MMA has lost a lot of it's luster in recent years with it's major commercialization.
It became popular because people were tired of Karate/TKD/Kung Fu/Krav Maga morons telling everyone their martial art can "kill in one touch" or something. So, Pride and UFC started and the entertainment was watching martial arts compete against each other in a near luta livre style. The idea of course being to find the best martial art. BJJ, Wrestling, and Muay Thai were the only survivors.
Once the global maxima was found it became relatively boring. At least to me. But lord was it fun watching "masters" of traditional martial arts get beaten up and down the ring and all the magic of their martial art going along with them.
The first few UFC tournaments, prior to the mixing that made MMA, was horrendous to watch during a mismatch. I remember a sumo wrestler losing to a kickboxer just as vividly as I remember war footage of Ukraine I saw yesterday.
There are still big upsets, and some fighters have quite unique styles.
I would say that what makes the sport less interesting is all the advertising, including the betting. Also, some commentators are so used to fighting, they often struggle to stay on topic. I get that they like the commentators to be personalities but it gets rather tiresome.
It's always funny to see people touting the virtues of de-escalation and soft talk. What happens when that fails? I started martial arts long ago because soft talk and de-escalation failed.
I started training martial arts years ago. Of the brawls I've been in since then, usually with the homeless or drug addled while out on the town, de-escalation has never worked. I've been in bars where you can't talk someone down. Do you know how long it took for the police to arrive when a homeless guy started a fight with me for no reason? After giving the guy what he deserved I escaped to safety to call the police/medical. They never arrived. Sobering. He ran off eventually. Which, frankly is a testament to the power of street drugs.
You can't de-escalate someone who is determined to harm you. This is a fallacy promoted by people who have never had to fight. You are universally safer by knowing how to fight and never using it than not knowing how to fight at all.
The correct answer is understanding the escalation of force spectrum. Always start by trying to talk some sense into them. Then, based on their next move you either escalate to physical violence to defend yourself, or lethal force if they use a weapon. FWIW BJJ and Muay Thai are the only martial arts you should ever do.
Life is not a video game. The police aren't there to help you. There are bad people everywhere. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
> It's always funny to see people touting the virtues of de-escalation and soft talk. What happens when that fails?
That (common approach) takes what is rationally a question of risk and turns it into a reactive question of survival. The reality is that there are many risks in life and I can't mitigate them all. I need to identify the greatest risks and mitigate those, and also I want to live my life - not prepare fearfully for danger.
So far, I've never needed martial arts, off the top of my head I don't know people who could have used it more than a few times - probably not enough, even if they knew what would happen, to spend the time learning it. It's like people who want guns for personal safety - 'what happens if you need one?' turns the question into survival; the reality is that I don't know anyone who ever would have benefitted from having a gun in private life; I don't think the risk is there (also, even in truly dangerous situations guns are rarely useful - a wild west shootout isn't a good solution).
Other people have different lives and experiences. Maybe they have more risk of situations where they need martial arts. Personally, I'd try to change my life so that I wasn't exposed to those situations but I really don't know about their lives. I guess if I was going to be incarcerated a maximum security prison, I'd want to learn something.
Yeah... there's other ways to deescalate but it involves sacrificing your ego. Unsurprisingly those who can sacrifice their ego and those who think they have to train because "Nobody should be the gardener in a war." are often not the same people.
> Of the brawls I've been in since then, usually with the homeless or drug addled while out on the town, de-escalation has never worked. I've been in bars where you can't talk someone down. Do you know how long it took for the police to arrive when a homeless guy started a fight with me for no reason? After giving the guy what he deserved I escaped to safety to call the police/medical.
I don't know you but there might be another way. I've interacted with many, many people who appeared unhoused (I usually don't ask people about their homes); I've never had a problem or a hint of violence. I've never been in a brawl or been close to being in one. Violence is easy to avoid IME.
> You can't de-escalate someone who is determined to harm you. ... There are bad people everywhere.
I've never encountered someone determined to harm me, afaik, and if that's how we define bad people, they are very rare. Humans are social creatures - just stand on a sidewalk downtown in a busy city - look at all the people getting along peacefully, being polite, helping each other. Logically, if you think of humans a bears - lone, anti-social creatures - then the danger makes sense, but very few people live on their own, away from other humans, like bears. We are social creatures, evolved since our proto-chimpanzee days to live harmoniously in groups, to only function even on a fundamental cognitive level when we are with other humans (solitary confinement drives people insane and is considered torture).
> You are universally safer by knowing how to fight and never using it than not knowing how to fight at all.
I'm universally safer knowing how to fly a plane, because what if a pilot is incapacitated? However, I don't need to plan for that.
I could see that sometimes but I don't think that's usually true. People who feel threatened are in the 'fight or flight' state; their sympathetic nervous systems is activated. They are less likely to trust you and de-escalate.
Of the brawls I've been in since then, usually with the homeless or drug addled while out on the town, de-escalation has never worked.
I don't totally disagree with your overall point, but I have to say...I'm 41, I've lived in cities all over the US, stationed abroad in the military, traveled all over the world, and I've never been in a single "brawl", nor have the majority of other men I know.
Maybe your neighborhood or line of work is such that you can't avoid it, or maybe you just have a higher risk tolerance than I do, but the best skill to have to avoid losing a fight is avoiding putting yourself in situations that lead to fights. No martial arts training in the world will save you forever from the wrong opponent, multiple assailants, weapons, or just being unlucky. If you keep getting in brawls, sooner or later your luck will run out.
> If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet
Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.
If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.
I'm vegan and athletic. I get about .7g/lb of protein a day which by most any measure is enough for anybody save people doing steroids.
People approach veganism as "take out the meat", which leads to nutritional deficiencies. You can't do that, you basically have to reboot the way you eat. I tracked all my food for months when switching to learn what mix of foods gave me the nutrition I needed. Now it is habit and pretty easy. The only new thing I supplement with is vitamin B12 and a protein shake after workouts. (I did the protein shake before being vegan so no change there)
> Killing innocent people is against international law and harms the country doing it. While killing terrorists is acceptable and even desirable to many people.
Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning and that _can_ include people aiding and abetting the enemy. Thus, "actual terrorist" is a fairly nebulous term along with "innocent people". War is hell for a reason. Except for in obvious cases like Mai Lai it is never clear whether to call a person "innocent" for allowing an enemy combatant to seek shelter in their home - for example. But you have to make a snap decision: is the woman carrying what looks like an oddly shaped baby actually carrying bomb? Groceries? Why is she walking so close to the convoy? Did we issue a warning? Did she heed it? A bad decision will cost you many more lives than taking one. War is hell.
> the targeting team has developed a far more flexible pretext for violence
Doubt. The kill order chain is most likely AI flags target -> fed to human operator -> operator confirms -> kill order. Of course, your counter argument is that the human is given pretext ("this is a target") and thus assesses it with the assumption but in theory it's actually a better situation. 80% accuracy is still better than previous generations warfare. You dont want to end up on the thermals of an apache carrying a tube you need to replace your broken sewage system.
The news is polluted with pro-Palestinian nonsense. It's very clear absolutely no one on social media has any idea what hamas does, or what the people of palestine have done to aid and abet the terrorists. This is not to justify just dropping bombs on people without cause but I would be pretty satisfied with a best-effort approach to the loss of civilian life given how deeply embedded hamas is.
And then the Israelis put that target they only have partial confidence about into a system called "Where's Daddy?" which will track their target until he goes home to his family at which point a kill order is sent out to drones and warplanes to massacre his entire family. [0, 1]
Is that the "pro-Palestinian nonsense" you were referring to?
See the part where I said aiding and abetting a known target makes you a target. "What about the children" is a very poor argument. Would you rather a fireteam kick down the door and have to shoot the entire family when they all scurry to a room and grab arms because daddy told them to? Because that's what happens - all the time. There's no "put down your weapons" like you see in movies. You have about 50ms to make a decision to neutralize a target.
I know people who are very screwed up after having to shoot children carrying weapons because their parents told them to. I know people who've had to make the kill/no-kill decision on a woman and her child approaching a convoy. It's a fucked up situation. That's why we try to avoid war.
You can't just deploy operators when a guy goes home to his family. It's expensive, dangerous, and difficult. If you leave him alone he could be ordering people from his home to kill your people. Unconventional war is by definition unconventional. If they fought like a regular military their families would most likely not be targeted. I have no data but I can tell you absolutely no one wants to kill women and children. Except for hamas, that is.
At this point, "aiding and abetting" seems to be "existing while inside Gaza." See the
deliberate execution of the world central kitchen workers in a three-phase strike to ensure maximum casualties as an example.
I mean, that's not true. But you won't agree with me as it's en-vogue to be pro-hamas. You should actually be ashamed of yourself how little you understand about how these terrorists operate and how boldly you claim shit like "genocide" and "execution".
I am against systems designed to target and slaughter civilians. I am against using starvation as a weapon of war. I am against rules of engagement so loose that it allows the military to kill a convoy of people coordinating directly with the Israeli military on a aid mission who are using GPS devices to transmit their location to the Israeli military using three separate strikes over 2.5 km. I'm against dropping 2000-pound bombs on dense civilian areas. I am against rules of engagement so loose it allows the Israeli military to kill three of the hostages it was purportedly trying to save while they're waving white flags. I am against using snipers against people hiding in churches and hospitals. I am against an approved collateral civilian kill rate of 15-20x.
I consider these positions to be pro-humanity.
If in your view, holding these positions makes me pro-hamas, I encourage you to examine if you are using an unnecessarily binary framing to analyze the death and destruction going on.
You can't just scowl seriously and declare "war is hell", and pretend that excuses everything. War may be hell, but it's only hell because of the individual decisions of actual people up and down each belligerent's chain of command.
Yes, but Hamas instigated this by attacking civilians and the PLO—and only the Palestinians and its silent backers—threw away a dual-nation solution during the Clinton era.
So when we include decisions, it’s important to be impartial here.
Blaming the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks solely on the PLO is a convenient lie that seems to only serve to justify the increasingly harsh treatment of Palestinians by Israel. The historical record shows that both parties were not willing enough to compromise in order to create the two state solution [1].
The convenient lie is papering over the blame where it squarely belonged.
Like many of my generation—Gen X—I was closely following the on-goings because it seemed so close (Berlin wall, Russia
seemed
like an ally; more
peace in our time); but in the end Arafat scuttled the deal because he did not want to compromise and give-up any part of Jerusalem.
“Arafat rejected Barak's offer and refused to make an immediate counter-offer.[100] He told President Clinton that, "the Arab leader who would surrender Jerusalem is not born yet.”
The citation [100] here is Jimmy Carter's book, which not only does not support the wiki summary (Camp David was based on a proposal from Clinton--not Barak, and Barak had "twenty pages of reservations" about the proposal himself), Carter also concludes:
[1]
> There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were succesful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.
In regards to the following talks at Taba, which perhaps the wiki is conflating with Camp David, Carter continues:
[2]
> A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made.
[1]/[2] Jimmy Carter - Peace Not Apartheid (it's on Libgen, go look for yourself like I just did)
> but it's only hell because of the individual decisions of actual people up and down each belligerent's chain of command.
If a 10 year old takes up an AK-47 and points it at you what are you going to do? If a woman carrying a child sets a suspicious package down what're you gonna do? This isn't a "decision by the chain of command" outside of ROE for the AO. Everything else is on you.
If your answer is "call the chain of command" your entire unit is now dead. Congratulations. The variance in the decisions is due to the fact you can't make decisions by debating the internal psychology of the moron who may be trying to kill you. Innocent people will die. That's war. I'm getting downvoted to death here because it seems the posh liberals sitting at their desks don't understand what an actual life or death decision feels like. To be honest I'm not shocked. The toughest decision most people make is what to have for lunch and even that is enough to give the yuppies anxiety.
> Keynes’s dream that we could all work for only 15 hours a week could finally be true – with only one small, simple (but transformative) change.
What the author fails to mention is Keynesian economics is how we ended up saddled with absurd debt. The "wealthy" are allowed to utilize this debt cheaply under Keynes.
For all the author talks about fixing the alleged wealth inequality caused by inheritance this single conclusion undermines a lot of work in the previous paragraphs.
My family matters more to me than any sort of baseless economic theory. If I knew my descendants would be forced to spend their inheritance I'd justify spending the money on exploiting any loophole available to avoid that. As it turns out, this is exactly what would happen under the proposed system and turning people into serfs with 99 year leases won't fix it. The theoretical "good citizen" doesn't exist and people will naturally do whatever it takes to preserve themselves and their wealth. The problem IS Keynesian economics that allowed such a disparity to exist. Taxing more won't fix it. I already pay enough tax as it is to wonder why the hell I even work. Imagine not even owning property your family can use in perpetuity. This is an absurdity that is advocating for feudalism where your lord is the government (which is already the case anyway).
> Not necessarily motivation in the sense of "why is this important", but motivation in the sense of "we are beginning a three page proof. Let me give you a paragraph to give you the outline so that you can fill in the details yourself, rather than having to read all of the details just to reconstruct the outline."
In graduate school this was the most frustrating aspect of paper reading (and writing). It makes sense why it exists however. Papers on mathematics in particular are laser targeted to a particular niche. As the science progresses you need more and more bespoke knowledge of previous work to even start the paper you're reading. There's an implicit assumption you've done your homework, so to speak, and authors likely feel there is no need to provide such a summary. Since, of course, if you don't have the pre-requisite knowledge the paper isn't targeted at you anyway.
Some of it of course is simply a pride thing. There have been many times I've felt the lack of exposition was a way to say "I'm better than you". I have no evidence this is the case but it would not surprise me.
SG&A is a cost on the income statement. This can only improve their quarterly earnings. Unfortunate it's the case, but stocks don't appreciate on goodwill (real goodwill not the line item).
> Your skills and experience are what get you ahead truly
In a decade of working in the industry I have found this to never have been the case. Every promotion I've ever gotten except for maybe the first few gimme promotions was because I was on the radar of someone important enough to make that decision.
Isn't getting on the radar of someone important, a skill? Knowingly or unknowingly you did something that gave you an edge..If you did it unknowingly then you can saya pure luck..But if you are able to knowingly repeat it, isn't thay skill sir...
The only reason I was on the radar is because I knew who to socialize with and what they wanted. After early senior engineer every promotion thereafter is typically political.
My first order of business at any company is to sort people into buckets of "they can help me" and "they cannot help me" and focus entirely on the first bucket. Those "after work beers" (or the remote equivalent) is where most of the work is actually done, imo. That is not to say I am without merit. But the assertion I am making is I could've probably bullshitted my way into even more positions if my moral compass was just a little bit more skewed.
I suppose changing the way you act around a certain person with power is a skill and the reward is the promotion. I know several people at or above my skill level that were promoted either later, or not at all, due to not realizing (or not caring) that merit means almost nothing. Of course, merit is what seals the deal - but "managing your manager" is more important than merit. Similarly, I've used a promotion of my own to put people I like on the right person's radar. It pays to know people. In this case, literally.
This is a lot of words to say you've never traded a commodity market. Blaming the liquidity providers while the fundamentals point to an exact reason cocoa is going nuts. Maybe do a little more than "clicking on random graphs" to find a spurious justification. Cocoa will go limit up until the situation in Africa improves. The "traders" don't move nearly the volume the large chocolate providers do. Are they also "manipulating" the market?
Only a small part of the retail price of chocolate is the raw materials. A 25 cent increase on 100g of dark chocolate is not going to substantially affect demand.
This isn't a stock market but a commodity market. Nobody is betting on what they think Cocoa will be worth in the future. So that point isn't relevant here.
If you look at old crop/new crop spreads over other commodities such as corn and soybeans it's clear that the disconnect between the front and back month is entirely on the yield (and therefore the price) of the future harvest. In this case, the futures contracts going out to 2025 are pricing in a poor crop harvest (and therefore a higher future price).
By construction the future will "collapse" to the cash price at expiration (modulo carry costs) meaning that the future is exactly representing the market consensus on future price.
This is no different than a stock market where a stock's theoretical price is the consensus on discounted future cash flows of the company. If a stock had an expiration date then it would have to collapse to the "cash price" (e.g. the exact discounted cash flow) at expiration otherwise funny arbitrage things happen.
>In this case, the futures contracts going out to 2025 are pricing in a poor crop harvest (and therefore a higher future price).
May 2024 futures are also up almost the same amount.[0] You can call that betting on the future but it's a big stretch. It's obvious that it is largely reflecting the current market price.
Since I can't edit anymore, it's a new comment. Here are the futures for March 2024 which already expired.[0] It is clear to see that this is not wild speculation. You are right however that people can still speculate on the harvest and demand of a commodity. But the nature of this speculation is very different from speculating on if Nvidia will be worth 2 trillion in the future. Additionally as futures expire that means you can always stay solvent by shorting a future that is soon to expire, which cannot be said with stocks (I realize that this is a separate point from the one I made initially). And the fact that futures expire itself causes there to be less speculation because the window of time for the asset to appreciate is much smaller. Taking your example of a stock that expires, Nvidia's stock would be much lower now if it expired next year. Commodities simply don't go up 100x like stocks do. When a commodities does go up, it make more sense to assume that yields went down or that demand went up. I didn't mean to say that it's impossible that traders speculate on commodities.
This is entirely due to the limit mechanism that tries to keep prices approximately in line with supply and demand. There have been several instances of grains in particular locking limit up during a blight over and over again. In recent history oil going negative is another example. If it wasn't for the limit mechanism (and in some cases, the literal government) stepping in they absolutely could 100x. When you're a goods supplier you'll pay nearly anything once prices reach your "uncle" level. The dynamics at limit are somewhat interesting as it's a case where the entirely market has consensus that "I need to buy (sell) now or I'm hosed".
I wasn't suggesting you were saying you couldn't speculate on commodities. I was mostly suggesting that even removing traders the "speculation" occurring is due to the anticipated future value of that commodity. If it wasn't, then buyers and sellers would go to the cash market which while extremely volatile may also be a smart choice for at least some of the crop.
IMO limit mechanisms are not nearly aggressive enough and I've been caught in a few of them myself. One of the few rare nightmare scenarios for a commodity trader. But making limits more aggressive would imply some form of price control which also would not be great.
>Cocoa futures ended Thursday at $5,635 a metric ton, shooting past the old record of $5,368, which was set in July 1977. Bad growing weather in West Africa is to blame this time as well as then.
>Hot and dry weather in Ghana and the Ivory Coast bedeviled growers in the region last year and threaten the cocoa crop again this year, said Jack Scoville, futures-market analyst at Price Future Group.[0]
I replied to this. The bad weather, etc, amounts to an 11% reduction in crop.
Cocoa is very elastic, so an 11% reduction in crop should not lead to a 300% increase in prices. The normal thing instead would for people to eat less chocolate until there is enough supply, with only minimal change in prices.
Instead there's something weird going on - tell me, would you buy a chocolate snack that costs 3 times as much as last year? Or would you buy a different snack instead?
Take a look at the already expired March cocoa futures.[0] This is clearly not speculation.
>The normal thing instead would for people to eat less chocolate until there is enough supply
The cost of cocoa is not identical to the cost of chocolate.
>Based on a 200g milk chocolate bar costing €2, cocoa
comprises around 10 percent of total costs; sugar 1 percent;
milk products 6 percent; production, packaging and
marketing and profits around 78 percent and tax 6 percent. [1]
This means a 3x increase in prices would make the bar cost €2.60. There are also products that use only small amounts of chocolate, reducing the total increase even further. For example the increase in chocolate costs in a chocolate chip cookie is negligible.
There is a dramatic, almost chasm-like, difference between "stupid" and rational.
Tactically it is a stupid decision. Remote work is by-and-large one of the biggest boons to an employee who would otherwise be jockeying for a house to start a family in a place that is too expensive. Studies have shown time and time again that even under threat of pay reduction employees will STILL choose remote work. The "stupid" capitalist pays them just enough to rent locally but not enough to buy. Companies that remain remote-only will likely absorb a large chunk of the best talent in the next decade. All of the middling and new talent will be forced to bend the knee. The actual bet here is that 200 middling engineers will outperform 100 of the best. When you look at the macroeconomics the conclusion is obvious. Those 200 middling engineers will likely be 50 local engineers and 150 foreigners.
However, it is a rational decision. These rich capitalists, in your words, are deeply invested in real estate. If they aren't, whoever invested in them is. Follow that chain long enough and you'll almost surely find Blackrock and Vanguard who, in my pet theory, is driving this movement. We aren't talking about Google/Facebook/Apple who have amazing self-owned beautiful campuses. We are talking about mandates from 100 person just-barely-not-a-startup companies.
All this movement did is show what kind of fraud the SV startup scene has been committing for the last two decades. Naturally, when outed, the fraudster panics.
It became popular because people were tired of Karate/TKD/Kung Fu/Krav Maga morons telling everyone their martial art can "kill in one touch" or something. So, Pride and UFC started and the entertainment was watching martial arts compete against each other in a near luta livre style. The idea of course being to find the best martial art. BJJ, Wrestling, and Muay Thai were the only survivors.
Once the global maxima was found it became relatively boring. At least to me. But lord was it fun watching "masters" of traditional martial arts get beaten up and down the ring and all the magic of their martial art going along with them.