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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I sleep 8 hours a night and wake up at the same time every day. I’ve found that as long as my sleep schedule is consistent and reliable, my energy levels are fine. It doesn’t really matter how busy I am throughout the day.

    Once the sleep schedule gets out of whack (I sleep in too much, or have to wake up at 3am for work trip) then it takes a good 5 days or so to go back to normal



  • I feel instructing people to do things goes into the action category.

    exactly. that’s how US law works. in England, the state has much broader powers to arrest you depending on your speech. Like for example, the first statement I made

    “i believe all [plural form of random ethnic slur] should be brutally murdered”

    a very similar post on twitter got someone sentenced to 2 years in jail over in England just a few months ago. let search around and find the direct quote…

    i found it

    “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it”

    My interpretation is that this is a belief. He didn’t explicitly instruct anyone to do anything. He said, in other words - “if people set fire to all the muslim immigrants, i wouldn’t care” or basically “i would be happy with people setting fire to all muslim imimgrants”

    in England, that’s a crime. in the US, you have to be much more explicit. You have to

    a) specifically instruct people to do something “everyone, attack that person in the red hat”

    b) hold the belief that your statement has a real chance to followed. so for example, if you right now say “hey kava, beat your wife” you almost certainly could not be charged in the US because a reasonable person would not immediately beat their wife because of a statement like that

    c) it has to be immediate - so you have to say something and it happen in the very near future. so if you write “let’s stab all the [ethnic slurs]” and then someone reads that 3 months into the future- you can’t be held liable.

    So I believe the US laws, in this case, are so much better than English laws.

    The US does a lot of shit wrong. So many things. But on speech? I think best in the world.

    edit: there’s more on this topic if you’re interested: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test


  • things not in the physical realm should have consequences not in the physical realm

    I mean, it depends. I think the current laws in the US are more or less fine.

    For example, if I send you a death threat through an online message, it should be equivalent to me sending you a death threat in any other fashion.

    So I’m not a total absolutist, but I am a strong free-speech proponent.

    I think saying something like “i believe all [plural form of random ethnic slur] should be brutally murdered” is an expression of a belief. it’s a horrific belief, yes, but it’s a belief. I think it constitutes as free speech and therefore the government cannot prosecute

    however let’s say I’m a musician at a concert and i see a guy in the crowd and point and yell to the crowd “hey everybody, attack that [singular form of ethnic slur] and rip his [religious apparel] off” - that isn’t a belief. that is an incitement to violence.

    that should be a crime.

    in England, both the first and the 2nd are crimes. here in the US, it’s only the 2nd




  • my tip is just to greet people loudly with a smile. say good morning, talk about weather, whatever

    i’ve found that most people will do as you say. just try and look away and go about their day. some people can even look mean with a face that is not inviting at all.

    but if you say hi in a friendly way one day, they look at you surprised a mutter something back.

    the next time you see them, they have a smile on their face and they greet you more warmly.

    really this is the thing about human connection. someone has to bridge that gap. and it’s not hard to do



  • I understand this phenomenon and it goes all the way back to Socrates. There’s that famous quote.

    The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

    And he even used to complain about the new invention of writing. Said it would weaken people’s memory because they wouldn’t have to remember everything.

    So I get it. I understand what you mean.

    But I think this is different. Because let me posit this.

    Cigarettes existed for a very long time, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s that they started being produced en masse. Very quickly, the majority of the country was smoking and smoking a lot. Much more than before.

    That eventually caused a dramatic increase in lung diseases because a lot more people were smoking. You could say “Tobacco has been around forever. Every generation has fads”

    But in reality, it was different. It was a new thing. Cigarettes were hand-rolled before. Now you could buy a pack and smoke your 20 a day much more easily.

    I think this is more similar to what we are seeing with social media today. I consciously make an effort not to judge the youth. And I’m not judging the youth. The social media “epidemic” does not only concern the youth, but all generations. Smartphones in general but modern social media specifically operate in manners we don’t fully understand.

    Look at the brains of gambling addicts. Your brain literally gets rewired when you play slots all day. Social media operates in a similar manner as slots. We are all rewiring our brains in a way that has never happened in human history.

    It could cause permanent damage for all we know. We just haven’t had the time or studies to confirm this. And if we look at research that exists right now, social media does increase rate of anxiety, depression, etc. It’s not so simple.




  • well, two things can be true. he could have committed serious crimes and it could be a case of the DOJ being used a political weapon.

    realistically most people who do the things Hunter Biden did get away with it just fine. It’s perfectly fine to be a criminal when you are part of that group. so if he weren’t Biden’s son, he would be fine (although he also probably wouldn’t be receiving millions of dollars from Russian convicted criminals).

    honestly, I think it’s one of the final nails in the coffin of our democracy.

    i think a lot of people need to start paying attention to what happens in Brazil. I’ve been seeing so many parallels. We had Jan 6th, they had their own Jan 6th a year later… except a more intense version

    A few years back, the president conspired with the justice department to try and put the opposition candidate in jail. the thing is - the opposition candidate was corrupt. but the whole trial was orchestrated not to seek justice, but to put the guy in jail so they would win the election.

    the trump-like candidate in Brazil got attacked in a crowd. helped him win an election. Trump got shot in the ear, helped him win an election. etc

    so many parallels

    we’re seeing similar weaponization of the justice system here


  • couple of things

    1. I’m assuming you mean Trump and as of now he is not the president
    2. Once Trump becomes president after Jan 20th, he will be just as much my POTUS as he will be your POTUS, assuming you live in the US
    3. I think you are trying to make the insinuation that somehow because I answered the question asked by OP, I am a Trumper

    I spent the majority of my life as an illegal immigrant in the US. I didn’t become a citizen until well into my adulthood. I was brought here illegally at a young age

    do you really think I am a Trumper? that I’m a red hat wearing Maga bible thumper? i would be a traitor to my own kind- being damned to spend eternity in the lowest level of hell freezing right next to Marco Rubio and Judas

    come on man stop drinking the koolaid it’s OK to admit Biden’s son is a criminal.



  • yeah i just try not to think about it. I’m glad I was in the myspace generation during my teenage years. so I was actually able to just delete my myspace later on as an adult

    i feel worse for the kids growing up today. they don’t fully understand the implications of what they are posting online. anything and everything is being recorded forever. my generation got a chance to be a stupid kid and have it be forgotten. today’s kids don’t get that opportunity

    the best you can do, though, is just stop posting potentially damaging things online. you can’t change what you already posted. and 999 times out of a thousand, it’s not gonna hurt you.

    i understand the overwhelmed feeling though


  • the safest perspective to have is this -

    every single thing you send online is going to be there forever. “the cloud” is someone’s server and constitutes online. even end to end encryption isn’t necessarily going to save you.

    for example iCloud backup is encrypted. but Apple in the past has kept a copy of your encryption key on your iCloud. why? because consumers who choose to encrypt and lose their passwords are gonna freak out when all their data is effectively gone forever.

    so when FBI comes a’knocking to Apple with a subpoena… once they get access to that encryption key it doesn’t matter if you have the strongest encryption in the world

    my advice

    never ever ever write something online that you do not want everybody in the world seeing.

    to put on my tin foil hat, i believe government probably has access to methods that break modern encryptions. in theory with quantum computers it shouldn’t be difficult


  • sad story. it’s emblematic of a mentality that is all too common in “ivory tower” positions

    whether you work for a university or a news agency or a government organizations, etc. everyone ends up self censoring because they realize that rocking the boat is bad for your personal interests. after working so hard to get into this little elite club, you don’t want to jeopardize your position. your identity and sense of self worth is tied up with it

    the few that end up trying get quickly chewed up and spit out by the whole.

    it’s essentially group think and self censorship. too bad this guy killed himself instead of trying to move forward in his life with another avenue.


  • i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything

    you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.

    if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.

    i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly

    so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed

    but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?

    that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.

    but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.



  • American goals in Ukraine are

    • make Russia pay dearly for every inch of land they take in Ukraine

    • use this opportunity to give a nice cash injection to our defense contractors

    • gather as much intel & data on both Russia & the modern battlefield in general. Sort of like the Spanish Civil War before WW2. A playground to test out new technologies

    These goals have already been accomplished. It’s been a great couple years in terms of hurting Russia for cheap.

    We want to prolong this war as long as possible. A Ukrainian victory would be just as bad as a Ukrainian loss. It’s why we modulate our aid carefully. Like Chomsky was saying before his stroke - “we will fight them to the last Ukrainian”

    I think a lot of people get blinded by propaganda in the moment. Even people who retroactively would be able to see it just fine (try and find someone who believes Iraq was a justified war) strongly believe the party lines.

    Reality is American interests and Ukrainian interests are not aligned.