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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • If, as you say, consent doesn’t matter for animals, then you can’t rape one at all and we can fall back to the more conventional “abuse”, “mistreatment” or “animal cruelty”.

    Your “contextual inference” seems to be the inference of consent, so I’m confused by what you mean. If consent doesn’t matter then clearly it doesn’t matter if the goat is tied to a pole.

    I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. If you kill a goat, you’re a goat killer. If you buy a puppy, you’re a puppy buyer. If you fuck a goat you’re a goat fucker, and unless you passed the impossibly high bar of proving consent, you’re a non-consensual goat fucker, commonly called a “goat rapist”.


  • If you can adequately prove to me that the animal understood and consented then what happens between you and the goat is your own business.
    It takes more than enthusiastic participation: it also requires the ability to appropriately conceptualize what’s being consented to. It’s why drugging someone and then using their enthusiasm as consent doesn’t fly, or why a 13 year old can’t consent to a relationship with someone much older than them.

    A goat understands goat sex well enough that we all generally agree they can consent if they’re obviously into it.
    A goat does not understand interspecies sex well enough to consent, regardless of their interest or arousal.

    At best your claim is that sometimes it’s closer to “statutorily raping” an animal, commonly known as “rape”.

    So put the horse back in the barn before you let the horse out of the barn.


  • “build it at the gym and show it off in the kitchen”

    The only way excercise significantly contributes to weight loss is by building more muscle mass, particularly lean muscle, that burns more calories at rest.
    Since your resting metabolism is a bit more than half of the calories you burn in a day, making it larger adds a notable chunk to the “Out” side of “calories in < calories out”, in some cases making it so the out side is capable of being larger than the minimum a person needs to eat to be healthy.

    By happy coincidence, it also makes it easier to excercise, makes you feel better and be healthier, and helps with awkward panting.


  • Your conclusion is correct, but your terminology is wrong.

    What we call AI today is AI, because AI doesn’t mean “capable of thought”, consciousness, sapience or anything like that.
    It’s capable of producing a coherent output adapted to observed circumstances. That’s roughly as far as the notion of intelligence goes, and it’s a very low bar. You don’t need a lot of intelligence to be intelligent.

    The people who coined the term were interested in how you make computers react to their inputs dynamically instead of acting closer to what we might now think of as a saved macro.
    “It’s intelligent because rather than comparing against a list of every known typo, it sees it’s not a word in its list, and then replaces it with the one requiring the fewest edits to reach. It learns by adding your corrections to the known word list.”


  • So, that technique is actually an attempt to avoid a major problem in road development: you make a road, and now it’s easier to travel so people use it and it’s congested. So you make it bigger and traffic flows again, and so more people start using it and it gets congested. This keeps going until you have the freeways in Texas: 26 lanes of bad traffic.

    Instead, one notion is to make the road wider only when it needs to be. It usually keeps traffic more mitigated for a few years before habits adjust.

    The real fix is to start removing lanes from the highways. People will find other ways to get there and schedule travel as needed. Or they’ll move out of the suburbs so they can get to work, or, the most ridiculous notion, they’ll vote for the creation of the most basic of light rail systems.

    Realistically they’ll bulldoze another 50 mile stretch of urban housing so people can drive easier for the 4 busy hours a day for the next few years, until we eventually entirely demolish the cities to make way for the roads that bring people into them.





  • I think it just stands out because you suddenly understand a word in a different context. When English does it it doesn’t stand out because it’s so riddled with words from different origins that basically any random mouth sound passes as a plausible English word.

    I went to a cafe and perused the menu, but I didn’t see anything I liked, not even coffee, so I waltzed out and went to the gourmet delicatessen across the street where I got a Reuben with extra sauerkraut. Hard to say no to corned beef.
    Afterwards I picked up the kid from kindergarten, and we picked a restaurant to go to. I wanted sushi, and they wanted tacos, so we compromised and got hamburgers.
    We went home, took a shower with the new shampoo, got into our pajamas and read our favorite genre of story: macho poncho wearing jungle robots singing opera karaoke in a salsa tsunami.

    We didn’t adopt the words to be cool, it just fit better. It’s hardly surprising that other languages would at least occasionally find one of ours useful in some mysterious way that words blend across languages.



  • Technically speaking, pasteurization is rendering eliminate some percentage of bacteria via temperature and time. With a pot you can boil milk, which will render it safe for a time, and also destroy a lot of nutrients and change the flavor. Pasteurization as done in a dairy is typically lower temperature for a longer time, keeping the flavor and nutrients intact.

    Because it’s not fully boiling you typically want a sealed container to keep new bacteria from getting in during the process. A pressure cooker is fine enough for home use.


  • There’s a line, and I don’t know where it is. I’d very much rather someone go who didn’t need it than the other way, but medical care is to some extent a finite resource that can be over utilized.
    Maybe the answer is to incentivise using it correctly instead of penalizing using it incorrectly. Get a check for showing up to or giving proper cancellation notice for all appointments, getting your regular checkups and stuff like that. Appropriate use of whatever we’re calling non-emergency walk in clinics. (At least where I am, your doctor has a lead time before appointments, and the emergency room is more geared towards immediate specialized care. The clinics are designed for “let’s give that sprained ankle a double check and pop a stich in that gouge”. Routine care that shouldn’t wait)


  • It’s that, plus other factors. The regulations are more lenient, it’s easier to get a more efficient engine in with more mass to work with, it’s easier to pass safety ranking checks, and it’s easier to put comfort features in that consumers want.
    Putting a large crumple zone on a compact isn’t as easy as putting one on a giant truck.
    (Note this isn’t saying big cars are more or proportionally more efficient , but that the efficiency advances they’ve made over the years are easier to implement in a large engine)


  • The average person doesn’t live at sea level. More than half of all people have a boiling point of more than two degrees lower.
    Most water that people who live near sea level live near is salt water.

    If you’re willing to accept that level of imprecision, you may as well go with average human body temperature, since it’s literally our temperature.

    Both fahrenheit and Celsius are defined by relatively arbitrary standards in relatively arbitrary ways. One decided water should freeze 100 degrees from boiling, the other 180. Should ice be 2 orders of magnitude from boiling, or half a circle?

    Celsius should be preferred because it’s the standard. Some french people decided they liked powers of ten more that others, so here we are. Thanks Napoleon.
    Neither system is adequate for the physically based goals of a modern unit system. Hence neither has any relationship to water anymore, instead being defined by actual physical invariants.





  • Not all cops in all places are all bad all the time. They’re always part of a deeply broken system and all the other parts of the usual rant about cops, but that doesn’t mean they never do a good thing.

    Most cynically: it’s basically a free bump to their performance numbers.
    Most leftishly: a business called, which is closer to who they work for.
    Most probably: theif was still there and someone was close enough that they’d be doing more than taking a meaningless report to file.