It’s inspiring that decades of research into space exploration is being used so that incomprehensibly rich assholes can blast themselves off into space for four minutes.
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Also pretty on brand to have an 18 year old passenger whose dad, a private equity ghoul, paid $28,000,000, on board.
Also here is some light reading as you ponder just how big of a piece of shit this guy is.
At least Jack Ma is using his billions to make Tai Chi mini movies where he fights Donnie Yen. That rules school, and we can all enjoy watching them.
https://twitter.com/JamesGleick/status/1417495458390417414?s=19
By my calculation, Bezos net worth has to increase to $82 trillion to reach the moon. That’s 82 times US GDP in 1969. Brb, gotta go buy some shit on Amazon.
is he? I thought Xi disappeared him.
Leon Black has been mentioned here and there on UP, like here:
And he popped into this great piece of writing from Matt Levine:
Leon Black, the former head of Apollo Global Management Inc., allegedly had an extramarital affair with a woman 30 years younger than him, paid her millions of dollars during their sexual relationship, secretly recorded their conversations, and spent millions more dollars to conceal the affair from the directors and clients of his firm. When I say “allegedly” I mean that’s what he alleges; that’s his defense of his actions.
Also, having affairs/abusive relationships seems really expensive!
In any case they seem to agree that, after their affair ended, they had lunch at the Four Seasons in 2015 and signed a contract providing that Black would pay her $100,000 a month for 15 years.
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I knew there was a reason I don’t meditate. Crazy stuff.
Britton explained to me that it’s likely that my meditation practice, specifically the constant attention directed toward the sensations of the body, may have increased the activation and size of a part of the brain called the insula cortex.
“Activation of the insula cortex is related to systemic arousal,” she said. “If you keep amping up your body awareness, there is a point where it becomes too much and the body tries to limit excessive arousal by shutting down the limbic system. That’s why you have an oscillation between intense fear and dissociation.”
She suggested I try a trauma therapy called Somatic Experiencing and invited me to her support group for meditators who have experienced acute distress. Their stories were validating yet heartbreaking: a steady stream of individuals using meditation in a search for relief from suffering and instead finding greater anguish.
While some were veterans of numerous meditation retreats, others simply dabbled with a meditation application. One woman, a clinical mental health worker, ended up in a psychiatric facility after her doctor recommended she participate in a 10-day meditation retreat. Numerous participants developed problems after using Sam Harris’s popular Waking Up app.
So much for Sam being a meditation guru.
Guy can’t hack it against Andy.
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Huuuuge grain of salt on “meditation can either make you too in touch with your emotions, or not enough!” I’ll buy that meditation isn’t for everybody, and I don’t doubt that it’s possible for it to be harmful I guess. But there are a shitload of real studies that have shown the benefits of meditation.
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If you read the whole article he talks about that. He just doesn’t think the downsides are made clear enough. I was surprised to find out there’s a physiological basis for it.
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Read this about mindfulness the other day and thought it was interesting. The study isn’t orientated the way the headline would have you believe, it looks at how mindfulness affects people based on their degree of independent or interdependent self-conception, and then also how you can alter that conception and how that affects mindfulness.
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Another mindblowing story. Just insane.
Fear not. Our very own SkylineDiver has assured us it’s a perfectly acceptable carbon-based fuel.
Interesting piece. I don’t think it’s that surprising. Meditation is essentially a tool for taking apart and remaking the mind. It has much in common in that respect with psychedelics, which are also valuable and powerful tools but also leave some people traumatized. There’s a bit of a survivorship bias problem with meditation teachers, in that people who teach it are typically people who have found it extremely beneficial, but that doesn’t mean it will lead inexorably to the same destination for everyone.
I think the vast majority of people, who are not on a full-on quest for enlightenment, will benefit from meditation practice and it sounds like the author agrees. I think he conflates a couple different things in the piece. He spends most of it talking about long-term, very intense meditation causing adverse restructuring of the brain, which, fine, I can buy that maybe this happens in some cases. But the anecdote about the woman who went to retreat and had an acute psychotic episode and killed herself seems basically unrelated and doesn’t really impress me. People without a history of psychosis have psychotic episodes. She was 25. Maybe it was the onset of schizophrenia, who knows. All sorts of things can induce an initial episode. Religious practices certainly can, but that doesn’t mean there should be a warning label on attending an Episcopal Church.
I have a week-long retreat coming up in late September. I’ll let you know if I go insane.
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I had to fix a problem like this for my girlfriend and I don’t remember the exact details but it had to do with the fact that contacts are stored in multiple accounts. Typically it’s your iCloud account and Google account, which is likely why the missing contacts don’t have iPhones - they’re the Google contacts. It might be as simple as going to Settings > Accounts & Passwords and turning on Contacts for the Google account. Also go to the Contacts app and ensure it’s set to use contacts from both. If you want to rationalise the list - delete duplicates and so on - you have to go to the iCloud website and do it.
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Yeah I was thinking it sounded a lot like psychedelics. Some people can handle them, some can’t. I was surprised to find out meditation could make that concrete of an impact and even make changes that show up on an MRI (when not meditating). At least according to the HackerNews comments on this article.
Are you going to the no-talkie version?
Can you describe the benefits you’ve gotten so far from meditation, and what you hope to gain from this retreat?
This is going to sound crazy but you might try calling Apple. I had a problem with iMessage on my work mac. I tried everything off google and finally in desperation just called Apple. The woman was super-knowledgeable and spent over an hour on the phone with me fixing it. I couldn’t believe it. I figured at the time they must really be pushing iMessage hard or something.
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In news that should suprise no one the FBI had informants and agents involved in the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, with informants and agents organizing and instigating
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