Intentional exercise is important for long term health. This can be as simple as frequently walking or biking, or as complex as any pre-programmed, celebrity trainer promoted fitness program. Frequency and consistentecy are likely far more important than what you actually do.

Being ripped and getting the best physique you can is something different. When taken to the extreme, it can even be detrimental emotionally and physically. At best, if being in that kind of shape is meaningful and fulfilling to you, there’s nothing wrong with the pursuit, but it’s not a moral failing to enjoy food and relaxation to the point of having a dad bod.

One of the better sentiments that came out of the functional fitness craze that eventually spawned Crossfit was “I want to walk to the mailbox on the day I die”. Unless fitness, bodybuilding, or competition are a passion of yours, that’s what it should be about: Maintaining your strength and mobility over time to make life more enjoyable and preserve your independence as much as possible.

It’s not about your physique. It’s about being able to handle a hike in the woods when the opportunity presents itself. Or to be able to mow your lawn without feeling drained for the rest of the day. Having energy left over to be present with your partner and/or kids when you get home from work. Even being able to a play a pick-up game here and there without feeling prematurely old.

It’s a shame that this idea is left by the wayside in favor of more extreme goals and a slew of one size fits all shredded abs programs that most people don’t really want or need.

We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.

The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.

You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?

This is a wild-ass guess, as I’m no religious scholar, but Paragone’s profile pic appears to be a statue of The Buddha, the emoji may represent the way Buddhists hold their hands together when bowing.

Daily: Wallet, phone, house key with folding reading glasses and pill container on the chain, car key (separate because I don’t like the way the key chain brushes my knee while I drive with everything attached), a couple of those plastic flossers in a baggy, lens wipes.

Often but not quite daily: “AAA” sized penlight, small pocket knife w/ screwdriver and scissors, and multipliers.

A four year degree, for the most part, proves you can hand in coursework and pass tests. It does not demonstrate the ability to apply any of that education in the real world, nor does it demonstrate any ability to acquire and apply new knowledge outside of a classroom setting.

When you look at careers where the application of knowledge and critical thinking are vital to the work, all of them tend to have some kind of post-graduate schooling or follow-on apprenticeship where one works under an experienced professional, and even people in those fields can be pretty fucking stupid when it comes to things outside of their specialty…

I believe this is what the c-suite types are referring to as “innovation”.

What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

Pre-fucking-cisely.

Do you have to pay extra to get someone to sit on your sandwich like that…?

I’m not sure how I missed this. It’s so obvious when you think about it!

I chuckled a little.

I took it as her being aggressively kinky and provocative to tease and embarrass her uptight partner, nothing says one way or the other as to if she’s really into that sort of thing or just messing with him since he clearly wouldn’t go through with it, and the punchline being his flustered and mortified reaction rather than just the sexual innuendo.

But the artist wasn’t shy about playing up the horniness and titillation either.

However, that’s not the only way to look at it, and it’s not like we’re dealing with Shakespeare here.

Nothing can be maintained without at least some of the skills and knowledge that built it. Even something like generative AI like LLMs will eventually break down in some manner. Its just what happens with complex systems, be they physical or digital.

After that happens, we’ll be forced to learn either to fix the thing, or how to do without the thing. How painful that learning process is will depend upon how essential that thing is to our lives.

If AI goes away in a few years, barely a blip.

If AI goes away after a few decades, and we’ve allowed much of our accumulated knowledge to atrophy… It’s a crisis.

It’s like an expansion pack for flat earthers.

Why should the regulation allow for more surveillance of users and data collection instead of outlawing the practices and algorithms that lead to many of these issues on the first place?

They’ve been trying to tie devices to identities for years now, and doing so allows them greater leeway to fuck with people’s heads, to spread propaganda more effectively, and to target dissent against themselves and their allies. This doesn’t protect people from having their mental illnesses exacerbated, it just allows their disfunctions to be shaped in the direction tech billionaires want them to be.

In my opinion, anything that uses an algorithm to drive engagement by presenting material designed to play on the emotions of the user should be outlawed outright. Video ads and paid content should be identified with title cards at the begining and end. Images and posts should be marked with headers and footers that make it clear this is paid content.

If the user decides to subscribe or block certain content, that’s the user’s choice. But the timeline should always be based on time and date or activity and never influenced by paid advertisements or engagement.

And that’s the bare minimum. I still consider that somewhat risky to interact with. If I had my druthers Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, and the rest would all be shuttered and taken offline next week.

It’s as if being able to say dumb shit like this without feeling self-conscious demonstrates that your thinking has a sort of ethical ambiguity about it that means you’ll go along with whatever to make the shareholders and your fellow c-suite drones more money. It also seems like it could be sort of a personal thought-terminating cliche, as in, “I’m not going to think too hard about the effects of the next round of layoffs, because a more efficient company will make more progress, and progress is moving forward.”

It’s… Not awful. Better than it looks in this picture.

It’s cooked in large quantities, and tastes like it. Seasonings are mild, but present. Lot of frozen premade stuff, lot of Sysco gallon cans of this or that. No such thing as a rare steak unless someone fucks up, per food safety guidelines.

It’s prepared in ways that don’t require a lot of attention to be paid to it, and no one is going to plate it like a chef, so presentation suffers. While it’s no gourmet treat, it’s generally palatable, and still better than some people get on the outside.

That said, surf and turf nights are common at a lot of overseas bases and ships during peacetime, not just as a last meal before war. Generally, stuff like an extra day off, time with family, or back in the day, extra phone calls would be what you’d see before heading out to anything long and dangerous. Even in some war zones, major operating bases and large ships would still have a taco Tuesday or a steak and lobster Friday to keep morale up. Not everyone has to deal with MRE’s and field kitchens.

Yup.

There won’t be a front line or pitched battles like people are fantasizing about. Something will kick it off, maybe a riot, an assassination, or maybe an opposition leader gets life in prison or even executed on fabricated treason charges and people start shooting/bombing about it. Then there will be a round up of “terrorists” and probably some lynchings that go unpunished after all the current surveillance tech out there miraculously “fails”, all followed by a protracted insurgency as a response to these acts.

I, for one, welcome our new rational and reality-based overlords…

Is culture fit not being weird, or is not having culture fit just resistance to working yourself to death?

Excluding a few examples like frequently used gym weights, common fastener sizes, and short distances, I still have to do rough conversions in my head to have an idea of what a metric measurement is, so I guess I’d say imperial.

But I wouldn’t be upset if the US converted to metric.

I’ve got a foot in both worlds, I have an IT education but have worked in or around skilled labor most of my adult life. Part of my current job even deals with training and evaluating people doing skilled labor.

In my experience, two kinds of people tend to do well enough to be described as thriving. Those who’ve worked with their hands before, either professionally or as a hobby, and those who approach the job with some humility and a mindset of wanting to learn and perfect a craft, similar to many artists.

It doesn’t matter what your background is, white collar, blue collar, no collar, if you’re overconfident and think a trade is going to be easy because you don’t respect the mental and the physical aspects of the job, you’re going to have a bad time.