ssjmarx [he/him]

While individuals can find space for weight loss regimes, it really is a society-level problem.

Consider an experiment with two populations of rats. One population gets a normal amount of food, the other gets the same food with a bunch of added sugar. Of course the population with added sugar gets fatter. But, while the average rat may have gained 10% weight or whatever, on an individual level you’ll see a wide range of results - some rats aren’t effected by the increased sugar, some gain a small amount of weight, some gain a lot.

This is basically exactly what we’ve done to ourselves in capitalist society over the past seventy-ish years, taken our previous diet and jacked it up with a ton of sugar (and other additives and a lot of increased volume). But while with the rats it’s easy to see that all you have to do to return the overweight population to normal is to stop adding sugar to their food, with humans we can’t see that because we’ve created a system that blames you for getting sick.

It’s like building a coal power plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and then blaming the residents when they start getting asthma or worse, and holding up the people who won the genetic lottery and don’t get lung disease as the example we should all strive to replicate.

As the founding fathers intended.

don’t go in a space shuttle

As awesome as it was in concept, that thing was a safety nightmare from the very beginning. With every other manned spacecraft if something goes wrong during launch you can blast off and land the capsule safely in the ocean, but with the shuttle there were large portions of the ascent and descent profiles where, if something went wrong, you were going too fast to turn around but too slow to make it to space so you were just hosed.

You know, even when I was a kid I thought Magneto’s plan in the first X-Men movie to turn everyone into mutants was fucking baller and they should have let him do it. Just 'cause that one guy turned into a water monster doesn’t mean that would be the default - the X gene expresses way differently in everyone who has it.

An no, I don’t think giving every human the X gene constitutes genocide, that’s fucking stupid.

TRUE

Even streamers who I like in short doses like Hasan can’t get through a fifteen minute edited video without saying the same thing five hundred times. It’s suitable as background noise, but if I’m listening to a streamer I’d almost always be better off listening to music.

I remember that argument was when I learned that my parents were NIMBYs. It was honestly a shock, they’re lib but I has assumed they would want a playground in the neighborhood considering that at that time there were six kids in the house with absolutely nothing to do inside walking distance.

100% correct, no notes.

I have a theory that part of the function of the “where is your child now?” stuff that really curtailed kids’ freedom in America in the second half of the twentieth century was a reaction to the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam movements. Both were prominently participated in by kids, the anti-war one especially, and when society goes from letting kids have a significant portion of the day to themselves in between school and supper to basically forcing them to go from one controlled location straight to another with no in-between, all of that potential youth-lead political organization falls apart because it doesn’t have anything to support it anymore.

I don’t think it was the primary driver - after all most kids weren’t joining the Students for a Democratic Society - but it is a relevant secondary reason. The primary driver was almost certainly “property values”. I remember one of my only interactions with the HOA where my parents lived concerned plans for a playground being voted down based on the logic that children playing outside would somehow lower everyone nearby’s home value (they also made the equally-bad argument that teens would hang out at the child’s playground to smoke). Multiply this interaction by a million HOAs around the country and eventually even the kids whose parents don’t demand that they come straight home still end up going home anyway because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn’t much different than, say, American emigration today.

edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it’s safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin’s death.

I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn’t until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn’t until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what’s available, so it’s just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.

Depending on how far you get sent back, there’s also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.

If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.

The only reason they got popular was that they were playing popular Black music while being White, also let’s talk about how Get Back was originally super racist.

I agree, we should add 10,000 to the CE in order to make the cutoff point the invention of agriculture.

I always say that the mistake filmmakers make is that they don’t want to make their character truly cringe. You’ve got to have the Fight Club guy go into his room and the walls are covered with underage anime characters and he wanks himself to sleep while clutching a body pillow and dirty talking to it.

Yeah taking into account R1 and the OT it seems like Mothma gets dragged along through the revolution by the more radical wing of her faction, pretty sure she isn’t relevant at all in the grand scheme until after the Empire is defeated and she becomes a politician in the New Republic (and fails to stop the First Order from rising lmao).

he wishes he had a dragon so he could attack Moscow

Did he even read his own books? My takeaway from them was definitely not “all of our problems can be solved by an application of incredible violence”.

Half your age plus seven, a nineteen year old is an adult and they can make their own decisions. As long as the 26 year old isn’t their boss or some other category with power over the 19 year old it’s fine.

The first X-Men movie literally starts with a scene of Magneto being separated from his parents at Dachau, which in hindsight makes his willingness to violently resist the fascist rumblings of the US government in that film completely justified and turns the X-men into the fucking Freikorps.

Professor X killed Rosa.

:sicko-yes: me rooting for the advertising bubble to pop and take down all of the largest tech companies with it

:sicko-no: me realizing that the company that will best survive that burst and then expand to fill the power vacuum is Amazon

:strangelove-wow:

I’ve never considered moving to Bakersfield before, but :soviet-hmm:

I think it’s the “individually tragic scale” that really activates my empathy. On a conceptual level of course shit like napalm bombing Vietnam or blowing up important water infrastructure in Iraq is much worse, but the story of a kid’s parents signing him up to get a black bag thrown over his head and driven across country to be physically and emotionally abused for years feels like something that could have happened to me if things had turned out slightly different.