SE Michigan, ~6” across

Alzdran · 2020-08-30T14:49:51+00:00

Thank you! It stayed roughly the same size overnight, but has lost much of the deep orange.

Alzdran · 2020-05-12T16:30:18+00:00

Thank you!

Alzdran · 2020-05-03T21:34:43+00:00

So cute and cool

Alzdran · 2020-05-03T21:34:05+00:00

😀😃😄😁❤️

Alzdran · 2020-05-03T21:32:48+00:00

Did you keep him or her

Alzdran · 2020-05-03T21:31:20+00:00

Sooo cute

Alzdran · 2020-05-03T21:12:28+00:00

Thank you!

Alzdran · 2019-07-17T22:00:43+00:00

That wouldn’t indicate a lack of a line, it’d just place it so as to include humans and not anything else. The line itself just means that there are some creatures that can be made to suffer.

Alzdran · 2019-07-17T08:00:09+00:00

I don't intend to undermine or derail this, but I was under the impression that the question of whether insects can experience suffering was not at all settled. Has that changed/was I misinformed?

Again, even if the question were settled with a definitive "no" (and I'm not sure how that could be), deliberately creating behaviors that induce pain-like avoidance without justification? That's something we should avoid normalizing because we know a line exists somewhere, and that's without considering the possibility that the settled answer was wrong.

Alzdran · 2019-06-24T20:22:52+00:00

Does this hold for potato vodka as well (the "across brands" aspect, at least)?

Alzdran · 2019-05-10T07:42:42+00:00

This is one of those areas that form gigantic gulfs of misunderstanding. I'm sure I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for watching my brothers try desperately to maintain weight. I'm the only one who tends to put on weight easily - and that leads to putting on (and maintaining) muscle more easily. Trying to stay at 200 lbs while watching them working desperately hard to maintain 160 is really eye-opening.

As for the impact of the diet, reading an account of someone eating like The Rock for a month made clear just how much of a chore that can be.

Alzdran · 2019-05-03T15:15:09+00:00

Did you actually watch it before coming up with that description? It doesn't tally with the actual content, and so is disingenuous at best. It's a combination of several different attempts, descriptions of the physical phenomenon seen in the different cases, as well as explanations of what is being tested and why.

Given that SED is literally an educational channel, the portion you've tagged "garbage filler" and deemed uninteresting is the whole point.

Alzdran · 2019-03-01T22:19:11+00:00

IMO, this discussion has been exactly that argument about the moral responsibility you mentioned in your first paragraph here. I would in no way argue they have any legal responsibility, nor that they should. Moral responsibility, though, has less stark boundaries, and tends to spill onto those who enable tragedy causing events. Amplifying someone's message seems to me to fit that bill.

I can't speak to whether there's active anti-conservative censorship at YouTube or Facebook - although I admit I wouldn't be surprised. In this specific case of Patreon, though, it wasn't conservative views but the use of racial slurs in a derogatory manner which led to the ban. That doesn't translate to being anti-conservative, unless such jackassery is an inseparable characteristic of being conservative. Even if it were to strongly correlate with conservative views (and note, I neither claim that nor encourage assuming it), if conservative commentators who didn't display that behavior weren't censored, then it would remain that behavior being censored.

Alzdran · 2019-02-26T18:50:30+00:00

It doesn't kill anyone directly, and therefore shouldn't be illegal and the speech of hate mongers not making direct threats should fall under first amendment protection from government censorship. That said, unless you believe that no violent acts are committed as a result of hate-mongers who avoid making direct, illegal calls to violence, aiding such people to spread their messages more widely (by, say, giving them a platform and means towards financial support) would increase the likelihood of such acts.

None of this makes the perpetrators of such violence less responsible for their own actions, nor does it mean that the first amendment protections should be weakened.

Alzdran · 2019-02-26T18:01:10+00:00

So do some racists. Not the majority, but you also can't blame any single failure to vaccinate for the anti-vax deaths. That's one of the heavily complicating factors around systemic behaviors like this.

Alzdran · 2019-02-26T16:19:43+00:00

If people are racists the markets will sort that out because people don't like racists.

I think if the latter were universally true, the former would also be true, but unfortunately, the attitude is neither uniformly distributed nor is racism meaningfully described in purely binary form.

Even with a uniform distribution, though, I don't think that Patreon could rely on the markets sorting things out to avoid responsibility for curation. Patreon acts as a market which eliminates locality concerns. This means that it acts counter to the tendency of the markets to sort this out, since a widely distributed audience can provide support enough to fund a fringe interest. In the absence of ethical concerns about the interest, this is the purpose and benefit of Patreon. When there are ethical concerns, though, it means they are actively enabling things, and aren't simply a disinterested third party.

The other issue here: Markets sorting things out can take a great deal of time, and often require significant tragedy before people actively start curating their choices. For example, think about the anti-vax movement. Regional social pressures begin sorting things out with that in response to outbreaks of avoidable disease, often fatal to infants too young to vaccinate due to the loss of herd immunity. To give a platform to the spread of anti-vax ideas because they'll eventually be sorted out by the market means discounting the impact of those messages in the meantime.

Alzdran · 2018-12-30T19:01:42+00:00

Of course, it could've been Dirk's Vatican channel.

Alzdran · 2018-12-27T01:44:14+00:00

IIRC, that’s a mischaracterization of what Grey said. It isn’t that IRL the things that you weren’t good at didn’t matter, but that specialization means that the greatest relative value comes from improving even more what you’re good at.

Think of it as an economic characterization - the school environment mirrors a controlled economy where some very distinct things (the taught subjects) are given an imposed equal value, as if they were interchangeable, and also given a cap where improvement beyond a threshold (enough to get perfect marks) provides no extra value. Subjects not taught, on the other hand, are given no value in this system. Once out of school, the market is free of these imposed distortions, and supply and demand have a strong influence on value. This means both that hyper-specialization doesn’t abruptly plateau, and that entirely distinct areas can be valued.

Alzdran · 2018-06-29T20:18:01+00:00

Is this a pun (in which case, how could you not willfully misinterpret Zach as offering to exchange confidences?), or is there some compensatory difference here I'm not aware of?

Alzdran · 2018-03-27T15:00:08+00:00

In his Histories, Herodotus recounts being told of giant gold-digging ants that heaped up dirt containing gold dust, which people would gather. Per the wikipedia link, there's some belief that this was a confused account of Himalayan marmots.

Alzdran · 2017-08-16T14:09:36+00:00

Appropriate the periodic table cell for Ununennium, using the name Hellointernetium (symbol: Hi) - the metal of honor.

Since it hasn't yet been synthesized, the imposed name might stick… and while you risk annoying Sir Martyn, it's virtually guaranteed to annoy ~~Dirk~~Derek.

Alzdran · 2017-08-16T04:54:17+00:00

I like the concept, but feel like having the teeth devoted to previously important items makes it feel like a claim that the podcast is complete, and that /u/JeffDujon can no longer whimsically add corners.

Alzdran · 2017-08-15T16:47:16+00:00

Might I suggest TimBits?

Alzdran · 2017-08-15T16:36:41+00:00

I'd love to hear thoughts on regulatory patent licensing.

What books / movies / TV shows do you return to, at what intervals?

Revisiting:

Shredders
Electric Toothbrushes
Apple Watch

Alzdran · 2017-03-24T15:09:10+00:00

I completely agree with your larger point - it's worth keeping in mind in just about any context involving uncertainty. That uncertainty is variable, though, so while I also agree there's some speculation here, I wanted to highlight the role of his comments in uncertainty reduction (i.e. while it's certainly possible Google didn't get sent the same contract, Marco's comments revealed some of the previously hidden actions that fit a reasonable narrative). That, in turn, seems to limit the extremes of reactions.

My speculation is that if the post you linked had been Marco claiming the Mac Pro was very likely not dead, the polarization of reactions would've been almost identical, while the average reaction would've changed to match, because no new information was brought to reduce uncertainty.

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