5434a
2d ago
I don't know what the procedure is for accessing it but if your btc is unmoved since 2013 then it's pre the chain fork and you'll have the same balance in btc-cash and the various other forks that probably sank without trace.
Tattoos are a bit like dinner services because many people acquire them through imitation rather than purpose. Tattoo-havers often try to justify having a tattoo by claiming it has a personal meaning for them, but that's not the point, the point is that it shows others that you belong to an exclusive group. Why would you need to signal membership of a group to yourself? It doesn't make sense.
The popularisation of tattoos has diluted this signal to point that all it shows now is that you belong to the group of people who have tattoos. I suppose that is exclusive, but it's a bit meta.
It's a bit like wearing a football club strip. If you wear a football club strip on a football pitch it typically means you're on one of the teams. If you wear it off the pitch it means you admire the people who are on football teams. Getting selected to play for a team is exclusive and requires identifying yourself to the other members of the team, admiring the people who get selected isn't and doesn't.
All of these are symptomatic of the lack of meaningful personal identities in modern life. It wouldn't be surprising to find someone with tattoos, a football strip and who also owns a dinner service. It would be surprising if that person was in a football team and had the full complement of domestic staff to serve them dinner. A few days ago I watched a documentary about Japanese host clubs where a number of the hosts in the club wore crosses. Were they Christians? Given that ~1% of Japanese are Christian I suspect that 25% of the young fashion conscious men who make their living from selling champagne bottles to lonely women as a proxy for their personal attention weren't expressing solidarity with Jesus. I suspect they were constructing a fashion costume with shiny and vaguely exotic elements to catch the eyes of their customers. They were presenting an image without any substance.
Some of this is understandable. We all wear shoes, and so athletic trainers have become popular as much because they're comfortable and colourful as because they're associated with elite sportspeople. We all wear clothes, and so we might wear the denim jeans that were made for miners because hey, they're low maintenance and long-lasting. We all have to drive a car, so we get something a bit like a race car or an off road car even if we only drive at the limit between one paved car park and another. And yeah, we all have to eat our dinner off something too. But we don't have to mark our bodies. If you like to decorate your naked body you could use paint or henna. If you like art and design you could ask an artist to paint a fully framed canvas for you. If you like body mods and get a kick out of pain you could get metal teeth, shave your eyebrows off or just repeatedly scratch yourself with an empty tattoo gun. But people don't. They get tattoos because it's an image of authenticity, a commitment. But commitment to what? Everyone likes funny cartoons, everyone has lost someone close to them, everyone likes cool art pictures, everyone thinks the unusual is exotic, and everyone likes to think they're special. But those things aren't special, they're mundane. Being in a prison gang is special. Serving in the armed forces is special. Belonging to a Maori tribe is special. Being a Jew in a concentration camp is special. That's why their tattoos are predefined. You can't get a tattoo of Bart Simpson's butt cheeks on your belly button to show that you're a member of the Maori. You're getting a thick black spiral on your face, like it or lump it. Belonging can imply ownership as well as membership.
It's not about keeping the body in perfect shop condition. If I'd been in the navy for ten years I wouldn't object to having a tattoo to symbolise that status. I would object if I then saw someone else with naval tattoos, asked them when they served and they told me they just think the pictures are cool and that they're symbols for, like, navigating through life with confidence, and stuff. Keeping your possessions in unused condition is lame but it's not half as lame as pretending you possess something you don't. Saying if you can't destroy it you don't really own it is persuasive rhetoric but it shrinks next to the plainer statement that if it's not yours you don't own it.
You know what else women are famously keen on? Men in uniforms. Some like an officers' dress uniform are incidentally rather spiffing, but I'm not sure there's anything particularly flattering about a fireman's waterproofs and safety helmet. The appeal is what it represents: a man who has been endorsed as brave and capable. I don't get to dress up as a fireman and start bagging chicks, if I dress up as a fireman I'll get laughed at if I'm lucky to meet any chicks and more violently humiliated if I'm unlucky to meet any off duty firemen, who coincidentally don't wear their uniform out of hours. Worst case scenario the deception succeeds and I get sent up a 100ft ladder into a burning building where I then have to hope a real fireman comes and saves me.
Tattoos should symbolise being somebody, but more and more they symbolise being anybody with £50 and a free afternoon. If you're a Naz Reid fan you don't need to get a tattoo, you can get a selfie of you courtside enjoying that special moment after they win the match. Let Naz Reid wear the team strip.
Edit to add: Another aspect of traditional tattoo usage is that many of the people who used them either don't have much personal property beyond the clothes on their back for one reason or another, or are liable to find themselves in that situation unexpectedly. This touches on the "if you can't destroy it" aspect from the other side - if you can't deprive someone of it then it's something they'll have forever. In a funny way it circles around to being a different strategy for keeping their possessions in an unaltered condition.
5434a
6d ago
I don't know what if any restrictions exist but it seems like it could be fairly straight forward to cross post the AAQCs to a Substack instead of a subdomain (vault.themotte) that isn't even linked from TheMotte or the AAQC threads.
5434a
7d ago
Maybe a modest amount if the narrative presentation and my sympathies line up with the characters' experiences. If something happens in the book that is surprising to me and the characters then I suppose we're similarly surprised, but not if it's clumsily foreshadowed but still took the characters unaware. Similarly something might happen that makes the characters angry or sad, and I could either feel sad for them, contemptuous of them, curious how they'll adjust, or bored by the whole situation.
5434a
9d ago
The wiki pages cover the basics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cold_reading
A search for "cold reading techniques" will bring up less dry sources. This one has a few books recommended at the bottom which you can find on annas-archive.org or libgen:
https://www.vanishingincmagic.com/mentalism/articles/how-does-cold-reading-work/
The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Persuasive Psychological Manipulation Technique in the World
Ian Rowland Limited, 4th Revised edition, 2008
“A comprehensive guide to the most persuasive psychological manipulation technique in the world and its application to psychic readings. Cold reading can loosely be described as 'how to talk to a complete stranger as if you have known them all your life'. This definitive yet easy-to-read guide explains every aspect of cold reading in detail. Although the book focuses on how cold reading is used within the psychic industry, many cold reading principles have applications in other fields such as selling, negotiation, management and therapy. This is a 'must read' book for anyone interested in the psychology of persuasion.”
5434a
15d ago
It's difficult to judge as a TV show because I know the book and so I knew the plot and the characters going in and could tell what parts they took out, what parts they altered, what parts they cut down and so on. Over all it was fine, no complaints*, but the book is necessarily a much richer experience and if I ever want to revisit the story I'd re-read the book rather than rewatch the show.
* One complaint: Lady Ochiba's anime villainess dialogue delivery.
5434a
22d ago
Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.
And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it's how I model people
You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?
5434a
30d ago
If you can you could turn over a couple of spade's worth of garden soil each day, I imagine she'll find it fairly quickly if there's anything worthwhile in there and it's not much more work than filling up a feeder.
5434a
1mo ago
How long is the engagement for a typical arranged marriage? What would be the longest and the shortest?
5434a
1mo ago
I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.
In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.
So... who were the peasants fighting?
5434a
1mo ago
Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.
5434a
1mo ago
I consider those attributes critical inasmuch as absenting them from the discussion leaves us with nothing to discuss, or at least nothing conclusive. Non rhetorical question: How can it be otherwise?
I might be mistaken but your objection seems to rest on "man" operating as a floating signifier that can be either male (sex) or masculine (gender). This is problematic because for transgenderism to be legible the gender has to be associated with sex. A gender that is unassociated with a sex is effectively arbitrary. If transgenderism depends on gender being arbitrary then it can't make strong claims predicated on gender, if gender is illegible then claims on gender can't be understood, and if gender is strict then gender only serves its function as it relates to sex.
5434a
1mo ago
Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.
For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.
5434a
1mo ago
I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.
5434a
1mo ago
I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term.
So do I when they're grouped as a sub category to a referent super category, but if we call them women the super category ceases to signify anything essential and becomes effectively arbitrary and correspondingly insignificant. (And when it's arbitrary I have no need to justify my opinion beyond it being an opinion that's mine. Back to square one, the circle created by trans rhetoric travels in both directions despite their intention.)
When I say "transwomen aren't even transwomen" I say it to contrast their own rhetoric and demonstrate their dependence on the binary they (selectively) disavow.
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible. Each element points to something distinct even where the element might be fuzzy at the boundaries. "Transwomen are women who want to affirm their gender identity as women by pursuing feminine social signifiers" (the most charitable framing I can come up with) loses legibility the more you think about it as each element circles back to itself until the boundaries it depends on collapse into meaninglessness.
My own belief is that they do this because, less charitably, they are men who [want to be women and throw out these convoluted rationales to avoid the distress of acknowledging that they simply can't]. What they can do is increase/maximise their femininity, which is what they're already doing, and which I can't see anyway of discrediting. It's plausible, it's feasible, and it's legible. It doesn't float my boat, but it doesn't knit my brow either.
5434a
2mo ago
Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
5434a
2mo ago
@zorbathehut
While we're doing site UI feedback, it would be great if the site tracked read/unread status while logged out.
When I'm logged in the site tracks how many new unread comments a thread has accrued since last viewed. When I log out and log back in the new comment count resets to all read, meaning I can't see which threads have been active, and I can't ctrl-f through the thread for "~new".
5434a
2mo ago
A slightly less practical one but a good mindset to aspire to nonetheless is the "touch it once" principle.
I generally bundle this and the thirty second rule into just mentally taking the piss out of myself that "I'll do it later, there'll be a better time" is a stupid lazy lie when I'm standing right in front of a task that already has my attention.
5434a
2mo ago
Going okay but currently hampered by my lack of adequate tools and workspace. Slow but steady progress.
5434a
2mo ago
I've got a couple of things housemates who worked in similar sectors have left behind but honestly most B2B swag seems kind of shitty, although that might have been due to their entry level positions. Stationery. Toys. T-shirts. Nothing you'd really miss (so you leave it behind), and more like a grown up version of the stuff you would have found included directly inside every box of cereal. I suppose it's a different affair if you manage a multi-million dollar budget.
I refuse any loyalty points scheme more complex than "collect 10 stamps to claim a free coffee".
5434a
2mo ago
That's close, but I mean more along the lines of:
Packet of branded food item (coffee, cereal, yoghurt, soft drink, snack, etc)
"Collect X proofs of purchase and get a free Y!"
And the free Y is something durable and/or worthwhile, and the X proofs is realistic, not triple digits. Or if it's triple digits the Y has real monetary value like a games console. The branded items running the promotion were available in every shop, so it was designed to cultivate brand loyalty rather than loyalty to a chain of shops. Stamps were more agnostic about what you purchased and tend to be limited to one chain or a small consortium.
I suppose most marketing campaigns have transferred to apps, loyalty schemes and other sign up lists, but I get the impression those are focused on discounts and other volume sales promotions rather than straight up material freebies.
5434a
2mo ago
I'm an in-and-out, follow the list, know the layout, largely own-brand supermarket shopper who pays the minimum necessary attention to packaging. Years of internet content have made me selectively blind to anything less attention grabbing than literal naked women (and even then...). But I was lying in bed yesterday reminiscing on being a broke student and getting a "free" Bodum cafetiere by collecting something trivial like two empty coffee packets plus P+P, and some other similar giveaways that I still have in the kitchen cupboard.
Do retail suppliers still do those promotions, or was it a golden age of economic abundance and marketing largesse? What's the best thing you've got from a retail promotion? What do you still regularly use that came as a freebie?
The only one I can think of having seen lately is the tokens on branded yoghurt, which I ignored for years until I one day I caved in to curiosity and looked up the details of the offer. Turns out you basically need to be a commercial kitchen consuming gallons of yoghurt every day to make it remotely worthwhile, and IIRC the offers were split between consumable cross-marketing crap like a sample bottle of artisan moisturiser (which you still needed far too many tokens for) and then jumped up to a weekend in a fully catered holiday cottage, with very little in between.
5434a
2mo ago
Beat them to the punch and send them a brief message on the day-of to cancel.
I'm joking of course but psychology and dating is so counterintuitive it would probably work.
5434a
2mo ago
I think you're being overly cautious and perfect's-the-enemy-of-good but fair play, you've considered that suggestion and it doesn't work for you. All I'd say is that for any bootstraps enterprise to work you're better thinking of it like a penniless illegal immigrant would approach it, ie bending the rules, delay spending until you've got the work assured, bargain hunting for materials, and starting with the small jobs no one else wants.
Magic man repairs, maybe? That looks like a basic/niche kit could fit in a backpack, there's no end of broken shit for free you can take home to practice on and then throw out again, and people pay top dollar to avoid redoing expensive work. Just an idea.
My underlying point was that identifying practical issues and potentially overcoming them to achieve a material result is more productive and stimulating than reading a book, writing a song, lifting some weights or listening to a preacher. It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon. Admittedly that's a lot harder if you need it to be profitable but it's potentially more rewarding too. Chin up.
Around 2015/16 Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a result of different views over how large the blocks in the blockchain should be.
They did this by creating a fork in the blockchain where, after the date of the fork, all the transactions on one chain would be incompatible on the other chain. So if you bought BCH you could transact on the BCH chain, but not on the BTC chain, and vice versa.
However the blockchain prior to the fork is the exact same ledger for both BTC and BCH. So if you had a balance of 1 "coin" on the BTC ledger before the fork then after the fork you'll have a balance of 1 coin on the BTC ledger and a balance of 1 coin on the BCH ledger too, because it references the same transaction history. I hope that makes sense.
The upshot is that if you have a BTC balance from prior to the fork you have the same balance on all the chains that have forked from that same ledger.
Last time I looked, which was quite a while ago, BCH was worth about 1/10 of BTC, but BTC had gone up at least 10x so it's worth following up. You'd need to read up on the proper procedure to do it though because if you send your pre-fork BTC to someone without splitting the BCH out first you're essentially sending them both. I'm about at the limit of my hazy, hungover, half-remembered knowledge at this point.
There were a bunch of other chain splits, from the seemingly more serious minded ones like Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV) through to the more scammy looking ones that seemed to be just riding the brand name through the crypto hype wave, like Bitcoin Diamond (current value 7 cents). I think BSV forked from BCH, so the same principle applies there.
TLDR It's complicated and you should do some thorough research on before moving your coins. Many of the forked chains are practically worthless but a few of them, while worth less than BTC, are still worth a good bit of money on account of how much the whole market has risen since the date of the fork.
Here's an old article about one of the forks that explains it better and might offer some terms to search https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split. Looks like searching "Bitcoin split" tends to return results about Bitcoin's regular mining reward halving which is totally different. Hope that helps you get started, my information is hugely incomplete and possibly wildly out of date!
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