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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • First and most especially the single most important factor: b/c I thought it sounded cool. 😎

    Second, I googled “what does Zaddy mean” - oh wait that was earlier in the day, cough, I mean I googled “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, found that it was first aired in 1939, and so put that.

    Third, it is a popular meme format.

    But mostly b/c it sounded cool (yet is accurate).



  • But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

    The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

    An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.






  • Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

    Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

    I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

    Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.





  • Not just right now - it was probably always that way. At one point those nations needed STEM e.g. engineers to win those (cultural) wars, while now we are gearing up to use robots and AI instead.

    Even so, I think the loss of antibiotics is more of a short sighted side effect. It could need a century of development to overcome, but it is more profitable to sell pain relief right now so… it’s a problem for a future generation to have to deal with, so long as I get mine now, seems to be the way of thinking.