
b_b's comments
b_b  ·  302 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Headed North

You pee. But I've never seen it spelled phonetically before, and it's really funny. People from that place are referred to as Yoopers.

psychoticmilkman  ·  302 days ago  ·  link  ·  

But is does just mean the Upper Peninsula, right? I had no idea locals had a pronunciation for the acronym.

thenewgreen  ·  302 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It does.

Totally agree with other comments here that consumables are the way to go. Just speaking for myself (and that may very obviously have nothing to do with whomever you're buying a gift for), I like to receive things to eat or drink more than anything else. A bottle of champagne, for example, is one of my favorite gifts, and I will never tire of it, yet my wife struggles to find "the prefect present" for me each birthday. Sometimes she succeeds, as in the time she bought me new binoculars, but in the end, I'm happy with a meal, a baked good from some specialty shop, or booze of almost any variety. I think this is such a perfect gift because not only do I like the thing itself, but I also rarely want more stuff. Giving someone stuff that they then have to find a place for, take care of, etc, can be kind of a dick move.

All that said, I'm currently buying my wife a V60 Polestar in the classic Polestar blue, because it's her favorite car. Nice and tasteful, sure. Inexpensive? Um....

WanderingEng  ·  304 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll caution against food or alcohol unless you know the person enjoys food and alcohol in the context of what you're gifting. Do I like cookies? You bet! Put a dozen cookies in front of me and I'll eat them all in the next hour. Do I want a dozen cookies? I do not. Gifting me cookies would annoy me. Work likes to do food rewards. Company gets some award? Pizza party! This week it was National Hot Dog Day. I enjoy all of that but don't actually want it because screwing up my diet makes me feel like trash, yet turning them down is seen as rude or anti social.

b_b  ·  411 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ‘I really don’t know how Zuckerberg and co sleep at night’

Probably on a really expensive bed. His project to bring "the internet" to poor people by basically just giving them facebook for free seems to be working really well, actually. The trouble is we sort of expect him to give a fuck what happens on FB. He doesn't. He will never. It isn't in his interest. His interest is in ensuring that the most people are on for the most amount of time. It's up to us to stop that. And I don't mean by deleting, noble of an idea as that might be. I mean there has to be consequences for the company's behavior. I would get attacked by a lot of libs for my thoughts on this topic, but I think the time for the days of providers not being responsible for content is past. AT&T isn't responsible for what you say on the telephone, because AT&T provides a utility. Unless or until FB is deemed to be a utility, they should be held to account for the havoc they cause globally. I don't know what that looks like, but clearly the status quo isn't working.

tacocat  ·  411 days ago  ·  link  ·  

rrrrr  ·  383 days ago  ·  link  ·  


Holding websites responsible for what users post is a hard thing to implement without undesirable side-effects:

b_b  ·  383 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's very true, but not holding them accountable clearly also has undesirable side effects. Good policy would at least attempt to balance the concerns on both sides.

kantos  ·  411 days ago  ·  link  ·  


So what you're advocating is for utilities to be held liable for their customers' use of their product? Or held liable for the what their customers' actions are as a result of the utilities' purpose?

I can understand the logic behind your AT&T example - some dumb robbers using AT&T phones to coordinate a heist won't come back to AT&T, especially since they can help provide records in court - not so much how it extends to Fb, re: havoc.

Or I'm completely missing your point.

b_b  ·  410 days ago  ·  link  ·  


No quite the opposite. Utilities are not held responsible for their users' behavior specifically because they're public utilities, and are therefore subject to extreme regulatory constraints.

On the other hand if I own a house and my tenant, without my knowledge, is selling drugs out of the house, then the government can hold me liable to some extent, depending on the circumstances. My house is not public, and I am responsible for what people do in it.

FB, Google, Twitter, et al. want it both ways. They want no regulatory oversight, and they want to never be held accountable for what is done with their products. I happen to find that disagreeable.

kantos  ·  409 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Understood, thanks for the explanation.

What about super-human ability to come up with plausible and believable reasons why you really wanted to be at the cocktail party but had to cancel at the last minute? That's tech I'd invest in.

mk  ·  530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

  Output: My apologies. To best enjoy your cocktail party, I must not attend it.
Devac  ·  529 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's called prolog.

?- Are you still coming to the party?



b_b  ·  544 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 22, 2017

No one biting today, huh? I thought the day before Thanksgiving was supposed to be the biggest bar day.

_refugee_  ·  543 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I checked for it earlier, but it wasn't yet up. Then by the time it was up I waffled on posting because my long-planned first humblebrag and short-planned grievous injury seemed not important enough.

Then I came back for time the third, though.

ButterflyEffect  ·  544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Tonight, tonight...

Dala  ·  544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm at work, and I cannot wait for it to be over. I neeeeeeed these next four days off.

b_b  ·  569 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: CANADA BANS SOYLENT

    The fat content can make up no more than 35 per cent of the total energy it provides, unless it is meant to be a replacement for all daily meals, in which case the maximum is 30 per cent.

Whether or not Soylent should be considered food is beyond me, but the above sentence is hilarious considering that the fat calorie content of Milk--the thing that every mammal can be and is sustained by--is almost 50%. Our understanding of fat is seriously perverse and outdated.

Odder  ·  569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Milk is also not a meal replacement, and I'd hazard that few if any people would recommend an all-milk diet. That would probably kill you.

mk  ·  569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I bet you could live a long time on milk alone. I recall learning about some nomads that live on milk and blood, of camels, I think, for several months at a time. Milk can build mammals.

tacocat  ·  569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Plenty of people are on a 100% milk diet. They're just all babies.

b_b  ·  609 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How the Democrats won the presidency

Not sure who really won, but the American people sure were the real losers. I've had a distaste for Republicans and a begrudging alliance with Democrats for a long time, but this past year has shown that both are far worse than I ever imagined. Liberals throw hissy fits every time anyone says anything remotely controversial, and they are 100x easier to bait into going into a screaming, blinding rage than the President. And they're just as dumb. As recently as early 2016, Bernie Sanders was giving stump speeches to the effect that low wage, low skill immigration was killing America (and he was cheered and applauded for it--he always clained it was a policy that only the Kochs are pushing for). Now immigrants are so fetishized by the Left that if you say an immigrant (any immigrant) doesn't have a God given natural right to work and live in the US in perpetuity you're basically a slave master. Ann Coulter opens her dumb, irrelevant cunt mouth and the Times has to cover it for like three weeks so that all the Liberals can have a group cry. It's embarrassing. And you can't even call Ann Coulter a dumb, irrelevant. cunt anymore without being a misogynist.

I often feel like the last man on Earth who easily gets along with people regardless of their political stripes. As much as I care about certain policies, I'm under no impression that your preferred marginal tax rates are a character trait. Trump will probably screw over the GOP. That much has seemed obvious from day 1 (or at least from when he told all the Christians how much he loves "two Corinthians"). But that sure as shit doesn't mean anyone won. This is war. There are no winners; only degrees of loser.

And so long as we are stuck with a voting system that weighs geography over population, we're going to have to compromise. And part of compromising is to stop fucking demonizing everyone for everything that you don't agree with. The biggest problem we all face (from my white, male privileged POV) is the environment (climate change, clean and abundant water, etc.). There was a time in America when the environment wasn't such a big partisan question. We can get there again, but not if every time someone says something that someone else could possibly construe as mean we have a temper tantrum. Life is hard. Fuck me, I sound more and more like a Republican every day. 15 year old me might travel into the future to kill me soon. If you don't hear from me, that's probably what happened.

b_b  ·  621 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 6, 2017

If November's election didn't expose my fair state as being occupied by the world's biggest morons, I found something the other day that did:

That's a truck sporting a sticker of a windmill crossed out, if you can't tell. We've gone from being indifferent to the environment to being actively hostile to it. Do these people not know that they hunt and fish in the environment?

Not pictured but present: an NRA sticker and a PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals sticker.

Edit: no idea what that imgur image won't embed. Any suggestions?

oyster  ·  620 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm almost positive some people think these things cause cancer. Billy Jr probably got oral cancer from the chewing tobacco and they're blaming the windmills. Yup, I'm not even sure if that actually makes the sticker better or worse.

user-inactivated  ·  621 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Add .jpg to the end of the url.

b_b  ·  621 days ago  ·  link  ·  


b_b  ·  626 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Robert Mueller Eliminates Trump’s Trump Card

Interesting short piece about self-pardoning:

The most interesting aspect is that Trump certainly would try to pardon himself, and it would be up to the Supreme Court to decide if that is legal. If they did, it would of course be up to the armed forces to enforce the ruling if the President didn't comply. Also, there's the business that the President can't pardon anyone from impeachment, meaning that if he did pardon himself, he'd be already admitting to a crime which Congress could then pursue (lol), since he'd have to say what he's pardoning himself from.

Trump was tweeting about Schneiderman this morning, so you know he's sweating this one.

am_Unition  ·  625 days ago  ·  link  ·  


Do you remember what it said? It seems to be gone now. I couldn't find it yesterday evening either.

b_b  ·  625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Something like "I wonder what color eyeliner worst AG in America Schneiderman is wearing today"

For real

am_Unition  ·  625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Better than I imagined, and I'm an imaginative one.

b_b  ·  780 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mike Flynn Offers to Testify in Exchange for Immunity
am_Unition  ·  780 days ago  ·  link  ·  

edit: that little twinge in his face that the video ends on is his subconscious trying to escape

So he's right about himself! This also implies that his crimes are relatively minor in comparison to those that his testimony speaks to.


^^^ mfw

b_b  ·  809 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking

I would say that Chaffetz even mentioning that Sessions should recuse himself is shocking, considering how low they've set the bar.

I'm sure it's perjury by the letter of the law, but give the guy a break--it's not like he lied about getting his dick sucked or anything. It's only national security.

ThatFanficGuy  ·  808 days ago  ·  link  ·  
ThatFanficGuy  ·  809 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cocksucking is a serious business. These guys seem to know this well.

am_Unition  ·  809 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So we agree that morality can be relative, but not (this) selective.

b_b  ·  845 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Trump's Staff Is Lying

Spicer's presser reminded a lot of the early days of the Iraq war when Hussein's information minister was on TV saying that the Republican Guard was on the verge of victory, as CNN was showing US troops on the outskirts of Baghdad marching toward the city center. It was a lie of such ridiculous proportions that you got the sense watching it that truth or untruth wasn't really the point of the press conference.

Similarly, Trump's claim about the inauguration was so farcical that you got the sense that the administration was really trying to cultivate a relationship with the truth. There may have been a component of Trump testing Spicer's loyalty, but I think that was secondary to intentionally picking a fight with "the media" writ large. A strongman, a man trying to build a personality cult, needs a foil. Usually it's easy, because America is the default foil for strongmen the world over. Trump is in the position of being in the belly of the beast, so his foil has to be some other subversive element. The media is a good one, because (a) they write bad things about him that just happen to be "true", and (b) his constituency is already distrustful of them. In that sense they're perfect. And how did the administration react? They threatened to cut off access to reporters who questions them.

That's diabolically brilliant. When they announced that they might move the press corps form the West Wing, everyone shit a brick. They realized they couldn't do it without cause. So they went out and sewed the seeds. Spicer cam out a day later and was clear-eyed and friendly. Do we not also think that was calculated? Of course it was. Now he can say he's been trying to be the good guy, but you reporters just won't quit. Give it two more weeks. They'll come up with another whopper to top this one. And if you think Chuck Todd was mean to Conway about lying about inauguration attendance, just wait until they lie about something that matters. Real reporters will flip out, and it will be the perfect time to cut them out of the deal.

Existentialist  ·  844 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I really think Trump's pouty because his ego was hurt. I don't think there's anything else to it.

kleinbl00  ·  845 days ago  ·  link  ·  

b_b  ·  1021 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Good bye stinker


b_b  ·  1034 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists

Bad economics is the driver of most of these problems. When incentives are set up so that if you fudge results, you're more likely to get funded, then fudging results is going to happen. A lot. Hence the "reproducibility" problem.

Twice in a row I've had grants that got pretty good scores on round one only to be killed on round two (after, you know, "fixing" the grant they way they suggest). In my latest run in with the NIH, our scores from two of three reviewers got markedly better on round two, and the third guy gave us all 7s, after more like 4s and 5s on round 1. No explanation necessary. No recourse. That's just NIH for you. Peer review is a scam.

I were to get a stab at fixing NIH's funding problem, it would be to do what they did in Nigeria with their entrepreneurship grants. Namely, take the top 50% and put them in a lottery. No more study sections. No more grants only going to people who already have grants. No more fretting about getting another grant the minute you get the first one funded. Just luck of the draw if you meet the basic requirements. Easy.

b_b  ·  1040 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Show Hubski: Forever Labs

It is my dream to ensure that the science that I've done for the last decade hasn't been done in vane. Most NIH sponsored research is completely divorced from health, and I would consider my life an abject failure if I killed countless rats and a not insignificant number if monkeys without improving the human condition. We will succeed, because the force of will of the people on the team will make sure of that.