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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • In America (and i fear this has spread to other countries), people like Mary Pride have pushed for homeschooling in addition to basically starting the quiverful movement.

    The idea is, you keep kids out of school so they are only allowed to learn your far right views, and you have as many kids as possible so you can 1) force the woman to stay at home and 2) have older kids forced to parent and teach younger kids.

    You then involve the kids in politics as early as possible so by the time they are adults, they have already made inroads to working with far right politicians.

    Some of those kids end up a certain version of smart, but the priorities are different. They might heavily focus on speech debate, both from a religious and a political point of view. On the “good” end of the spectrum, the kids end up truly charismatic and persuasive, and on the “bad” end, it’s basically tiny ben shapiros who just gish gallop you at any chance they get.

    Often, but not always, girls are completely neglected since “they only need to learn how to run a home”. Oftentimes kids are abused, and homeschooling is a way to hide that from authorities.

    To contrast with all of this, I think there situations where we should be more flexible with homeschooling. If a parent has expertise in a topic, they should be able to cover like a couple classes or something. I knew homeschooling kids who came to public school for a class or two, but I didn’t know any kids who were homeschooling for a class or two.

    People in this thread are saying it’s dumb to think you can teach better than a teacher, but if it’s between 1:1 tutoring and being in a class of 30, you have a big step up.

    Personally, I found math classes trivially easy basically up until i was like 17. Math classes till then mostly just focused on teaching how to accurately and repeatably do all the things that calculators do perfectly. I could rant about how math is taught a lot, but I won’t. If I had 1 on 1 teaching on a more diverse range of math topics, I could have learned way more. We should be helping parents/kids do that if they can.




  • Strongly agree. Everyone has a perspective, and even exclusively presenting objective facts will still be biased due to what is included and what is excluded.

    As an example of someone who handles this well, I’d recommend Layne Norton. He’s a fitness/physiology/diet communicator. He has a PhD in it (which by itself doesnt prove much), but he is very careful in every video to only make supported claims, and he clearly states when he is only giving opinion.

    For example, he will point that understanding a single mechanism doesnt tell you the whole story, so you need randomized, doubled blind, placebo controlled human trials (and preferably many), to really understand something.

    That’s something that so many influencers in that field get wrong. They’ll talk about a single study that looked at the effects of a plant on a certain metabolic pathway in a petri dish, and use that to recommend people take it as a supplement. This ignores the obvious possibility that in vivo results wouldn’t match in vitro, and that the pathway they discovered isnt completely overshadowed by a different pathway with the opposite effect.

    He has a few biases/conflicts of interest, which are explicitly mentioned in pretty much every video: he sells supplements, he invests in a protein bar company, and his PhD research was funded by the beef and dairy industries.


  • Yeah, this is really the answer. Over and over and over again, it’s clear that the policy of his regime has always been to “flood the zone”.

    Every single week, they do something unique and so heinous that it would have ended any prior administration. They can keep things from sticking by just continuing to do stuff like that and get popular focus on a new thing. The people that should be able to keep them accountable legally are similarly overwhelmed.

    Greenland was probably never a serious thing for the regime, it just had to serve a purpose of keeping their opponents busy. It’s the political equivalent of a gish gallop.





  • The problem is that French food in the Anglosphere has literally been the fancy food since 1066. That’s why English has 2 words for every meat: the germanic peasant word and the french nobleman’s culinary word (cow-beef, chicken-poultry, deer-venison, sheep-mutton, swine-pork, etc).

    Being the default “fancy” food is going to do damage to any cuisine as the purpose becomes more about fanciness than tasting good or being what people from the place actually eat.

    For another example, look at American Italian food. In a lot of small towns, Italian restaurants are the de facto fancy restaurant . It’s basically made it so that Italian restaurants in much of the US are either way too expensive and fancy or they’ve gone the opposite route and just overcharge for really basic pasta with sauce (olive garden).


  • If you don’t like truffle oil, you probably just don’t like truffle, and that’s fine. Like the other commenter said, it’s literally just the same compound that’s been synthesized.

    2,4-Dithiapentane

    Real truffles obviously have some other flavoring compounds in there, but like vanilla vs vanilin, you’d probably have a hard time distinguishing between them in a dish in a blind taste test.

    I have eaten shaved truffles, and even that’s really a gamble. The problem is that they aren’t really good until they are “ripe”, but once you dig them up, i don’t think they ripen any more. There’s also a big counterfeit problem since many species look similar. I’ve had good truffles, and I’ve had truffles that literally just taste like nothing.





  • Seconding cooking for sure. You have to eat, so you might as well find a way to enjoy it, save money, and stay healthy in the process.

    Repairing things. Electronics, clothes, furniture, it doesn’t matter what, but try to learn how to repair stuff. It eventually encourages you to buy less, but higher quality items. Also everyone likes if you fix their favorite thing.

    Organizing people. This isnt often treated as a skill, but it really is. You’ll find over time that in your group of friends, someone is always the person to try to put together the next activity. Try to be that person. That’s super useful in all parts of life. Keep in mind that people will end up being lazy and expecting you to keep doing the work, but try not to take it personally.




  • Anyone replying “stretching” is basing their response on grade school gym class, not science.

    Studies have not shown that stretching has a positive impact on injury prevention, and this has been widely known in the literature for over 20 years. Stretching can improve performance in some sports like gymnastics where increased flexibility is needed, but that is unrelated to injury.

    Stretching has a negative effect on performance in other cases because it actually decreases muscle force generation.

    Think about it, would you think that loosening all the belts on a machine would automatically make it less likely to break down?

    So what does prevent injury?

    • Good warm-ups. Walk before you jog before you run. Lift an unloaded barbell before a loaded one, etc.
    • Strength. A joint surrounded by muscle is a stable joint. That means doing exercises that strengthen all the muscles, including minor ones. It’s part of why most people who know what they are talking about will try to get you to do compound lifts with free weights over single joint exercises on machines.
    • periodization/progressive overload. Basically slowly building intensity and then backing off to recuperate.