(Part 2) Best products from r/SubredditDrama

Look at what your job is. You're a repairman, so of course you're going to see a lot of broken Dysons. It's a super popular brand. You've seen hundreds of unhappy people, but that's because the millions of happy Dyson owners have never had to call on you. No mass market product has a 100% satisfaction rate these days - production isn't perfect, things break, etc.

Your entire perspective is heavily biased against popular brands. I'm not sure how you don't realize that. User reviews are worth a lot more:

http://www.amazon.com/Dyson-DC65-Animal-Complete-Upright/product-reviews/B00HNUFSLG

http://www.amazon.com/Dyson-DC41-Animal-Complete-Upright/product-reviews/B008SG536E

And the amount of 4-5 star reviews look pretty damn good. And I've had zero issues. And other people I know with Dysons are all very happy as well, which is a large part of why I bought one in the first place.

At the very earliest, pretty much anything on a computer at the time was written in BASIC, so it was a trivial matter to do things like add new words to Hangman, or change the colors in a Space Invaders clone to make the ships more visible. Later, when the C64 came out, I got this bad boy right here and started learning how to make tweaks to machine code. It was all very primitive, and involved a lot of trial and error, but figuring out things like how to get extra lives in a super hard game like Raid Over Moscow was sooo worth it.

The first game I ever played that came with a "modding tool" as it were was Enchanted Scepters. A friend of mine had that on the Mac. We tried to make our own game and didn't get very far with it, but we did have a lot of fun putting vulgar words in the dialogue of the base game.

E: Wrong link.

It's not a simple of guerrilla warfare. The type of warfare encountered in Vietnam is often referred to as fourth generation warfare (4GW). 4GW involves a series of complex strategies working together to both discredit and demoralize an opponent.

I would argue that a bigger aspect in 4GW is discrediting an opponent. We saw how this worked on both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Originally the Palestinians gained the upper hand in part because they were able to win the political war. The Palestinians took great lengths to make themselves look like the good guys who were effectively peaceful individual armed with little more than sticks and stones going up against the heavily armed Israelis. Strategists on the Palestinian side ensured that very few actual weapons were used by its fighters and make it a point to accuse the Israelis of using live ammunition (when oftentimes they were using rubber ammunition). They also invited reporters in the Palestinian region and gave them open access to everybody but ensured the most eloquently spoken individuals were readily available to talk with those reporters. Those interviewees made sure to discuss their desire to simply stop the fighting and left out any claims of wanting to destroy Israel or hurt Israelis. This strategy paid off and won the Palestinians a great deal of international sympathy.

Then the tables turned. Arafat returned from Tunisia to Palestine after the initial uprising had mostly concluded. After arriving he started discussing his desire to destroy Israel and wipe its people off of the face of the Earth. Suddenly Israel was able to wield international support. It was able to point to Arafat and his people as proof that the Palestinians wanted to destroy Israel and that conflicts between the two regions were merely acts of Israeli self-defense. The Israeli government made sure to point out that peaceful coexistence is impossible when one side has a desire to entirely wipe out the other side. Rather quickly international support began swinging behind Israel.

Many people who talk about guerrilla warfare in the United States forget about the political side. Guerrilla tactics can chip away at an enemy's morale but it can also fuel their propaganda machine. It's trivial to make random bombings look like vicious acts of wanton destruction. Properly spun guerrilla tactics can be a boon for the target as they can use attacks to argue that the war is purely self-defense in nature.

Most of the people who talk about guerrilla warfare against the United States government are poor at developing sympathy from bystanders. Instead they typically come off as being rather dickish. In the eyes of the general public this makes any military action the United States government takes against advocates of revolution justified.

If you want to have a serious discussion about waging war against the United States government you need to invest more time in public opinion. You need to set yourself up to be the reasonable individuals in the eyes of the public. Like the Palestinians during the first Intifada you must make it appear as though you're striving for peace at any cause and merely taking defensive action against the great bully of the United States government. That's a far different game than most revolutionaries seem to play. Instead they seem to favor the "I wish the motherfucker would" style, which is to say they make it appear as though they want to fight the United States government. Without public support for your side guerrilla warfare is unlikely to succeed.

Sort of. The rules for English haiku are slightly complicated because it's fundamentally a Japanese poetic form that we picked up and started using for some reason. As a very brief overview, in English, the following criteria generally apply:

• It should be three lines, with the general guideline of short-long-short. (There are other words for poems with the same semantic elements but different structure.)
  
• There should be a juxtaposition in tone or theme between the first two lines and the last one. This is the concept of kiru from Japanese haiku. In Japanese, there are lists of words to be pulled from to denote this, but listing words in English is a fool's errand, so we just get wishy-washy conceptual guidelines. =)
  
• In Japanese, there are lists of seasonal words you're supposed to draw from, but again, English is not a good language to list words in. English-language haiku often use season as a thematic element, but it's not strictly necessary.
  
• As a final super-abstract point, a haiku should create a sense of presence in the reader. It's supposed to be describing a place and time so you can feel yourself there, rather than e.g. chronicling an event.
  
  There are very good books about English-language haiku if you're interested in learning more. I'll recommend The Haiku Handbook as quality and comprehensive.

Yeah, its a bit more complicated than strictly statist vs. strictly private, its always been a bit of a mix. Early universities were funded primarily through religious or royal charters, and while not necessarily statist like we think now, meant that some higher authority held the purse strings (though, to be fair, these early universities were more like guilds in a lot of cases).

Really support for mathematical and physical based research as a way of improving or altering the real world came through governments competing militarily, especially in the cases of artillery and cannon boring. These new technologies required knowledge of metallurgy, trajectories, and combustion, all of which spurred the knowledge necessary for later inventions like the steam engine or the Bessemer steel process. We had knowledge and science but it really exploded as a practical way of changing the world with these huge investments. A great book I read on the subject, The Most Powerful Idea in the World goes into a lot of detail on these events.

Hey if you enjoying messing around artistically and like the look and feel of oil paint, I suggest getting some decent quality oil pastels, like this! They have rich colors and are virtually mess free. Your kid will probably love them too! They blend very nicely, I'd get some mid weight pastel paper for them, like this.

Thorny indeed, but I was thinking of "Travels with Lizbeth", which could definitely be a biased perspective. In the end, somewhere in the charity chain, the giver has to put faith in someone, and the smaller and more local it is, the better I feel about it. Ideally it constrains the degree of possible corruption.

Though not exactly in the realm of drama, I learned of these lovely whitptail lizards through a poem (and that poem through a book) called "Cascade Experiment" by Alice Fulton. You can find the poem here: about halfway down the page. I really recommend it; it's short and sweet and it's discusses some of the issues at hand here in the great way only poems can. I just had to share it because it's my favorite poem, even if not super relevant to the drama. I'll just share the bit of the section about the lizards, but please check out the entire thing in that link above if you like it!

>Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time

>making themselves felt, as when thirteen species

>of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females

>stay undiscovered due to bias

>against such things existing,

>we have to meet the universe halfway.

>Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what

>looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.

James Waller's book Becoming Evil is a wonderful text that demonstrates the mechanisms by which ordinary people get roped into (in this case) genocide, but covers fascism pretty well.

Bernard Susser's book Political Ideology in the Modern World lays out the ideas that I mentioned above excellently. It's a text book so it's a bit dense, but it is worth the read to really understand.

No you're right the majority did settle in the west (ie. the Maghrebi countries + Libya), because it was viewed almost as a frontier by the soldiers in the Islamic armies who wanted to settle there. There were also later migrations that occurred for political reasons the most famous being the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in the Middle Ages.

With the Levant it was largely the same as in other countries. When the Arab Muslims arrived they established themselves as the local elite and to this day many of the old notable Palestinian families like the Nusaybah are descended from Arabs who did settle in the country during the Islamic conquests. The armies and administrators were all Arab (in the early years) but like I said mass population displacement didn't really occur and Palestinians at large are generally believed to be descended from a mix of the numerous peoples who have inhabited and moved to the land over the centuries, everyone from Greeks and Crusaders to Turks and ancient Jews. Over the centuries after conquest more and more of these people adopted Islam as a faith in order to obtain more social privileges, something that initially caught the invading Arabs by surprise. Since you'll probably ask I'm getting most of this info from the books In God's Path by Hoyland and The Great Caliphs by Bennison.

Thanks for the kind words, I have an intense love-hate relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I'm literally always either the most "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" person in whatever room I'm in, not that I care for those dichotomous and ill defined terms) and nothing to do today so I've just been popping in to comment periodically.

If you're expecting to be "talked out of" something on reddit, you're a fool (or, more likely, you're being dishonest -- more likely because you're already mischaracterizing the responses you're getting).

But because I'm a fool too, I'll nibble just a little at your bait:

First, even if your characterization of art as "decoration and entertainment, nothing more" were true, it would still be important. Just as dreaming when you sleep is important, just as laughing is important, just as enjoying the taste of the food you eat is important, just as being surrounded by people whose company you enjoy is important, just as feeling happy instead of miserable, afraid or numb is important.

Of course your characterization is wrong and art is more than merely that. It can also help us develop empathy and expand our capacity for communicating with others, for understanding and being understood; it can challenge the way you think, and exercise your mind -- as important for a healthy mind as exercise is for a healthy body; it is part of the way we speak to one another, the way we understand ourselves and the world, and always have; it helps us comprehend history and it is a part of history; it can even anticipate scientific discoveries. Art is important, mostly because it brings pleasure and joy -- at its best, difficult pleasures and lasting joys -- but also because it's an integral part of being wholly human.

It's not a "scam" per se. The FDA has approved coolsculpting and the process behind how it works is an actual thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryolipolysis

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4444424/

However the marketing and results are hugely overstated bordering if not entirely lying with classic fitness industry techniques (managing water weight for pictures etc). And there are plenty of currently available ice pack solutions that do the same thing that aren't marketed and upsold specifically for this purpose that will work just as well. Ex. https://www.amazon.com/LotFancy-Therapy-Reusable-Microwavable-Freezable/dp/B013FWXKA6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492703161&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=belly+ice+pack&psc=1

However a session of cool sculpting or DIY or whatever for your average husky will probably throw off way less than a pound of fat over a 2 month period. The 10 to 25% reduction (on regimen) is only seen in morbidly obese patients and they literally lose weight by skipping lunch.

For certain areas Cryolipolysis is actually good, for example like face fat which is generically not prioritized for liquidation.

Also just an FYI if any solution worked as well as it's marketing said it did you'd have a huge mortality rate for doing it.

Just taking 1 liter of fat (2.2 pounds) in one session for liposuction in a 110lb person can raise their risk of death to a significant degree (single digit percentages seriously), no actual surgeon should even agree to this volume. Currently the general mortality rate is %0.0002 used to be %0.0016 in the 70's.

Exactly and they have some pretty cool "leashes" these days. As a todder, my son liked to try to run into busy roads, because this made mommy react and terrified mommy was "funny." I was pregnant with my second child and my toddler could officially run faster than I could. Some other mom told me about "leash" backpacks (like this), so he didn't have an arm restrained or anything. My son's was a plush monkey backpack and he loved the thing. I also loved it, because I didn't have to worry so much about him killing himself, when he was wearing it. As a bonus, if it was super icy out, the harness of the backpack made it possible for us to stop him from falling on the ice, if we went out for a walk in the middle of January. My son loved going on "ice walks" in the winter, because the backpack made it so he never had to hit he ground, if he slipped.

I have some friends who have children who are way worse runners than my son was. They are afraid to get a backpack like this for their kids, because they worry about the judgments of strangers. Fuck strangers. Safety is far more important.

>college is such a fucking scam these days

This misconception is so prevalent on reddit I have a comment saved just to address it. Link

>It may be accurate to say college is overpriced, since bubble is makes no sense. I don't think this is accurate. Over the last 40ish years the college wage premium has increased. In 1974, an average college grad made 32% more than a high school grad, in 1999, the difference had risen to 80%. You can read more about it in this book. A college degree is still a really good investment. Maybe not as good as 10 years ago, but not negative.

>Also, you can't evaluate returns to investment in college by looking at sticker price. Financial aid process lets schools do very precise price discrimination - they can basically just walk up the demand curve. Saying nominal tuition increased by X isn't very meaningful. College is pricey, dropping out is very pricey, but it is still worthwhile. The college premium is not just a selection effect.

So yes, college can be expensive, but for most people it is a great investment and becoming more so over time as our economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based.

Wow, that's a pretty good explanation of my reasoning. Do you have any modern and accessible philosophy of science you'd recommend? Pretty much the only stuff I've come across is /r/atheism-style naive Popper. I'd also be curious to see what you have to say about this book. I haven't read it, but I watched a talk based on it, and it looked pretty interesting.

Specifically, it shows that there is a qualitative difference between those with and without the disorder, both physiologically and in drug response; thus, whether you want to call it a disorder or not, it does describe a distinct subpopulation that it is meaningful to discuss as a group, distinct from other individuals who may share some traits with members of the group - that is, that it exists. You say that we know it exists (which is true!) and suggest that the debate is on classification of that subpopulation (reasonable!), but I don't think that's universally true. I don't really have any evidence to offer other than anecdotes, so take that as you will.

Incidentally, the question of "is it really a disorder or just a normal variation, possibly with a purpose?" is really, really interesting. There's a book called Survival of the Sickest that makes some very interesting connections between ostensibly-harmful disorders and possibly historical (or current!) benefits that derive from the same trait/gene/what have you.

Interesting question. Off the top of my head, I would say that makes you not so much 'a feminist' as 'a person whose viewpoint has been influenced by feminism'. Personally, I don't think you can really call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in patriarchy, as in the idea that women are historically oppressed as a class, but that is a big discussion and not one I intend to get into here.

By the way, you say you 'really don't believe in a contemporary patriarchy' - what about the likes of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? Is patriarchy not expressed through the machismo of certain Latin American culture and households? If it was considered relatively normal for Latino men to beat their wives and have control over the household finances, (that's a big 'if', I know), would that not be considered a form of patriarchy? You might like to take a look at In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, which could be said to portray a patriarchal society, in terms of the social norms and household arrangements of the subjects. Obviously, it depends a bit on what you mean by 'patriarchal', but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to refer to these families in that way.