Friday
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
No alcohol in the home, partial abstinence except for Sundays and accepting hospitality. Full fast on ember days, fridays, and during Holy Week.
Last year I drank only water- and I still intend to be closer to this- but as I’ve been having more difficulty getting going in the morning cutting out caffeinated beverages seems unwise.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Like I said, this case was significantly more complicated than I made it out to be in the post. What the case actually turned on was a provision in the Uniform Commercial Code meant to address situations such as this. A complicating factor was that Warren wasn't even technically in arrears. The terms IIRC called for something like payment within 30 days plus escalating late fees after that, with breach not occurring until the bill was 6 months overdue. Warren had never once paid "on time" but had waited until the last minute and withheld the late fee. There was some argument about whether the coal company had waived that contract provision by accepting payment without protest, and the coal company was arguing that this was evidence that they were juggling their payments to see what they could get away with, and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy, and that yes, an order requiring them to comply with the contract terms would essentially mean giving away something like $400,000 worth of coal for free.
The case boiled down to the UCC provision allowing the request for reasonable assurances of performance. The judge was sympathetic to the coal company, but he said that if they had concerns they could have requested reasonable assurances at any time, and that anticipatory repudiation of the contract wasn't proper. Then the argument became how long Warren had to provide the assurances and whether the coal company could suspend performance until it received assurances. This is where the whole irreparable harm thing came in, with Warren saying that if they didn't get the Friday shipment that over a thousand employees would be laid off by the end of the weekend and the mill would be idled indefinitely. The final ruling was that the coal company had to make the shipment but that Warren had to make reasonable assurance before the next shipment, and he would dismiss the breach of contract suit as soon as the shipment had been received.
In a general sense, no, it isn't fair, which is why the UCC has provisions for dealing with that kind of situation. If the coal company had concerns it could have asked for assurances a week prior. In any business transaction, there's always some chance that the other party isn't going to hold up his end of the bargain, and that's the risk you take doing any business. The coal company could have protected itself with a condition requiring prepayment back at the formation stage, but they didn't, even though Warren was only a few years removed from coming out of a previous bankruptcy. Up to this point, Warren had held up their end of the deal, just not in a way that inspired much confidence, and there were rumors that they were insolvent. Furthermore, if Warren had already filed for bankruptcy this question wouldn't have even come up, because suppliers have to keep honoring contracts during a bankruptcy.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic
The U.S. never officially recognized the republic of Texas. Annexing the republic of Texas came about because democrats needed a victory vs the whigs; the country supporting Texas nationalism full throttle was actually France.
There’s an interesting alternative history where the USA votes against annexing Texas. I’ve thought about writing it up and posting it on, like, a Friday fun thread. But the long and short of it is that president Tyler wanted to annex Texas to shore up a pro-slavery position, and the democrats in the next election successfully framed it as a referendum on US territorial expansion while they whigs wanted to punt the issue to try to avoid talking about slavery. Mexico in this era had many breakaway republics and it was generally thought that Britain and France would seek to weaken the Mexican empire to carve out new world spheres of influence by taking the breakaways as Allies; these were the two major backers of the republic of Texas, which spent its entire existence at war and heavily indebted.
I don't disagree that your average Place, China is almost certainly going to be more third-world than your average Place, Japan, and there are very real issues there, many of which are a result of the PRC's truly disastrous policies. But considering how many people go to Southeast Asia and absolutely love it, I'm not necessarily sure first world-ness is something people are generally looking for (as tourists, not as inhabitants). People travel en masse to places like Bali despite the fact that "real" Bali isn't something to look forward to; poverty is pretty rife in many parts of the island and Denpasar is packed full of slums. But travelling to Bali has effectively become something of a fashion trend, Bali is the buzzy tourist-friendly place you go to see the good side of Indonesian culture, and you can ignore as much of the mundane or the bad as you want. I grew up in Malaysia, a country people tout as a good place to visit, and what Malaysia is really like isn't necessarily what most tourists experience. In other words, people go to shitholes all the time, ignore the bits they don't want to see, and love it. There's nothing wrong with travelling like that, either; you're not obligated in the slightest to do things that'll make you feel miserable. But I'm not sure if China's third-world nature is the main factor here.
When I talk about finding "bad takes in travel forums", I mean the stuff I've seen is as bad as stumbling upon threads asking why it is that China has seemingly no truly historical sites, just hollow recreations and cash grabs. Then someone else says the Cultural Revolution destroyed absolutely everything in China, then someone else comments down in the thread "You know where the real historic stuff is? Japan." This despite the fact that many Japanese sites are also just recreations and reconstructions; places like Senso-ji or Osaka Castle were rebuilt in concrete in the 20th century. Kinkaku-ji is a new construction, Takkoku no Iwaya in Hiraizumi is a new construction, and so on. The majority of historical sites in Old Kyoto, despite it being spared bombing during WW2, don't predate 1788 due to a fire that ravaged the city. People still travel to these sites in Japan in spite of the fact that much of what's there isn't exactly original, and enjoy it, and that's fine, and of course there are also authentic historic sites in the country (Himeji Castle, Golden Hall of Chuson-ji, etc). But I'm wondering how in the world people forgot that there's an entire ancient walled city, Pingyao, in Shanxi province, that still houses 20,000+ people while retaining all of its traditional architecture and its urban planning from the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is not only the best preserved proper city in China, but all of East Asia. Then there are towns in Anhui like Xidi and Hongcun, which are representative of traditional non-urban settlements in China during the 14th to 20th centuries - many of the buildings there are very old, and a lot of these towns still have traditional economies and clan-based social structures. Then there are the old tea forests and ethnic minority villages of Jingmai Mountain, where the locals still cultivate tea using methods dating back to the 10th century and perform Tea Ancestor ceremonies and festivities. The thought that crosses my mind is disbelief in the vein of "you seriously couldn't find anything to your taste in all of China? What the fuck it's the size of ten countries how is that possible". There are many authentic places where old China can be found, they're just a bit farther out; you can't expect to visit Beijing and get that kind of experience. The CCP sucks, but they don't possess MCU powers; try as they might they can't snap their fingers and make literally thousands of years' worth of rich historical and cultural heritage vanish overnight.
Then there's the example of South Korea, which is basically a first-world economy comparable to Japan at this point (in fact, its GDP per capita overshot Japan a while back, and its self-reported happiness levels are comparable last I checked; granted, they do have an ongoing military draft which certainly isn't ideal). As a tourist I had a great time there, and was surprised at how well maintained it was and how much traditional culture there was. The density of UNESCO sites there is higher than anywhere else in East Asia, and two members of my family (one of whom went on that trip with me) have travelled both to Korea and to Japan, and both preferred Korea. But we were actually almost discouraged from travelling there after coming across many threads which followed the same pattern - invariably, a poster would ask whether they should choose Japan or Korea for an East Asian trip, and almost unanimously the comments on such threads would advocate Japan as a destination, and state South Korea was comparatively boring, soulless, lacking in historical sites and nothing special. Our friends and coworkers who had travelled to both places also offered up the same opinions, and the only reason why we ended up picking Korea as our destination of choice was because said family member had already travelled to Japan before, and wanted something different. Frankly, I'm flabbergasted by people's lukewarm reactions.
In other words, I'm not so sure if Place, Japan is based so much in the actual reality of how Japan is, or is basically a fashion trend driven by Japan's dominance in media and electronics exports for much of the late 20th century. And I like Japan! I think it's a country with a lot to offer. But the way people endorse it over virtually every other East Asian country gets ridiculous sometimes IMO.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5mo ago
I think I've been in love, butterflies in the stomach, heart thumping at the sight of them love twice in my life. Mere lust or fondness? I think I've lost count.
The first instance was painful. A pining adolescent romance for someone who was emotionally unavailable, and just not that into me. I thought the fact we were going out on dates and that she was coming over was enough, while doing my best to ignore the fact that while we were in college and her friends were around, she'd treat me as if I was just one of them.
The second... It didn't pan out. At this point I'm well over the bitterness, and I wish I had understood we weren't compatible, but as the bitter and wise say, when you're in love and have rose-tinted goggles on, red flags look just like flags.
The two of them could have passed for sisters (if absolutely nothing alike personality-wise, barring a love for dogs). I guess twice bitten forever shy? I'm sure it'll happen again, if experience is any hint, I never have a choice in the matter. I thought both of them were the One (or two, in rapid succession), and was at the "We'll get married eventually" stages with the latter, but alas.
I tell myself I don't miss them. And it's mostly true.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Okay, you seem to be on some kind of spree with this comment and this one and this one. All of which seem to be testing the limits of what you can get away with. Given that the common theme is "I hate a lot of people (and fantasize about violence a lot)" paired with the obvious fact that you are a returning alt who we probably banned not long ago, and I would suggest you cool it.
My job as a tax accountant is killing me with its sheer, soul-crushing boredom and monotony. Starting out it felt much better due to the fact that I actually had to pick up many aspects of the job on my own, but at this point absolutely no part of the job surprises me or challenges me at all, and it's effectively become a huge production line where I optimise for efficiency in tax preparation (sometimes even over the quality of the work, since I've gotten some comments that I should be striving not for perfection but trying to balance that with output). I'm certainly not the fastest employee in the firm in terms of efficiency, but as it stands I'm currently burning through all my jobs faster than people can allocate me new work (our billing/charge-out rate is still so high relative to the amount we actually end up charging the client that there are still write-offs). My managers state they're impressed with my ability to pick up concepts and the high quality of my workpapers, I personally think this is called not being retarded.
I was recently assigned one of the toughest workpapers in the firm. I looked through it. It does not look difficult. They're thinking of making me reviewer on certain jobs because they think I know the job well enough to do a high level review. I should be happy that they feel confident enough about my work to do such a thing, but at the same time every part of the job is an utterly predictable slog. It feels like they're essentially paying me to be the accounting version of a code monkey. Working for even 1 hour makes me feel like I'm being suffocated and I barely recover over the weekends. I keep myself awake through the workday with enough coffee to make my hands shake.
There's also the fact that I feel like people have effectively taken much of my work for granted - there was a time early in my career where I was working on one of the most demanding clients, and helped a superior of mine complete some work that was their responsibility by working until 4am on Friday and coming in on Saturday, just one day before I was supposed to travel for Christmas. That very same year, I effectively got a "Meets Expectations" (a score of 3) on my performance review, and a bonus... of 2% of my already-pretty-low salary. After many experiences like these I no longer care about going above and beyond, but even with that mindset I can't help but be bored to tears with the repetitious and unchallenging nature of my current work. How people can find this in any way rewarding is beyond me. It's fucking obscene.
I guess I should feel lucky I'm not saddled with super long hours (not typically, at least). It's certainly not the worst work out there - most jobs are pretty terrible. But the malaise from this is bleeding into my everyday life.
I won't rehash too much of my Friday Fun Thread comment about cars, but some points to consider:
Buying new still kind of sucks from a value proposition. You'll almost always regret the equity you drop for a car being new. That feeling lasts 3-6 months and you pay for it for 3 years. Buy something fresh off lease instead. This is one of the most extreme examples you can think of, but getting a Panamera for $40k (compared to what would be a $238k sticker today) is amazing.
If you want a car to not spy on you, you'll have to get an older car. I have not seen communities to lobotomize modern cars, it seems difficult and would disable features that you only get with new cars. It's much more likely to find communities that modernize older cars with newer features.
I find the nannying and eco/safety features of modern cars infuriating. It's like watching commercials on TV; they almost make me physically sick. However, there are some killer new car features I lust after:
- Radar Cruise Control
- Apple/Android Car Play
- Heated Steering Wheels
If you go after those, I don't think you can go wrong. Getting something with enough space to put stuff in is important.
I know you view these as just an appliance but any other detail at all? Do you go on long drives? Do you go camping? Do you care how it looks? Any brand preference at all?
The executive order says only that, within 15 days of January 23 (i. e., by Friday of last week), a plan for "full and complete release" is to be presented to the president. It does not provide a deadline for the release itself.
(The deadline for the separate plan for release of the RFK and MLK files is 45 days from January 23—i. e., March 9.)
sockpuppet2
6mo ago
Reuters: Health clinics grapple with US funding squeeze
It seems funding hasn't been fully restored and a lot of affected clinics don't have sufficient cash reserves:
Three community health centers near Richmond, Virginia, were forced to shut down after federal funds used to pay staff salaries remained inaccessible since last week, said Virginia Community Healthcare Association spokesperson Joe Stevens.
As of Friday, another nine centers across Virginia also could not access federal funds but continued to see patients by tapping into reserve funds.
"They will need money in the next week," said Stevens. "We don't know why some centers can access funds and some cannot."
In Virginia, community health centers provide medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmaceutical and substance use services for approximately 400,000 patients. For much of the state's rural areas, the centers are the only option for primary care, said Stevens.
One center that was still unable to access federal funds is in southwestern Virginia, where the next closest option for medical care is more than an hour's drive, he said. Most providers were able to access Medicaid and grant monies once the spending freeze was rescinded. However, some say they are still cut off from payments used for essential care, including medical, dental, prescription drugs and behavioral health.
And, of course, problems with transgender-serving clinics and federal grants for STI prevention and treatment:
Late last week, some healthcare centers that provide HIV prevention services and care for transgender patients received notices that grants issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be terminated. The letters cited the Trump administration's orders on diversity and gender identity, according to three recipients of the notices.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention referred questions about the grants to the Department of Health and Human Services.
St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.
"We have made a decision not to cut back any programs because of any threats from the federal government," said St. John's President Jim Mangia.
St. John's has joined a lawsuit filed by California's attorney general contesting the funding cuts. Mangia says he will seek private funding to make up the loss.
The LGBT Life Center in Norfolk, Virginia, received a letter stating $6.3 million of the organization’s funding, or 48% of its annual budget, would be terminated, said spokesperson Corey Mohr. The center provides medication and monitoring to 400 patients with HIV.
I'm curious what the LGBT Life Center's grant was for, given that St. John's had 25% more patients. Maybe it was specific to HIV-positive patients and treatment is genuinely more expensive than prevention? But I had thought PrEP, PEP, and ART were the same medication at different doses, and that progression of HIV to AIDS is very uncommon, so that wouldn't make much sense.
zeke5123a
6mo ago
I looked a little at the brief. The APA piece I would need to look more into but it is not the norm of my experience with the APA and I am dubious because they seem to misstate their claim re PII. One of the exception for disclosure of info is to people within the same agency. Per an interview by the treasury secretary Friday the DOGE aligned people looking at treasury payments were actually employees of treasury and therefore they were clearly covered by the exception.
Maybe this fact would’ve been pointed out if this wasn’t an ex parte proceeding but I’m pretty convinced the whole thing isn’t about law at this point.
I actually appreciate the first game's inclusion of homosexuality in that manner because it was realistic for the setting and you needed to build a relationship with him (platonic) to get that information out of him. By realistic, I mean that in that time to be homosexual meant that escaping to a convent was a way to avoid execution as a sodomite.
What I don't appreciate is the dumpster fire trying to insinuate that sharing a bath (spa) with your friend in the first game is low key homo-eroticism.
There's this theory that men in the past were actually more comfortable being physically close in a fraternal/platonic way because the potential of homosexuality in the act was unthinkable. It makes sense to me that now homosexuality is ever present, modern men must telegraph their heterosexuality and avoid anything that could allude to homosexuality. This has cut off so much of male/male platonic affection that it's a tragedy.
Edit: There's a 'how are you enjoying the game?' post in the Friday Fun Thread if you guys are playing.
So... what's the Elon deficit reduction strategy here? Get like 5-10% of the government to resign, maybe fire another 5-10%, then go to congress and say look we can spend 10-20% less on salaries, go ahead and pass a reduced budget through reconciliation?
This actually sounds not too crazy.
Hopefully losing 10-20% of the work force doesn't cause a corresponding 10-20% reduction in government revenues but... it's kind of hard to see how it would.
EDIT: maybe something's wrong with me but I consider this topic fun and not weighty which is why I posted it here in the Friday thread. Seems like it has created a more typical CW thread discussion. My bad.
You're also failing to take population into account. The current combined population of Israel, Palestine and the West Bank is about 15 million people. In 1948 it was about 2.2 million. Let's average that and say the combined population is 8.6 million in the period under discussion.
The Troubles were almost entirely confined to Northern Ireland, only occasionally spilling over into the Republic and the British mainland. To keep things fair, I'll exclude any deaths which took place outside of Northern Ireland, per this table. The population of Northern Ireland was 1.5 million in 1966 (when the Troubles began) and 1.7 million in 1998 (Good Friday Agreement), giving us an average of 1.6 million for the period.
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3,272 deaths against a population of 1.6 million = 214 deaths/100k
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100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million = 1,221 deaths/100k
So the Israel-Palestine conflict is only 6 times as bloody as the Troubles, not 360 times. And that isn't even taking timescale into account, as the Troubles went on for 32 years while the Israel-Palestine conflict has been ongoing in one form or another since 1948.
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3,532 deaths against a population of 1.6 million, over 32 years = 7.2 deaths/100k/year
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100,000* deaths against a population of 8.6 million, over 77 years = 16 deaths/100k/year
So only slightly more than twice as bloody as the Troubles.
*Roughly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I saw this on twitter: https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1883711988544753868
Apparently Biden gave clemency to a drug lord who killed an 8 year old kid and mother to shut them up. This makes one wonder how many of these executive orders were even vaguely known of by Biden as opposed to random whims by staffers who are in a rush and do random, bizarre things.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/22/us-news/biden-grants-clemency-to-conn-man-convicted-in-death-of-kid/
But there was reportedly only one witness to the killings, and Peeler beat the murder and capital felony raps — but was convicted on the lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder.
Peeler served his 25 years on the conspiracy conviction, and was transferred to the federal prison system to serve out his 35-year sentence for dealing cocaine, which ran concurrently.
On Friday, one of his final days in office, Biden commuted Peeler’s drug sentence, ordering him free on July 16, according to the Courant.
The stunning move was met with immediate outrage.
I finished The Trial on Friday. It was rubbish, dull as dishwater, not a patch on Metamorphosis. Kafka took a killer premise (a man is arrested but never informed what his alleged crime is, and must mount a defence in spite of not knowing what he's accused of) and squandered it: Josef K's arrest never has any material impact on his life, the allegedly nightmarishly inscrutable bureaucracy never really materialises. I've read books which induced the sensation of Kafkaesque dread and disorientation far more effectively than the book from which the term originates.
Started Montaillou today. As someone who doesn't read much "pure" history (or any, really), it's quite a challenging read, but I intend to finish it anyway.
throwaway20230125
6mo ago
Another year, another karma farm<ins>post about civil engineering</ins>.
The fifty-mile-long pavement-preservation project described in my previous post has been sent out for initial review. The one drafter in our office drew from as-builts and from satellite photographs the pieces of roadway that were not available in electronic format. Then the design (as far as pavement preservation even needs any "design") was split up between the five engineers in our office, yielding a workload of around ten miles per person. The end product was two hundred and fifty 24″×36″ sheets for fifty miles of roadway. (Again, this is just a brain-dead pavement-preservation project. Resurfacing projects have been known to exceed one thousand sheets for ten miles of roadway.) A good use of taxpayer dollars? I guess so.
Bureaucratic rigmarole:
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I mentioned in my first post that, whenever the elevation of a roadway is increased by at least half an inch: The project must be reviewed by the Environmental people for flooding problems, and any location that would cause a flooding problem must be milled down before the new pavement-preservation treatment is applied, so that the overall increase in elevation is reduced to zero. Locations underneath overhead structures (whether bridges or signs) must also be milled down in this fashion.
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I also mentioned that, if old electronic stuff like weigh-in-motion stations is present in the road, the electronics people may request that the electronic stuff be replaced as part of a pavement-preservation project.
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New environmental rule: Any amount of elevation increase in or near a floodway (definition; red-and-blue striped areas on this page's maps) is forbidden. The half-inch exemption is not applicable in and near floodways.
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New rule from FHWA (Federal Highway Administration): Any amount of milling in a project now triggers the requirements to construct new ADA-compliant curb ramps at intersections throughout the project. Previously, pavement-preservation projects were exempt from this requirement if the milling was limited. (I think the limit was something like ten percent of the project's total area, but no pavement-preservation project ever got anywhere near it.) That exemption has been eliminated. Also, weigh-in-motion stations can't be replaced in pavement-preservation projects under whatever exemption they previously were operating under.
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The construction of new ADA-compliant curb ramps is out of scope for pavement-preservation projects.
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Result: Goodbye, a quarter-mile-long piece of this pavement-preservation project that runs over a dam, plus a few other random spots adjacent to bridges! Goodbye, two random spots underneath overhead sign structures! Goodbye, three weigh-in-motion stations that the electronics people wanted to replace!
Bureaucratic failure:
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In the first half of 2024, my office originally was supposed to be working on a project to replace an old traffic circle with a standard intersection. (The traffic engineers recommended a modern roundabout*, but the municipal government rejected that option.)
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Whoops! The traffic-circle project was immediately adjacent to a bridge-replacement project. There was a minor conflict between the two proposed roadway edges, and a major conflict between two proposed drainage basins. (These conflicts weren't noticed previously because: the bridge spans a river between counties A and B, and the associated project was assigned to county A in the project-management system; the traffic circle is in county B, so the associated project was assigned to county B in the project-management system; and counties A and B are in two different project-management regions.)
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The conceptual designer for the traffic-circle project and the final designer for the bridge project suggested adjusting the drainage basins and coordinating the roadway edges to eliminate the conflicts. But the Environmental people complained that doing a drainage (or hydrological or hydraulic—whatever) assessment of the same location twice would be a waste of their extremely limited resources. Since the bridge-replacement project was much further along in the design process, the traffic-circle project was merged into it, leaving my office to sit idle with no project assigned (other than the aforementioned fifty-mile pavement-preservation project, plus whatever random maintenance work orders came along) for six months.
What a wonderful use of taxpayer dollars!
*Reminder: A roundabout is a circular intersection with no traffic control except a yield sign at every entrance. Anything else is just a sparkling traffic circle**.
**Imagine being at intersections / so fat you look and see food
Reiteration:
More people need to make lengthy posts about their cool jobs in the vein of my previous post
<ins>s</ins>! I've been waiting with bated breath for the past<ins>two</ins>year<ins>s</ins>to hear about the dreaded "scrum master", "daily stand-up", and "Git merge conflict" from some of the 10× programmers that supposedly frequent this website. Maybe we even have an architect who can complain about his clients' wishy-washiness and scoff at all the pathetic free (libre) attempts to compete with Chief Architect, or a paving contractor who can express his hatred of his local transportation authority's resident engineers and in-house designers in the strongest of terms.
I could pretty easily come up with Actual Humans writing (and putting serious effort into!) something that'd come across as more unusual and (definitely!) more nasty
Well, it had to get the training data somewhere. (Co)incidentally, AO3-styled prompts/prefills are IME one of the most reliable ways to bring out a model's inner schizo, and as downthread comments show R1 doesn't need much "bringing out" in the first place.
I covered this months ago when the Ban was gaining support.
You have ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they have now done... Then later you get lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok:
Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform.
One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States...
Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant.
“The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism,” JFNA wrote in an official letter to Congress. “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”
Before the ban acquired enough support, the Times posted an article called Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism:
TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.
For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."
And on top of that you have WSJ and Economist admitting that the momentum from the support came from the Jewish lobby.
This is completely typical of @2rafa, and frankly a typical audaciousness of many Jewish people. We have leaked recordings of Greenblatt proclaiming that something must be done about TikTok because they have a GenZ problem. Then you have Jewish journalists posting "why TikTok must be banned" which includes alarmism over anti-semitism as the chief concern. Then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok because of Israel, not CCP. After the political support for the issue starts to change due to that pressure, you STILL get people like @2rafa who just are unable or unwilling to see an obvious political play even when the means, motive, and opportunity are all crystal clear as day and directly admitted to by the people involved. You get Greenblatt saying on a secret call that "something must be done about TikTok" then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups, but @2rafa enforces the norm that nothing nefarious can be attributed to Jewish people.
And there's a 20% chance I'll be banned for posting this comment, but at this point people like 2rafa are just admiring the Emperor's clothes when denying that the TikTok ban happened because of Jewish lobbying. Even when the people involved directly admit what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Edit: Also why not throw a quite from Mitt Romney into the mix:
Driving the news: In a forum Friday at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S. have "been so ineffective at communicating" justifications for the war in Gaza, adding, "Typically the Israelis are good at PR."
"You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates," Blinken said.
Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
Maybe you just have better executive function than I do? All I can tell you is that three pairs have really saved my ass when one pair was long-term lost (later found between the bed and the wall), the second pair I was using was short-term lost (left in the bathroom) and I really had to go out the door to get to work.
Besides, each pair was only $30 (again, Zenni + Black Friday), so why not.
Call around to find an optometrist who is willing to give you the pupillary distance as well as the prescription, then buy the glasses online through Zenni. Alternatively, if you only have the prescription, you can use a reversed or expired credit card to measure your pupillary distance at their website by taking a picture of your face with the card on your forehead. If you order during Black Friday, it is very cheap.
Get the maximum blue light protection possible. It will help you sleep and reduce eye strain and headaches. Get some clip-on sunglasses, too.
Two is one and one is none. Get three pairs. Nothing sucks more than not being able to find your glasses when you absolutely need to go out the door.
Get sturdy plastic glasses with as few moving parts as possible. Thin wire-frame glasses break way too often. They should look like this, not like this.
Frames vary widely in price for no apparent reason. I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart. Get the cheap ones.
Rov_Scam
6mo ago
I'm a few years older than you, but beyond the internet, I think the problem started with cell phones. First, because they enable much easier communication, and second, because they became status symbols. While ease of communication seems like a good thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of making it easier to flake. If I call you tonight and we make plans to do something right after work tomorrow, unless you change your mind within the next few hours, you're pretty much stuck. Obviously, if there's some kind of emergency you could call me at work or at the place where we're supposed to meet, but that's intrusive and inconvenient (especially if you have to find the phone number of a business without the convenience of the internet), reserved for situations where you truly can't make it. These days, if it's getting late in the day tomorrow and you feel too tired to do anything, you can always just send me a text cancelling. I'm always available, and you don't even have to talk to me directly.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but it also makes it much easier to be late for things. If I have the kind of appointment like a job interview or court appearance where it's imperative that I be on time, I'm almost never late unless I make a fundamental miscalculation or there are unforseen circumstances. But if the engagement is merely social or recreational, I'm horrible at it, not because of unforseen circumstances, but because of inertia. After all, if I say I'm going to meet friends to ski at 9 am and I'm running a half hour late, I'll just text them to start without me and I'll call to see where they're at when I'm ready. In the old days, they'd have to wait around for me in the parking lot, not knowing where I was, and they couldn't go on ahead of me because I'd have no way of finding them once I got there. Being late meant either getting them pissed off waiting or running the risk of being ditched for the day.
Whether or not this is a net negative is hard to say. People flaking is annoying but it's nowhere near as bad as people having medical emergencies and no way to call an ambulance. Hell, it's probably better than the old days when people would have to cancel for legitimate reasons but had no way of contacting you and just stood you up. It's better than being stuck at home waiting for a call, or needing to get in touch with someone who isn't home at the time. As much as people complain about people being slaves to their phones now, it was worse in the old days. If you were at home and your phone rang, you basically had to answer it. Sure, you could screen calls through your answering machine, but this was inconvenient, and the idea of doing this for every call, all the time, was absurd. So you basically had to answer the phone, and the person on the other end could be anybody, wanting to talk about anything.
To get back to the social aspect, say I'm having people over this Friday night and I'm calling friends to invite them. These days you'd send a text. The recipients can see the group text, check their schedules, and respond at their convenience. If they don't really want to commit but want to keep it as a contingency, they can wait a few days to see if anything better comes up before responding. In the old days, you'd call your friends, and they'd have to give an answer immediately. "I don't know" was an acceptable response, but one only given in the event that there was some legitimate contingency involved that prevented you from committing in the here and now but wasn't certain enough to entirely preclude your attendance. And giving such a response required you to take the additional step of calling the host back at a later date to give a firm answer.
Which brings me to my second point, about phones being status symbols. This, admittedly, isn't that much of a problem, but it ties into everything else. Cell phones were always status symbols, but originally they were status symbols of a different type. Owning a cell phone before about 1995 meant that you had a very important job where people always needed to be able to reach you and it was worth paying ridiculously high fees for this capability. Then the cost of the phones and the basic subscription came down enough that normal people could afford to have them, but the per-minute charges were expensive enough that most of these were only used for emergencies or other situations where they were the only option. Landlines still ruled the roost for everyday conversations.
Then, in the early 2000s, changes were made to the business model that made teenagers actually want to own them as opposed to having them so they could call their parents for a ride. First, plans became available that came with a certain number of minutes that could be used during the day, and unlimited minutes on nights and weekends. Eventually, unlimited talk became the standard. Now, they could be used for casual conversation without your parents getting a huge bill. Second, texting became available, quickly gaining market share for low-priority communications that weren't worth interrupting somebody over. If I called for the specific point of telling you that the Penguins' goaltending looked especially shitty tonight (and not as an entree to a longer conversation), you'd be annoyed. If I texted the same you wouldn't care. The ability to have short, inane conversations (in an era with a telephonic keypad) didn't appeal much to adults, but kids loved it.
And with more kids having cell phones, marketers realized there was room for improvement of the phones themselves. Progress in cell phone design was initially centered around making them more compact. Now it was about making them more stylish. This is where Apple really knocked it out of the park. The Blackberry had existed for years, and provided much of the same functionality as smartphones would. But they were only appealing to people who actually needed the functionality. Nobody bought a Blackberry as a status symbol, and people who needed them for work didn't seem to like using them (one friend of mine who bought one for work purposes was thrilled when her job started paying for a work phone because she could now carry a normal phone for personal use). The iPhone had improved functionality, for sure, but it was a status symbol more than anything.
This only gets truer as time goes on. The first iPhone was a huge leap forward, but subsequent iterations have been less revolutionary than the improvements to the flip phones before them. Every couple years we'd at least get a new, useful feature, like a camera, or a full keyboard. Smartphone improvements are basically limited to incremental improvements of technology that already existed in flip phones or the first generation of smartphones. Faster processor, better camera, waterproof, etc. But new iPhones don't really do anything that the originals didn't, and that statement is even less true when comparing the current generation to the previous. (The biggest selling point of the iPhone 16 is that it has native AI capability, which sounds good until you consider that any phone with access to the internet has AI capability, just not on the phone itself. I don't know who this is supposed to appeal to.)
Nonetheless, there are people who want this thing. Every time a new iPhone comes out, there's a line out the door at the Apple Store of people who can't even wait a couple of weeks. Contrast this to the 90s. Phones were appliances. My parents had the same wall phone hanging in the kitchen throughout my entire childhood and most of my adulthood. You only got a new phone if the old one broke or, rarely, if there was some game-changing feature like a cordless handset or touch-tone dialing that you wanted. The idea of getting a new phone every two years was like the idea of getting a new dryer every two years.
The importance of this to the current phenomenon relates back to the first reason. Even though phones seem more central to our lives now, they are actually less central than they were 30 years ago. Like I said, if the phone rang, chances are you answered it, even though you probably had no idea who it was or what the call was about. If you made plans over the phone, you were stuck with them, unless you went to great lengths. If an important call came and you weren't home, you were out of luck. Our entire lives revolved around telephones and having access to telephones, but nobody really noticed or cared. They were as exciting as vacuum cleaners. Now they're as sexy as ever even though the core functionality hasn't improved since the introduction of texting. Once the average person was liberated from the noose of the telephone, that should have been the end of it, and progress should have stopped. The smartphone's integration of communication equipment with a portable, but unimprovably limited, personal computer, should have been the last improvement anybody cared about. But here we are, 15 years later, and people are even more concerned now than they were then.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6mo ago
I've been attending BJJ for about a month now, with a gap around the holidays for of in-laws followed by a gap for illness. I attend between three and four classes a week. I'd like to push closer to five, but work obligations get in the way, along with injury avoidance. When I do back to back days especially a night class followed by a morning class from Friday to Saturday, I tend to back off on rolling after a couple of rounds. My buddy who I started with has already had to skip two or three separate weeks with different injuries he picked up, though I think it's worse for him because he did enough martial arts back in high school to have some idea what he's doing, so his mind is telling his body to do things his body isn't ready for.
Fitness wise, it's been a tremendously good decision for me. The workout I get out of rolling is so completely different than what I was doing before, that I really see the value. Some of that is probably just a matter of new movement patterns and angles, but it's also cardio in a way I've historically been bad at forcing myself to do. Hopefully, it will also provide the motivation to do more cardio at home, because I clearly need to improve my conditioning to survive rolling longer, especially as I'm relying on strength to escape, pretty constantly. The coordination and proprioception aspects are also weaknesses of mine, and I hope to see improvement over time.
The relationship of strength to technique in BJJ has been interesting. The lore of BJJ has always been that strength doesn't matter, size doesn't matter, with enough technique experience and intelligence will always win out. This is often true, I've been choked out by guys I outweighed by a lot. But, the value of strength is also immediately apparent to me. While obviously I do suck, I would suck a lot worse if I were weak on top of everything else, I watch other newbies suffer even getting through the warmups, I'm grateful to my past self for spending so much time lifting/climbing/rowing. My belief has been reinforced that strength is the master category, and will improve your experience in any activity.
My biggest concerns to progress at this point beyond conditioning and injury avoidance are related to metrics and tracking. I miss the feedback of the weightroom, numbers go up good. I've always tended towards something like the Bulgarian Lite system, and it has kept me motivated over the years. In BJJ at this point, it's hard to figure out what a good day looks like for me, because I'm getting my ass handed to me over and over. My coaches, who are great guys but perhaps not the most introspective, would with certainty reply to this question with something like "Just keep coming you'll get better." Which is probably true, and the fact that this is a mental problem for me at all is probably the reason I never made it as an athlete, I know I'm the one who is wrong here. At one point a couple weeks back, when I was getting a little down about just getting worked in every roll, I wrote in my notebook the goal of landing one submission by the end of January, and that I would wait until then to reassess. Funnily enough, the next day I went to class and managed to surprise a guy by hitting a throw, taking his back, and sinking the RNC. With that hurdle overcome (my k/d isn't zero!), looking forward I need to figure out what's next. After yesterday's class, I wrote down in my lifting notebook a quick count of submissions I hit cleanly, clean sweeps, and successful guard passes. The fact that I could write that down more or less from memory after ten rounds should tell you a lot about how I was doing, I was mostly in survival mode trying to get to half guard from side control or mount. I'll see if this is a practical way to track progress, or if it at least salves my feelings of inadequacy long enough to get to a point where I'm making real progress.
This job fuckin’ sucks, man!
I’ve been meaning to write this update for 4-6 weeks, but here we are. The last week of training wasn’t any more illuminative than the three before it (for the same reason; low call volume; my trainer apologized to me several times for the “bullshit training” that I was receiving), and apparently the folks up north had intended to keep me for more time to make up for the slow pace, but due to communications SNAFUs they called it at that and sent me on my own.
The first week on my own nearly broke me. Lots of calls, almost all far away, and I barely/didn’t know what I was doing. Too slow/disorganized and not good at diagnosing, and there was one particular call where I had what I thought was the gas leak isolated to a bank of four lines and just couldn’t find it. I found and fixed a leak, but it wasn’t the leak. Not being able to fix a problem bothers me in a way that I can best describe as ego-killing, and adding salt to the wound my supervisor got bitched at for me getting too many hours when four out of five days involved 5-hour round trips between the calls and home (Uh, I was under the impression that overtime was expected with this position. I drive more than any service tech in the company due to the low-density market I work in.), which in turn meant that I got bitched at/nagged to take lunch breaks. Apparently the company is in the middle of an overtime crackdown. I asked to be demoted to line cleaning and was denied.
Since then, things have been weird and, well, slow. I have good calls and bad calls, and have gotten better at not letting the bad calls make me want to end it all (I’m not being serious, wasn’t in any danger then and am far from it now, but good God those first few weeks were rough.) while allowing myself to feel good about the good calls. We’ve been so dead in service that I’ve been repeatedly sent to cover line cleaning routes for lack of service calls.
The problem is twofold: The first one is the most clinical. I don’t make enough money at this job to afford doing it long term. Adjusted for inflation, I make about what I did delivering pizza for Papa John’s 10 years ago and could probably match or beat it if I went back to the Papa. I could almost certainly make more money delivering pizza for Domino’s. Overtime hasn’t happened, so I’m stuck in the worst-case situation where I drive 10 hours a week for free (first and last hours of one’s daily driving are unpaid) and simultaneously struggle to get close to 40 hours a week. It’s a nonexistent to negligible gross raise and a significant hourly pay cut.
The second problem is that I mostly hate this job. I’m better at not taking it personally, but I’m not good at correcting foaming beer problems. I’ve gotten better at finding gas leaks but am far from a maestro. I’m not as fast as I would like to be but I’m getting better at putting kegboxes together (I didn’t know how much that aspect of the job would resemble working in construction.) I can change parts and within the parameters I’m trained on (aka. Not involving the HVAC side of things) I like working on glycol chillers, if only because the problem is usually obvious (My most common calls there are either a broken/ pump/motor, failed temperature controller, or total loss of coolant due to a coolant leak.).
My supervisor is blowing nothing but sunshine up my ass about how great of a job I’m doing and judging by the shoddy previous work we’ve done I’ve had to correct on some calls I’m at least partially inclined to believe her, even adjusting for the fact that we’re longtime friends, but I don’t feel like I do a good job. I’ve done some good jobs and gotten lucky draws here and there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m good at my job. Good would mean fixing the hard calls. As of last Friday I was allegedly the top-grossing service tech in the company for the month of February (This probably means that I was the only one to install a glycol chiller, our biggest ticket item.), something that “never happens” coming from my market. If true (and I don’t think she’s lying), my response is less self-congratulation and more “Holy fuck, I guess everyone else is as dead as I am or worse, because I’m not doing shit and my sales are well below the old goal to make commission.”.
The good news is that I should be able to pass a drug test (My new year’s resolution was slow to get off the ground, but I’m pushing six weeks without fake weed, and I don’t really miss it.) as of next week and start shotgunning applications. I don’t know what or where to do next, but this ain’t it. If I fail such that I’m still working here mid-April, I’ll make my one year anniversary and get a week of paid vacation.
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