Don’t be embarrassed, I think a sarcasm tag was necessary. It was not clear to me either

Airport!

I don’t listen to podcasts, but probably Elfeed+Emms would be perfect for this

Edit: here’s a quick guide https://www.draketo.de/software/emacs-tipps#elfeed-emms

Mfw the electric field leaves my body

My view is it’s because of the history of US immigration. Other countries exist, but only as genus, a historical detail about where people come from, but not as a living part of present reality. Modern day Germany or the Byzantine Empire, it’s all the same, just a dead fact in a textbook.

The most common type of vegetarian still eats dairy and egg; they just don’t prefer flesh. It’s wrong to assume vegetarians are opposed to all animal ingredients. In practice, if you order at a restaurant, it is necessary to be clear that no animal product should be added. Condiments don’t always register as “meat” to non vegans

If I don’t specify vegan then they put oyster sauce and fish sauce still

Try looking at it from the other perspective, that being desensitized to animal slaughter on a mass scale is the weird thing, and that urban people, alienated from the realities of agriculture, have retained this default morality that knows killing to be wrong.

We are indoctrinated to believe it is a flex to have a “strong stomach” to eat animals, the stranger the better, raw etc. This is cope because deep down we feel depraved like that Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son

We have CPUSA and TPUSA, but how about BPUSA?

Kirkenstocks

This is the take I have too. I don’t think this is a matter of arrested development or “not growing up”; I’m suspicious of the prejudice behind such statements.

Collecting vs playing with toys is the difference between exchange-value and use-value. You can infinitely accumulate exchange value in the form of toys, but use-value drops off after a small number of toys. You only need one or maybe a few toys in order to play. All that has changed is the social acceptance of collecting and the mainstreaming of that hobby. I would guess in proportion as adults are unable to make “real purchases” (in scare quotes) on housing and such, because those are too expensive.

Adults have long been toy collectors. Before we had funko pops, Boomers were buying Barbies and other dolls.

Yes

You mention reduced viral loads wrt vaccines, but ignore the (much larger!) reduction from wearing a mask.

I’m not ignoring masks. I only mentioned that about vaccines to correct what you said, that vaccines only make you feel less bad when you get sick.

you mention providing free masks, but dont mention restoring mask mandates

I guess that was implied in “etc” but technically you are correct that I did not list that.

What you call “anti-mask rhetoric” is just me describing what is happening around me. I caught covid twice through mask + vaccination. During the initial lockdown, I lived in an area where even with a mandate people wore their masks incorrectly and didn’t get vaccinated. That’s the situation we are in now, and I’m kinda over being mad at individuals about it when our leaders are piling on the reasons not to do these things

Vaccines tend to reduce viral load if/when you do get infected, thus reducing further transmission. That’s why everyone should be vaxxed even if they catch it anyway. The holistic approach would of course be best, mask + vax + reducing physical proximity.

I disagree that the most that we can do is mask. That’s why I mentioned veganism and environmentalism; those are other examples of individual efforts being at most a mitigating factor, not really a solution per se, not on its own as a “grassroots” trend. It requires management from the top down, at all layers of society, to actually mean anything. Radical action against covid would mean things like legal protection for remote work, mandatory and unlimited paid sick time for covid, stricter indoor ventilation regulations, free vaccines, free masks, etc. Tbqh, sitting in a poorly ventilated cube farm with 30 other coworkers for 40 hours a week — mask or not, if a coworker has covid, I’m catching it too. That’s what I mean about employment. Fulltime in-office is the norm again, and yes they will fire you if you don’t comply. That is way more impactful than any individual choice to mask.

My purpose is not to justify not wearing a mask but to explain my understanding why the large majority of people stopped.

I agree with masking although I don’t really understand the antipathy toward people not masking at this stage when few do. At this point it feels like trying to solve climate change by separating and recycling plastic from my trash. It does help, but the most I can do is asymptotically approach equivalence with me not existing at all or being a complete shut-in. I became vegan once I internalized the harm I participated in toward animals… and still, my efforts can at most be equivalent to me taking up zero space. The problem is still there even if I individually do everything right.

Most people collectively, and not voluntarily, gave up on slowing covid once the governments of the world decided it was over… because losing one’s job and starving is a more concrete threat than covid for a lot of people… or at least that is how they perceive it. It’s not fair and it is an example of how society leaves behind the disabled. Yet… I don’t feel anger toward random individuals who are more or less just scraping by. The problem is bigger than a single person, it’s not about the relative difficulty of wearing a mask (it’s not that hard) it’s about the perceived futility of it all.

Practically speaking, fighting for cheap or free vaccines seems more effective than convincing each individual to mask. I don’t foresee generalized masking happening again unless a new variant significantly increases mortality rates.

Dissolved gases. You’re swimming in the warm embrace of my dissolved seal fart gases.

deleted by creator

even a properly-run organization will have to recruit from a pool where up to 95% of men are removeds

This study was alarming, thanks for sharing it. At the risk of downplaying the results, or maybe just to discuss more, I don’t think that is an accurate summary of what it found; what it found wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong. It is still very normal for men to push sexual boundaries of women. It should be noted that:

1. The study’s participants included only men (mostly straight) who have been sexually active in the past 2 years
2. The definition of sexual force includes things like the man “[telling] her whatever she wanted to hear” (this was the most frequent tactic)
3. This was an anonymous online survey

Regarding #1, this might not affect the result that much, but should be noted ~30% of young men are not sexually active. For #2, I find this very troubling but nonetheless different from SA, and I wonder how much of that 95% is people who admitted to only that tactic. I would connect it to the history of “wooing” / courtship and its modified expression in modern dating, which carries with it all of the misogyny in which women were much more directly positioned as property. Both men and women are trained to accept courtship as a norm. Part of that is persistence (on the part of the man) and modesty (on the part of the woman), both of which contribute to the trampling of women’s autonomy

Adding more context, as I also love Org mode:

The main feature of Obsidian is the ability to create links (“backlinks”) between two note files. This feature can be added with the Org Roam which is the Org version of Roam Research’s note-taking system. I like the Org Node package, which is essentially the same as Org Roam, but with improved performance and no database complexity. I mention these other programs to demonstrate that, actually, Obsidian replicates features already achieved by other programs. There is no need to use Obsidian if you are starting from scratch.

The cost/benefit of learning the Org syntax, which is anyway not that bad if you know Markdown, is even better when noting that many Emacs packages use Org files for configuration. For example, elfeed-org for RSS feeds, and anki-editor for building Anki flashcards. So this is not a one-off syntax that applies only to notes.

Org Mode can also replace Jupyter notebooks, with the built-in org-babel feature: you can embed executable code into your notes!! Overview of org-babel. This feature creates incredible possibilities, blurring the lines between source code and documentation. Indeed, many Emacs users write their config file (source code) as an Org file, which is processed (“tangled”) into a source code file later on. That way, the code can be documented in Org’s rich markup formatting, and regions can be folded with Org Mode’s outlining capability (which is itself just Emacs’s outline-mode, not specific to Org Mode)

The ability to add properties to Org Mode headings is what enables so much extensibility in features like Org Agenda (calendar/todo/time tracking), Anki decks, contact cards (org-contacts), and almost anything else. Org Mode is more than a mark-up language; it is practically a high-level, human-readable programming language. But the great thing is you don’t have to do all the advanced stuff. Org Mode is excellent at its core purpose of outlined note-taking. But the advanced stuff is there whenever you need it.

@transbyanism@hexbear.net