u/GuessWhoIsBackNow on joy vs drugs

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1iby7in/is_orgasm_the_best_feeling_a_human_can_get_or/m9mllgl/?context=3

Going on a good and challenging run, having sex with someone you love, accomplishing something you worked very hard to achieve, these generate these kind of, healthy, serene feelings of joy. It’s a really comfortable, enjoyable type of happiness that doesn’t feel straining or overly intense. Drugs cannot beat this.

What drugs can do, is artificially boost you far beyond that level of joy. Yet the joy feels different.

Even though it’s a far more intense kind of happiness, there’s always that lingering, creeping feeling in the back of your head. That little voice that says ’it’s going to stop working soon and then you’ll feel like shit’. ’The party’s over, all good things come to an end buddy’, ’you’re a useless, drug abusing piece of shit, why are you up at 6 a clock, you have work tomorrow!’

Neither U.S. Spy Nor KGB Foe Could Turn the Other

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-30-mn-3494-story.html?repost=true

Almost immediately, Platt found that despite his secret mission to recruit Vasilenko, he was being charmed by the Russian. “Halfway through the game I realized, I really like this guy,” he recalled in an interview.

Platt persisted, even though Vasilenko showed no interest in the American’s blandishments.

“I never stopped trying to recruit him,” sighed Platt. “But he never crossed the line.” The best evidence: Vasilenko never told Platt about Pelton, who wasn’t caught until he was compromised by a Soviet defector, KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, in 1985.

Instead, Vasilenko tried to turn the tables, asking Platt to work for the KGB, with dismal results. Platt recalls telling Vasilenko: “What in the hell can you offer me?”

Through their awkward espionage courtship, Platt and Vasilenko gradually discovered they were soul mates--streetwise risk-takers who shared a voracious love for the spy game and a disdain for the faceless bureaucrats back at headquarters.

Wheel of Fortune: How I prepared and how I did

https://www.kiratebbe.com/?page_id=31

I was a contestant on the 01/22/2025 episode (#8108) of Wheel of Fortune. Read more about my audition process, how I studied, a play-by-play of my game, and my retrospective of what preparation ended up mattering.

Ladies & Gentlemen...50 Years of SNL Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxYQd51Xuk

My Last Trial

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amanda-knox-murder-slander-trial/681457/

The lie that I was at the house when the crime occurred led to repeated instances of what is called forensic confirmation bias. The lie colored the collection and analysis of all the other evidence. It led police to ignore exonerating evidence, such as my lack of a motive or any history of violence or mental illness, my alibi, and the virtual impossibility of participating in such a brutal murder without leaving a single trace of DNA in the room. And it led them to distort and magnify the significance of trivial evidence, such as the fact that my DNA had been found in the bathroom where Guede attempted to clean off Meredith’s blood. Of course my DNA was found there—that was my bathroom too.

This phenomenon has been demonstrated by the cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror. In a 2006 study, he gave six fingerprint experts pairs of prints that, unbeknownst to them, they had previously judged in their own casework as matching or not. The experts were given some made-up context for each pair of prints. For the nonmatches, they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime; for the matches, they were told that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. This fictional information resulted in two-thirds of the experts changing some of their original judgments. Believing that a suspect confessed alters the supposed objectivity of scientific experts. Dror went on to show a similar effect in other forensic domains, including DNA analysis and forensic pathology.

[update 1/26/24: has been reversed] Obeying Trump order, Air Force will stop teaching recruits about Tuskegee Airmen

https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/trump-dei-tuskegee-airmen-banned-air-force-20054637.php

A video on the pioneering Black pilots, famed for their World War II exploits, was stripped from an Air Force basic training curriculum at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.

Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/life-lessons-from-the-first-half-century-of-my-career/#B6

Seek out honest feedback; it might be right.  Getting honest feedback is critical to success. You don’t want the first comments on your ideas to come from the decision makers. Remember that criticism of a project or idea is separate from criticism of you as a person. Offering suggestions is an endorsement that reviewers think your ideas are sufficiently interesting to be worthwhile of their time.

Listen hard to the feedback and never push back. At project retreats, the most important session is when we get reactions from outsiders, and we enforce the rule that no one argues with feedback.15

For papers, I send drafts to many people for feedback as early as possible. (I sent this article to a dozen.) I especially recruit reviewers who might not be fans, as they’ll give unvarnished comments.

Gretchen Ronnevik on refutation

https://x.com/garonnevik/status/1819090982429958284

In classical rhetoric, ad hominum attacks, and twisting the words of your opponent where they would say "but that's not what I said, nor how I meant it," is actually the weakest way to refute their arguments. It shows that you don't have a good case against their issue, so you resort to theatrics and distractions instead. 

The reason that you want your opponents to agree with your representation of them is that you are seeking to win them over and persuade them. If they feel they have been misrepresented, they will never be persuaded, they will just continue to clarify again and again, until they realize you have no intention of actually hearing them.

If your goal is to persuade and reason with people, it's all in how you handle your refutation. If you are seeking to be polarizing, or popular with your own friends, you will misrepresent and do ad hominum attacks. Your goal will show through in how you handle your refutation. 

SLS is still a national disgrace

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/

In 2019, NASA awarded Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower – a glorified steel truss far simpler than the booster catching towers SpaceX assembles in weeks – by March 2023 for a total cost of $383m. 

As of today, the OIG reports that the tower will cost $2.7b and is to be finished by September 2027, but more likely 2029. For reference, the Burj Khalifa is seven times taller, contains paying tenants, hotels, and shops, and was built in five years for just $1.5b. 

If you had $2.7b in 27 million $100 notes, and you piled them up, they would be so much taller than Bechtel’s non-existent launch tower that you’d need not one, not two, but 23 separate piles to exhaust the supply. Whoever wrote Bechtel’s side of the contract certainly earned their bonus. Whoever wrote NASA’s side should be made to paint the entire structure with a toothbrush – but I expect they’ve long since been on Bechtel’s payroll in some kind of advisory no-show job. 

Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds

https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-with-rss

With most online platforms, it’s becoming more and more difficult to view a feed of content that is not generated by an algorithm whose purpose it is to keep you engaged. Often, these algorithms are a black box where you don’t know why certain content is being promoted, let alone have full control over the content you consume. The incentives and needs of those controlling the algorithms are different from your own. Platforms may seek to politically influence you or sell you something you don’t need. Platforms may change hands, changing the influence they wish to have on their users. The good news is RSS and Atom offer a decentralized alternative.

Decentralization is becoming more popular as people are growing increasingly frustrated with centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Reddit. Protocols such as ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AtProto give people more control over their data, identity, and content feeds. Allowing people to consume the content that they want to consume, in a way that works for them.

CARROLL MOORE MAKEMSON

https://www.2bcliberty.org/our-blog/carroll-moore-makemson

Once upon a time, in Roanoke, Virginia, under the light of the Mill Mountain Star, Mary Carroll Moore was born to proud parents William and Mary. Carroll’s aunt and long-time fellow do-gooder and mischief-maker, Frances Eddy (Aunt Boo) attended Carroll’s birth, cementing their soul connection from the start. Carroll’s early childhood was spent in Pennsylvania, where her father attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Carroll encountered school for the first time. She never left education after that. 

AI Written, AI Read

https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

In Celebration of and in Thanksgiving for the Life of President James Carter - 1.9.25

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state.

If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.”

Maybe he is working off a thesis where red tape expands to consume the resources available to it (as measured in bureaucrats). But my impression is that the amount of red tape is determined more by things like:

— How likely is it that their decision will get challenged in court?

The day my bullies apologized: Race, the South and a reconciliation decades in the making

https://www.salon.com/2015/04/25/the_day_my_bullies_apologized_race_the_south_and_a_reconciliation_decades_in_the_making/

It all came back in vivid detail as Greg sat in his Subaru opening the mail, hundreds of miles and decades away from Georgia. There were other letters after David’s. One came from South Carolina, from Celia Harvey, whom Greg remembered as a cute, shy girl who had assiduously avoided him at school. “I’m writing this letter today to ask for your forgiveness,” she wrote. Another envelope came from Alabama, from Joseph Logan, who had been cocaptain of the Americus High football team. He had enclosed a four-hundred-word sketch about an assault on Greg that he had witnessed during their senior year. “I hope your reading it does not cause unpleasant memories about AHS,” he said in an accompanying note, “but I am sure it will.” The most anguished letter, postmarked in Florida, was from Deanie Dudley, one of the most popular girls in the senior class, the homecoming queen. Greg smiled at the thought of Deanie; he had nursed a secret crush on her in high school, something she’d have been mortified to know about at the time. Her apology was couched in religious terms and suggested a keen sense of guilt. “I will never again say, ‘How could the Holocaust have happened—how could all those Christian people in Poland and Germany have stood by and allowed it to happen?’ I was present with you over a long period of time, and I never once did one thing to comfort you or reach out to you. It was cruelty.”

u/Schattenspringer: Need a fake kid to piss off my wife

https://www.reddit.com/r/BORUpdates/comments/1hxajz9/need_a_fake_kid_to_piss_off_my_wife_short/

I can't decide what amused her more... the effort I put into the ruse or the fact that I ended up proving her right in the process.

Here a couple gems from wife after I told her the truth.

"Where the hell did you find that guy?" "I'm glad your son wasn't a serial killer." "I might have been mad if he came here looking for money." "Next time you can save $100 and just assume you're wrong." "You know I'm going to get you back, right?"

Smells Like American Spirit

https://slate.com/life/2024/12/work-jobs-sales-telemarketing-america.html

But in a very real sense, salesmen built the American economy and, by extension, America itself. In his book, Friedman notes that in the mid-19th century, more than half the U.S. population lived on a farm. Consumer markets were nonexistent. Salesmen went out and made them from scratch, a sale at a time, and not simply by bringing quality goods to eager buyers; they took them by their lapels and didn’t let go until they signed on the dotted line. Fortune magazine observed, in the mid-20th century, “Mass production would be a shadow of what it is today if it had waited for the consumer to make up his mind.”

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty

One of the reasons I have found so much success with The Odyssey, aside from the monsters and murder, is that the emerging generation of translators, including Dr. Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley have been transparent about their processes of bringing new life to canonical treasures like The Odyssey and Beowulf. In one lecture, Wilson explains that historically, translators would often intentionally foreignize their language to establish gravity and reverence for these works as products of “alien cultures,” a tradition the new generation of translators are choosing to break from because of the exclusionary effect it has on readers. Contemporary translators have shifted their mindset from one of preserving tradition, to one of illuminating narrative and purpose. Homer wanted his audiences to be both entertained and shepherded into the culture. Wilson seems to want that too, and so she gives us a deeply relatable, heartbreakingly honest, and eminently readable translation of The Odyssey. In allowing her understanding of the story to expand with time, she remains true to the story’s original purpose and relevant to a new generation of readers.