domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
I think using freshly ground beans just results in a much richer, smoother flavour compared to instant coffee. I'd say the flavour has more to do with the fact of using beans rather than the brewing implement used - if you gave me a blind taste test of an americano brewed using an AeroPress and another brewed with a French press (but using the same beans in the same quantity), I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference. The main advantages of an AeroPress lie in its ease of use, its robust, non-fragile design compared to the French press, and the fact that it's better-suited to making espressos than French presses (as my preferred coffee is a cappuccino). But if plastic in contact with hot water is a no-no for you, I don't know what other advice I can offer, other than that I've heard moka pots tend to burn the coffee.
Out of curiosity I looked up whether AeroPresses contain BPA or phthalates, and apparently not, which is a relief as we've just recently replaced almost all of our plastic lunchboxes with glass ones for this very reason.
I'm pro-2A and own guns myself but there's a certain irony to outspoken 2A defenders being assassinated that's hard not to notice.
"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."
I do wonder if his last thoughts were "shit. still worth it, though". You can count on conservatives to be ethically consistent when it comes to gun rights. I don't expect anyone on the right to talk about banning the rifle used to kill him.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
2d ago
People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead.
I saw it and yeah he’s dead. Press F.
Frankly I doubt this will escalate into anything unless the shooter had very clearly stated political motives. If the pictures of the suspect are accurate then it was a white boomer. Very much could get swept away as a “crazy guy with a gun”.
Magusoflight
2d ago
Yes it’s so absurd it can hardly be believe can it?
Almost enough to make you seriously question how are society has been structured and why it’s been allowed and even enforced to be this way
cjet79
2d ago
It wasn't enough effort, since you removed it so fast I removed the mod note as well.
Hieronymus
2d ago
I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer. To be specific and even gesture at the scope of the issue would take an effortpost that I don’t have in me right now. But I can give a few examples:
- Ban abortion and assisted suicide.
- Reverse government recognition of gay marriage. The reason this one comes so early is that gay marriage makes a bunch of the other changes to family policy harder.
- Require a demonstration of (considerable) fault to obtain a divorce.
- Take fault into account when deciding what responsibilities the spouses have to one another in the distribution of property, etc.
- Acknowledge that people will abuse this if they can get away with it, and so treat perjury in divorce proceedings seriously.
I have ideas at various stages of development about how the state can make male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families a realistic option for more of those who want them; better respect parents’ rights and duties in raising their children; defend those who speak the truth on culture issues; protect the right of self-defense; and acknowledge the independence of churches. I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what comes to the tips of my fingers for now.
I don't think I want any plastic in contact with hot water. :-I An Aeropress made of other materials might be interesting though. Do you mind saying a bit more about how you notice the difference in taste, compared to, say, insta-coffee, which any enthusiast apparently refuses to drink?
I'm considering a Chemex ("pour-over" made of glass, with paper filters you have to buy from the same producer at not insignificant running cost) but it looks a bit too hipster-y for my liking. And having to tie that leather knot, hmm. Not sure...
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
Posted this as a top level comment but was worried it wasn't high effort enough. I think our thoughts on this are roughly the same though:
Charlie Kirk getting shot really doesn’t help the impression I got from the Trump assassination attempt, the UHC CEO assassination, and the Zizians that we're entering a 1970s-style age of political violence.
I'll ask the obvious question before the admins likely delete your post due to lack of effort.
Who?
Edit: Boy, did I get that question answered elsewhere...
tkt
2d ago
I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.
As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.
In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.
OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
FtttG
2d ago
I bought an AeroPress about five years ago and use it every day. (Being made of plastic, it's almost impossible to break, unlike the French press I bought the year before which I carelessly shattered a few months later.) When we moved into our apartment a few months ago, the owner had one of those Nespresso knockoffs that consumes pods. We tried it for awhile, but quickly went back to the AeroPress because we preferred the taste.
The crudeness of such spherical-cows Bayesianism did form part of my point. This is exactly why I said that I "would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence". I think falling back on any Bayesian pattern-matching in this sort of case is largely illegitimate, whether that's assuming that a black man stabbing a woman can't possibly have been racially-motivated, or its converse of readily assuming that eg a white cop shooting a black man has to have been an unmotivated racist hate-crime. There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".
I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land. We'll be in prima facie land until the suspect is interrogated, or at the very least, a background investigation is made into his life based on people who knew him before the incident. The information we have now is woefully insufficient to assert much of anything about the killer's mens rea. (I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)
Ergo I think it's much too early to make any kind of cogent statement on the murder. But journalists have to try to spin more than the bare objective facts out of this, it's what they're paid for. So they fall back on extremely loose pattern-matching. This pattern-matching is dumb, but I argue that any pattern-matching would be dumb and the particular heuristic they're applying ("white-on-black murders are more often racist in nature than black-on-white") doesn't seem like a terrible heuristic as these things go, heuristics just don't get you very far.
Anyone starting to wonder what the point of "academic freedom" is? It certainly doesn't do what it says on the label, and mostly seems like a way to keep commies on state pensions while they burn the commons of our society.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men
...why would you say any of these things as though they favored your point?
Tree
2d ago
Maybe someone should post the charlie kirk assassination. Sounds like a culture war.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.
Magusoflight
2d ago
it's basically a wash between black women and white men.
I wouldn’t call it a “wash” exactly.
FarmReadyElephants
2d ago
It's not mere contempt though. It's specifically using trans norms as camouflage for bad actors that I'm concerned about. Women are considered less dangerous and awarded more sympathy than men. Trans identified men who are bad actors specifically take advantage of that.
When I heard "Ziz" referred to as "she", I specifically was not on alert for a psychotic man to be active in my social circles and I underweighted the danger from Ziz as my priors were set to "female" and not "male". If I knew there was a murderous psychopath named Jack LaSota going around, that primes my behavior differently.
Trans language pollutes the information commons, to the benefit of evildoers
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.
To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.
Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice.
I’m assuming this is a joke?!?!? I like not being stabbed.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good
Nullius in verba the motto of the Royal Society. Of course these days, even they would tell you to "Trust The Science."
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
The sad conclusion of all this seems to be: the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good. If a conflict between their scientific principles, and their political principles arises, scientists seem to reliably choose politics.
The central myth and in my view issue of modern discourse is this idea that science, more specifically empiricism, has metaphysical and moral value, and can be used to make claims in such fields. It absolutely can't. Empiricism cannot make value judgements and be used as a cudgel to force metaphysical arguments about what a man or woman is. The second you begin to cross that line, your vaunted neutral, empirical viewpoint falls apart.
Unfortunately if we truly accepted this as a society, we would basically have to rewrite our institutions from the ground up anyway, a truly harrowing task. We'll see if empiricism is defeated anytime soon.
Magusoflight
2d ago
I've only been stabbed twice
Only twice? Noob
Also, the two Minneapolis lawmakers and their spouses who were targeted back in June.
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