Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
23d ago
How about Cargoes, by John Masefield?
It has, I think, two interpretations. The first one is fairly boring – taking it "seriously" as a romantic look back at history, where he is describing two past ages filled with fanciful wonders and contrasting it with the dreary modern world
The Straussian reading is IMO vastly superior. Take the first verse, describing a ship in antiquity filled with "ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine". It's all luxury goods; pure consumption, skimming from the top without improving anything in the long run. It represents a society unwilling (or worse, unable) to reinvest its surplus wealth into growth, to actually improve itself, instead opting to spend it on awful signalling games among the elites that will lead nowhere.
The second verse is similar, but about a cargo of gemstones during the ~17th century. The same critique applies to it – it's all still signalling, with no real productivity involved.
When we get to the third verse about the modern world there is an abrupt change in mood, now ostensibly negative. What are the items the ship is carrying however? "Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays". No more useless bullshit, this is goods from a society that is actually getting its shit together. It symbolizes reinvestment, growth, and actual strength, the kind of strength that will save billions from crippling poverty, eliminate famine, cure diseases plaguing humanity for millennia and bring education to everyone.
The third verse is so overwhelmingly good that it completely destroys the veneer of negative sentiment that it's described with. Consider if the poem instead was about people and not societies: The first describing an extremely rich man hosting an opulent party, and the third about a poor boy studying and working hard to improve his life. Wouldn't it then be completely obvious who you were supposed to think was better, even if the boy was described as dirty and hungry?
What's more is that the Industrial Revolution was real. How many boats in antiquity actually carried things like "apes and peacocks"? It's certainly not representative, and the places mentioned doesn't even make sense (Nineveh wasn't coastal, a Quinquereme is Hellenistic and from the wrong period, and even so you're going to have a hard time rowing it from Iraq to Palestine!). The second verse is more "real" in that there really were treasure galleons, but again not very representative. If you want an actual cargo you'd have to describe tobacco, sugar, or, you know, slaves.
In contrast, in the third verse there really were tons of ships carrying coal and road-rail! Not only is it enormously better, it actually happened.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2mo ago
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2mo ago
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
My new-years resolution is to lose weight. I've been a bit overweight all my adult life, except when I participated in slimemoldtimemold's "only eat potatoes" community trial which worked really well. This year I'm doing it again, but just by myself. (One also saves a ton of money doing it, which helps!) The plan is to not eat anything except potatoes and vitamin supplements until Easter – except for important celebrations, like birthdays and such.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Quite right, apologies for forgetting that. I haven't yet decided on whether to post about it whenever I've finished, but if so I'd probably mention the Baal thing without actually performing it. Another good reason is that it would also be the least kosher meal that'd nevertheless be permitted to eat if it would save one's life, and involving idolatry would mess that up.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
That'd be forbidden, but it doesn't have anything to do with the actual food specifically so I don't consider stuff like that.
Also Allah, being the/a monotheistic god, is less bad than paganism! E.g. if an idol worshipper touches kosher wine it needs to be destroyed so it doesn't benefit anybody; not so if a Muslims does.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.
The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
A little project I want to do this year is try cooking an "Acherburger", that is, a meal that breaks the most kosher laws possible. There's some discussion about doing that online, but it's mostly low-effort stuff like "bacon-wrapped shrimp" etc. Lame! One can do so much more.
Here's the initial plan:
For the meat patty, combine as many treyf animals as I can. The supermarket in my city has a whole bunch, e.g. rabbit, kangaroo, alligator, even bear. I'd put a little of a bunch of them in, with the bulk being pork just so It doesn't taste too weird. Animal blood is forbidden as well; so I add a little bit of that too.
Onto this we'll add cheese, of course.
For frying, one can use suet instead of oil/butter, as that's forbidden.
Produce must be tithed before consumption, and you can't eat fruit during the first three years after planting. Outside of Israel, this isn't necessary unless you know for certain that it is the case; luckily I have a relative with a lime tree I know isn't that old, so I can add lime to the sauce and break that commandment.
Produce that may contain insects must be checked, or it is not kosher. Thus we don't do that for the lettuce, deliberately closing our eyes before putting some on the burger.
We'll eat it during the passover sabbath, so the fresh bread we'll buy is Chametz, Pat Akum, and Chadash (and of course the entire preparation of the meal is forbidden due to the sabbath). Naturally none of our utensils will be kashered either.
For the drink, we'll have wine. I have a bottle of Château Musar 2015. In addition to it being not kosher, 2015 was a Sabbath year in Israel, and since the wine is from Lebanon which counts as "Eretz Yisrael", it's not allowed. We'll also make it yayin nesech by pouring a little bit of it out in dedication to Baal. Before drinking it, I'll take a Nazirite vow to abstain from alcohol just to deliberately violate it.
The one rule I have some problem with breaking is Kil'ayim, that is "the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards [...]". This applies to Israeli produce only, and buying anything like that to make sure the seed were mixed during planting seems difficult. Sure, I can get spice mixes grown in Palestine in my local spice shop, but how can I be sure it actually broke any rule when it was grown?
Anything else I've forgotten about?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test
Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.
It it's intended to be a straightforward action/suspense movie, then it's not very good.
If it's intended to take the piss out of such movies, it's better. It's basically a John Wick type of story, but all elements being sufficiently shitty so as to just be above blatant parody. For example, there is a narration throughout the movie where the protagonist justifies his actions and puffs himself up with a sort of sophomoric "cool assassin guy" / "nothing personnel kid" persona (he literally calls civilians normies) as well making mildly unfunny quips. It's long unclear if it's just shitty writing; but in one scene his monologue is abruptly interrupted when somebody talks over him, so it becomes obvious that it's his actual internal monologue and just him being a blowhard. It just never actually blatantly winks at the audience, so you'll have to realize this yourself. (Another thing that points to this is that he constantly fucks up, especially when doing "cool ruthless assassin" things; like when he shoots nails in a guys chest during an interrogation and has an internal monologue calculating how slowly he'll die, but none of that works and he just dies instantly instead.)
Similar things are going on with the plot and character motivations; he wants to kill the people responsible for assaulting his wife (who is given the minimal amount of screen time to establish a motivation for the protagonist, and then is basically never thought of again). He leaves a pile of dead people in the wake, executing even innocent people without mercy to not leave evidence, but then in the end when he meets the big boss responsible for everything the guy gives him a piss-weak excuse of having no idea what is going on, and the protagonist just buys it instantly and lets him go.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
5mo ago
Would you mind sharing what your idea is? I enjoy reading and thinking about software architectures.
If you somehow was able to give me positive dignity equal to the inverse of me flopping about in slow motion and failing to catch a ball in front of a million viewers, then I probably would pay 500 USD for that, and I suspect a lot of people would too.
(Actually not even $500 – it's multiplied with the estimate that the person would actually pay up without any sort of trick or gotcha, which would be pretty low in that situation if you weren't aware that the person is some sort of moderately famous youtuber.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
I suspect a lot of it is just content theft with the minimal effort required to make it unique. The reactor finds some content, and since he is a more savvy marketer/promoter/algorithm-manipulator/staring-with-open-mouth-thumbnail-maker than the original he can simply slap his reaction in a corner and hijack the views.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
I have a little blog post milling around in my head about one of my favourite lyrical/poetical "tricks" – using e.g. the refrain as a framing device, but having the meaning of the refrain changed by the context of the verses so that it implies something else in the end. I'm probably never going to get around to writing it, so I'll give you the abridged version of some examples I've had in mind that may be of interest. It's pretty common for European folk songs to use it:
"Son Ar Chistr/The song of the cider", a traditional song from Brittany (YT: Alan Stivell, 1970).
It begins as a drinking song – "Drink cider, Laou, for cider is good! A penny, a penny a glass!" – but the verses quickly descend into telling how the singer is an alcoholic womanizer and was kicked out of his house by his wife, so when the same refrain comes back it's clearly about him drowning his sorrows in cheap alcohol instead.
"Hej Sokoły", a Polish/Ukrainian folk song (YT).
It begins with an uhlan cavalryman sent out to fight in a foreign land, saying goodbye to his girl. The refrain is then about falcons flying past the mountains and forests, seemingly symbolizing his untetheredness from his home. However, in the last verse he gets killed, so now the falcons in the same refrain are instead his last thread back to home. (I also like the turn in the "Wine, wine, give me wine!" line, as the first obvious interpretation is quickly turned around to mean that he wants alcohol as an anesthetic).
"Jag hade en gång en båt" Swedish/Dutch singer-songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk is also a rather good but more advanced example. (YT, and Lyrics), set to the same (originally Bahamian folk) melody as Sloop John B by the Beach Boys.
The first verse is about the narrator reminiscing about an old boat he once owned and then lost. In the second, he sings about an old dream he had and lost also, and so on. In the final verse it's a city park, gone due to a nuclear bomb. The song then quickly unwraps back, so you can have a new interpretation to each verse – from the figurative (the hopes and dreams of the narrator dying in the blast) to the concrete (the boat was lost due to everything being obliterated). Reexamining the first verse where the narrator states that he had a boat "so, so long ago", one can interpret that not as a nuclear war survivor or anything but rather humanity as a whole, implying the second verse means that all the hopes and dreams of humanity is gone.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.
(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)
Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.
In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:
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Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.
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Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.
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Not counting transfer payments.
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Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.
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Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
completely incomprehensible
I assume it's some sort of Straussian/obscurantist thing; intentionally hiding your points to prevent normies from being able to read it.
Much less charitably it's because his points are weak & often vibes-based, and any reasoning he makes would evaporate if stated explicitly and with any sort of rigour beyond Darkly Hinting to what you mean and letting the reader fill in the blanks. The few times he has written about things I am familiar with, the content really has been rather poor – take this article, for example, where he argues that a software that is only able to perform HTTP GET requests is safe, as such requests don't affect the server content. Anyone that has worked in web security know this is blatantly wrong, as there is probably hundreds of easily performed exploits and escapes for that weak of a sandbox.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
The biggest disappointment with the ending was
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
As many said at the end of the deflated coup: "if it turns out that you can occupy one city, march in columns on Moscow, and then if you fail you will not suffer any consequences, then there may be many who will want to try to this themselves.
On the flip side, making a deal and then killing your competitor anyway ensures that people will be a lot less likely to make deals with you in the future, even in cases where you don't intend to defect. Having the killing be blatant then might actually work in your favour, as it won't be seen quite as sneaky and underhanded.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
You can use the "function calling" mode for that, using the API. It restricts the model to output JSON, so it doesn't get any opportunity to scold you about your questions.
I asked it to "Provide a list of (at least ten) races and their average IQ", and limited it to only return an array of objects with a "name" and "iq" field. The result was this.
Much better than I anticipated!
I've figured that Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" could work as a Sabaton song, and it's indeed not bad.
(Also in Motown form, or 80's synth)
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