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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • …Why the fuck would I need a chain on my lawnmower? AFAIK, push mowers are all direct drive for the blades, and riding lawn tractors use belts.

    Carburetor, not ‘carborator’. And it’s mostly the most polluting engines–lawnmowers, chainsaws, etc.–that are still using carburetors. Every thing else that uses gasoline has switched to fuel injection.

    And last, DO NOT LET ANYONE OTHER THAN A PROFESSIONAL CHANGE THE SPRING IN YOUR GARAGE DOOR.




  • I’m a reliable voter. I vote in ever state and national election (but not local ones, because my residence is weird; my address is technically in one county, but the town my address is in is in a different county, so I wouldn’t have any political connection with the local races that I can vote in).

    It would take a very unique ® for me to vote ®. Given their traditional policy positions that are pro-business, anti-choice, etc., I’m not sure who could even go that way. I suppose I could be convinced to vote for a libertarian running as an ® if they were able to make a case that they stood for strong individual liberty protections while also supporting strong regulations on businesses.

    On the other hand, there are definitely (D) candidates that I would simply not vote for at all, like any (D) that was anti-choice.

    Prior to 2016, my parents were 100% ®; they’ve switched almost entirely to (D) after seeing how radically the party shifted.







  • EDIT: I am wrong about the sample size. Yes, the sample is a little small, but not too far off. They’re registered voters rather than likely voters, which is not quite as good, but, again, no terrible.

    The poll surveyed 892 registered voters and has a margin of error of 3.2%.

    As FiveThirtyEight would say, that’s a bad use of polling. That’s a very small sample size, and there’s no indication that it’s representative in any meaningful way.

    Even more important, Obama has said she has no interest in being the president; she’s not willing to run.




  • Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)

    But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.

    The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.


  • While mass-shooting deaths account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities, they play an outsize role in how safe Americans are feeling, Murthy said.

    Yeah, no shit. And this is even worse when you consider that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings–which are defined by the gov’t as four or more people shot (not necessarily killed), not including the shooter–are gang violence or ordinary crime (robbery, etc.). So the kind of mass shootings that people worry about are, statistically speaking, relative to the number of people that live in the US, *very, very rare. When you look at the kind of targeted, mass-casualty events that happen annually in the US, you’re looking at odds that are similar to winning a jackpot in the lottery.

    It’s not that mass shootings are realistically a problem that most people will have to face, but people freak out about them because they’re on the news all the time–if it bleeds, it leads–and because it feels more random than, say, a serious car accident. Despite serious car accidents being more common by multiple orders of magnitude.

    It’s fundamentally a perception issue.



  • “Gender critical” is a dogwhistle for anti-trans. Dawkins falls squarely into that camp, of questioning everything that trans people, and experts on the subject have to say. The problem with being anti-trans–or, one of the problems–is that by its nature it assumes that there’s some kind of sex role in society. E.g., women are A, B, C, and men are X, Y, Z, and you can’t move between them. That kind of gender-essentialism is fundamentally socially regressive. Dawkins is also quite significantly culturally Christian, and Islamophobic, e.g., he is entirely critical of Islam both as a religion and as what he perceives to be a culture, but doesn’t direct the same types of criticism towards the Anglican church that he grew up surrounded by.

    how you identify/feel is a different matter in many people’s eyes.

    The way I see it, it’s just not my business. The only time that someone else’s gender identity is going to matter to me is if I’m potentially interested in dating them. They’re not harming people, they’re not ‘taking’ anything away from cis-women (or cis-men, for that matter), so why should it be my business what they feel they need to do with their body in order to feel comfortable in their own skin? I came across this a few weeks back, and it really drove that home to me.

    But does that alone make him Right Wing now?

    It’s a spectrum, like all things. You can be pro-science, but also still have a very socially conservative view on the ‘right’ place for people in society, or still maintain false beliefs about the ‘rightness’ of capitalism, imperialism, and so on. And scientists are still human, and prone to the same cognitive biases as everyone else.

    Being right wing doesn’t necessarily mean being religious. Being left wing doesn’t necessarily mean being atheist. Yes, that’s more often true than not, but I think part of that is that the right in general uses an appeal to tradition–which includes religious practices–as part of their package. But, on the other hand, Jesus, as depicted in the 4 gospels and the early Christian church, would have been very comfortable to socialists, as would the teachings on tolerance.

    In re: podcasts, the only explicitly atheist one that I still listen to is The Friendly Atheist. I find Jess to be annoyingly hyperbolic most of the time, and she frequently makes wildly overbroad statements, but Hemant Mehta is pretty measured overall. Mostly I listen to politics (FiveThirtyEight), 2A podcasts (A Better Way 2A, the irregular Tiger Bloc Podcast, Guns Guide To Liberals, Practical Shooting After Dark), a couple of ex-Mormon podcasts (Mormon Stories is great if you love really, really long form interviews), You Are Not So Smart, sometimes BtB, Cool People Who Did Cool Things, a couple others.


  • I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

    (FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)