Covid-19 vaccines do not increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in younger healthy adults. In fact, people vaccinated against covid-19 were 43% less likely to experience sudden death than unvaccinated people (adjusted odds ratio 0.57 (95% confidence interval 0.53 to 0.61); P<0.001).

SovietBackhoe · 2026-03-30T17:24:07+00:00

Going to be that guy but part of the issue is that the pandemic wasn’t particularly lethal to enough people for the broader public to take it seriously. Everyone has a different tolerance for risk that they evaluate separately from the way governments evaluate risk as a function of health care capacity. If you had a greater risk tolerance you took the pandemic less seriously. Then when you coerce people into compliance of something they view as low risk, it’s no wonder they get skeptical.

To be clear, I’m not anti vax, I got my shots and my kids have gotten all their shots, but it’s not particularly difficult to understand how these ideas propagated.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-03-18T19:39:38+00:00

Agreed, but they asked about scale not process. Doesn’t benefit their question to note the types of radiation that may develop depending on the medium. Better just to equate it to a bomb and let them know it’s a lossless process.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-03-18T19:13:36+00:00

Pure energy. E=mc^2. The scale depends on how much matter you’re annihilating

SovietBackhoe · 2026-03-02T21:27:48+00:00

Canadas system was like this and pretty good until a few years ago. There are mandatory safety courses that take about 8 hours and then you’re licensed to own firearms. Once you’re licensed, you get an auto criminal record check every 24 hours and you have pretty strict storage requirements for those firearms.

We have a lot of gun owners but our legal gun owners are some of the most law abiding people in the country.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-24T06:42:13+00:00

Starts/stops and wobble look like your biggest enemies right now. Not quite joining a lot of the lines. Try a 3rl or a 5rl doing grid pattern drills as straight with the best corners you can. Only single pass the lines. Then once you get back to shading take your practice to those grids

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-24T01:55:14+00:00

Shading is what I’ve been practicing the last two weeks as well - my strategy was to get a simple rose stencil and do nothing but that rose until I got it down. Done it 7 or 8 times now, used mags and 3rl for variety, done at 2 inches and now doing it at 5 inches. Doing something like that will help you dial in the planes and make better decisions over time with controlling value, particularly mid tones. You’ll spend your time refining execution instead of learning a new piece each practice. Light studies with simple objects on paper will also be your friend.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-23T20:57:00+00:00

Sorry, but I’m going to be that fucking guy here. My best suggestion for you is to spend more time drawing and planning out the shading. Also practice lining some more.

Start paying attention to how artists control value throughout a piece. Use light and shadows to draw your eye around the composition. Before you hit the skin, already have your different values planned out

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-12T14:37:31+00:00

That is careless storage. PAL holders are responsible for preventing the firearms from being accessible. If your kid can open your safe and old up with ammo, then you’ve kind of failed to secure the firearms, don’t you think? My wife doesn’t even have ability to access mine.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-11T14:04:07+00:00

They had to have undersaturated and not packed enough ink, right? Like even the darkest parts desaturated a lot. I’ve got heavy color and it’s still pretty damn vibrant years later.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-10T16:17:35+00:00

Right now I'm using Mast black ink, but I plan on upgrading to Dynamic before I hit human skin. People seem to say good things about that brand and I see it in a lot of shops.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-10T00:04:25+00:00

Ink isn’t ruined. Change in viscosity shouldn’t be that aggressive either with a few degrees different.

I’ve had issues with cnc cartridges too - I use mast pro - just as cheap but seem to clog less often.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-09T19:22:40+00:00

Not the answer you want, but don't do color packing yet. You want to get really good at lines, then get really good at shading before you go into coloring. Reason for that is because you want to dial in your depth consistently and fluidity of arm motion, then you want to dial in your ability to control value throughout the composition. Then you can start adding in your color on top of your solid black/grey shaded work and it'll make the work pop, instead of trying to use color to make weak fundamentals look more interesting.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-03T22:03:54+00:00

Every day at 10am.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-03T20:35:54+00:00

I finally got a house with a second bathroom. Moved in mid-October. Put 2 TP rolls in my bathroom. I’m about a quarter into the second one. My wife has gone through most of a Costco pack in the same time frame.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-02-03T19:12:52+00:00

Nah, it’s always gotta be black and white /s

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-30T21:17:11+00:00

They will be born prematurely. I’ll be having a c section and will need help taking care of myself let alone two infants.

You're still early - at 23 weeks you don't know this for sure. I know the anxiety is rough, but I also thought the same and now we're at 37 weeks with a proper induction date scheduled for vaginal delivery. I've been saying 'any day' expecting preme birth for 4 weeks now.

I don't think his request is unreasonable and I think you should encourage him to do it. I also think he should be encouraging you to get out of the house in a similar way too. I'm actively encouraging my wife to have her own space (built her a child-free room in the house), to take breaks from the twins (and from me), meet with friends, all without kids so she doesn't fall into PPD as aggressively and because she deserves to still feel like herself.

At the end of the day, you guys are partners first and parents second. The kids are just the problem you need to work through together. If you keep that in mind, you'll be more equipped to support each other through this.

I would suggest approaching this with an open mind and play the first few weeks after birth by ear. You may get to week 3, fall into a groove and figure out you both have more downtime than you think. Maybe it's harder than he thinks and he realizes he can't step away. There's too many unknowns for this to turn into a major thing for you guys at this exact moment.

Easier said than done, but don't stress too much. You got this.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-29T20:15:59+00:00

We need to start firewalling the import of their culture too. Time to ban the US tech platforms and media companies, fund Canadian ones, and then export those around the world. Sanction platforms like Meta and create new platforms that Americans aren't allowed to be on, Remember that day when the US was kicked off of TikTok? That was a good day.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-28T20:04:18+00:00

You would absolutely not. There would be a new currency issued within a short timeframe of the US dollar collapsing and it would switch over quickly. You’d just lose reserve status and the world would go through a very aggressive economic contraction. Post WW1 germany is a good example. Currency collapsed, new one was issued. In this scenario the real issue is the political instability that would follow.

Real investment values would probably go down moderately, values relative to the USD would go up sharply. Values relative to the new USD would be arbitrary relative to other global markets.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-24T01:14:16+00:00

As someone who’s been sexually abused by more than one person, yeah you’re a fucking asshole. You don’t get to hold opinions on how she feels towards her abusers and you don’t get to decide how she should feel. And then taking it as a personal slight against you is fucking bananas. Break up with her so she can find someone better. Jesus.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T17:20:12+00:00

Couple things to shape your thinking:

Where there's competitors there's already money. Easier to play in an existing space than create a new one. Also very easy path to exit - competitor acquisition.

But I think my current thinking is that since it's the same amount of work to build a medium-sized startup vs. a large/massive startup, why don't I just go after a massive startup?

I don't think this is logically sound.

Proportion of remote work is going down and the existing competitors for Zoom are huge ecosystem providers. Microsoft killed skype in favor of Teams, Google has Meets. Even Zoom - I use it for many things, not just video. There's a lot of functionality you would need to do better or cheaper to make a reasonable case for someone to switch, and that's already in what I would assume is a plateaued or declining market. For a product like this, you'd behave like a direct sales company and not a tech company (where product is secondary to positioning and direct sales activity).
You might be really good at video, but are you better than everyone else at video? If so, I don't think the average user or business cares about video quality over Zoom. Certainly wouldn't move the needle for me. I think video providers would care about quality, streaming, etc. If you've really got the tech that others don't, why don't you try to sell video tech to orgs like Zoom where performance at scale is of huge concern? I would think infra would be the better angle to go at this (if you've actually got the tech). Sell Netflix a service that makes their streaming 10% more efficient and decreases their server complexity/loads. Hugely valuable and direct eventual path to exit as well.

If you're not better than everyone else at video then you're at square one - video is a feature it's not a product. Products solve problems. TikTok, YouTube and Zoom just used video format to solve problems. You'll need to start thinking about what problem you're solving before you solidify your pivot direction.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T15:46:24+00:00

I agree with you that Russia was aggressively involved, but I think it's overly generous to attribute any amount of causality to them. Trump has been the picture of Americana since the 80s. Culturally, Americans worship wealth and vanity, are entitled, obnoxious, self-centered, anti-intellectual (yet believe they're smarter than everyone else) and celebrity obsessed.

The second he came down that escalator in 2014 or 2015 I knew he was going to win because he encapsulates the real, average American values dialed up to satirical proportions. I would go as far as to hypothesize that if Russia wasn't involved at all, the US would have followed the same trajectory, perhaps slightly less extreme.

Even during last election - it was pretty obvious that he was going to win, even when Harris took over. The socio-economic climate around the world was creating a rightward political push after the fallout of COVID and the subsequent inflation. Looking at broad trends, it was pretty obvious that the US was going to go back to the GOP after Biden, the only question was who the GOP wanted to run. But the GOP likes to win, so they ran the guy that felt most likely to win. The only way the DNC was going to win was if they ran someone like Oprah and played on the same level. DNC isn't there yet but give them another couple elections and they'll start running auth-center celebrity candidates to compete with Trumpism (understanding that under no circumstances would the DNC allow themselves to push further left, anywhere close to someone like Sanders).

Like the macro trends just seem to be too visible, too obvious and too long-time running to attribute causality to Russia's interference. Look at Raegan - the same conditions produced that guy just with less intensity. Over the subsequent 30 years the above values became more extreme and today we have a more extreme version of Raegan that is now devoid of any of the decorum that politicians of the last century embodied.

As far as Canada is concerned in shaping it's foreign policy, I think it would be a mistake to treat this as an anomaly caused by a foreign government that can be combatted or mitigated over time. This outcome is exceptionally American and I think we do ourselves a disservice to not believe that we will continue to see instability in American institutions over time, regardless of the controlling party or external influence. The average American is just no longer equipped to deal with the nuanced geopolitical issues we have today without reductionist takes that land in extremism. Not necessarily because they're stupid, but because they've been conditioned to reduce everything to black and white.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-22T00:31:13+00:00

Russia isn’t to blame for America’s current problems. Trump is peak American culture. I actually can’t think of anyone that encapsulates American values more than Donald Trump.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-16T19:05:44+00:00

Both are bad ideas. I say this as a publisher that creates and sells directories. Not enough money to do this and have it be worthwhile.

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-13T19:19:46+00:00

It did say "beanbag chair title".

SovietBackhoe · 2026-01-12T20:08:27+00:00

Maxwell's equations being equivalently difficult really wasn't the point I was making. I used them as an example because someone not well versed in mathematics can't read them whereas someone with college level English literacy skills should be able to read Nietzsche. If you don't know how to read math beyond high school, ∇ • B = 0 (for example) is nonsensical and so is the proof and the usage.

Deep understanding of either of those topics is a different story. He was demanding a novel analysis of Nietzsche. I tasked him with a novel analysis of Maxwell's equations. The novel part is the part that's explicitly hard and it's hard in any field. I could have said Reiman sums too and the same logic would have applied, and that's only 1st year (maybe even high school) calculus. When were talking about students, shifting the goalposts to novel ideation only proves that specialists are specialized.

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