Bender_on_Fire

I really love "when the levee breaks" by Led Zeppelin, but the original by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy deserves more recognition.

Kind of a pet peeve of mine, but Tainted Love was originally performed in the 60s by Gloria Jones, a black soul singer. Considering the lyrics of the song, I think it could be interpreted as an interracial love affair, which adds a political dimension to the song that the Soft Cell version seems to lack. I would consider it to be some sort of cultural appropriation even if it's hard to define. In any case, it doesn't really sit right with me that Soft Cell and later Marylin Manson had all the artistic and financial success with it while Gloria Jones is mostly forgotten about. Don't get me wrong, I like all three versions (and there are quite some more even) in a vacuum, but I think it's worth pointing out this bit of background info.

Connections Puzzle #523 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩

Strands #211 “Words with weight” 💡🔵🔵🔵 🔵🔵🔵🔵 🟡

Might be my first one with just a single hint!

I might have made this up as well, but I have a very distinct memory of basically suddenly becoming conscious at around being 3 years old. I woke up from a nap and for a couple hours or possibly days, I wasn't sure whether I was dreaming or the world around me was actually real. After a couple of days of waking up in the same environment, I eventually accepted this to be reality. I of course don't remember everything from this point on in my life, but it really felt like the first time I was able to explicitly think about stuff.

I didn't see the pattern either and had to look it up. Apparently, you can rewrite 1 + 1/(1+2) + 1/(1+2+3)+... as 2(1 - 1/2 + 1/2 - 1/3 +...+1/n - 1/(n + 1)) = 2(1 - 1/(n + 1))

From there, the limit of 2 is obvious, but I guess you just have to build up intuition with infinite sums to see the reformulation.

First of all, I agree that it would be great if a drug/medicinal procedure would cure a certain condition in each and every patient or at least the vast majority of them. Sadly, that is rarely the case, but that by no means is equivalent to say that when this drug or procedure helps, it's mostly or entirely due to the placebo effect. That's the whole reason we need randomised controlled trials as their might be a significant difference in treatments that only becomes clearly observable once a certain sample size is reached and possible confounding variables are controlled for (usually by randomisation). The human body and many of diseases are incredibly complex so it's naive to assume we could forsee each and every possible influence on a drugs efficacy and therefore determine without error how a patient will react to it.

While there is quite a big group of non-responders when it comes to psychotherapy, it is, on average, an effective treatment clearly proven by a vast body of research. There is still much more to find out, but putting it on the same level as not consuming gluten is in no way defensible.

Now to get back to chiropractics, I don't know too much about it, but I thought it's mostly short term pressure and pain relief, which however rarely combats the underlying issues. Can still be helpful, of course, as pain relief helps with getting more physical activity, as this is often a culprit for example back problems.

That said, I personally wouldn't let anyone touch my spine or neck like some chiropractors do. I'd be too scared of irreparable nerve damage.

more dollars flying around -> economic stimulus -> inflation.

This is a logic that seemed intuitive to me as well for a long time. However, it doesn't make much sense to me anymore when I think about money as simply a representation of wealth or value.

Imagine somebody spending their time and Know-how to build a chair which can be sold at 50$ more than what the original materials are worth. Through their work, they created wealth. The still unchanged amount of money does not accurately represent the currently avaliable wealth anymore and in order to still be redistributed among all goods and services relative to their worth, prices would need to drop (deflation). Now of course, the value of a chair and other goods generally declines over time such that wealth can also disappear, which will cause inflation if it happens excessively. If the government decides to stimulate the economy, ergo creating new money and distributing it, there will still be no inflation if this money is in some way or form used to create the same or more wealth than the equivalent of the newly introduced money. This can easily happen when there are bottlenecks in the current economic situation such as high unemployment or underdeveloped infrastructure.

If of course the new money isn't used to create more wealth, either because it is pocketed by some entities or because there simply are no people or natural resources available, it will lead to inflation.

You can add the Lakers to that. I guess it's natural for scoring to distribute over the quarters since being behind incentivizes playing your best players for longer and hustle in general. In addition, if you know your opponents are slow starters for example, part of the game plan might be trying to exploit that which would make it a self enforcing feedback loop.

I think the text tries to make the point that it doesn't work not because but despite him being black. The argument Perry and others make in this case is not one in the form of material benefits but rather moral ones. A member of a marginalized group makes it big, which is supposed to inspire others from this group. The point is that this form of trickle down economics works just as badly as the "regular" one, which is hardly at all.