Early 60s. She was prone to distrusting authority. She believed the youtube doctors who said colonoscopies aren’t worth the risk, so she delayed getting one for years. Eventually she had to because nobody could explain her symptoms. At that point she was 57. If she hadn’t waited she may have been in time to treat it successfully. After the diagnosis she told her sister (5 years younger) who then went to get a colonoscopy. They found polyps that would have become cancer, but because it was early it was trivial to remove them.

That was the argument my wife was giving me six years ago. The stool tests she took showed nothing. She died two weeks ago after a grueling battle with rectal cancer. You’re not going to convince me.

Seriously, do get a colonoscopy, when appropriate. The risks are minimal and the reward is not having to go through years of chemo, radiation, and surgery and then dying of colorectal cancer.

Pro:

• It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

Okay, if you can explain to me in detail how four dimensional topology is going to be important to me while I’m stocking the shelves of your grocery store, I’ll give you an answer.

Visiting Tijuana for a few weeks. I usually like to brush up on my Spanish before heading South. Didn’t have time this go around. But I’m using anki and talking with the locals asking a lot of questions. I’m learning more than I expected. I’m a newb still but I’m taking the opportunity while I can.

Looks like the truck skidded sideways into the beam support, knocked it over, and then the beam fell on the truck.

ITT

“It’s a lie!” “It’s the truth!” “Nuh-uh!” “Uh-huh!”

It’s almost as if obfuscation of the truth were the goal. I wonder who that benefits…

My uncle took his own life when he was 19. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t warn anyone. Just one morning my grandmother walked in and saw him hunched over on his bed completely pale, all the blood drained out of his face. There was a glass of cyanide in water on his bedside table.

It broke them. Neither of my grandparents recovered. Years later I was staying with them for a while and I overheard my grandmother say “we have our son back”.

Every suicide is like that. It’s like a bomb that shatters the lives of everyone close to you. It isn’t a solution. It doesn’t end the pain. It just passes it on to everyone else. But nobody would do it if the pain were bearable. “Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping.” There is no blame, no judgment, only tragedy and pain.

But people who survive and find help Will tell you that it gets better. That they’re glad they survived and that recovery is possible So if you are thinking of suicide, know that it is the worst possible option, no matter how hopeless it seems. There’s always another way.

Dvorak at work, QWERTY away from work. I occasionally start typing Dvorak at home, but it doesn’t take much to reset the brain to QWERTY. I learned touch typing in high school in the 80s on a mechanical typewriter.

So is it just the DMT or is the psychotherapy part important? How important? What type of psychotherapy are they using, CBT, IPT, MPCT?

I always just use a cold stick of butter like a crayon. Grab the hot toast and wipe the butter on it straight from the stick. Butter knives are only for room temperature butter.

“If there was one person Donald Trump stayed loyal to it was Michael Jackson.” … Trump … didn’t believe the accusations of child molestation levied at the “Thriller” singer… The president defended Jackson as recently as 2015, when he tweeted that “Michael was very misunderstood - a great talent.”

He was just misunderstood, guys. He wasn’t a pedophile. It doesn’t matter if she’s nine years old. Age is just a number. – Trump, probably.

I’m my experience it’s about a ten to one ratio of people who shit on vegans because they “never shut up about it” vs vegans who actually never shut up about it. So a vegan wanted to show she could climb Mt Everest. She did it, then she died of acute altitude sickness during the descent, something completely unrelated to her diet. Her husband, also vegan, lived. She became one of hundreds of people who have died in that climb, all of whom wanted to prove they could do it. Just let people live their life how they want to. Heaping scorn on someone who died trying to prove themselves isn’t cool.

First thing to understand is global collapse isn’t an event. It’s a slow process that unfolds over years, or more likely, decades. We are already seeing it happening, but since it’s not like the movies most of us don’t recognize it.

The second thing is that baring some catastrophic imminent localized danger you aren’t going to see hordes of displaced people fighting for your potatoes. It takes real desperation to pack a bag, leave all the rest of your things, leave your home, and walk far away hoping it’ll be better somewhere else. Even now people stay in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places.

So, odds are you’ll have time to set up a garden, set up a rainwater collection system, maybe get some solar panels. Whatever you want to do to prepare for what you expect is coming, you can probably do it. One guiding principle in this is try to minimize your external dependencies. If you can feed yourself and live comfortably without a big shopping trip every week you are doing better than most. Independence from utilities is more difficult, but doable if you want to put the effort and money into it. Another principle is learn useful skills. Learn how to build things, fix things, buildings, cars, electric motors, etc. Most people jump to protecting yourself from bandits. Do you live in a high-crime area? If so maybe move. If not, take some reasonable self-defense precautions. You aren’t going to fight off an army or even a coordinated gang, so just don’t worry about it too much. Basically, live in an area where you get along with your neighbors and you help each other out. Bonus points if they are self-sufficient too.

I mean, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, so just try to insulate yourself from whatever system shocks might appear. You’ll need to adapt as the years go by and things get worse. Good luck. :-)

These kinds of takes have legs because the capitalist parasite class really does value profit a lot more than your life or mine. When a drug company finds a cure for blindness and decides to charge almost a million dollars for it, you can’t really argue that they have your best interest in mind, or even a shred of human decency. That said, the take posted is not how it really works. If they discovered a drug that cured asthma in 3 days they’d patent it and sell it for a million dollars. They’ve already done it for other ailments. No one can argue they wouldn’t.

(and btw, just disable JS to kill the paywall on that link)

Are you just sick of beans and rice or have you not found a recipe you like? If the latter, try this one. I made it a day or two ago and it’s good.

Serious Eats Foolproof Pan Pizza is one of my regulars. You can put all kinds of stuff on a pizza and it’s still good. I’m vegetarian so I use fake chicken and such, but here are a few of my favorites. (they all have mozzarella)

• Teriyaki sauce base, fried tofu, green beans, mushrooms, red onion, fried eggplant
• Barbecue sauce base, chicken, mushrooms, red onions, pickled jalapenos, sweet corn
• Refried bean base, cheddar, onions, mushrooms, pickled jalapenos. Top with Romain salad w/ ranch.
• Tomato sauce base, mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives. (flexible, use what you like)

You can make the pickled jalapenos. And the refried bean base is just a can of beans with a little water, garlic, and salt. Heat to cook the garlic then blend/mash.

I also like a good vegetable pot pie. That one is made with simple ingredients like potatoes, carrots, celery, and mushrooms, along with any spices you like. She has a nice pie crust recipe too. Turned out well when I made it.

Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.

And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.

My first guess was a three way portmanteau: fucking + tangled + angular. Not sure how angular fits. Maybe sharp pointed or something?