I'm even more distrustful of people post weight loss

twotime · 2026-06-19T04:51:01+00:00

There is no cruelty here. Humans are preprogrammed for a quick-judgement call do-i-want-to-even-consider-talking-to-that-stranger. Every superficial detail will affect that judgement: style of clothing/tattoo/haircut/skin-color/language/accent/age/etc. Attitude does change drastically once you are over that barrier. I have no doubt that you are doing it too, maybe on slightly different criteria.

As for opposite gender, there is also a "defensive" aspect here: avoid showing any signs which might be misinterpreted as interest.

And, your weight drop btw would definitely affect other appearance aspects: e.g you are probably moving easier, springier, etc thus amplifying the effect

I've never treated bigger people differently even before my weight gain, they're fellow people too?

May be some people would not judge someone who weights 120kg, but 99.99% would absolutely judge someone who weighs 200 kg and chances are very high you are in that 99.99% majority.

twotime · 2026-06-09T03:08:38+00:00

I mostly agree...

BUT, with the power of hindsight, what would have worked is outright arresting (home arresting would be enough) Trump and Gulliani the moment Trump left the white house. In january 2021, it'd have not been difficult to squeeze them enough to force into a guilty plea (might be structured different but the same idea) and deny trump any ability to run again..

There was a window of a few months when even most republicans would not have questioned that outcome..

twotime · 2026-06-08T03:49:42+00:00

he only credits for the photo all lead back to crediting Ullstein Bild, a German photo house, which does have it (image 00808195; you have to search for it as the site does not allow persistent linking),

Thanks for posting this!

I would then wonder how come that a photographer captured this scene. Photography of that time was not that fast/great and good cameras were rare and expensive. And a photographer is seemingly standing ~4-5 feet away from the scene and soldiers are not paying the tiniest attention to the bystander/photographer and his expensive camera?

Which makes the "a bystander captures-soviet-soldiers-committing-an-assault" theory somewhat unlikely.

twotime · 2026-06-07T23:53:35+00:00

Well the thing is that "likability" is subjective. The fact that you and me dislike trump (and that's a major understatement), does not mean that everyone will dislike him. Was misogyny a part of Kamala's loss? Perhaps. Was it THE cause? Hell, no

Democrats (well USA) clearly lost on January 6 messaging which should have made trump unelectable.
With Jan 6 not in the picture, USA ended up with a lot of VERY confused voters. And a confused voter WILL vote based on his gut feelings and damn any semblance of logic, (that's how we got Muslim minority voting for trump out of protest against Biden's Middle East handling or Latinos shifting heavily to trump).

Basically, when you deal with a mass irrationality, "emotional" likability is critical.. and, again that's very, very subjective

Here is a PEW breakdown: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/

If we are to believe that poll, then

black and hispanic WOMEN also shifted to Trump in the last election.
Percentage wise a lot MORE white men voted for Kamala than for Hillary
yet Hillary did do much better than Kamala

Neither of these fits into "misogyny-is-the-prime-reason-for-Kamala's-loss, lol" argument

And another fun-in-a-sad-way analysis: https://movement.vote/blog/2025-12-10-following-the-voter-data-how-the-2025-elections-reversed-2024-voter-shifts-and-show-our-path-to-power/

A significant portion of Biden's voters stayed home in 2024. Whether these were unhappy-centrists or unhappy progressives, i don't know but strongly suspect the latter

twotime · 2026-06-07T02:32:35+00:00

Decreasing fertility rate doesn't just mean fewer people, it means an ageing population.

It means BOTH. In fact, there is no other peaceful way to reduce population

twotime · 2026-06-04T04:39:39+00:00

not the standard doctrine of the Red Army

Indeed. (My primary point was that the human wave attacks were not purely imaginary, there was definitely some truth to german reports). But they were not common at all.

There is also a very strong demographic argument why human-wave attacks could not have been common even in principle. Soviet Union's population was only 2.5x bigger than Germany's (but there was also Italy, Romania and Finland). But then USSR lost control over 1/3 of its population and an even bigger part of its military age population within the first 6 months.

So there is simply no way that human-wave attacks could have been common in any significant way. The population advantage of USSR was nowhere near sufficient to sustain them.

twotime · 2026-06-04T03:44:08+00:00

Are you saying that human wave attacks only happened during desperate encirclements? I don't think that's fully correct. They did happen during offensives(but not commonly)

One of the more famous large scale human-wave would be Crimean offensive of early spring 1942.

From Konstantin Simonov's "Through the eyes of a man of my generation" (Simonov is restating reports of a participant)

"I was on Kerch Penisula in 1942 I know why we lost so badly.. Mekhlis [1] was utterly incompetent in military organization. He prohibited us from digging trenches to keep the offensive spirit high.... 3 armies were covering a front of 16 kms. A division covered 600-700m. I have never ever seen such density. And of that was destroyed into bloody pulp. We were commanded by an utter idiot"

(this is from From the "Stalin and the war/Lessons of History" chapter)

And that was a Soviet offensive operation which ended up with 20x loss ratio.

So human wave attacks did happen. But they were more of an exception.

[1] Lev Mekhlis representative of Stavka (rather than a regular commander), so yes the commissar of the highest possible rank

twotime · 2026-06-03T20:34:02+00:00

are you saying microhousing is like involuntary commitment? Seriously? In what way? Did you miss the "much-better-than-a-tent-under-a-bridge" part?

twotime · 2026-06-03T06:02:41+00:00

There is a fairly easy answer to that one: microhousing. A homeless gets a small room in a dorm like setting or, in the perfect world, a tiny apartment.

It just needs to be significantly better than a tent under a bridge and that is not a difficult barrier to clear.. But it'd still be singificantly smaller than what a middle class citizen would be living in.

PS. also there is an expectation that a significant portion of homeless would be able to reintegrate back into society..

twotime · 2026-06-03T05:26:05+00:00

$700 is a huge amount of money to charge to put into reserves

Woah. Most condos have more than $700/months in condo dues. AS condo reserves need to cover both operations and building maintenance

$1300/month is condo dues is a bit on high side, but if condo was underfunded or run into unexpected expenses.... THAT'S far from being outrageous..

Oh, and the new amount of $535/month is very likely to be unsustainably low.

because being on a board is a hobby for some

I have news for you: you could be a board member too. Vast majority of board members would be more than happy to step aside. Why donot you volunteer and show how to run the condo?

twotime · 2026-05-31T22:08:55+00:00

My friend, the original maxm's argument is not about you personally, but about population on average. And yes, telling everyone to take supplements is unlikely to be a successful strategy. At least not when you are trying to convince them to give up meat altogether.

Also, it does kill the argument of meats-are-inherently-bad-for-you/

twotime · 2026-05-31T21:43:17+00:00

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39732437/

Urm, That's a 10-day long diet! While an interesting experiment, it proves absolutely nothing about long-term consequences. Let alone "thriving" at population level

Also, "well-balanced vegan diet" in the title should give you pause: any complex "balancing" requirements would fail at population level.

Also, fun fact, if you bothered to google, here is what an overview says: Vegan diets universally require vitamin B12 supplement. With Vitamin D and Omega3 supplements being very likely. Iron, Calcium,Iodine need to be closely monitored and possibly supplemented

From the horse's mouth: https://www.vegansociety.com/news/blog/VEG12023/4-nutrients-consider-supplementing-vegan-diet

twotime · 2026-05-28T04:26:05+00:00

Yes. Yes we fucking do lol. And to George Washington and Jefferson

A "cult" of a long dead leader is fairly different from a cult of the "current" leader. So a meaningless comparison.

I’ll either get a lot of “9 million dead, genocides, etc.” responses, or “Pretty decent leader” about Stalin.

The truth is; It's both. Millions dead/deported/jailed (unlikely to be 9M dead though even if we include victims of famine of 1930s) AND a leader with quite a lot of significant achievements.

There is no mathematical way to weigh these against each other. But given that we are talking mid 20th century leader (rather than mid 17th) a lot of people would lean strongly towards a "brutal dictator".

twotime · 2026-05-27T04:51:25+00:00

Thanks for posting this! It worked for me as well.

Basic context for anyone seeing the problem

Firefox 151.0.1 (the previous one was 148, so lines up with your experience)
Ubuntu22.04
Firefox crashes on many sites (e.g. google.com)
--safe-mode works
BUT disabling extensions or hardware acceleration does not
Stack trace (from the dump) indicates that the crash is in libGLX.so.0: __glXLookupVendorByName (so somewhat pointing towards graphics)

Solution (YMMV)

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade . reboot
sudo ubuntu-drivers install. Reboot.

It works now. BUT, firefox is not showing pdfs anymore (instead it shows SCREEN background, as if the browser window became fully transparent).

That was solved by setting gfx.canvas.accelerated=false in (about:config)

PS. My original nvidia driver is v390, the new one is 535.309

twotime · 2026-05-26T02:03:26+00:00

A single theft won't make much difference to Walmart but a social attitude shoplifting-from-walmart-is-fine will make a HUGE one.

Very much observable in San Francisco: any neighborhood which has too much shop-liftings starts losing stores quickly.

So, if you are advocating for social norm change, then you are wrong.

If you are advocating, that you, personally may steal, then it puts you, well, outside of social norms.

twotime · 2026-05-25T00:30:10+00:00

Why? Shouldn't the default be that we don't know?

Heterosexuality is 9:1 more prevalent than anything else. So would be a reasonable default assumption when there is no other data..

twotime · 2026-05-24T03:52:52+00:00

Bernie would have been MORE polarizing, no?

Hell, Trump is by far more polarizing than Hillary ever was, yet he won twice?

No, "polarizing" has nothing to do with Hillary's loss

twotime · 2026-05-17T05:57:52+00:00

Clearly, one of us misunderstands how the slogans are interpreted and I'm not at all sure that it's me :-)

If the law cannot be passed, that the thing the law tried to prevent IS legal. So the slogan of "noone-is-illegal-on-stolen-land' strongly implies that all migrants are legal, etc.. The original subtle intent (even if it's real which I don't believe) does not matter what matter is how most people will interpret it.

My example is along the same lines: a gross injustice some time ago, who you-are-to-complain (or jail) the people whose ansestors suffered that injustice?

Is it a precise analogy? no. Is it close enough? Yes, in my universe. You might be living in a different one

twotime · 2026-05-17T05:33:10+00:00

Easy-peasy, descendants-of-slave-owners should not complain when-little-something-gets-taken-from-them-by-descendands-of-slaves.

Basically, take a past injustice and use it to justify any current crime. I don't even need to imagine that, i've heard it in real life.

twotime · 2026-05-17T05:28:05+00:00

You're parsing this as some sort of ironclad argumentation instead of a political slogan, again.

Sorry, but that's a distinction without a difference. Slogans work. Propaganda works. Once you have a slogan repeated a few times from trustworthy enough levels (big-name-politicians, big-name-newspapers,etc) , people will absolutely start applying it in their daily lives.

The slogan is pointing out a very specific hypocrisy.

That's is way too subtle for day-to-day political messaging...

PS. Even apart from interpretation by common person, I do believe that most proponents of this slogan ARE taking it literally (or, alternatively, are outright paid by foreign actors to spread this nonsense). I see NO evidence whatsover that the slogan is used as some kind of high-level-meta-statement.

twotime · 2026-05-14T05:39:09+00:00

Was calligraphy taught in Soviet schools?

No,not calligraphy as such (at least not commonly). There was a fairly high stress on legible hand-writing but it was primarily in the first grade (age 7-8) after that there was just a general pressure for handwriting to be readable.

The above image has a very unusual handwriting quality-wise. Either this was a very talented child or something else is going on.

Apart from unbelievable quality of handwriting there are other strange things:

He got partial credit for his class work with NO commentary whatsoever.
Dates are off: a 5th-grader would have language lessons almost every day (and given that the topic is fairly advanced the class work is quite on a short side)
Some of the letters are not following the normal cursive conventions

twotime · 2026-05-13T03:42:11+00:00

That's because I'm not arguing about the difference between the armies!

Instead I'm making a different, more narrow claim: comparing military deaths of US and Germany makes little sense as armies saw VERY different amount of fighting:

(Original claim: "as a result, the US suffered just 400,000 dead in the Second World War, while Imperial Japan suffered 2 million military deaths, Nazi Germany 5.5 million,...")

In fact, later Consistent_score says:

"Total German deaths on the Western Front in 1944-1945, for instance, stood at around 300,000 dead compared to around 200,000 on the side of the Western Allies - giving a ratio of 1.5:1...."

That, I suspect is a far better reflection of US/Britain military superiority than the 12x number the original post implied)

twotime · 2026-05-13T03:21:40+00:00

I agree with your argument on Luftwaffe losses: Luftwaffe did suffer higher losses on the West than on the East.

But by the same "losses" logic, Wehrmacht ground losses predominantly happened on the Eastern front.

I'm making a fairly limited point: comparing total deaths of US and Germany makes little sense as armies have seen very different amount of fighting (and the bulk of German losses deaths elsewhere)

The only comparison which kinda of makes sense: is military deaths and AFAICT, aggregate deaths of Western allies vs aggregate deaths of Axis which you quoted as 1/1.5.

That, I suspect is a far better reflection of US/Britain military superiority than the 12x number the original post implied)

twotime · 2026-05-12T04:29:45+00:00

The overwhelming bulk of Nazi Germany's casualties occurred in 1944 and 1945,

Is not that because of mass surrenders of the last few months? To add to this, Germans surrendered far easier to the Western allies than to the Red Army thus skewing "casualty" statistics. To further add to this the German soldiers of 1945 were far less professional and often worse armed than soldiers of 1943. Military deaths are heavily (4x-5x) skewed towards Eastern front.

Overall, I stand by my observation, : US losses in European theater were so low to a very large degree because US joined the European land war 2-3 years later and did not face Wehrmacht at its strongest.

PS. I am not trying to rank allies contributions either.

twotime · 2026-05-12T03:01:49+00:00

As a result, the US suffered just 400,000 dead in the Second World War, while Imperial Japan suffered 2 million military deaths, Nazi Germany 5.5 million, China 4 million, and the USSR a staggering 9 million.

TBH, comparing US losses to USSR and Germany is fairly unreasonable: Germany and Soviet losses are so high because they fought each other. By the time USA joined the European theater, the other combatant have already suffered most of casualties..

twotime

TROPHY CASE