pugets · HackerTrans

When I turned on the music and chatter, the first audio that played was of a chimpanzee wildly shrieking for about 2 seconds. The song which played after was “Sonargaon” by Daniel Masson, which as far as I can tell does not include that audio. Maybe someone at the KSFO Tower was having a bad day. Very funny.

pugets

vorig jaardiscuss

Missouri has a lot of those names, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Missouri_places_named_...

pugets

vorig jaardiscuss

What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.

My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.

pugets

vorig jaardiscuss

My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.

The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?

To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.

But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?

pugets

vorig jaardiscuss

What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

“We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision.” - Proverbs 16:33 (TLB)

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

The second graph in that article ("The Partisan Gap on Economy Ratings") is alarming. In mid-2016, ~30% of Republicans said the economy was doing good. By mid-2017, that figure passed ~80%. By comparison, optimism among Democrats fell from ~70% to ~55% over that same time period.

I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.

What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Why restrict the definition to political censorship? Surely there are such things as academic censorship, religious censorship, etc.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I once moved towns and needed to cancel my LA Fitness gym membership. I found that they wanted me to go to their website, find the Cancellation Form, print it out, fill it out with my account details, and mail or fax it to their corporate office. I don’t believe there is any way of cancelling it online or over the phone.

So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill?

Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

What word would be better than “choose” in this context? For the majority of people who aren’t prisoners or toddlers, there is a good deal of personal choice that determines what foods we eat and how much.

Even if fate has it that I must end up at a Wendy’s drive thru tomorrow night, couldn’t it be true that I could choose to eat the 400 calorie meal instead of the 800 calorie meal, or order water instead of Sprite?

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

It does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things:

1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function

2. Consume as many calories as your body will need to function

3. Consume fewer calories than your body will need to function

When you consume more energy than you require, your body stores the remainder as fat. When you consume less energy than is required, your body converts your fat into usable energy.

Now obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation of nutrition. What you eat, when you eat it, how efficiently your body converts food to energy, and other factors will determine the little details. But the explanation I've provided is not nearly as over-simplified as "it just doesn't work."

To make a comparison, it would be like suggesting that the financial advice "earn more money than you spend" just doesn't work as a method of saving money, on the grounds that some % of Americans who try to save money end up in credit card debt.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

That’s also how I lost most of my weight. Sure, you could spend 25-45 minutes on the treadmill… or you could just not eat 5 Oreo cookies, and you would achieve the same result (from a caloric perspective).

My best tip for not eating junk food: Don’t buy it. It’s so much easier to eat chicken and rice when you don’t have a bag of Doritos on standby.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

If I did a push-up for every product that has “revolutionized” the fitness world in the last several decades, you would see my body and probably assume that I had used those products.

If you have a floor, a wall, and autonomy over what enters into your mouth, then you already have everything you need to gain muscle and lose fat.

Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd. Peloton preys on their customers’ fear of sunk-cost by selling common exercise equipment at exorbitant prices. They want you to fear that if you don’t use the equipment, then you’re wasting your money.

pugets

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Reading, writing, discovering, voting, and convincing myself that in just one more minute I will return to my day.

pugets

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I proposed last year with a lab-made diamond. I did almost no research, went to one jeweler and only twice, shelled out less money than I was spending on rent, and I walked away with one of the prettiest rings she has ever seen. Her friends unanimously love it. They can’t believe I picked it out.

I don’t know or care about the politics of the diamond trade. All I can confirm on is this: Lab-grown diamonds are the real deal. They will even fool a jeweler’s naked eye.

pugets

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions.

In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."

The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.

What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

pugets

3 jaar geledendiscuss

In college, I did my calculus homework on blank printer paper using Sharpie markers. I could only fit one integral per page, maybe two if I was lucky, so I’d turn in these 15-page stapled assignments. It was calculus all the same, and I got great grades. I think the purpose of this comment is to reinforce that the medium doesn’t matter — if you focus on the content itself, you’ll progress.

pugets

3 jaar geledendiscuss

In my estimate, it’s because the crazy views get virtually no pushback from within liberal social circles.

I say this as a socialist who is critical of essentialism and other nonsense popularized by academia last decade. On liberal websites like Reddit, if you make a critique of the performative nature of land acknowledgements, you are sure to be called a conservative. The prevailing assumption is that anyone bothered enough by those cultural issues must not be a true liberal.