Lemmeenym @ Lemmeenym @lemm.ee

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8

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129

Joined

1 yr. ago

Honestly, I don't get it. I saw the total eclipse in '17 and I've seen a couple of partial eclipses and they weren't particularly exciting. I live about 10 min outside of the total eclipse path and I'm not even sure I'm going to walk outside for it. What am I missing? Why are people spending thousands of dollars to see it?

I'm in a similar position, middle aged, clear driving history for about 15 years, car's an '18. I pay ~$450 every 6 months with Progressive. Paying the whole amount up front gives me a good discount. If you can't do that size payment at once you can pay with PayPal credit and it should be no interest for 6 months so you can get the discount and still pay monthly.

We're no where near $170 a year but $500 is very high. I haven't had a ticket or accident in about 15 years, I think insurance companies can only go back 6 years, and I'm paying about $75 per month.

I'm not convinced that Biden hasn't slowed down. Dude's old but his speaking style, history of gaffes, and his stutter makes it hard to really gage a change in his public speaking. I definitely don't think he's struggling nearly as much as Trump but ultimately I'm not sure how much difference it makes for how I will vote. Even if Biden was as bad as Trump he would be the better choice because he builds teams and listens to experts whereas Trump collects sycophants and listens to whoever best flatters his ego.

The job of the President is complex and involves dealing with incredible amounts of information. No one person can meaningfully process the amount of information Presidents get presented with everyday nor have the background to understand and properly contextualize the variety of types and sources of that information. The person that recognizes that they aren't experts on every subject and who builds teams of subject matter experts to help them process the information and make the most informed decisions possible will always be the better choice.

This required a huge amount of redesign and engineering, why didn't they design it to have an interchangeable battery? I know very little about the technical aspects of batteries and electric cars so maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of designing interchangeable batteries for electric cars but it seems like electric race cars are a good place to develop the tech and would give them a better chance of competing with gas powered racing. In addition to that it seems like interchangeable batteries in consumer cars would solve a lot of the issues people have with electric cars.

Making fight decisions based on "could I kill it" is a convenience of human technology. The ability to seclude ourselves during healing and medicine allowing us to avoid infection, heal faster, and heal from more serious wounds has skewed how we think about fighting. Most animals make fight decisions less on "can I kill it" and more on "how badly can it injure me".

Sure a human can kill a house cat, absent technology can the human do it without having the skin on an arm or leg shredded? Will the injuries be significant enough to make you unable to protect yourself from other predators? Will the injuries set up infection and kill you?

Cats are basically the perfect land predators. Even with their small size domestic cats are the most deadly and destructive hunters on earth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/

They are ambush predators. They are really good at evaluating prey, identifying strengths and weaknesses, figuring out how, when, and if they should attack. Cats know whether or not they can win a fight. Cats will sometimes charge into fights they can't win, like attacking the bear, because they know that they can inflict damage and that the other animal is making a similar fight decision. The hyper aggression of a 10lb claw tornado flying toward a 200lb bear is usually enough to convince the bear that the fight isn't worth it.

You are comparing apples to apples but I think there is an issue of scale. It's like the apples that are produced by the tree out back (Cuba) vs the apples that are produced by the little stand the vineyard keeps for their fall cider (US). I don't have a lot of fruit trees out back so the couple basket fulls that apple tree produces is a huge portion of my fruit production but the vineyard's couple ton of apples is only a small portion of their fruit production.

For rice, the largest rice crop Cuba has ever produced in a single season is estimated to be 465k tons in 03/04. The US produced 11m tons and exported 3m tons of rice last year.

Edit: overstated US rice production do to not noticing a unit difference.

Scaled

They're afraid of another lawsuit. If they get sued for pushing lies related to the same topic the Dominion suit was about it's likely to cost them more than that one did.

If fantasy is back in then Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series is very good. For a while Laurel Hamilton was my favorite modern author. I can recommend the first 9 books of the Anita Blake series. Unfortunately the further you get into the series the more mystery gets replaced with erotica. I didn't read the last couple of books she released in that series.

I assume fantasy is also out based on the no sci-fi and no Stephen King request. That eliminates the majority of what I read.

How do you feel about true crime? In Cold Blood is a classic and a very engaging read. I'll Be Gone in the Dark is quite good and the killer had not been identified when the book was written. The Poisoner's Handbook gets into the origins of forensic science. The Blood of Emmett Till successfully presents Emmett Till is a human being while still framing his murder as the significant cultural event that it became. This last one is a bit controversial but If I Did It is very well written and very strange to read. The ghost writer's commentary adds to the book in very meaningful ways.

That's certainly possible. LLMs led to these questions for me but I think they will equally apply to any communicative AI that sees wide adoption.

There is a super depressing story of a YouTuber named Leathersmokemi who died engaging in a similar fetish. Nick Crowley did a good video on him. I don't know of a fetish centered on prostate cancer specifically but there are cancer fetishists and the fetish centered on terminal illness is called nosaphillia so it's certainly possible that there are fetishists already out there focused on prostate cancer specifically.

It's not just phrased poorly, it's not a true statement. It's a conservative talking point that does not bear out when you look at the federal budget. Republican Presidents and Congresses increase spending at least as much as Democratic Presidents and Congresses. Both parties are big spenders. Despite this and related talking points, Republicans are the less fiscally responsible party because while increasing spending they tend to enact policies that reduce growth in revenue.

I understand that stepping on one could blow out your flip flop.

No but the only punishments that can be imposed if the person is found guilty is removal from office and being barred from holding future office.

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

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

You probably don't want to read all that so here's a what I think is the important take away as far as your question is concerned. American Christians have always been a bit different from the mainstream religion elsewhere. The largest Christian group to come to America in the early colonial period were called the Puritans. They believed that the English Reformation did not go far enough. They were staunchly anti-Catholic and were very upset that the Church of England had adopted so much theology and tradition from the Catholic Church.

The Puritans believed that the Bible is the complete revelation of God rejecting the papacy, the concept of continuing revelations, and the related concept of the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that individuals forged their own covenant with God and that their belief and acceptance was all that in required for their salvation. That sin is so pervasive in our corrupt world that it was unavoidable, no person can be "good" or worthy of salvation and so salvation is only available through God's mercy. They believed that it was their role as Christians to fight against the corruption of the world by spreading their theology and enforcing their concepts of sin and redemption on each other and on the greater community. The narrative is that they fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. The persecution that they faced was that they were not allowed to make laws banning things like alcohol or "revealing" clothing that they considered sinful or forcing people to go to their churches.

They adopted most of there theology from a reformist movement called Calvinism that sought to expand the Protestant Reformation further stripping away the power of the clergy and empower believers to enforce theology. Calvinists adopted an extremely socially conservative interpretation of the Bible and supported strict adherence to their moral ideology and severe punishment for violations of their concept of morality.

The modern Christian movements that trace themselves back to that foundation are still the largest Christian groups in the US. In the 1960's the Republican party began the "Southern Strategy" which was shift of political focus to conservative social issues and attacking secular institutions. Republicans used this strategy to unite the philosophical descendants of the Puritans under a political ideology that is strongly focused on conservative social issues and on pushing their concepts of religion and morality into all aspects of society enforcing adherence through government.

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

Prosperity theology is a newer theological concept that was popularized by Oral Roberts, has been embraced by the Republican party, and allowed the rise of the megachurch and celebrity preachers. Basically Prosperity theology gives an answer to the question of how you know that that someone is "living right" and a solution to the problem of evil. You know that someone is "living right" because God rewards their righteousness with material wealth. Evil exists as a punishment for the corruption of the secular world. Bad things primarily happens to the unholy but evil spills over to the righteous because secular corruption is so pervasive as to make sin unavoidable in our fallen world. Poverty is the primary form of punishment God visits upon the unholy.

You say you are from a predominantly Christian country so I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to recognize that this is a significant departure from the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Bible. I dare say that the departure is significant enough to be called an outright rejection of the teachings of the purported source of their morality and salvation.

To throw an add on to your comment in case readers have the ideal that the Navy's mostly flying cargo planes, Top Gun is the Navy Fighter Weapons School. The Navy is flying a decent number of cargo planes but they also have some of the best fighter pilots in the world. Also flying a Space Shuttle would be a lot closer to flying a cargo plane than a fighter jet. Space Shuttles weren't designed to maximize speed and maneuverability so that kinda makes pointing out that the Navy has amazing fighter pilots irrelevant, but they do.

Yes I was, sorry. This is even more useless than I thought. The Kim Davis case has already established that public officials have an obligation to perform their duties without regard for the sexuality of the people they serve. The law has already been preempted by federal law and precedent in the 6th Circuit which is the appeals court with jurisdiction over Tennessee.