I’d say they’re tight, not loose.

Ronaldo’s ego is incredible, and he’s almost always looking out for himself in everything he does. But, you can’t deny that he’s one of the best ever players. And his charisma means he’s a great choice for something like this where he has to perform and interact with all the “scientists”. Someone like Messi could do the same kinds of moves, but he wouldn’t be able to chat with the presenters and “scientists” between events in a natural way. (P.S. I love that they got someone named Ronald to be the ordinary guy who couldn’t do anything useful, that was just funny.)

I also think Ronaldo genuinely cares about all the biomechanics and all that, as long as it’s something that applies to him, and that he could use to make himself better. A lot of other players just play on instinct and don’t want to have to think about it.

Hearing is definitely part of it, but I imagine it’s only hearing the sound of the ball being kicked. After that it’s going to be far too quiet to hear until it gets close, and he’s obviously reacting long before that. Maybe hearing helps him adjust in the last tenth of a second, but he’s not hearing the ball’s entire flight.

As for the body mechanics of a pitch or a kick, it is amazing. Like, a proper powerful punch involves leg muscles, hip muscles, waist muscles, chest muscles, and only then do you start to get to the arms. For most of us, the best way to realize how coordinated everything has to be is to try to do something with your wrong arm/leg. Everything that flows naturally on your strong side is just completely wrong on your weak side.

What’s amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.

There’s a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.

https://youtu.be/0k2ey_okQ4E?t=1255

They’d die with the slaves too.

The Earth is the only place where humans can live. A tiny number of humans can just barely live in orbit really near the earth as long as people on the earth keep spending millions to regularly send up supplies.

Problems that would have to be solved before humans could live somewhere else:

• Growing food
• Getting water
• Producing oxygen and getting rid of CO2
• Surviving radiation
• Surviving in a different gravity
• Repairing anything
• Manufacturing anything

Growing food is the obvious one. Even on Earth at 1G with ideal sunlight and low radiation, there has never been a successful closed biosphere. Surely you’d have to perfect closed biospheres on Earth before trying anything outside of earth, and then hope nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong with the biosphere experiments on Earth they just open the door (or more often cheat and pretend it’s still working while sneaking in food / oxygen from outside). And, even if you could get a closed biosphere to work, it would be the blandest vegan diet imaginable. To have any variety in your diet you’d need a massive, complex biosphere.

Water, oxygen and CO2 it’s the same problem. Sure, we have an idea of how to recycle them in theory. But, in practice it’s much more difficult. On the ISS they recycle about 80% of the water. Seems pretty good, but that means they still need deliveries of 6000 to 9000L of water per year, and that water is used for oxygen. On Earth, you can’t lose water. The worst that can happen is that it escapes into the atmosphere where the atmosphere and gravity trap it, and it eventually returns to the ground in the form of rain. On Saturn or Jupiter water released into the atmosphere wouldn’t escape into space – but humans couldn’t live on Saturn or Jupiter. Everywhere else the atmosphere is to thin or too hot, or the gravity is too weak to prevent water from escaping. So, even if you could get orders of magnitude more efficient at recycling water, and almost never have leaks, eventually you’d need a resupply.

Radiation is another huge one. The earth is protected by its magnetic field and thick atmosphere. Astronauts in the ISS are still mostly protected by that field because they’re orbiting close enough, but they lose the protection of the atmosphere. 1 week on the ISS is like 1 year of background radiation on Earth. And, that’s your best case. Go anywhere else and you will be cooked by radiation. The astronauts who did a quick 1 week jaunt to the moon were probably OK, but for actually living elsewhere you’d need a lot more protection. Maybe you could do that if you lived underground, but say goodbye to the idea of living in a dome or something.

Then there’s gravity. Humans evolved to live in 1G. Astronauts who spend even just a few months in zero G often have permanent problems as a result. And, that’s fully grown adults whose bodies were formed in 1G environments. Who knows what would happen in childbirth, or to a baby’s development in anything other than 1G.

Finally, repairing and manufacturing. The modern world is very specialized, and often repair parts are made in a factory on the other side of the world. Electronics fail, and they’d fail a lot more in space where they’d be exposed to radiation. You could probably make a small facility in space that could repair basic electronics, but if a computer chip failed, there’s no way you could make a semiconductor fab on another planet. Even on Earth it’s a thing so specialized that it’s only done in a handful of countries. 3d printing is cool and all, but it is extremely limited. Even the finest setting on the most advanced machine is very coarse compared to what can be done in specialized factories. You’re also very limited in the kind of “filament” you use. Even if you use a metal filament, you can’t make something much more complex than a wrench, and that wrench wouldn’t even be like a good wrench which is made from heat-treated steel. So, you couldn’t really live a modern life on another planet, but you also couldn’t live a 17th century life where windmills were the most advanced devices around, because you wouldn’t have wind, or flowing water, or trees to built things with, or anything else.

If humans really wanted to be a multiplanetary species, and were willing to spend absurd sums of money over decades to support a base on another planet while it got up to speed, then eventually, it might be more-or-less sustainable, as long as it had the ability to capture asteroids and so-on. Even then, life there would probably suck compared to life on Earth. Even compared to an earth ravaged by wars, climate change, etc.

We have the Nazi bar owned by the Nazi who proudly put the Nazi flag outside and kicks anybody out who insults Nazis, but where a lot of non-Nazis still hang out because it was the busiest, best place before the Nazis took over: Twitter.

We have the soulless corporate bar run by a guy who installed cameras everywhere in the bar, in every booth, every bathroom stall, where every 5 minutes the music is interrupted by an ad, and where the exit door shut has been welded shut: Threads.

We have bar started by the guy who initially owned the Nazi bar, but who has since been kicked out, that has recently accepted a major funding round from TESCREAL fascists, but where the vibe, so far, is pretty chill, where they promise that eventually you’ll be able to wander to nearby bars that all share the same menu, but where that promise is always some vague time in the future: Bluesky.

We have the series of no-name pubs that don’t show up on any maps, some run out of people’s houses, some even run from studio apartments, some run out of mental institutions, where you can leave any time you want and take your friends with you, where it’s a bit of a free-for-all, and if you want a round of drinks you have to chase down the busy publican and ask what’s available, and where you might be asked for help pouring drinks: Mastodon.

It’s great to see that years after the Nazis took over, some people are finally choosing to stop going to the Nazi bar. It makes you wonder why they stayed so long though. But, I’m not as impressed with where they’re choosing to go instead.

It’s worse than that.

Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.

https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901

Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.

A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:

Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?

tract

rap

various

Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren’t that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.

• Feeding them probably wasn’t too expensive if you had a place they could just graze. Even if you didn’t own a farm, there were probably still wild / common areas where animals could graze.
• Shoeing / vet care probably wasn’t as expensive when horses were the main means of transportation, so vets and smiths were everywhere
• In a rural area, you probably already had a barn / stable / shack that you could use to provide the horse with shelter, so it didn’t need its own additional building. If you did need to build a structure, land was cheap and so it was only the cost of labor you had to worry about.
• Cleaning out the horse poop was a chore, but it could be used as fertilizer, so it wasn’t just something you had to dispose of
• You’d still need saddles, stirrups, reins, etc. But, that was made from leather and metal and would probably last decades with some basic maintenance
• Since horses were, ahem, workhorses, not race horses or display horses, they were probably bred to be sturdier and not as prone to requiring medicine or frequent vet trips

It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.

I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.

The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn people that there’s an S coming.

Fuck the poor, fuck the old, fuck the environment, fuck soldiers and veterans, fuck the sick, fuck food safety…

Agreed. Also, “Your body, my choice” is possibly meant as a threat, possibly meant as a taunt. But, what it definitely is: a statement of power. Asshole men are saying this because they think the landscape has shifted so much that they can now get away with it – and they’re probably right.

American police are already some of the biggest right-wing assholes. Who do you think they’re going to side with in a confrontation where a man says this to a woman? Even if legally a woman were 100% justified in responding with violence, in the real world where men have the power, and men are feeling even more powerful since Trump’s victory, being legally right isn’t enough.

He was very popular for a long time. He’s been PM under 3 US presidents so far: Obama (only for a few months), Trump (part 1), Biden, and will probably be in for part of Trump’s second term.

Like all leaders, people get tired of them. That’s especially true when there’s a global inflation crisis, and every local leader gets blamed as if it’s their fault.

I think he’s been… fine. There have been some minor scandals, but just the typical stuff where the government helps out politically connected companies. Other than that it’s extremely minor stuff like sticking his tongue out in a playful way in parliament, dressing in Indian traditional costumes on a visit to India, taking a vacation at a place owned by a rich friend. Some of the legislation he passed has been good, like legalizing marijuana, implementing a carbon tax, and a major infrastructure bill. Some has been stupid like the “online news” act that tried to get Facebook and Google to pay the major Canadian for-profit news companies for linking to their stuff… rather than addressing the actual issue of their monopolies.

I don’t think the Liberal party is particularly inspiring. OTOH, they’re so much better than the conservatives. But, because Trudeau reneged on his promise to get rid of First Past The Post elections, they’re going to be his downfall in the next election where the left-wing vote is going to split between the NDP and the Liberals, handing the Conservatives a big majority.

My mom is so stupid she’s a fucking hazard.

If there’s a club for that, I’m in it too.

I literally don’t understand how my mom gets through day-to-day life. It’s just a matter of time before her bank accounts are drained by a scammer because no matter how many times I try to explain it to her, she believes everything she sees online as long as it reinforces something she already believes. If it challenges her beliefs she ignores it.

She got an email that said she owed money to an internet service provider she doesn’t use, and hasn’t ever used. Obvious scam, right? She knows she doesn’t use them, but the email seemed “Truthy” so she was really worried that she owed them money. There’s no way to convince her that it’s a scam because even facts like “that’s not your ISP, you don’t and have never used that ISP” can’t penetrate.

She trusts memes more than family members who have degrees in something and are willing to patiently explain it to her. She spends a lot of money buying snake oil, or overpaying for things she can get essentially for free (i.e. buying bottled water because she’s afraid of fluorine in municipal water). This has made me realize what a huge amount of the world’s economy isn’t people buying things they need, or even things they want because it makes their lives better, it’s people buying things they don’t need because they’re afraid of something that isn’t real.

Anyhow, yeah, Trump won the idiot vote, and he’s going to make changes to the US that will increase the number of idiots. Things are going great.

Online? Yes.

In person to friends while chest bumping and hooting? Yes.

In person to a woman they don’t know in all seriousness, and not just to antagonize? I sure hope not.

What you see on TikTok are the most entertaining videos. I have no idea if they have to cut out 2% of the videos because they’re not entertaining, or 50% or 98%.

Viola?

It definitely looks like you are.

Someone in their late 40s is not a girl.