ArbitraryValue @ ArbitraryValue @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

When my sister bought a couch, it wouldn't fit and so the building super "helped" her by ripping half of it to pieces in order to get it into her apartment. Then she made me put it all back together, which was rather challenging. At least the upholstery was still in one piece.

I'll have my revenge years from now when my sister wants to get rid of the couch. She'll try to break it up again and she'll realize that I put it together using heavy-duty screws rather than the little nails that the factory had used. That thing is not coming apart again.

You think so but then you'll reach mid-life and you'll learn that things can in fact get worse :)

Mine was weird because he had very intense separation anxiety but as long as I was with him, he loved everyone and wasn't afraid of anything. He could even watch fireworks with me - when the noise started, he gave me a look and when he saw that I was calm, he didn't worry either.

No, there were always lots of people relatively near me. Even when I lived in New Hampshire, I was only an hour away from Boston. Now I live in Manhattan. My issue is the standard one that nerds have: intense social anxiety, and all the solitary habits formed by decades of social anxiety.

The funny thing is that when my dog was alive, I made sure that he had an active social life. I would even ask strangers with dogs if their dogs would like to meet mine.

I'm a man and I sought out relationships exclusively through online dating*. It was extremely discouraging, but it did eventually work three or four times (depending on how you define a long term relationship) over the course of years of trying. Each success was a big deal.

I used the free version of the old OkCupid - the one where you wrote a long profile and answered a bunch of multiple-choice questions. I only sent messages to women who seemed highly compatible with me, and I put some thought into every message. My rough estimate is that one in twenty messages received a reply. One in five replies lead to a date. One in five dates was the start of a long-term relationship. So that's "only" about 500 messages per relationship, and that took several years. (There weren't 500 women on the site who lived nearby and seemed compatible with me at any one time.)

I have no idea how well the modern "swipe" apps work. Frankly they seem gross and I never seriously tried using them.

Edit: I should add that I looked a little worse than average, had weird hobbies, and possessed enough social skills to sit quietly and not embarrass myself or the people I was with. I wasn't exactly hot stuff.

*I have been introduced to women by a friend or relative a few times, but that friend/relative was the one who took the initiative.

Egypt's current government is pretty good at suppressing opposition. Generally that's not a good thing but it does mean that Egypt can probably handle Hamas.

I don't know what exactly Trump has in mind but I think the key factor is giving Gazans citizenship in an Arab country. They can keep the land if, for example, Egypt agrees to annex it.

It's probably the only way to end the conflict without waiting several generations and hoping that cultures change over that time, and a significant improvement to the quality of life of most people in Gaza.

The land itself is not the deciding factor. The conflict would end if Egypt agreed to annex Gaza and no one was forcibly displaced. I think any rational Israeli would agree to that (this may not include the current government) but Egypt doesn't want it, and reasonably so.

Does it matter what your "default" state is? If you're safe until I threaten to harm you unless you comply with my demands, then I'm obviously oppressing you. If you're in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don't intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.

With that said, humans do innately interpret an offer of rescue contingent on paying a very high price as a form of compulsion. Someone who makes such an offer is going to be viewed much more negatively than someone who simply does not offer to help at all. Maybe it's a way of making credible threats?

A purely logical person cannot negotiate with the rescuer, because the rescuer knows that purely logical people will pay any price. However, a person known to be irrational and willing to die rather than be taken advantage of can negotiate. There's a trade-off between the advantage of negotiating and the very high price of failing to come to an agreement, and I suppose the strength of humans' innate intolerance for unfairness has been tuned by evolution to attain this balance (or perhaps it attained balance in our ancestral environment but no longer does in our civilized state).

I think that those are different meanings of the word "oppressive", which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.

Imagine the following scenarios:

1. You're alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
2. Now there's a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
3. The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
4. Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person's offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn't anywhere left where you could survive alone.

Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there's no possibility of improvement. However, there's clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you're either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?

If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.

The feeling I have for Pikachu must remain hidden.

Well technically you can neglect anything you want.

Why would he say something so easily disproven at this point?

His reputation for honesty and good judgement is ruined!

I think the Romans would have been insulted by the implication that they weren't very good at torturing (a particularly unwise way to insult them) but the point still stands because the Romans tortured a lot of other people too, including the two men being crucified next to Jesus.

Ah, I see now. Elon Musk intended to tell some bad puns at the inauguration but then he accidentally did a couple of Nazi salutes instead. Puns are so easy to mix up with other things, which is why now he's mixing up puns and an apology. It's a mistake that anyone could make.

Sorry, I only date women who would prefer to wear the French maid outfit themselves.

Trump in 2024 is the President of working class voters, so I'm sure they'll be fine with this. It's a good thing that the Democrats and the rich people who support them aren't in power!

I was surprisingly old (about 10 or 11) before I understood on an emotional level that "everybody dies" meant that the people I cared about would die. Before that time, I could have logically reasoned that these people were a part of "everyone" but I still felt like they would live forever.

What I'm saying is that I think it's realistic that Simba knew that if there was a new king then the old king was dead, but he never really thought about what that meant about his own life.