HelixDab2
@HelixDab2@lemm.ee
- Comment on Mexicans offered $1,300 to hand in a machine gun 1 week ago:
I’ll give them $1400 to sell them to me. (For legal purposes, that was a joke. Please don’t kill my
dogcats, officer.) - Comment on what exercises work for you to avoid back pain? 1 week ago:
Hit up exrx.net and look for weight lifting exercises that target back muscles specifically. For lower back (erector spinae), thing like weighted hyperextensions are going to target it specifically. I would suggest doing about 12 weeks where you start you back workout with basic compound lifts–deadlifts, squats, bent over barbell rows–and progress to more isolating lifts like hyperextensions at the end of the workout. I would suggest doing that 12 weeks with just 1-2 sets of 12-15 reps for each exercise, with rests of 30-90 seconds between sets and exercises; that will get your body ready to progress to more sets at higher weight and reduced repetitions. And yes, you need to change you workout every 3-4 months or so; that’s a basic principle of periodization. Changing your workout will mean more or fewer sets, with lower or higher numbers of repetitions, and different weight. In general, you’ll do a few sets of high repetitions with lower weights, and more sets of low repetitions with higher weights.
Also, don’t forget to do abdominals; those are important stabilizing your back.
For cardio, rowing is going to be your go-to choice for a strong back.
I would strongly suggest getting a personal trainer for a few sessions specifically to work on your form for squats, deadlifts, etc. If you do that though, be very, very firm with them that the only thing you want is direction on form; PTs will have a strong tendency to try and sign you up for months or years of training that may or may not help with your specific goals. Look for trainers with ACSM or NSCA certifications only (most other certs are barely worth the paper they’re printed on), ans a BS in kinesiology or exercise science.
- Comment on Teamsters President: H-1B Visa Program 'Displaces' Americans from Their Jobs 2 weeks ago:
…And you are just now discovering that the interests of workers–regardless of whether or not they are in tech, medicine, skilled trades, or any other field–do not align with the interests of the business owners? My dudes, this is what the left has been trying to tell you for over a century (literally!) now.
- Comment on Go into debt if you have to 2 weeks ago:
I remember the 80s when high sulphur coal was the norm, and we had problem with the sulphur emissions causing acid rain; I def. don’t want to return to that…
Related - I saw a science alert that speculated that we could buy time to cut carbon emissions by seeding the atmosphere with superfine diamond dust; it would both block and reflect solar radiation. The downside? About $250T in cost.
- Comment on Go into debt if you have to 2 weeks ago:
Eh. Methane is worse when it’s released as a gas than when it’s burned and released as carbon dioxide. If you drive by oil refineries in Beaumont, TX, you’ll see them burning off methane–flaring–because it’s a byproduct of oil refining. Is any of this great, or even good? No; any way you slice it, it’s all greenhouse gasses. OTOH, there are far fewer other pollutants with LNG than there are from coal-fired plants, and we don’t yet have the capacity to generate sufficient power using renewables or nuclear. (Meanwhile, a lot of hydro power is at risk because climate change has shifted rain and snow patterns so that rivers and reservoirs are drying up so that we’re losing that source of renewable power.)
- Comment on is feeling disrespected reason good enough to change jobs? 2 weeks ago:
people do not quit jobs
Bullshit. I’ve quit jobs before. like the job I had at a veneer mill. It was boring me to tears, was so loud that ear-pro was mandatory–about 110dB, IIRC–and I was spending about an hour each day digging splinters out of my hands. (Couldn’t wear gloves b/c they didn’t have the dexterity needed for picking up a single sheet of veneer without breaking it.) I don’t think I even saw my manager more than a few times in the brief period i worked there.
- Comment on And because you deserve it, here's one from the top shelf 2 weeks ago:
Ethanol is also a medication. It’s used to treat both methanol and ethylene glycol poisoning, as well as the withdrawal symptoms from severe alcoholism (…which are able to kill a patient, unlike opiate/opioid withdrawal).
Hell, oxycodone is a medication; I got enough to kill a horse (which really isn’t saying a lot; horses are surprisingly delicate animals) after a major surgery. But guess what? It’s still addictive, and will kill you.
The fact that something might have a medical use doesn’t preclude addiction.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 1 month ago:
I’ll buck the trend here.
Yes, I want him prosecuted. I want every single piece of evidence the cops have put out in public, and I want the public to see exactly how they traced him and caught him. I want people to see just how insidious the surveillance state is, and I want them to understand what kind of lengths they’ll need to go to in order to avoid getting caught the next time.
- Comment on Taylor Lorenz Says 'We Want These Executives Dead' Hours After Health Insurance CEO Murdered 1 month ago:
the US decided that the left is too extreme for them?
Er. No. That’s not what happened. When you look at vote totals from 2020, you can see that Biden got 81M votes to Trump’s 74M. Looking at vote totals from 2024, Harris got 74M votes–the same as Trump in 2020–and Trump eked out a slightly improved performance at 77m. This isn’t a ‘mandate’; this is fewer people showing up to the polls. If the same number of people had voted in 2024 as voted in 2020, it’s probable that Trump would have lost again. That isn’t people saying the left is “too extreme”, that’s apathy.
- Comment on Taylor Lorenz Says 'We Want These Executives Dead' Hours After Health Insurance CEO Murdered 1 month ago:
Okay?
I don’t see a problem here. Right wing personalities encourage harming and killing LGBTQ+ people and liberals, far-right people bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors, but now it’s suddenly bad to say that oh, yeah, some people deserve a good killin’?
Seems like crocodile tears to me.
- Comment on It's fire... Maybe concerning but fire still 1 month ago:
How have you forgotten Remedy, with Alan Wake, Control, and Quantum Break?
I feel like Finland might be where I belong. If only I could realistically learn Suomi…
- Comment on It's fire... Maybe concerning but fire still 1 month ago:
Lots of weirdly emo ballads, TBH. The metal is good, but it’s still pretty niche from what I understand.
- Comment on Is a Quest 3 really worth it? 2 months ago:
It depends on what you’re doing with it.
I use it solely for Ace XR, which is a dry-fire simulator/tracker. Ace XR is available solely for Meta Quest (2 & 3), so I didn’t really have many options. Unfortunately, I’m currently rehabbing a serious injury, and I am unable to practice.
For gaming? Not really. I like the PSVR2 headset more for that; it’s a better headset overall. I’m still working on getting it set up to work with my PC though. As other people have said, getting corrective lenses for a headset really makes them more enjoyable if you need glasses; it’s a pain in the ass to have to put in contacts when I want to use VR. For the Meta Quest specifically, and upgraded head band and spare battery (that also acts like a counterweight) is very nice to have.
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 2 months ago:
And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 2 months ago:
IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.
- Comment on "What Is Your Dream for Mozilla" - Mozilla is doing a survey, questions include "What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?" 2 months ago:
They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.
- Comment on Caves 2 months ago:
I’ll keep that in mind. I live at a high enough altitude that I’m literally in the clouds pretty often (e.g., when it’s overcast everywhere else, I’m in pea-soup fog), so cedar is one of the prime choices for anything that’s going to be outside, just to keep it from rotting.
- Comment on Caves 2 months ago:
Sadly: no attic. I need try making an attractive bat roost for them. I wonder how bats feel about cedar, since cedar is rot resistant?
- Comment on Caves 2 months ago:
I love seeing the bats coming out at night in the summer; I can see them in the front clearing, swooping around after moths. I’ve got a bat house, but I think that it’s been vacant for years; I need to find a better way to attract them to my home.
- Comment on Biden thinks Trump voters are trash. 2 months ago:
It’s a human being at every stage of development
Based on what? Religion? Jewish thought says that a child only exists once it draws breath.
In cases where they didn’t consent to sex, it still doesn’t make sense to kill them.
So, to be clear, once a person has already been deprived of their freedom and liberty by one person, they should continue to be deprived of their liberty?
Riddle me this: where would you stand on forced organ donation? That is, you’re a tissue match to me, and I need a kidney. Would you be okay with being legally obligated to undergo surgery and give a kidney to me so that I can live? To make it a little lower stakes, would you be okay with being legally obligated to donate blood every eight weeks in order to preserve the life of people that need blood and blood products to live? Why, or why not?
How is that different from someone being obligated to undergo the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term if they don’t want to be a parent, and especially if the were sexually assaulted?
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 2 months ago:
Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.
- Comment on You have a bad friend if he isn't willing to help you bury a dead body or if he is willing to help you. 2 months ago:
It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they’d ever be found are very, very poor.
Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain’t gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I’d say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there’s no electronic trail of where you’ve been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you’re driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn’t recovered for at least a year, you’re likely in the clear.
- Comment on In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment? 2 months ago:
The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)
But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.
- Comment on In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment? 2 months ago:
Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it’s actually good.
- Comment on Is it okay to take drugs to make yourself a better person? Does it make a difference if "better" is mental or if it's physical? 2 months ago:
Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.
Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Boldenone in particular will sharply increase red blood cell production, which in turn increases blood pressure, and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AAS will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AAS can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.
There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.
- Comment on Pretty sound reasoning here. 2 months ago:
I believe that’s correct; but it’s not all handguns, only a very, very few. Any handgun that’s gas operated (and there are, like, five) is definitely still going to fire.
- Comment on Biden thinks Trump voters are trash. 2 months ago:
If banning them wouldn’t significantly affect firearm deaths, then why are Kamala Harris and the majority of the Democratic Party pushing for it?
There are several reasons. First, the times they are used in crimes, they tend to create much higher casualties than you would otherwise be likely to see. The combination of a vry high velocity intermediate cartridge with a box magazine makes it very easy for a novice shooter to expend lots and lots of bullets, bullets that are generally more deadly than a pistol-caliber firearm. Secondly, it is a slippery-slope; they want to ban these now to make more extensive bans in the future seem more acceptable, esp. to courts. It’s a way of creating precedent. Third, for people that don’t grow up with firearms, they just seem more scary than wooden-stocked, full-power rifles. And last, all politicians, across the board, seem to want to maintain the supremacy of state-sponsored violence; Dems want to ban guns, Republicans want to give cops ever heavier firepower.
Again: neither side seems interested in directly addressing root causes for violence, which are largely economic. Fix the wealth disparity in this county, eliminate the systemic racism that limits access to opportunity for non-white people, and end toxic masculinity, and you eliminate most of the gun homicides. From speaking to a criminal defense attorney that specializes in gun rights, the biggest single thing the gov’t could do to sharply reduce gun homicides would be to entirely end the way on drugs.
However, given the number of states that have very little or even no restrictions on abortion,
FIRST - I misspoke/I was wrong. Each trimester is roughly 12 weeks. The absolutely earliest viability is about 22 weeks, or close to the end of the second trimester. Earlier than that, and a fetus is little more than a tenant that’s not paying rent.
This article isn’t saying what you think it’s saying. Yes, there isn’t a time limit, but most or all states do not allow abortions after fetal viability. That is, if a fetus can survive outside of the womb–heroic measures or not–you aren’t getting an abortion. Does it seem unreasonable to you to allow abortion when a fetus can not survive independently? If so, why does that seem unreasonable? Do you believe that any person should be legally required to use their body for the benefit of another person?
- Comment on Biden thinks Trump voters are trash. 2 months ago:
Easily.
First, banning assault-style rifles wouldn’t be ‘disarming’, unless you’re going to argue that any regulation of firearms is disarming. Is it dumb? Sure. Would it have any significant effect on firearm homicides? No; even most mass shootings are committed with handguns. (For the record, I own multiple assault-style rifles, and I compete in action pistol (USPSA, IDPA, etc.) and two gun matches regularly, in a non-ban state. I do oppose rifle and feature bans, because I oppose regulating tools rather than changing material conditions.)
Secondly, Roe v. Wade never allowed all abortions up to the point of birth. Roe v. Wade specifically balanced the rights of a person-to-be against the person that had to run the risk of pregnancy and birth, and said that prior to viability–broadly speaking, the end of the first trimester, but realistically more like 27 weeks–the rights of the women overrode the state interest in protecting the not-yet-life of a potential person. Beyond that, the overwhelming majority of all abortions that happen after the first trimester happen because there are defects incompatible with life, or because there’s a complication that will kill the woman if she does not terminate the pregnancy.
I’ll also note that if you really wanted to reduce rates of abortion, you would ensure that schools taught comprehensive sex education–including accurate, factual information about birth control and how to use it (e.g., none of this ‘abstinence only’ bullshit)–as well as making birth control widely, easily, and affordably available to all people.
- Comment on Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun? 2 months ago:
So, um, 400M rockets.
Yeah, that ain’t happenin’.
- Comment on Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun? 2 months ago:
I think you wildly underestimate the amount of trash we’re be talking about here. This wouldn’t be a rocket, this would be thousands, or hundreds of thousands of rockets. And that’s just the start.