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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • On the night of August 8-9, the Manson family murdered everyone who was home at the Tate house - Sharon Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairdresser; Abigail Folger, a coffee heiress; her boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter; and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old visiting the property’s caretaker. This is the very definition of a murder. Therefore, no Jews were ever murdered because it didn’t happen exactly like what I’m arbitrarily declaring to be the very definition of a murder. There’s no legal definition of what constitutes a murder. There have never been any murders before or since.

    This is FACTS AND LOGIC.











  • There’s really not a lot more to it. I did it a really long time ago so I don’t remember everything, and some things may have changed, but it went kind of like this.

    First, you have to open an account at a broker. Let’s say you choose E*Trade. They’re pretty much all the same these days. Then you fund your account. You can transfer in $1000 or $5000. Once the account is open and the money is in it, you can buy and sell stocks using their app or web ui.

    With the basic account like this, you’re using your own money to buy and sell. If there’s a company ABC that’s trading for $10/share, you can buy 100 shares for $1000. Let’s say it goes up to $15 in a year. You can then sell it for a 50% profit (minus some small brokerage fees).

    A margin account is meant for people who have more experience in trading, but you indicate that by self-certifying. With a margin account, you can still trade in cash transactions, but you can also borrow money to trade with. If all of your cash is tied up in investments (for instance) you can use those investments as collateral to borrow funds to make additional trades. You’re paying interest on what you borrow, which will subtract from your profits. If your investments drop in value, you may be forced into a position where you get a margin call and are forced to sell off some stock or deposit more money.

    Anyway, at that point you can start to do things like shorting a stock. Shorting is where you think a share price is going to go down. Let’s say I’m not invested in ABC, but I think they’re going to go down. I can sell 100 shares of ABC at $10 per share by borrowing them from someone else’s account (the broker handles all of this). That gives me an immediate $1000 cash in my account, against a debt of $1000. If ABC goes down to $5, then I can close out the position by buying the 100 shares at $5, leaving me again a $500 profit. If on the other hand ABC goes up to $15, then I’ll close out the position and lose $500.

    With all of that said, you shouldn’t worry about investing like that if you’re not funding your 401k or retirement account first, and you should have an emergency fund put aside before that. If you have those covered, the best first step is to open the brokerage account and get into an index fund, like the Vanguard fund that tracks the S&P. After that, you can get to learning about what your next steps should be.




  • Coming from someone with an academic background in biology, the treknobabble in biology and medicine is pretty terrible.

    There’s a concept called the neural correlates of consciousness that basically states that every thought, memory, emotion, or other mental process has a direct correlation with the wiring and states of the cells in your brain. We can debate on whether or not to include other body states or gut bacteria, but the essence of the argument is that there is no “mind” as a phenomenon apart from the brain. This being a more serious sub, I’d argue that something like transporter technology implicitly assumes this, since you arrive with the same thoughts, memories, and emotional states as you had when you were decompiled.

    So you’d be able to say that the Vulcan amygdala becomes hypertrophic during pon farr due to signaling by some other physical brain structure and activates the limbic system which itself becomes hypersensitive to stimulation and so on. So you can govern your pointy-eared patient some space Xanax, which increases the effectiveness of Vulcan GABA, which calms them down. Or using your advanced knowledge of physiology that no doubt extends down to the level of quantum effects, find another avenue of intervention.

    Basically, I’m acknowledging your point - it’s a necessary complication that makes for interesting plot lines - but it really doesn’t line up with a justifiable in-universe answer.


  • I am using Voyager. It’s very far from a UX clone, unfortunately. When entering a link, for example, it simply creates the markdown for the link and leaves it to you to paste in the link on the text body, rather than popping up a text box and setting the body text itself. It frequently will lose the screen when scrolling down a list of posts, turning a solid black and requiring you to scroll back up to restore. When switching user accounts, rather than leaving you in the post you were reading, it drops you back into /all, which makes it difficult to impossible to juggle multiple accounts. I think k that’s also the one where the text you’re typing ends up underneath the visible part of the text box, making you have to scroll to see what you’re typing.

    I’m also using Avelon, which has similar but not identical issues. I’m also using Memmy and Mlem, which get further away from a mature product, and I’ve tried Lemmios, Thunder, and that one whose icon was a rocket ship. Each one has bugs. No one has a great search function, no one lets you browse topics by instance (that I’ve been able to find), only a handful allow you to block instances and even blocking a topic takes three or four clicks in some clients. I also think there’s a performance falloff with the number of blocks in several of them.

    And the reason I don’t just browse local or subscribed is that there’s simply not enough traffic.

    I’m not slamming the devs here. Software is hard. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. UX can be very hard, especially if you’re letting the bar be set by AB and Apollo. One of them has a good text recovery tool that takes you back to the thread you were replying to, but others don’t even let you copy text from the post you’re replying to.

    Honestly, I think Christian Selig should teach a master class on app development. Overcast is another one where a single developer writes a better app than most corporate teams (that’s still just the one person, right?). It can be done, and I’m sure it will be done. It’s just not quite there yet.


  • seven year itch

    Wow - I had never put those two together before.

    Anyway, Memory Alpja states that intensive meditation is also used to alleviate the problems associated with pon farr.

    What doesn’t make in-universe sense to me is that the condition comes from a neurochemical cascade. Even in our time, we recognize many of these conditions and have targeted drugs and therapies for them. Surely a society that is medically and technologically more advanced than ours by orders of magnitude would be able to simply treat the condition.

    As a plot point it makes sense, and Roddenberry both personally and as a person of his time saw things like brain processes as strange and mysterious. It allowed them to play with the still evolving character of Spock and with Vulcans in general. It allowed them to do that “put a human condition into an alien and turn it up to 11” kind of thing they loved so much. The same would go for Lon Suder, of course.

    They just get really hand-wavey around medical questions.


  • For me, a queer atheist with a brown Jewish partner, there’s no question about me voting for Biden. It doesn’t matter mathematically because I live in a dark blue district in a dark blue state, but I’m going to cast that vote. I also recognize that the choice is between an elderly conservative with outdated ideas and the possible end of American democracy.

    The reason why I think we are well and truly fucked is that our standard bearer is among the most milquetoast presidential office holders since Bush I. Neither the democrats nor the press has any idea how to deal with the existential crisis we are facing. Trump had his followers chanting “lock her up” against his political opponent. Biden is keeping the dignity of the office of the president.

    I don’t know if there’s a better tactic, but people making millions of dollars as political consultants have had since 2015 to come up with a counter strategy, and this is the best they’ve given us. They do not know how to deal with a successful fascist populist.