State of the Discussion

I once declared on the old site that it was perfect IMO. Being fickle, I say this one is perfect too. Lacking Michael's god-like powers, I am not tempted to customize the presentation for myself, and anyway I like it as is. FWIW, my laptop browser is Firefox and my Android browser is Chrome. From the start, I set Chrome to show me the laptop version of the page, as I had done on the old site. Works for me.

A preview function would be nice, but I haven't seen its absence be a problem so far.

So, that's my 2 cents worth of opinion. My gratitude for setting up the new site and for creating the archive site is boundless.

--TP

OK made the font a little bigger. I totally agree with Michael, but the whole installation seems to have as its goal, keeping you as far away from the html as possible.

If anyone has an urge, here are some wordpress themes
https://wordpress.org/themes/
Everything seems more for an e-business website than for a group of people to communicate with each other. More's the pity.

I go running some 2 times a week and have been doing this for decades. No major problems so far, but I seem to be one of the younger ones here. What's really annoying is that additionally to my myopia, which I have had since childhood, I have developed far-sightedness as well in recent years. Also, I get the feeling that I'm slowing down when it comes to planning, multitasking and such things, feeling a bit overwhelmed at times of high stress, but generally I can handle it.

I was just thinking of the Constitution, I'm sure if Trump falls, there will be other things, sekaijin's list is good. Tariffs are probably difficult to tackle constitutionally, especially when one side has ignored the guardrails. Of course, after Smoot-Hawley, they gave control of the tariffs to the President, so it's not clear who could be trusted with it.

It might be instructive to consider what sort of laws were put in place after Nixon. I don't think there was any talk of amending the constitution, which might be a measure of how much more Trump has broken the system.

(I'm being incredibly optimistic that Trump will overreach and him and the people around him will be called into account, though that optimism calls to facts not in evidence...)

From the Ministry of Truth link: "the Secretary of Labor will personally certify the initiation of investigations for the first time in the department’s history."

This could only seem like a good idea to someone who had never worked in an organization with more than a dozen people.

Governments, at least successful ones, all run bureaucracies. Big bureaucracies. Everybody loves to trash bureaucracy. But the reason that they are pervasive is that they are the best solution mankind has so far developed to manage large groups of people. And there are narrow limits on how much you can accomplish without involving large groups of people.

To put it bluntly, if the Secretary of Labor really is personally certifying the starting of every investigation then either 1) he doesn't have time left to do his actual job, or 2) there are only going to be a handful of (no doubt extravagantly publicized) investigations. Or, considering this administration, probably both.

I'm replying to this comment in the admin interface to see how this works.

The only aches and pains I get are normal ones, gone after a hot shower or a night’s sleep.

I'm curious how you are defining 'normal ones'. 20 years ago, if I was hurting, I would generally know why. Ache in the wrist, ahh, we were doing this technique a lot. I always had a pretty good idea of what caused it. Now, I'm living in a world where I have aches and pains and I have no f**king idea where they came from. As a friend said, 'getting old is like you have the flu, but it is more like a baseline rather than an exception.'

I have never been consistently active and fit long enough to establish any pattern. I have years of being very fit followed by years of being a complete couch potato. Here I am, turning 70 in a few months, and I can't really gauge my status because I'm always in between.

On the one hand, I can still hike for miles and manage elevation gains of up to 1000' without much trouble. The only aches and pains I get are normal ones, gone after a hot shower or a night's sleep.

On the other hand, elevation gains of more than 1000', or any hikes in 80+ degree weather (never mind humidity) are so much more draining than I think they should be. My lungs seem to get a weird spongy feel, which DuckDuckGo tells me could be COPD or fluid, gee thanks.

I have told a friend I'd love to go with her on her next Mt. St. Helens summit hike. I have a LOT of conditioning to do before that, and am hoping I am capable.

On a more whimsical note, I was about to wish us all a happy Autumn Solstice Eve when I looked up what date it actually is and - ???- the Autumnal Solstice is September 22.

Solstices and equinoxes always being on the 20th or 21st was good enough while I was growing up; it should be good for the current generation!

That's wonkie, I've been going into the backend and changing it and was going to contact her about fixing it, but that was sort of down on my list. I'll change these, and I've just written a message to her and we will sort it oul.

The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress.

Who delegated some amount of that power to the President, in the event of an emergency. Congress didn't specify what was an emergency and what not. The current SCOTUS seems inclined to the position that absent a specification, an emergency is whatever the President says it is.

lj, I rather doubt that there would be an amendment about tariffs. The Constitution already gives power over them exclusively to Congress. The problem we face is that we have an administr3which cares not at all about what the law or the Constitution says. Well, except when it is convenient to use as a cudgel. Otherwise, they just do as they please, confident that neither the Supreme Court nore the Congress will try to stop them -- nor could do so if they tried.

Just as we see with "Originalism", if you don't care what they explicit constraints on you are, and if nobody has the power (or perhaps the willingness) to stop you, then anything goes.

Michael, you've got me rethinking things. If I had to narrow it down to a single event, during COVID, when we were having some classes on campus but still a lot of online stuff, a colleague and I went to the basketball gym on campus. I used to play a lot of basketball, but that was over 40 years ago and I was totally embarrassed that my shots were basically a foot or two short of the basket. Free throws seemed like a heave. While we were 'playing', a gym class where the students played basketball came in and the teacher asked if I wanted to run with them. I said sure, and did about 15 minutes of running up and down. It was a PE class, so none of the students were very good, but they were young and running and about 5 minutes in, I thought 'I could really hurt myself doing this'. After they did the first rotation, I said thanks and bowed out, but now, any kind of really strenuous play that is random seems like asking for trouble.

I have had to admit that I will be the slowest person on the trail from now on, because the people I used to pass have all got e-bikes. I’m old-fashioned, I guess — the goal is to conquer the uphill bits on your own, not to pass the job over to some batteries.

I hear you on the e-bike thing despite riding one myself most of the time. Paradoxically, I too want the uphills to be a challenge, and chose my e-bike because it promised *less* than the other e-bikes. I wanted minimal added weight and the ability to be able to set the pedal assist low enough to keep the rides challenging and natural feeling, with just enough of an electric tailwind to make the steepest parts of the trails rideable, rather than forcing me to hike-a-bike. It's not quite as challenging as riding full-acoustic, but it reduces the effort by a third, while doubling the time I spend riding, so it's a net gain for my fitness.

Alas, the rest of the e-bike knuckleheads I encounter seem to be addicted to the thrill and illusion provided by the boost, or are wanting the motor to shuttle them up the hills so that they can bypass the struggle and just get the downhill rush. And the social riders among them are hopeless on this front. The most competitive among them always rush to be first up and are in a hurry to get to the gnarly bits, and they haze everyone else into conforming and upping their boost just to keep from being dropped. Most of the group would be happier with less boost, but the biggest man-child always seems to drive the consensus.

I am in the process of turning my older, non-electric, hardtail mtb into a more gravel-and-excursion oriented bike for when weather limits me to the mixed-use bike paths. Those hills are much more manageable than the local wilderness trails.

My latest tests show my cholesterol getting out of hand despite having a healthy diet and getting the recommended exercise. Not a surprise, given the family history. Will probably end up on statins soon enough. Diet and exercise have held off genetics for a decade-and-a-half longer than most of my line, but there's only so much to be done with that.

In the hope that I am done going into moderation, and further to wonkie's point about Goebbels, this is from the NYT in 1939, under the headline Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime:

https://www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/archives/goebbels-ends-careers-of-five-aryan-actors-who-made-witticisms.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.IExY.Y2cofB8EzqsL&smid=url-share

I think my approach is a less formalized version of what nous described. If we disconnect completely and irreparably, the alienation from each other and the dehumanization of each other both become that much easier. That makes people more willing to harm each other in various ways, and that's dangerous for everyone.

Someone on another thread some time ago brought up one of the ways the divide between sides during The Troubles in Northern Ireland was narrowed. IIRC, it had much to do with talking about things other than politics to rehumanize each other.

I thought I would see how long that last comment was in moderation, because I think last night the average for mine was about 40 minutes. It's now 21.02, so it's been in almost three hours, and I'm bored with checking on it, so this is just a catch up before I shut up shop. As I mentioned, all my boxes except website are filled and ticked. And Priest, the time stamp seems to be UK Summer Time, which is GMT+1.