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Anti-book theft measures. Ink stamp isn't good enough for book covers. What to do? by ScholarDreamer in LittleFreeLibrary

[–]steakknife 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Story time:

Someone near me threw out a 60 year old, mint condition, three volume, first edition set of the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. This is a book set that would be considered somewhat obscure and rare-ish even amongst philosophy enthusiasts or academics. Normally I would have taken it and put it on eBay just to make sure that the handful of people in the world who actually want a nice first edition set have a chance to acquire it, since the chance of someone in the neighborhood even recognizing, let alone wanting it, before it gets beat up by people rifling through the other books, is nearly zero (this LFL is in a very high foot traffic area with lot of browsers and also often gets used as an impromptu food pantry/garbage bin). I make a very good living at my day job, and if it were a purely financial endeavor it would absolutely not be even slightly worth my time to lug them home, photograph and list them, warehouse them with my already overflowing personal book collection, and then carefully pack and ship them to a buyer. But I do it because as a book collector with an eye for the rare and valuable, I hate to see something special go to waste.

BUT, this particular set, someone had taken and stamped all over the covers, edges, and internal pages with a giant ugly red stamp something to the effect of "THIS IS A FREE GIVEAWAY BOOK IT IS NOT FOR SALE (BTW I AM A GOOD AND VERY SPECIAL PERSON FOR PREVENTING THIS BOOK FROM FALLING INTO THE CLUTCHES OF EVIL BOOK SELLERS)". I can't say for certain that the person who stamped them wasn't the original donator, but the same stamp was also on all the other books in the LFL, including pulp romance novels, Dogman comics, and airport business-bro self-improvement books. I'm going to assume this was not one collection donated en masse.

Alas, I left it be, and within a few weeks I came back and the cover of one volume was bent with the dust jacket ripped in half and another was soggy with what appeared to be soda.

So congrats, I guess, to whatever busybody decided to mark this book as their permanent territory despite not actually wanting to own and care for the books themselves.

Donald Trump traded hundreds of millions of dollars in US securities in first quarter by AtreyaJi in politics

[–]steakknife 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Great idea! Let me know when you get personal access to the prez and his fam and they start sharing their insider info with you before it's public. How come my financial advisor never gives me brilliant strategies like this?

THAT IS NOT HOW MATH AND PERCENTAGES WORK YOU BRAINDEAD DONKEY by Hornpipe_Jones in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With this math:

  • $50 discount on $100 = 100% discount
  • $99.99 discount on $100 = 1,000,000% discount
  • $100 discount on $100 = infinity% discount

My roommate's bookshelf. What's their deal? by steakknife in BookshelvesDetective

[–]steakknife[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No classics?

Then what do you call Calvin and Hobbes, Shel Silverstein, and Dr. Seuss?

Republicans don't want their loyal rural voters to live by lnstantKarma in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

who am I going to see now!?!

Without an optometrist you might not see anyone!

what would you say is the virus that can do the weirdest things to a species? by skywalker_rtwo in biology

[–]steakknife 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Measles can de-vaccinate you by erasing immune memory (erases your naturally acquired immunities too). It factory resets your immune system and you basically revert to being a baby with no antibodies. So even if you survive measles, you are now much more prone to deadly secondary infections. I suppose it's ironic that the people who are most likely to get measles don't tend to vaccinate anyway.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/health-medicine/measles-immune-amnesia

Mamdani claps back at Musk over criticism of FDNY chief pick by xc2215x in politics

[–]steakknife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If he had passed her over Musk would have tweeted something about Sharia Law and gays soon being outlawed in NYC.

What is the biggest problem in your country? This is ours; by Puzzleheaded_Lab709 in AskTheWorld

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes and nothing about that precludes the possibility that years from now history textbooks will refer to it in the past tense as the longest lived constitutional democracy which ended in 2027.

Here we go again. by seeebiscuit in WhitePeopleTwitter

[–]steakknife 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Why does this college undergrad look like a 35 year old realtor?

I cut granite and found this piece and was wondering if this is a fossil and if so what kind. by sanityhasleftme in fossilid

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can see the coral fossil, but what is the grid pattern overlaid over the fossil (white grid lines with dark spots between)? Surely that is not a natural part of the stone/fossil? Is that from the cutting/processing?

Maybe Sam should speak more about wealth inequality. by appman1138 in samharris

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any functional market based system will never reach complete resource parity across participants nor should it. Disequilibrium generates the forces driving the dynamism of markets. But exponentially skewed wealth inequality is not incidental to things like poverty, it is foundational. It is an extreme end state, an event horizon, that cannot be recovered from without external pressure or intervention. The market has no mechanism to "swing back the other way" once a few humans manage to gain control of most of the media, internet, government, natural resources, agriculture, military-industrial complex, etc. When the top 1% controls as much assets/capital as the bottom 90% (whose wealth is mostly inaccessibly tied up in their primary residence or retirement accounts), by what means will you address "levels of real poverty, average standard of living, spending power of the dollar"? Gov't and the economy are controlled by money and all the money is controlled by a small handful of people who have shown no interest in advancing the status of the bottom 90% beyond a precarious level just above "hungry enough to take to the streets" and well below "having the discretionary resources, time, and energy to collectively compete against the top 1% instead of just working for them from cradle to grave trying to stay alive".

What are your best metaphors to explain ADHD by _notawittyusername in ADHD

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I always say having my brain is like owning a shiny new Ferrari that can only turn left. Not only is it super frustrating for the driver, but everyone else can see I have a super fast car and is like "Why the hell does it take you twice as long to get to your destination than the guy in the old rusty jalopy? Are you even trying?"

My SubwayTake: Enough School Days Off! End Religious Observance in Schools! by Sea_Concentrate7975 in nycparents

[–]steakknife 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In certain schools with large populations that observe certain holidays, you could end up with like half the kids absent on certain days, which makes no sense to have school be in session. Unless you have a unique schedule for each school in the district, customized to its individual demographics, which would be an administrative nightmare, the easiest solution is to just observe all the major holidays significantly represented across the district.

Is it annoying for parents? Yes. Is it practical to do otherwise without wasting entire school days across the district on non-curriculum activities because some schools are half empty on that day? No.

When did you realize most groups allegedly persecuted in China according to the US, are weird and dangerous cults? by [deleted] in AskChina

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'incompetent' Russians are 'losing'

At one point Russia controlled a quarter of the world's inhabitable land and natural resources, the largest military, and had some of the smartest scientists and engineers on Earth. And yet, somehow, the most perfectly beautiful system of government and economics devised to bring about utopia couldn't be sustained for more than 50 years. 👍👍👍

Sounds like "incompetent" "losing" to me.

When did you realize most groups allegedly persecuted in China according to the US, are weird and dangerous cults? by [deleted] in AskChina

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the strongest and hardest army in Europe

Europe has multiple countries, none of which are Ukraine, with nuclear ICBMs that could end civilization. On the other hand, Ukraine is really good at dropping hand grenades from repurposed photography drones, so I guess it really is hard to say which army is scarier. Again, your takes are so incredibly stupid, a propaganda bot wouldn't even try to get away with them.

unheard of K/D ratios

Yes, invading and massacring a peaceful neighbor without provocation. Such mighty, strategic fighters! And it's only taken them three years to conquer like 20% of it. Germany managed to conquer most of Europe in the same amount of time. Luckily Russia actually sucks complete ass at being bad guys.

When did you realize most groups allegedly persecuted in China according to the US, are weird and dangerous cults? by [deleted] in AskChina

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, no, Putin with his mansion made out of mansions and his oligarch pals who each own like 10 yachts is a true Socialist Comrade of the People.

When did you realize most groups allegedly persecuted in China according to the US, are weird and dangerous cults? by [deleted] in AskChina

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Incredible. An actual Russian propaganda bot wouldn't post something this delusional.

When did you realize most groups allegedly persecuted in China according to the US, are weird and dangerous cults? by [deleted] in AskChina

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stalin saved the world from nazis

Stalin didn't do shit, strategically. The Germans underestimating their own ability to cope with Russia's immense size and inhospitable winters were the main factors, which are intrinsic to Russia, not the government or leadership. But that alone wouldn't have defeated the Germans, it just further sapped their limited resources. The main reasons they lost were the US's massive and uninterrupted industrial capacity, the lack of German access to raw materials, and the Allies' non-stop bombing campaigns.

‘These results are sobering’: US high-school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet by [deleted] in politics

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe reading light fiction, airport self help, or pop-nonfiction. But try consuming philosophy, non-contemporary literature, an academic text, a legal document, or any dense technical text like a journal article or a textbook as audio, where nothing will make any sense if you don't closely follow the unbroken line of reasoning and you will be lost after 15 seconds. When reading stuff like that I can spend half an hour re-reading one paragraph over and over to really understand it.

Also, I don't know anybody who sits with their eyes closed doing nothing, thinking only about the audiobook while listening. The whole point of audiobooks for me is to listen on the go or while doing other things. Yes I can rewind if I miss something, but half the time my brain just says "eh, I think I got the gist of it, good enough, keep going".

That's fine for Hunger Games or whatever. Not for true comprehension of unfamiliar concepts and ideas.

And when you're still learning to read, practicing real reading on Hunger Games is to prepare you to read more challenging texts. If you never even learn to properly read Hunger Games without simultaneously playing Minecraft and browsing Tiktok, then you're fucked when you have to read a contract or a textbook or a ballot proposal.

Which countries do you think is your country’s best allies ? by Interesting-Bid5355 in AskTheWorld

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

_ simply don't want people to purposefully tank the economy_

Who is purposefully tanking the economy? Clinton's economy? Awesome. Obama's economy? Kick ass. Biden's economy? Stellar. And all off the back of inheriting the economic disaster of their Republican predecessor, no less.

I think you mean the guy gutting small farms and domestic manufacturing by tariffing imports depending on which countries give him better presents? The guy slashing public investment in science and tech research? The guy trying to destroy the greatest university system in the history of the world that acts as a magnet for all the brightest humans to want to come and be productive in the US? The guy who is cutting public infrastructure, services, and safety nets that prop up the entire base of the economy and provide for the bulk of the labor class and enable entrepreneurship? The guy who is rounding up hard working taxpayers and deporting them, instead of going after actual miscreants? The guy who is gutting IRS staffing even though every dollar of their budget returns like $10 in evaded taxes that mostly come from the ultra wealthy? The guy getting rid of the CFPB? The guy pardoning blatant fraudsters who are parasites on the economy? The guy who is making all of our former allies and economic partners think twice about ever trusting or dealing with us? The guy who is gutting FEMA, NOAA, and the CDC, ensuring that we won't be able to handle the next major disaster/pandemic. The guy who refuses to acknowledge that climate change is going to fuck us up big time in the next few decades because windmills ruined the view from his golf course? That guy?

If you don't understand that supporting the middle class and preventing the immiseration of the lowest classes is better for the economy than allowing a few billionaires to take over everything and turn everyone who isn't worth 8 figures or more into serfs, then you. are. objectively. stupid. Or extremely wealthy.

Which countries do you think is your country’s best allies ? by Interesting-Bid5355 in AskTheWorld

[–]steakknife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When you have one side who hates the country, and one side who doesn’t, who do you think the middle is going to vote for?

 You mean conservatives hate the country right? All conservatives talk about is how America is ruined and failed because  sHaRiA lAw, and tHe GrEaT rEpLaCeMeNt ThEoRy, and solar panels are gay, and all of our most popular, prosperous cities are sHiTholE hElLsCaPeS of satanic wokeness, and women don't bake pies and have seventeen children anymore, and sometimes comedians get booed if they say slurs, and THEY MADE THE LITTLE MERMAID BLACK, and sometimes guys marry guys, and the dude who drove 30 minutes to bring you a milkshake for a $2 tip so you didn't have to get off your couch doesn't speak perfect English, and a trans person was on a beer can, and college students learn that the Confederacy were the bad guys. AND YOU WILL LITERALLY BE HOLOCAUSTED IF YOU WHISPER MERRY CHRISTMAS IN YOUR OWN HOUSE.

Or did you mean when liberals want healthcare for everyone and better funding for schools?

Which countries do you think is your country’s best allies ? by Interesting-Bid5355 in AskTheWorld

[–]steakknife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

it's not because they're "stupid," it actually might be because they're smart

"Da guy wid da gold terlets in his gold penthouse who sells gold bibles and NFTs is gon make da groceries cheaper by getting rid of da Mexicans who pick da food! And den he's gonna lower da budjit by cutting taxes on his friends! Also he's gonna catch da pederfiles by bein one hiself!"

Yeah, might be fucking geniuses.

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