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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Just to reply in a real and not snarky way, the BBC has a strong anti-trans bias as well. The question is about factuality and reliability. Fox News will run anything that fits their ideology and in the case of trans issues demonizes trans people and trans affirming care.

    To be clear, this doctor is making a vague claim of there being “young children” getting “irreversible” medical interventions. I mean technically getting a vaccine is irreversible, getting antibiotics cannot be taken back, and setting a broken bone can never be undone. Irreversible is meaningless in this context. What he is claiming is that there is some sort of harm. This is not true.

    Surgery is not done on young kids in general. The rare cases are not really worth considering and do not represent trans care in general. The exception does not prove the rule and honestly I have not seen any evidence of children getting trans surgeries.

    What is common is the use of puberty blockers. These are medications used safely for preventing precocious puberty and they delay the onset of puberty. This allows time for the child to work through their gender issues and be able to make an informed decision before starting hormonal transition to trigger the correct puberty for their gender. Putting off puberty has small enough consequences to be reasonable and for trans kids it can be really important for reducing risk of harm.

    Fox News is dishonest, this doctor is dishonest and violating their Hippocratic Oath, and this discussion is a bullshit anyway. This constant ranting and raving about half a percent of people is just crazy. Nobody needs to talk about this without a qualification or loved experience. If you don’t know what you are talking about then it is a good idea to say nothing.




  • To be clear, the current system has a similar bias against non-white people. The rate of conviction is higher for non-white people, the sentences are harsher, and defence is less likely to be adequate. This is an attempt to balance things out a tiny bit and to hopefully not completely ruin the whole life of a person due to a series of bad choices. She should have known better, she has no justification for this behaviour, and what she did was wrong.

    She will serve a 3 year sentence rather than a 4 year sentence. That is still 75% of the time and still has all the other associated harms such as being denied freedom, difficulty reintegrating with society, and loss of social bonds and status. She is not getting off without punishment, she is not getting off with a slap on the wrist, she is being imprisoned and will be marked as an abuser.

    If the argument was “No abuser should get off with so little time in prison” or “Prison time is I effective at preventing SA” then we could have a conversation, but in this case it is all about the fact that a factor like cultural and social background resulted in a reduction in sentence when it normally results in a higher likelihood of sentencing and long prison time.



  • To expand on this a little, there are tonnes of options for spying on people but the key is tying your face to your identity. If you have a phone with you at a protest and they capture your IMSI (unique identifier for that handset) they can place you at the scene. They then only have to narrow down a little which face is tied to that phone and they know who you are. If they have a way of making a large database of faces and names, for example requiring ID and facial scans to access porn, then they can make this process much more rapid. It’s almost like there is some sort of overarching plan here, some sort of seizing of power through multiple fronts which are all connected and share interests, like how people who are all rich share the interest of further concentrating power in their own hands, just as an unrelated example.


  • I have a small SSD on my laptop. Only 500GB, so I can’t install all of the games. I move ROMs to my external when not playing them and move them to the internal to play. I also package games up from Steam/other sources and do the same. That limits how many games I have installed at any time and helps make some friction to getting stuck in choice paralysis.

    That said, for other thing is multiplayer. I an playing Hytale with my partner and we were playing Minecraft before that for a while, so playing together becomes playing that game together and is therefore simple.


  • January was $1262 in AUD. I eat a fairly meat based diet with ribs, pork belly, eggs, butter, and good coffee. I would consider it reasonable for myself, my partner, and my cat. That also includes other household things like cling wrap, dish liquid, and so on, so actual food cost is probably more like $1000-1100. In USD that is $697-767, so well under $200 per week. Also my meat is top grade Australian beef, widely considered some of the best in the world, and the butter is grass fed cow butter. I work 20-25 hours per week and can support my partner and myself on my pay and my partner’s disability payment.


  • Lol, yes, though they secretly love the attention and love. Mine is absolutely clear about wanting pets and cuddles at all times and will even come sit on my chest when I lay down to be gently rocked by my breathing just like he did when we was a tiny kitten. Nothing is better than giving a cat what they need.


  • I like to think of it as saving the brush for when the replacement breaks. It is a spare now, having a lovely early retirement with the possibility of returning to work depending on circumstances.

    That said, I have found that putting things back where they go is the second best tool. The best for me is to literally tie it to myself. My belt bags have all the important things including a first aid kit, phone, headphones, power bank and cables, nitrile gloves, pen, notepad, car keys, and so on.

    For your cat I would recommend buying a few of the brush, identical ones are what I would go for, and place them where you would expect to find the brush. Maybe try looking for the brush and just note all the places you check in order. Then load each up with a brush and you will never be without.

    The most important thing in life is to pet the cat so anything we can do to ensure we pet the cat is good.


  • I don’t know about your local area and associated limitations but I can speak more generally.

    Volunteering your time is a really rewarding thing and it can feel better than donating money. But that is feeling better for you. If you have specific skills, for example web development, then volunteering your time in that expert capacity can be very helpful. If that skillset is not needed then using that skillset to generate funds to donate is more effective. Your efforts are not fungible, but money is, meaning the organisation can use the effect of your efforts in the most beneficial way for their goals, even if it is not a good match for your skills.

    Considering specific hours of your work as volunteering hours and donating those hours of earning may help you get the feeling you need, feeling like you are helping and involved, while turning that effort into something useful for the cause you care about.

    “On Saturdays I volunteer for my favourite charity by working my normal job and donating the proceeds”


  • I still occasionally open up Alley Cat which is much easier now that you can do it in a browser.

    https://www.playdosgames.com/online/alley-cat/

    That’s from 1984 so fairly old, but it just feels amazing. Amazingly clunky, but amazing. I love the fish bowl so much, the mice are evil, and dating is hard for a cat.

    I also regularly replay SNES games and recently finished The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. So much fun, such a well balanced game.

    For most played it would have to be various solitaire games, especially Fourty Thieves. I have played these so much my phone has burned in card shapes, but that’s fine for me, worth it.

    If I exclude cards it is Creeper World 3 which has at least 50 full days of play, but probably much more by now.



  • Check out Open Arena. It is based in the source for Q3A but it is fully fleshed out with new characters and weapons. Absolutely frenetic and great fun.

    +1 for micro machines, though I prefer v3.

    And older GTA, GTA2 was my favourite. I play it every so often and always enjoy it, but it is hard to play GTA 1 with modern expectations, they really improved for 2. “And remember, respect is everything”



  • First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

    Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

    Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

    Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.





  • Calories in, calories out.

    For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.

    After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.

    It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).

    Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).

    If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.