Eelongate

It takes serious denialism to believe the covid vaccines are anywhere close to the effectiveness of polio vaccines.

The forecasts for Dublin I'm seeing predict 10C or higher for most of Tuesday. Regardless, my advice is to keep the windows open where possible and it will offset the energy needed where it isn't. And the other component of my advice, turning down the thermostat in places where it gets cold, is certainly applicable in Ireland. You don't need 25C indoors in the winter.

I'm something of a master thief myself; my whole life when commercial breaks started on TV, I changed the channel or turned the TV off.

It's not just a matter of heavy metals in the soil getting accidentally sucked up by the plants. From this PDF linked from the article: http://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/s...

> In addition, we investigated possible adulteration, specifically the addition of bulking and/or coloring agents, in four of the 15 spices that are commonly adulterated in these ways.

So at least in some of the cases, deliberate adulteration with heavy metal containing dyes/etc is a real possibility. This should be (probably is?) a criminal matter but it seems the FDA isn't particularly concerned about it. This disturbs me.

Seattle. Before then, New York.

> If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA

About that...

> In addition, the limited testing the FDA has done on spices has been focused on harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, not heavy metals, Ronholm says.

How much did CR spend to buy these spices? A few hundred dollars? A thousand at most? I don't know how much the tests themselves cost to run, but I can find lead test kits on Amazon for under $20. The biggest cost would doubtlessly be manpower so.. put some interns on the job?

But yes, I expect the FDA's lame excuse will be "Gee wiz we wish we could do our jobs but we need another billion dollars for what you're suggesting." Such is the way with the American government.

> CONSUMER REPORTS tested 126 herbs and spices from 38 brands for arsenic, cadmium, and lead. (We did not test spices that tend to be used in baking, such as cinnamon and nutmeg.) We tested two or three samples from different lots of each product.

This testing is frustratingly sparse, couldn't they find garlic powder in Trader Joe's? They're missing many brands for many of these spices. And I don't think you can bake heavy metals out of food, so why did they omit cinnamon?

What is a concerned consumer like myself supposed to do now? Eat food without spices? Buy test kits and test spices myself? I guess I could write a letter to my congresspeople to tell the FDA to do their goddamn jobs, but I don't expect that to work.

The end game is that we get to all enjoy some fresh air, isn't that enough? I've been doing this for years, long before any covid.

There's a tool for that: a brick.

In much of the world for much of the year, it doesn't get below freezing for at least part of the day. The solution to the heating problem is simple then: simply don't. Open windows when it's above 50F / 10C (to give a healthy safety margin to the water pipes) and tell people to wear sweaters.

Do this where it's possible and you'll offset the energy expenditure of heating in places were it actually earnestly gets cold. And for that matter, limit their thermostats to 50F / 10C too. Being able to wear t-shirts in the winter when there's a blizzard outside is an absurd luxury.

> But attacking the lock is the last thing a smart or determined person will do.

I think that is contextual. In a whole lot of apartment buildings, the windows into the apartment are inaccessible from the outside. The door frame is metal, so kicking down the door would wake half the apartment building. Without a lock on the door, anybody who got into the building (generally easy) could silently enter any unoccupied apartment and nobody would know it. But with a good lock, nearly every would-be thief who can't pick locks will go someplace else.

> To get to the truth of the matter, we will need to agree on what's actually happening. The phrase "concentration camp" provokes imagery of Nazi Germany, with overtones of the most egregious human rights violations.

Using the term "concentration camp" used to refer to nazi death camps is euphemistic. It really misses the core horror of the holocaust by drawing attention away from the death/extermination aspect of the camps and instead naming the camps for concentration (e.g. internment.)

"Not to be confused with concentration camp." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp

The camps for Japanese-Americans during WW2 could be appropriately called concentration camps. Wikipedia redirects "concentration camp" to their page on internment, with this note: "Not to be confused with [...] extermination camp." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp

> the content was put back up.

The repo is back up, but the project is dead. I suspect the developers got nasty letters from lawyers behind the scenes. I believe yt-dlp is the future of this project, but it's presently lesser known than youtube-dl so the lawyers got what they wanted in the end.

> So you can sit around in your new subreddit with enough subscribers that you can count them on your fingers, posting freely, while /r/politics (or wherever) has a subscriber base measured in millions.

And if by some chance your subreddit manages to become popular, the admins and power mods will conspire to take it from you. Reddit sucks.

An attack on bitcoin might have other motivations. For instance, a powerful government might attack bitcoin specifically to undermine bitcoin's credibility and utility.

In a ternary system, wouldn't 1.222... equal 2?

Posting flamebait to troll precedes 4chan by many years. 4chan really isn't that old in the grand scheme of internet things, and isn't truly the originator of very much. Virtually any form of trolling you might find on 4chan was pioneered somewhere else many years before 4chan existed.

Besides Australia and New Zealand, are there any particularly liberal countries in that corner of the world at all? The authoritarianism of the China aligned and/or left/communist Asian countries is well understood, but what of the rest?

South Korea spent much of the 20th century under military dictatorships, going from one military coup to another. Singapore's single-party system (with suspiciously fascist iconography[0]) is notorious for harsh authoritarianism. Japan today is a lot more liberal than it was a century ago, but their criminal conviction rate is too high to be believed and public support for the death penalty is around 80%. All three of these are nice countries in many respects, but I don't think any of them are particularly liberal by anglosphere standards.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_and_circle

> This means the current laws prevent the web from being the wild west.

If you take 'wild west' to be pure anarchy free from any law, then sure. But I don't think that's what is actually meant, nor does it describe the real wild west, nor even the popular perception of the wild west. Pop-media depictions of the wild west are filled with sheriffs, bounty hunters, judges, etc. That wild west outlaws exist as a trope implies the existence of laws for these outlaws to violate. Utter absolute lawlessness is not the implication of 'wild west'.

> Dodge city cowboys are a myth based on thin facts and nothing about the wild west is good regarding internet governance

Nothing about the real wild west as you describe it has anything to do with the internet. Where are the analogous internet cows or commercial exploitation of internet prairies, or sweeps westward? This is all nonsensical. The literal reality of the wild west has nothing to do with regulating "trolls" (criticism of politicians) online.

Laws for that sort of thing already exist, so that's obviously not what they're talking about when they say "unmask trolls". It's clear these Australian politicians are authoritarians who are upset about people insulting them online.

To me, empathy is about trying to understand the way other people think or feel so you can anticipate how they might respond to things. In forming mental models of other people and running through simulated scenarios with those mental models to explore possible outcomes, I think you're engaging in a form of empathy.

> I am a pretty empathetic person (maybe less so to strangers than friends),

I feel the same, strongly so in fact. I think the accuracy of the mental models used for empathizing depends on experience; experience with that specific person and one's own life experiences in general. The better I know a person, the more accurate my mental model of their behavior and feelings will be. General experience socializing with other people also enhances empathy since that experience enables somebody to create more accurate models of how people in general think or feel about things. Further, personal experiences allow somebody to better empathize with people who have similar experiences.

I tried taking their little quiz and couldn't get past the first page. It asks me to imagine somebody I know, then asks which details I can observe. But those details are unobserved until the quiz asks me about them. The color of their clothing? I wasn't thinking about any specific clothing at all, but when prompted to I'm able to imagine that person in many different outfits. Vivid details of those clothes? Sure, I can imagine details, but the details aren't necessarily there in the "image" until I'm prompted to invent them. The possible answers to the question just seem... invalid. The details are neither dim nor vivid; the details are undetermined and flexible.

Maybe the quiz should first ask me to imagine that person in a specific circumstance, where those details are predetermined by my memory of that circumstance? Even then I still don't understand what the quiz really means by half these answers. What does it mean for an image to be "lively"? That it's moving around? Am I meant to be imagining a still image or a moving image? Depending on how I interpret these questions and answers, I could get completely different outcomes from this quiz.

> day dreaming to play out various scenarios like a decision tree to “workshop” how to interact with specific people

Seems like a reinvention of empathy.

I lost one of my friends to the tulpa crap a few years ago. It's self-induced schizophrenia and it ruined his life. He lost his job, all of his friends, and last I heard was living on the street.

The old are more reliable voters, while the youngest aren't even permitted to vote (even though they have more at stake, since they will have to live with the consequences longer.)

In a game of telephone, the further you get from the original source the less reliable the information becomes.

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

Nah, it's really easy to never smoke. I've been not smoking my entire life. I think his comparison is dead on the mark. If people who choose to be unvaccinated can be vilified for taking up hospital beds, then so can people who choose to pick up a smoking habit.

This article is about the F-18 Super Hornet, which Boeing manufactures. However I think it's interesting to note that the F-18 and F-15 were both designed by McDonnell Douglas. The last time Boeing designed a successful fighter jet on their own was never.