India and build offices for them there.
I still notice my confusion at the endless push toward the indiaification of the USA by these groups. Do we really want to bring over all of these people who will effectively never integrate because they won't have to?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2hr ago
Copper IUDs have side effects too
Can confirm, my wife suffered from terrible unofficial but internet recognized symptoms from Paragard for years. She finally got the damn thing removed after a couple of bouts of intense, labor-like pains that landed her in the ER and surprise, surprise, no more of those or any of her other symptoms.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2hr ago
I am surprised everyone seems to be missing the obvious explanation. Bezos is a guy who has been transitioning from businessman into a power player in American elite and needs to build up connections with the media, capital and political elite. She is probably an absolute operator who knows everyone, seen everything and can plot power moves in a way very few people are capable of. And she obviously knows how to take very good care of a man.
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Sounds good, me too. But as with many, many iterations of this problem, I'm gonna notice if your advocacy for no racial politics only gets deployed against a specific type of racial politics, and gives the others a pass. And this noticing is going to crystalize into a policy of rejecting calls to oppose the specific type of racial politics that is currently very effectively opposed, while claiming that the sort of racial politics that is both endemic and enshrined is no biggie. This policy is not itself an endorsement of racial politics, in my view; I am not actually under the impression that the WN or HBD hardliners are actually on my side; as far as I'm concerned, they are also Blue Tribe, and I have no intention of cooperating with them. But neither are inter-blue conflicts my problem to fix. Further, to the extent that Blues are willing to attack people like me on a racial basis, I think defense against those attacks is entirely reasonable. Anti-white racism obviously exists, and opposition to it should be coordinated in all the usual ways.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
She looks ordinary, which fits because they got married back before he was "Jeff Bezos, insanely rich guy" and was just "Jeff Bezos, another guy with a plan to make it big". She's also that little bit taller than he is, at least in photos of them together, while I notice Sanchez is that little bit shorter than him. That might have something to do with the attractiveness of the new missus, as well 😁
aceventura
2hr ago
I would rather have no racial politics at all.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Yeah, I get the impression they want to reduce headcount and salary costs, so the admin and management and sales will get the hit rather than the programmers, but there may well be an eye on "do we really need to hire some kid out of college at a high salary when we can just get our pet AI/five Indian coders to do it for us cheaper?"
jkf
2hr ago
If nothing else, a reasonable suspicion that someone bought the seeds of an illegal plant make it much easier to get a search warrant
Not sure how you get from "Bill got a letter in the mail" to reasonable suspicion?
The only way you are getting busted either way is the cops gaining entry to your house somehow (tipped off or there for other reasons probably), in which case "I just like to keep my fruit in a carboy" isn't going to do you any more good than "I thought those were tomato seeds".
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
When I had a kitten I maimed a captured rat to teach it how to catch rodents. I feel no guilt about this whatsoever.
The great chain of being is real. I simply refuse to give a crap about shrimp welfare. You can too. The answer to ethical vegans saying ‘but think of the animals’ is ‘yes, when I do that I remember what they taste like’. I recommend this approach.
aceventura
2hr ago
How do right-wingers like Auron think about them?
Auron MacIntyre may admittedly not be the best example. But, simply put, MacIntyre and those adjacent to the Online Right/Dissident Right see immigration and nationalism through a more blood and soil framework than most Trump voters, who are happy to hang out with their Hispanics friends and actually do see them as real Americans. As for gays, they've adopted a strict "no compromise" policy that I don't think is popular IRL. Lots of talk about "degeneracy" and "subversion", with numerous Jewish references.
In my view, there's no viable political project that can emerge out of this, at least not on a national scale. But maybe that's the point; right-wingers who are sincere white nationalists (or close enough to that ideology) need to build their own small communities and try to insulate themselves and their children as much as possible from America.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Ten years later, you have seasoned developers retiring and who is there to replace them?
I imagine the presumption is "by the time the old warhorses retire, we will have developed AI that is even better than they ever were, so we'll just go on pulling ourselves up by our bootlaces".
jkf
2hr ago
Yeah, but I thought you were arguing that controlling weed is harder relative to controlling alcohol, and I'm not seeing it.
IDK why you thought that -- I said ' "I dropped some seeds in the bush someplace" isn't bad... '
Doesn't that imply that attempts to ban it are actually keeping the potency down?
IDK, maybe? Careful illegal growers were certainly making very potent weed back in the 90's; probably earlier. How potent does it need to be?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2hr ago
In what way? I am seriously struggling to think of any analogoes other than a vague “it isn’t going as planned”. And even then it’s going badly in a wholly different and opposite way. In the occupied territories Russia has zero resistance and can govern as if everything is normal. But the initial battle plan was a fiasco. This is the exact literal opposite of Iraq invasion
GeneralElephant
2hr ago
Almost all of these employees laid off employees will be replaced by H1-Bs (Microsoft put in for over 6000 the first two quarters this year) as well as previously announced hiring in India.
I’m not sure where AI comes in but they certainly aren’t replacing their laid-off workers with AI unless AI stands for “another Indian”.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Of all the things I did not expect to see in a "J'Accuse!" post, composting would have been high on the list if I had ever contemplated the ethical and moral issues involved. In letting worms break down food scraps to create soil. Like they've been doing ever since the first worms crawled through soil breaking down humus.
When I read stuff like that (if your food scraps are already fly-infested, be sure to humanely kill the insects before disposing of your rubbish), I have to wonder are these people living in the world of nature at all? Like, they're writing as though they were all born and raised on a space station that never saw a crumb of non-metallic, non-artificial surfaces in all their born days.
I swear, I am getting N.I.C.E. vibes from this attitude of "nature, ugh, organic life is so gross and icky" about, well, every darn natural process in the world of animal life. From "That Hideous Strength":
...The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.
"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."
"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."
"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.
"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."
"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."
"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."
"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"
"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."
"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"
"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."
"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."
"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"
"Go on," said Winter.
"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."
"That's true."
"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."
"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."
"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."
..."There is a world for you, no?" said Filostrato. "There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling-point. You would die, yes? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end."
"Yes. A dead world," said Mark, gazing at the moon.
"No!" said Filostrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat-like whisper of a voice that is naturally high-pitched. "No. There is life there."
"Do we know that?" asked Mark.
"Oh, si. Intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic."
"But how----?"
"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with--a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."
"Do you mean that all that," Mark pointed to the mottled white globe of the moon, "is their own doing?"
"Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have no atmosphere, no water."
"But what was the purpose?"
"Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface-dwellers--savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests--yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers, and fierce wars, in the caves and galleries down below. But the great race press on. If you could see the other side you would see year by year the clean rock--like this side of the moon--encroaching: the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist, growing smaller. Like cleaning tarnished silver."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
unspecified "lots" of white people think white identity is silly too, and there isn't even a white identity month, nor explicit hiring/educational quotas for white people.
I don't think you have a consistent rubric for what racial politics actually looks like.
aceventura
2hr ago
And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?
If you attend some Black History Month event, of course.
If you're just hanging out with your black friends, no. Lots of black people think the month thing is silly.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
The "leads to genocide" observation is hardly exclusive to white people, though. See also: Japan/China in WWII, Rwanda, any number of sectarian feuds in the third world. Realistically, it seems like it was largely the norm or at least not uncommon among almost any group with the power to do it until largely-European philosophy eventually decided it was a morally repugnant idea (to which I'd agree).
Sometimes it seems like "genocide" only applies if European-descended folks (er, Volks) are doing it, otherwise it's just "sparkling ethnic cleansing" or something.
MollieTheMare
2hr ago
The thing I see done "wrong" the most is starting/stopping in combination with saddle height being too low. Everyone who hits they gym knows hitting a squat ATG makes it way harder to produce force compared to 1/4 squatting. But for some reason people do not translate this to raising their saddle to where they can produce the most torque. I'm pretty sure it's because they want it low enough to put a foot down when they stop. The canonical site about this topic is here.
Honestly some of it may not be your fault but the bikes. It's Not About the Bike, but I'm 80% sure what you have is a bike shaped object from Walmart. I actually think there's a place for that kind of thing, especially for kids bikes, but unfortunately "good" bikes are unreasonably expensive in the US. At least the Euros can get decent city bikes or entry level sports bikes from decathlon for non-absurd prices. Like seriously bikes easily start getting into motorcycle territory pricing in the US.
Riding on the road on the US is frustrating for everyone, as a recent thread here talked about. I do quite like mountain biking still though. Trail systems are color coded like ski slopes. Hit full send on trail where you just about but don't lose it. Upgrade colors as you improve. For fitness basics of any cardio apply, watch out for over use injuries and assume you will have to put in more hours than if you were to train aerobic capacity via other modality.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
You're objecting to a billionaire Wharton grad, a graduate of the London School of Economics who happens to be a scion of a family that has been described in terms similar to royalty, and an entertainer with a long and illustrious career.
I don't think you'd know Elite Human Capital if it leg-dropped you.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.
It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.
One week ban.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
The facts it got objectively wrong aren't accepted as objectively wrong by anyone except online far-right autists.
Lol, whut?
You might want to read what /r/askHistorians thinks of Guns, Germs & Steel and if you think that subreddit is full of ”online far-right autists” I suggest you check in for psychiatric evaluation for massive delusions.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3hr ago
and i think I made that clear in the above comment when I talked about the subject knowing
I dont think this is considering intent properly. Theres a difference between doing something despite or because of an effect. I think what Im suggesting here is similar to the doctrine of double effect - and you have been arguing that because the "forseen unintended" case is ok, the "forseen intended" case is too.
I think there is a conflation between sexual intercourse and the possible results of sexual intercourse - or conception. Sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina.
How do you think acts and their proper form are determined? I thought that it was to do with purposes. Meanwhile your description taken at face value, without background knowledge of what you want it to mean, sounds like condoms are ok too. I suggest that thats not a coincidence: the principles youre using on this case are much more permissive than those that inform your general view.
Eh, I understand why you had to do it. But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here. Mister Turok is pretty salty but still. A boy can dream.
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