Sometimes I think about that woman in the Guardian article who thought wearing a small face mask prevented her from “being perceived” and I wonder at how people’s brains can malfunction so spectacularly.
Maybe she read or watched too much Harry Potter as a kid?
Just how long the UK, Australia, NZ, Canada, and some other places are going to persist as prison countries?
Would guess a good long time. Dang, I am still surprised by how fast the “infinitely open borders” liberal shtick went right out the damn window.
FYI, I am against prison countries, of course.
And this is what the strongest people in the world actually look like. pic.twitter.com/ct1t75CYDJ
— David Teich (@Davidzteich) May 29, 2021
This kind of shit is fucking moronic. It depends on what sort of lift you’re doing and what you’re attempting to achieve as to how you look — in other words, what you are optimizing for. Actors are optimizing for very different things, as are other sorts of athletes. I really hate when people attempt to argue against something with ideas just as inconistent as those they are attempting to combat.
I don’t know who that lifter is, but he are most likely doing a clean and jerk, and having all that mass allows you to shift that weight above your head while doing this.
By the way, the lifter below is lifting 576 pounds in the deadlift at a 141 pound bodyweight, which is weight-to-lift ratio that exceeds all male lifters — that is four times her bodyweight, and she looks nothing like the dude in the tweet above:
Of course, I found the nonsense on Ian Welsh’s Twitter because for some reason he generally hates lifters and those who attempt to physically better themselves. No idea why. Probably some past trauma.
Sorry, you still cannot feed Hot Cheetos to monkeys at the zoo.
Well, there went my Memorial Day plans. Totally ruined.
Pretty much:
The first ten on today’s playlist:
The cameraman at the QAnon convention just inexplicably spent 30 seconds zoomed in on a speakerโs bare feet.
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) May 30, 2021
Quentin, that you?
The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people.
Shockingly, dipshits who don’t get vaccinated against Covid are getting sick and dying from Covid.
Who would have ever thought?
Interesting that Zeynep has come to the same conclusion that I did, that over the long term Zero Covid absolutism is going to really fuck over countries like Australia and New Zealand.
That’s something I realized a few months ago when it seemed they didn’t really give a rip about vaccinating anyone as they’d “contained” the virus. Australia is still only 1.9% fully vaccinated, which is a fucking joke. If the more-transmissible variants ever get loose there, which is quite likely, those are going to rip through the place like a tornado through a trailer.
Zero Covid is a fantasy version of how the real world works. I wish it weren’t, but in most places it can’t work, and in the places it does work now it will eventually fail.
I don’t agree with some of the ideas in this interview, but it’s been very sad seeing liberals move to this belief system.
Ultimately, I think puritanism contributes to a lot of poor public health messaging and policy. Thereโs a sense that itโs unimportant or even wrong to want to have pleasure for the sake of pleasure, when itโs actually a human universal and can be critical for health and well-being.
The same damn lib will tell you prudishness hasn’t increased while their fingers are wagging so hard you can hear sonic booms. It’d be funny if it weren’t so generally harmful.
Funny thread. And true, alas.
Tip for those who don’t know anything about retail: the only store that is likely to have anything in “the back” is a shoe store. Most others do not and never do. Think about it. Why would a store keep a bunch of crap they want to sell where no one can see it? It doesn’t make any sense.
Shoe stores have limited shelf space and the boxes are necessarily fairly large, so sometimes they do have other sizes available in the back of the store. Other stores, there’s basically no chance of any hidden stock.
Wow, she’s big fun. What a voice.
Apple's move from "only computer that just works" to "feels like setting up late-90's linux on a laptop" has been a heartbreak to those of us who used to lord it over Windows-using colleagues by printing stuff and getting online
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) May 27, 2021
Yes, it is very fucking sad. There is no OS I can use anymore. All terrible. None worth the machine code the CPU executes.
It begins to seem to me that the only way for countries to deal with Covid is going to be to get it under control w/draconian methods, then enforce a hard border with mandatory quarantine (backed with prison penalties for breaking it.) https://t.co/ToN02apFfM
— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) May 29, 2021
This is not really how viruses work, though. I mean, it’s kinda true if you understand very little and need a kindergarten-level comprehension? This all emerges from a reservoir of deep misunderstanding of the complexities involved, and the constraints on viral evolution. The above is just lockdown worship and lockdown life propaganda pseudoscientifically rebranded, which unfortunately Ian Welsh has started to engage in.
I’m not a virologist but I read vastly more than most people. So let’s talk a little about viral evolution and evolution in general. I will avoid most technical terms so my thoughts are accessible to most.
If you model a problem space to be solved, and evolution attempting to solve those problems, there are some solution configurations that evolution will never reach. For instance, it’s nearly impossible, even over infinite time scales, that a biological creature will evolve a jet engine as found on a 747. Why? Some of the steps are too onerous, too much of a leap, for blind evolution. However, obviously, jet engines are possible because we have them. Brute biology just cannot get there no matter what.
Now let’s bring it back to viruses. It’s harder for people to think about these things, I think, because viruses are so very minuscule and barely (or don’t) follow many of our macro intuitions. And because HIV is a highly-unusual virus but also the one that many are most familiar with (sort of). Suffice it to say, the SARS2 pathogen also has tradeoffs and constraints and configurations it can never achieve no matter how evolution influences it just like with my example of a jet engine above.
What are these limitations? Well, we don’t know all of them and probably never will, but SARS2 is definitely not infinitely-adaptable nor infinitely-malleable no matter how many hosts it infects or how it spreads. There are some — many! — states it will never get into no matter the time or infection pool, and even in those ones it can achieve there are large compromises. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that SARS2 will escape vaccines completely (or for long) because its mutation rate is actually very low and the mutations it can express (the problem space it can solve) tend to make it much less heat-tolerant.
That is one example — there are others. But my point is that when you hear this sort of catastrophizing and people becoming alarmingly aroused by the prospect of infinite lockdowns and hard borders forever, realize that though what they are doing might seem scientific, it’s little different than the anti-masker claiming that masks can’t work because their breath is able to go through them.
Don’t believe either group. Neither know even a little of what they are talking about.
I use virtual machines fairly frequently with older versions of Firefox installed in them. It’s almost shocking how much better and more capable those supposedly out-of-date browsers are than any modern version of FF.
During the recent era of observing Firefox’s crapification, it’s been strange watching otherwise-smart people perfectly parrot the contention that it was just impossible to have Firefox be both configurable and secure — that it was in fact so difficult and out-of-bounds to even ask for that it should not even be considered.
Of course, the reality is that continuing to allow the browser to be customized was no harder than making Firefox secure, or rather “secure,” and in some ways continuing to allow customization would’ve made the project and product more popular, thus garnering more users, allowing it to flourish, and thus allowing more initiatives of all sorts.
I think the story of the last twenty years of my life has been realizing that “smart” people are far less so than given credit for, and these days I continually revise downward my estimate of their capabilities. The events with Firefox are just another example and reason that has occurred.