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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • It’s statistically correct, but not specifically correct. It doesn’t tell you for certain that you, personally, have too much body fat (or too little fat/muscle), but it’s a good indicator.

    And that’s really what you’re looking at; you’re trying to figure out if you have more body fat than you should.

    Harpendens skin fold calipers–when used by a trained professional–will give you a more accurate measure of your overall body fat percentage. And InBody scale will measure bioelectrical impedance (essentially running a low-voltage current through you and measuring impedance) to give you a fairly accurate measure of your body fat percentage, but how well hydrated you are can significantly affect the reading. Hydrostatic underwater weighing was long been the gold standard for measuring body composition. BUT dual x-ray absorbiometry (DEXA) has overtaken it, because it’s significantly easier on the person being tested.

    That said, body fat alone doesn’t tell you if you are actually healthy. You can be fairly low in body fat, and have horrific cardiovascular fitness. And being exceptionally heavily muscled, (say, 200kg, at 7% body fat; Mr. Olympia levels of muscle) doesn’t appear to be healthy on your joints and heart either in the long term.



  • Weeelllllll…

    We’re violating trade agreements with our tariffs. But giving tax breaks to companies that re-shore industry would also likely violate trade agreements, because it would create ‘unfair competition’. Kinda like the way that China has given subsidies to certain industries–such as solar panel producers–has created unfair competition, since they have far lower costs than other solar panel producers. As such, tax breaks and incentives would probably also hurt our trade relations, because we would essentially be taking jobs out of other countries. …But that would probably hurt out relations with other countries far, far less than what we’re doing now.

    Honestly, there’s not a great way to bring manufacturing jobs back in a way that doesn’t harm our relationships with other countries, or our national interests in some way. By purchasing shit from companies with lower labor costs/standards of living/higher levels of labor abuse/etc., we’ve undercut our ability to produce the same goods at a competitive price while also keeping our own standards. Even if we went back to pay ratios between workers and executives that existed 50 years ago (I think that lowest to highest ratio in large companies was about 150:1 in the late 60s), that wouldn’t be enough to keep our living standards, avoid labor abuses, and still be competitive with shit we get from China.

    This is compounded by the fact that we do have some of this manufacturing in the US, because it’s more-or-less required by the Barry Amendment (USC 10 §2533(a)). But the costs are astronomical. Take a backpack made by Mystery Ranch. Their Black Jack 80–identical to the USSOCOM SPEAR Patrol bag they make, just with another name–is $1200. The version that’s made in Vietnam and is not Barry-compliant, was about $400. The materials and craftsmanship were substantially identical, but the fabrics were sourced from outside the US, and the manufacturing was done outside the US. There’s no reasonable way that the US gov’t can subsidize those kinds of costs.



  • You’re making a ton of straw-man arguments.

    1. You don’t have to be the best. You do have to be good enough to get scouted by a professional team if your goal is to play professionally. I never at any point said that it wasn’t worth playing if you couldn’t be the best or do it professionally. I spend a lot of time shooting competitively; it’s likely that I will never make Master or Grandmaster in anything, and as a result I’m never going to be sponsored or be able to earn a living at it. (…Not that the money is very good anyways.) So what? I still have fun.

    2. In sports, playing professionally is a meritocracy. Socioeconomic class matters insofar as having more wealth and privilege means that you’ll have access to better training prior to becoming a professional. But the child in question already has access to training, through a parent that plays professionally. But that’s all the farther that socioeconomic class gets you in sports. People from poorer backgrounds often get to go far in sports, if they have the skill.

    3. Yes, OP could be wrong. On the other hand, OP is claiming to be a professional in the field, and is therefore more likely to have an informed opinion.

    4. Success is a combination of directed effort, an inherent capability; it’s not one or the other. If you lack certain inherent capabilities, then all the directed effort in the world won’t get you where you want to be. You can have all the gifts to achieve greatness in a given field, and yet fail completely if you don’t carefully direct your ability in that area.

    5. See above. The kid already has access to top-tier training, and is not making the grade necessary to perform at a professional level. Ergo, the part that is lacking is capability. …Which is why my anecdote is relevant; it’s not my unwillingness to work my ass off that has limited my power lifting aspirations, it’s my physical capabilities. (And yes, I really did work at power lifting. And will again once my shoulder finished healing, even though I’m never going to be competitive at any level.)

    6. Of course the kid isn’t going to be at the same level forever. But he’s not on track to be at a level where he’s capable of playing professionally. A 16yo that’s capable of going pro–esp. when they have access to high-level training–would be expected to be performing at a certain level. According to OP, he isn’t. The probability is that, while he will continue to improve (up until age catches up with him), he is not going to be at a professional level in time to make a career of it.

    7. You’re drawing a false dichotomy between being honest/realistic with your children, and having a relationship with them. I’m gathering, from what you’re saying, that you don’t believe that the parent should give their child a realistic assessment of their performance, and should simply be encouraging; it that correct? It seem like you believe that putting all of your effort into a goal, and failing to achieve that goal would not cause deep bitterness on its own; am I reading that correctly?

    8. “It’s my opinion that it’s better for parents to encourage their children in their dreams […]” I partially disagree. I think that parents need to encourage children to set realistic goals in life, and goals that can be stretch goals. Maybe that looks like going to school to become a biologist, and going on to medical school if biology ends up being fairly easy for them. Maybe that looks like going into a trade if they’re good at working with their hands. Playing professional sports–or being a touring musician that makes enough to live on, etc.–is like winning a jackpot in the lottery. Sure, you gotta play in order to win, but for every person that wins there’s millions of people that don’t. I would hope that you would say that anyone planning for retirement by buying lottery tickets was a fool, even if that person was your child. But even so, you can play sport for fun.


  • if he’s not great at football even though he’s living with a pro, that shows me how little you value him.

    Some people simple don’t have the ability to be good at some things, no matter how hard they work at it, no matter who mentors them. Very, very few people have the ability to be a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regardless of what kind of mentorship they have.

    Let me give you a concrete example.

    I’ve had a major shoulder surgery after tearing the shit out of my supraspinatus and the labrum. The supraspinatus passes through the acromium process on the scapula. The acromium process has roughly three different shapes, which are largely determined by genetics. A type I acromium process is smooth, and allows the spuraspinatus to pass through easily. Type II and type III acromium processes have pronounced ‘hook’ shapes–type III significantly more so–that make injury to the supraspinatus much more probable. I have a type II acromium process. Had Mary Lou Retton been my mother and coach, and I’d tried to be a gymnast, I would have destroyed both of my shoulders long before I was ever going to be going to nation-level events; the limits of the shape of my scapula would have made success impossible, given that a strong and stable shoulder is required in gymnastics, regardless of sex/gender. I would likewise be unable to be a competitive powerlifter, for much the same reason; working up to a nationally competitive snatch would have also destroyed my shoulders. (And, in point of fact, it was working on push-presses that killed it.)

    People are not a tabula rasa, only needing the proper encouragement to become paragons in a given field.



  • If I could get a fully remote job and move to the middle of BFE… Well, I’m considering doing that without a remote job, and just accepting that any job I can get will take a longer commute and probably earn pay less. I lived in Chicago for more than a decade, lived in San Diego a few years. Currently I live in a rural part of my state, but the city keeps creeping nearer, and I’m seeing farms in my county get bulldozed to put in yet another housing development “…starting from the low, low $600s!” of identical, oversized, characterless houses with 1/4 acres plots of land and no trees.

    I don’t want neighbors. I want trees, deer eating my hostas, raccoons trying to tear open my garbage bins, and bears being oversized raccoons. I want candles and laterns in every room because the power goes out every time there’s a thunderstorm, a woodburning stove that I can feed with trees that get blown down, and enough land that I can raise goats, chickens, and do a little dirt farming, in addition to my job. I want to opt out of this goddamn rat race, and just have a quiet place where I can offer people refuge from the bullshit that’s happening around us.


  • I think that the YPJ calls themselves something like democratic syndicalists? It’s close enough to anarchism that it’s the easiest way for most people to understand it. The way that they’re organizing their communities is pretty special, and I hope that they’re able to keep their regions autonomous and maintain their ideals.


  • A lot of the prices have corrected, just not all the way down to pre-pandemic level. I remember that primers were flat-out unavailable for a long time, then they were breaking $.10/ea for really cheap SPPs. 9mm ammo was >50cpr for a while, too. Both are down now, but not down to the $.03 for primers, or 20cpr for 9mm. Some of it is inflation in general. Some of it is that there are more people buying guns and ammo now, and there’s a pretty sharp lag between demand and production, since no one wants to build new factories for temporary demand spikes; increased demand is driving up prices. Also, fun fact, a lot of companies that make AR-15s are getting very close to insolvency right now. Each person only needs so many AR-15 variants, and the market is super-saturated. That’s less of an issue with ammo, since it’s a consumable, but it still worries the companies that would be building new plants.

    Yeah, I still wish ammo was a lot cheaper, but it is what it is. Instead of high-volume shooting, it means more time dry-firing.







  • […]if you’re male and your partner is female then I’m surprised that she has any interest in things like Thundercats or He-Man regardless of her age.

    First, I wouldn’t suggest assuming that.

    Second, the point isn’t that a partner has to like these things, but they do have to have some kind of awareness of them. You could substitute Smurfs, Family Ties, Michael Jackson’s breakout album Thriller, or watching the Challenger explode on live television because everyone in the school was watching Sally Ride go into space. Or George Bush’s famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” speech. There are a million events that are foundational to who you become. When the person that you’re dating–or in a relationship with–don’t share any of those cultural moments, it’s much more difficult to build a lasting relationship. Not impossible, but harder; that’s true with any cross-cultural relationship as well.

    Common interests are nice, yeah, but they aren’t everything. Shared values—and values are very strongly shaped by the things you were exposed to growing up–are probably the single biggest thing; if you don’t share core belief systems (morals, ethics, what is important, meaning, etc.), then it’s unlikely that a relationship can survive.