monktastic1

Lol, don't know how my mind filled in those letters, but that was indeed my Portland experience so I'll leave it.

Oh, thank God. I only visited Portland once, and despite being vastly different from Austin in climate and flora, the sea of billboards made it feel eerily familiar (and not in a good way). I expected it to feel more like Seattle, but that one thing made a world of difference.

Yes, that's what it's saying.

I'm confused by your comment. First, powers of two are 2^n not n^2. But what do you mean you missed the title and wondered what was going on? How could you expect to understand the contents without reading the title? Surely I'm missing something.

Indeed, meditation is the best approach I've found as well. It can be seen clearly -- not as an idea, but a direct realization -- precisely why the mind's attempts to pin "this" down are futile. I don't have a better word for that experience than "miraculous."

> I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.

Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.

So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?

It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.

I also had one night of fever and incredible chills, followed by two days of no symptoms. No Paxlovid. (But then I did get bad cold-like symptoms for a week, and what seems to be long Covid...)

But only in high-risk patients, it should be noted.

Surprisingly not: https://youtu.be/0WlmScgbdws?si=k28GyfN5wXmSsf6i. Some things just work better in stand-up format.

Can you help me understand your comment? Being the best at one thing is very different from being good at everything, so it's unclear how that advice applies to your children.

Also, what does "do some" mean?

It's broadcasting on every valid ("odd") frequency. I guess it still depends on if you have an analog or digital dial.

I think I'm slow. Can you explain this again, maybe with more words?

It's hard to discern whether you're misreading this whole thread on purpose or not. Nobody is claiming that trans content in general is NSFW, but that a certain subset of content therein, displayed openly on the site is -- which OP evidently agrees with. If you think OP is anti-trans, I don't know who you think is pro-.

For anyone else not well-versed in the lingo, I thought I'd share this Smithsonian article and attendant Reddit thread. I found them informative:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-a-study-on-mice...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1hyychf/scientists...

> The brain’s waste-removal process is “like turning on the dishwasher,” a neurologist says, but common sleep medications may harm it"

> The team then tested the impact of Zolpidem (a common sleep medication also known as Ambien or Zolpimist) on this system, and found that the norepinephrine waves during sleep decreased by 50 percent and fluid transport into the brain decreased by around 30 percent in zolpidem-treated mice. These results suggest that sleeping aids that impact norepinephrine production—which includes most sleeping aids—might harm the brain’s waste-removal system.

You might appreciate Charles Eisenstein (or he might be too "hippie" for you). I posted one quote of his as a top-level comment, but here's another:

Clear-cutting aside, the decline of one after another species of trees all over the world is something of a mystery to scientists: in each case, there seems to be a different proximate culprit — a beetle, a fungus, etc. But why have they become susceptible? Acid rain leaching free aluminum from soil silicates? Ground-level ozone damaging leaves? Drought stress caused by deforestation elsewhere? Heat stress due to climate change? Understory damage due to deer overpopulation due to predator extermination? Exogenous insect species? Insect population surges due to the decline of certain bird species?

Or is it all of the above? Perhaps underneath all of these vectors of forest decline and climate instability is a more general principle that is inescapable. Everything I have mentioned stems from a kind of derangement in our own society. All come from the perception of separation from nature and from each other, upon which all our systems of money, technology, industry, and so forth are built. Each of these projects itself onto our own psyches as well. The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the “cause,” we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine … all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation.

...

Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World.

I am reminded of a passage from Charles Eisenstein's "Climate, A New Story":

Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:

> Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now. MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.

No, if you read the article, you'll see that he addresses this point.

I interpret it as saying that at least the system hasn't just degraded into a rubber stamp (where someone like Tao can publish anything on name alone).

In case anyone else was mildly confused by the wording, it seems the author simply missed a few words: "had to change the default prefix from..."

Yes, it's a question, but you haven't answered what you read that makes you suspect so.

Can't even log in. I get "Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON"

Yes, I was never confused about that. It's just that I've never heard this particular phrase, or anything like it. In retrospect, it appears to be a transcription error.

Yes, but why one and 1/100th?

Did you mean just "one hundredth?" (i.e., 1%)? "One and one hundredth" suggests 101% to a native English speaker.

Edit: ah, you probably spoke "one one hundredth" and got a transcription error.

It doesn't "imply" nanometers, it literally reads nanometers. The standard abbreviation for nautical miles is "NM."

Interesting. I didn't read it as aggressive, and certainly not "very" aggressive. I read it as polite and perhaps mildly defensive. What about the response suggests aggression to you?

Are you not "totally dependent" on the air you breathe, the water you drink, the sunlight that gets turned into your food, ...?

It's not just "used in many ways," it has several definitions. The one that almost everybody uses -- including the Fed[0], US Dept of Labor[1], and the ECB[2] -- is about rise in prices. Nobody is saying that your definition is bad or wrong, but to claim that it's the only (or even primary) one is disingenuous.

[0] https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/i...

[1] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/inflation

[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-mor...