Yeah, flying around Europe / UK can be pretty damn cheap if you book in advance and with a low cost airline. Normally it ends up costing more, because if you want hold luggage that’s another £40, and if you want to sit with your friends that’s £15, etc.

But if you’re traveling light it’s often cheaper to fly to another country than take train in your own. Which isn’t great…

And the single video that isn’t a “Sponsored” ad is still from Red Bull, and basically an ad.

Intresting! If anyone has unpaywalled version I’d like to read more.

I do think it’s odd that a billionaire has basically payed to have his own vice-president (I don’t think many people would argue that Vance was an obvious choice apart from as a puppet of Thiel) and that billionaire is overtly apocalyptically bonkers, but the press barely cover it.

I’ve seen mention that Thiel had been discussing the antichrist in lectures. Butt with all this talk of AI bubbles and the insane amounts of money being funneled into the industry, here’s a extremely rich and powerful man, who has basically groomed the VP (alongside all the other influence his wealth gives him) who is making wild messianic claims about AI and accusing any opposition to it as the work of Satan! That’s insane!

Imagine that when Bush was trying to get support for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld was going around giving lectures on the Crusades and the role of Isreal in the Apocalypse. Sure, there was and is support for stuff like that in fundamentalist evangelical churches, but it wasn’t the avowed belief of the inner circle of the US government. And if it was, I don’t think Britain would have gone along with a literal holy war. Is that really the stage we’re at? I use to read about the 3rd Reich and finding it implausible that they were actually making policy decisions based on a invented hodgepodge of occult nonsense, but now it’s starting to be believable.

So conflicted. On one hand, I don’t really want to trust something that comes out of musk/xitter… But on the other see that most of the maga and Isreal accounts come from India and Africa seems so plausible…

This is a really good answer. Even terrible parents generally ‘love’ their children. Some believe that means giving everything they want and never saying “no”, others believe that by bullying their kids they’re “making them strong”. And some genuinely love their kids, but less than they love their career or football.

Fortunately most parents really do want to do right by the kids, and have a more sane idea of what love means. But they might not always express that love in the way the child needs or understands, for a variety of reasons.

I think your absolutely right that people shouldn’t call a question stupid in c/nostupidquestions. But they can and should criticise a question for being a rant disguised as a question (eg. “Why are X people so stupid?”). More borderline is a questions that maybe meant in good faith but seems to have so many problematic assumptions built-in, that it’s difficult to even engage with fairly. It might not be a stupid question, but it’s been phrased in a way that makes so many wrong assumptions, that answering it becomes an unnecessarily difficult chore.

I saw your question about veganism, and I can imagine some people took it as way of poking vegans. Vegans get a lot of hassle online, and are often asked to justify this or that, so asking “why don’t they eat roadkill” (in so many words) could be seen as not coming from a genuine place of curiosity. I’m not saying your question wasn’t genuine, but I can imagine that other people thought so.

I do think your question falls into the “too many dumb assumptions”. There were responses along the lines of “vegans don’t eat meat, so of course they don’t eat meat that has died naturally”. And you responded with “I meant the philosophy not the diet”. If that’s true, then it was a “badly phrased” question, not a “stupid” one.

Nostupidquestions is meant to be a place to ask questions that you feel like you should know, or everyone else seems to know. If you ask confusing or misleading questions, it’s reasonable for people to respond with “that’s not what veganism means” or whatever. But I do 100% think people shouldn’t say it’s a stupid question (although, having read through the thread I don’t see anyone saying that to you…)

If I saw someone wearing a helmet, with cap strapped on somewhere, I’d understand. It’s practical, and it’s pretty clear that your planning to wear it when you remove the helmet, you’re not trying to make some sort of statement. Go for it! (as long as your cap strap is reliable…)

Unless im sleep deprived or intoxicated, pretty instantly. But although I sleep pretty well, I generally wake up regularly through the night to turn over, flip my pillow etc. So, waking isn’t usually a shock. Maybe if I got woken by an alarm I’d be confused, but generally I wake up a few minutes before my alarm.

I don’t drink them that often so I’m not sure I’d necessarily notice, but I strongly prefer Pepsi. And I have repeatedly been a bit meh about about a cola I’ve been served and discovered it was Coke.

If you’re trying to blame “stupid consumers” or “evil companies” you’re not thinking about things systemically. Of course, under our current economic system, companies are going to end up exploiting, because there’s lots of pressure to maximise profits, and minimal pressure to avoid decisions that make money but harm society. And consumers are going to make bad decisions, because they live in a society where they are constantly bombarded by advertising and social values that encourage spending and don’t punish buying unnecessary shit.

The naïve (or self-serving) status quo view is “but consumers should know what they can afford, and not waste money. And customers should take their business elsewhere if a company does bad things”. If that’s really what you want to happen, then create a system that incentivizes that - have strict rules on credit and loans, so that people can’t buy takeaway food on credit, enforce strict anti-monopoly measures so that there lots of genuine alternatives for consumers to turn to, have requirements for news media to inform the public about all the actions that companies take that are harmful to the environment, their workers, or the general population (and make clear who are their competitors, and only those alternatives that aren’t owned by the same conglomerate), and so on…

If someone promotes a system that relies on “personal responsibility” but doesn’t promote tools that facilitiate that responsibility, then they are being disingenuous.

AI bot, check the post history

Yeah, don’t know the guy beyond repeatedly hearing that he scores out of his league. But I’ve always thought he seemed pretty physically attractive. I kinda suspect that straight guys just have very little sense of what actually makes a guy look hot.

I’m not sure if they’re what you’re looking for, but their are various little mental exercises you can do depending on what your trying to achieve.

Relaxing visualisations - if I’m trying to sleep and I’m too worked up about something to relax, I close my eyes and visualise a peaceful scene, e.g. being on a warm tropical beach, the heat of the sun lulling me to sleep, the gentle lapping of the ocean… It doesn’t always put me immediately to sleep, but it helps get my brain out of the problem-solving stress mode.

Sensory engagement - if I’m feeling anxious and getting stuck in a panicky loop, I try to engage my senses. Notice four things around you that you can see, three you can hear, two that you can smell, and a texture you can touch (a stone wall, your jacket’s fabric). This works well because when I’m stressed my brain doesn’t want to be told to “calm down”, it’s trying to warn me of danger. So instead of forcing some relaxation, I engage my senses, checking my surroundings, and generally there is no danger, just the hubub of normal life. This reminds my lizard brain that although being worried about missing a deadline is stressful, I’m not in immediate physical danger and should calm tf down.

Sense of perspective - when we are in an emergency our sense of time shrinks so we only focus on the immediate problem. As we relax, we become better able to consider the larger future. This is great in a crisis, but also leads to dumb overreactions. So, if something goes wrong, and in the grand scheme of things it’s actually not a big deal, but to me right now it feels like the worst, I use this technique. I visualise my surroundings and then begin zooming out, viewing my self from above, seing the room and then the building, the pulling out like a map tool, seeing the area, the country, the globe. I sometimes continue, visualising the solar system and the milky way. After that, it feels a lot easier to shrug and accept that whatever embaressment or frustration felt like it was going to ruin my day is, in fact, just not that important.

I enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D’s quitting messages, “Chickening out already?” or “Press N for more carnage. Press Y to be a weenie.” and the like.

Read the manga anyway, Gas Turbines are lit

Was hearing something from an English literature professor recently. He was arguing that we were on track to have a new cultural renaissance, because historically cultural transformations have come when the ‘guardians of culture’ (the tastesetters, the academy, etc) spend all their time in ever increasing arcane and self-referential debates. Then groups from outside of the cultural institutional power start doing something very new and vibrant and it ends up transforming cultural expression.

I guess the downside is that even ‘soon’ in this context could be 50 years, and it’s quite likely you won’t recognise or like what the new art when it emerges. Renaissance art is beautiful, but at the time it was seen as base and anti-intellectual, taking the abstract symbolism of medieval art and replacing it with “this statue of a guy looks reeeealllly like a irl guy doesn’t it!” Uhh, well done Michaelangelo, I can see a naked guy whenever I go to the baths, what does your ‘art’ say about his place is the cosmic order, his eternal destiny and the state of his soul?

Anyone come up with a good measure of distance that makes the speed of light a nice round number? I like the metric system, but the meter feels pretty arbitrary. We could do better!

Had a quick search on Google scholar, lots of stuff comparing general rates of engagement with hobbies in different countries, especially linked to helping older people. Thiscompares some countries, and observes that both wealth and wealthy inequality lead to less engagement with hobbies (which is why the US is relatively low).

I found this one that discusses how covid impacted different types of hobbies in various countries, but I couldn’t see a quick table of hobby prevalence. Just comments about stuff like cooking being more affected by covid in anglophone and Hispanic countries.

It’s worth giving it a go! Here’s a recipe that bakes a foccacia at 200°. At worst it’ll be less than perfect, but it’ll definitely be edible!

It would be helpful to know what you’re baking? It might be cooking longer at lower temperature, but it might also be about adjusting the size (a larger cake is usually cooked at a lower temperature to allow the centre to cook before the outside over-browns).