Yep, and the while thing is moot anyway because use of the systems does not require ownership, so while the owners can exert more pressure on the algorithm and change what shows up other actors can do the same a little less easily on each platform. Propaganda is alive and well, so maybe try to limit yourself somewhat to a smaller group of people you actually know in person and be critical of information coming in.
Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.
That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.
Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc… There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.
Damn right! I loved the NHS when I lived in the UK. I broke my ankle when I was a kid over there, same deal, into the hospital, xrays, cast, etc, not a cent out of pocket for my family. I got a nice pair of crutches on load which I returned at the end and even got to try using a wheelchair when we went to Tesco because I stacked it (Aussie slang for fell over badly) on the way in on my crutches and they panicked, so yay for new experiences! Overall, 10/10 would recommend the NHS as of 1998, and the Australian Medicare system as of the rest of my experiences (2007, 2012, 2023) which resulted in hospitalisation.
Yeah, if possible. If you find you bite them a lot check for ADHD, Autism, underbite, overbite, and any other swelling like around the neck. I have ADHD and am autistic and also have a very mild overbite, but meds for the ADHD are honestly the biggest improvement for me.
Yeah, it was about a year ago, surgery was August 4th 2023 so it is recent but I have had a solid recovery. I am at the gym doing weights, running around, honestly feeling better than I have in years. The suggestion from the cardiologist is I may have had a bicuspid or just dodgy valve and that made it more susceptible to infection, so I may have been running on borrowed time for years anyway. Still, I love my new valve, I take warfarin to manage clotting risk, and life is just generally better than before. It did force me to move on from my job delivering groceries and towards nursing, but that is not because of physical consequences, just a recognition of the finite nature of time.
Also, when I am in a quiet room I sound like a bomb from a cartoon, just tick tick tick, so that’s awesome.
Man, in Australia I had a very different experience for a much worse situation.
I had endocarditis, a heart infection. It was a bacteria called Streptococcus Sanguinis, a common mouth bacteria, which had gotten into my bloodstream probably through me biting my cheek and found its way to my heart. It then proceeded to eat a heart valve and spread to my lungs. I found all this out after gradually getting sicker, finding myself unable to breath, then having sudden oral thrush (a classic sign of immune failure). I drove to the hospital and parked then walked to the emergency room from the carpark about 30 metres (95 feet) away. It took 4 stops for breath to make it in.
The doctor listened to my left lung, made a face of “Oh dear”, listened to the right lung, “Oh dear again”, then listened to my heart and had a slightly wide eyed moment. Not the response you want. They could hear my heart was working overtime, running at about 140bpm while resting in the bed. It turns out I had about 75% regurgitation, meaning to get one heart pump worth of flow my heart had to do four pumps. Still, I was quite fit, so I was able to walk and talk etc, but my O2 was dropping, pushing down to under 90% which is not ideal. I had all the diagnostics including quite a few xrays, ct scans, ultrasounds, and similar tests. Lots and lots of blood tests (several a day for about 2 months) along with specific testing for what the culprit was, what antibiotic resistances it has, and therefore which antibiotic would be best. I had open heart surgery and got a synthetic valve along with removing the infected valve and clearing remaining junk (bacterial lumps which could hold bacteria and potentially start a second infection later). I got flown across the country and back for the surgery and had over 2 months of hospital stay with 24x7 care and feeding.
Total cost to me was what I spent at vending machines.
The situation in the USA is insane and needs to change. The only major country with privatised health care and the only country that thinks it is normal to have people face medical bankruptcy.
I would recommend checking out audio books as a medium for reading. It allows you to increase the speed to whatever works for you, so 2x for me, and listen to a lot more in a day. It also frees you to listen at any times you have nothing cognitive happening, so dishes, washing, cleaning, etc.
As for single day books, the first book of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E Taylor. I loved the whole series including the recently released 5th book and the first is only 9.5 hours at normal speed, so about 4.75 at double speed.
Also All Systems Red is the first book in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. The perspective of a SecUnit, a type of sentient cyborg, which has hacked its own programming and removed its limiters so it can act freely. This means no guard rails, no rules, no limits, which results in lots of TV shows being watched and avoiding humans. It is snarky, fun, and interesting. It comes in at 3.5 hours normal time, so 1.75 at double speed.
I agree, licensure is appropriate for electric bikes that work like petrol powered bikes. If you use a hand control or foot control to make the bike accelerate it is a vehicle with similar enough properties to a motorbike or motorised scooter that it should require a license plate, registration, and driver’s license.
That said, anything that does assist only is more like a mobility scooter or bike with training wheels. You may not be able to go as long as you can with the electric bike by yourself, but if the drive characteristics are similar then it should be a bike. Those characteristics are speed, stop distance, involvement with the generation of motion, and how the weight is balanced.
So a bike that assists when going up a hill but won’t help you go faster past a certain speed is not fundamentally changing how you behave on the bike, but if you can twist the handle and get acceleration beyond your personal max speed it is clearly different.
If we could have many more people riding electric bikes which behave like supported push bikes then there would be fewer cars on the road, more exercise for people, and no massive increase in risk, actually probably a decrease due to fewer bikes being hit by the reduced number of cars.
I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.
If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.
All models are approximations of reality, thus they are ideas humans make in the context of their social situation. Norms and attitudes impact what we research, how we interpret data, and what we end up believing.
While the aim of science is to get closer to the truth the end result is going to approach but never reach perfect accuracy. With gender we see the social norms all through the expression of gender in different ages, generations, socioeconomic statuses, cultures, and countries. With sex we see a flattening of what is present into a strict binary with exceptions rather than what is actually present, a range of different karyotypes, sensitivities to hormones, levels of hormone production, interactions in regulatory genes, and differing morphologies. Gender is a diverse spectrum, but so is sex, and the reason we teach the XX XY version is the same as how we teach mathematic ideas. Basic stuff first, then expanding on that idea, then going further until we have the capacity to really understand the basics, like the multiple page proof that 1+1=2. Yes, basic biology says male and female, but intermediate talks about the diverse presentations of sex.
The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.
That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don’t have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don’t claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying “do this perfect thing” seems counterproductive.
If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.
That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.
I’m reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said “Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it”.
If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don’t axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.
As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don’t have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.
I’m here in Australia and now, 4.5 years in, still haven’t had it. I mask whenever outside and use good hand hygiene at a times. I carry alcohol hand sanitiser and have wipes in the car for when I take my mask off in the car to wipe my face. I haven’t had a cold, flu, RSV, or covid since 2019 when I started wearing the mask because of bushfires. I work with vulnerable people who could get very sick from covid and so I don’t want to carry it person to person, and I also have an immune compromised partner who I don’t want to give it to. Honestly it is not a big ask and it is very effective to just mask up.
Seat 8
Eat a kilo of cashews a few hours before boarding, make them really taste the horror, ideal location for diffusion. Maybe add some sorbitol gummy bears and refuse to leave my seat. I reckon I can make at least half vomit.
I work in disability support. I leave the house, drive to my client, then don my mask and wear it until I leave the client and get back into my car. If I have a client all day I can just wear the mask all day, eating before and after my shift. I have not gotten a cold, flu, or other disease for the last 4 years and I have worked with people who actively have covid, influenza, RSV, and other illnesses.
My mask is a pm 1.0, so a little better than pm 2.5 which is what n95 is, and it works very well. Honestly I can’t see me changing my behaviour around masking ever. I don’t get sick, I don’t carry illness to vulnerable clients, and I don’t have to change my behaviour day to day so habit is solid and easy to maintain.
While it didn’t help my endocarditis last year it has definitely protected against covid and even now I have not gotten it once. I think it is a good deal overall.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/sitzpinkler-german-men-pee-sitting-down/
“62% of German men sit down “every time” or “most times” when they go pee. That’s more than men in 12 other countries surveyed worldwide.”
Or have education about how much piss goes everywhere when you pee. In Germany most men sit to pee most of the time, it is a cultural issue and can be changed. That said, if you do urinals, make them stalls too, I don’t want to chat with my pee neighbour.
OK, so good, a clear starting point.
First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.
The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.
So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.
So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.
Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.
Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.
Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.
Yeah, the whole “China is doing propaganda using TikTok” line is kind of like saying Russia is using bots on YouTube. Like, yeah, maybe, sure, but focussing all your efforts on one single platform and ignoring the rest is silly. As the red team you would use as many different platforms as possible, make sure your disinformation output was broad and came from multiple, even opposing, ideological positions, and absolutely swamp the information space with junk. If nothing is reliable people don’t approach things carefully, they just check out. Once people check out it is a win.