This is so sad to read. Knowing that the people actively making every aspect of life more monetized and addictive are acutely aware of the harm they create, yet are motivated by such base selfishness that they can ignore all that for the paycheck.

Could your observation be any other way though?

It recognise addiction (limited agency vs influence) and monetisation (economic rewards the primary means to influence behaviour) as problematic. It kind made “doing bad for pay” a premise of the system.

Large pay-checks incentivising bad behaviour is exactly another observable outcome of the same systemic issue.

To be fair, risk calculus does not appear to be this administration's strong suit.

You forgot to weigh the relative likelihood of somebody needing a life flight to survive vs the likelihood of that flight being shot down. The first is very high, or they'd not have called for a helicopter, while the second is quite low even if there is a cartel psycho running around with MANPADS. They're more likely to hold their missile in reserve than to randomly fire it off at some helicopter out of the blue.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find any human who has been 100 pounds overweight for any amount of time that doesn't have an obesity-related comorbidity.

Hypertension, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, etc are all common in the general population and exacerbated or even caused by the physical and lifestyle conditions that beget obesity.

If you haven't used it, how can you judge its quality level?

That's heavily dependent on regional/cultural factors. Among a younger and (mostly) gayer demographic, the once-feared "C-word" is very commonly used, especially in its adjective form.

How do you use it as an adjective? The bad thing was always labelling someone with the word, but there isn't really any other way to use it.

We Aussies have many ways to use it as a compliment

Sick cunt, Mad cunt, Good cunt Etc

Physics is the poster child of a discipline that knows its foundations are wrong. Basically every physicist understands that our current theories are full of holes and a new way of thinking is needed. So I don't really buy the idea that physics in particular is stifled by a rigid adherence to the status quo.

The charitable version of this is that to reconcile all the holes, we in fact need radically new and different mathematical underpinnings that aren't currently on the horizon. I don't know how that could be true; certainly any new foundation would have to reduce to something very like the current theories under already-studied conditions. If it is, though, we might be on a really big local maximum, and the path off of it might look really weird and nonsensical for a long time (which is why I can't quite bring myself to fully dismiss Stephen Wolfram, for instance :D).

Maybe the trick is to forget math entirely! Accept we live in a universe where 2+2=, where pi will change before your even half way around the circle!

Cast off the shackles of rationality and embrace a universe where the only constant is change.

While you're at it you should smoke this shit, it's wild.

Username checks out.

Anyone from Portland who can explain the dirt/gravel roads shown in the Eastmoreland/Errol Heights area? For example, on Malden between 45th and 52nd.

Street View shows these are residential roads mired in mud and muck -- surprising for being in a built-up populated area of the city.

During a trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in my youth, we portaged through Party Lake. I am sad to report no revelry occurred.

However, Mud Lake definitely lived up to its name.

> Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass.

What exactly constitutes "hard to change"? In many countries, fundamental freedoms are regular legislation which can be overturned in the usual manner. Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.

There are also countries that have a constitution that cannot be overturned like a regular legislation. It's not like the US is the only place that has it that way.

Right, I didn't mean to imply it was a US-only phenomenon -- plenty of countries have fundamental rights enshrined in their constitutions, with varying degrees of difficulty to amend. I was specifically responding to the claim about countries that instead have "hard to change" laws, since laws are typically much easier to repeal than constitutions.

> Even a threshold of 2/3 or 3/4 to change is much easier to overcome than the federated constitutional amendment process in the US.

This can go either way. If you can agree 3/4 of state legislatures to agree on an amendment, you can successfully ratify it (via convention if needed if Congress isn't amenable). But 3/4 of state legislatures can represent small states - so much so that it's possible to amend the US Constitution though legislatures that are nominally representing less than 25% of the country (and in practice even less than that when you consider the effects of FPTP).