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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2024

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  • I don’t know about this specifically but I’ve read that a lot of this Walz allegation stuff is being traced to Russia. In general a lot of Harris Walz misinformation/deepfakes are allegedly coming from Russia.

    Wired has a paywalled article but if you google ‘Walz allegations fake Russia’ you’ll get quite a few hits.

    But if that’s the case, like ‘quasi-professional’ propaganda firms, they probably use cracked wifi, VPNs, coffee shops, probably hard to find them at a physical location, let alone Russia allowing extradition. They’d want some fair trade at a minimum












  • We evolved to have that response in a world in which hospitals didn’t exist and in which we faced predation by other animals, and ‘curl into a ball feeling like shit for a couple days’ was the most viable way for the body to handle even the most mundane of infections (all the other ideas didn’t make the cut and here we are). But now, 21st century, we’re like ‘oh it’s just the cold’ and actively attempt to mitigate it.

    A slew of other things are still stuck in 20,000BC as well, like our bodies not being able to deal with copious amounts of sugar, or thinking we might have difficulties securing our next meal. Cut too many calories trying to lose some fat and your body legit thinks you’re dying and starts breaking down all sorts of soft tissue that isn’t fat. Or vasoconstriction when we’re out shoveling snow with a warm house 15ft away, all sorts of shit







  • I think JD Vance is a sellout with absolutely no principles, turning his back on his ideals to ride Trump’s coattails, but this doesn’t really strike me as anything outrageous.

    Some tech bros have reinvented the wheel yet again, this time by making an app centered on 1031 ‘like-kind’ transactions, which is already big in agriculture (trade land for cash in a transaction that isn’t a taxable event and maintain the rights to farm on it). It’s pretty popular because often, there’s a generational rift where someone’s kids don’t want to farm, so they use the land as a retirement vehicle and cash out, but I digress. They’re basically the ‘we buy ugly houses’ version of that hooplah.

    We have very lax laws in regard to foreign investors purchasing real estate or investing in securities, and they don’t seem to be soliciting foreign investors. Foreign companies don’t normally solicit American investors but if you have mutual funds in your 401k you probably hold BABA and BIDU. It’s a privately traded company so one must be an Accredited Investor, last I checked the biggest hurdle for that is net worth >$1MM.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think people in office should divest from most things including bonds (policy can affect yields) but this seems a little bit less scummy than Door Dash (those guys are blood sucking parasites for small restaurants)


  • For me it’s the difference between a preponderance of evidence suggesting such, and something being applied and proven until any doubt is removed.

    For example, I was trying to find studs in drywall recently (last house was plaster and lathe), and looking at things Socratically, I could use a stud finder but I might be drilling into conduit or a pipe. So I was like “I can use magnets to hit drywall screws to try to confirm the presence of a stud”, and it seems reasonable, but I’ve never attempted it in practice, and there could be all sorts of things a magnet could hit, since I’ve no experience with drywall, how close a steel pipe could be, any of that. So it’s a belief. It’d be rather arrogant of me to accept this as a reliable method without testing this method, drill through a pipe and wind up with egg on my face.

    So, I tested this by getting two magnets to stick vertically, then measured 16" out, got 2 more magnets to stick vertically, kept doing that until I hit half a dozen spots, all 16" apart. Drilled a pilot hole, felt resistance and the smell of wood, drilled a couple more.

    I think somewhere between mounting a flat screen to fixing 3 closet shelves it became knowledge, not sure exactly when, but all the doubts were removed and it never blew up in my face. I can just waltz in a room and sink a bunch of holes in the right spot now without being skeptical of some electronic stud finder.

    I guess what I mean to say is that testing something and having it consistently work and be reproducible is what leads to knowledge imo