Blueberry
3mo ago
sounds more like Wini, Widi, Wicky
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet …
Vici is related to victory. And the hard c=k is manly.
Blueberry
5mo ago
Looking at successful religions, dietary restrictions and the conspicuous observance of them seems ritualistically important in binding people together
I think this is also part of it. There is the "Veganuary" in January which is even tried by flexitarians/carnivores and sort of like Ramadan or catholic lent. And the dietary restrictions by the more fanatic minority have outsized influence on the more tolerant/flexible majority, which pushes culture in one direction.
It is a bit of virtue signaling (the vegan has bragging rights over the vegetarian), a bit atonment for our sins (at least eating vegan Pizza with fake cheese feels that way), good old market capitalism (aside from fake cheese many products got crazy goods. I don't care if I eat real chicken nuggets or plant based nuggets), but it is also development of a shared culture and being part of something bigger (which is universally regarded as good or at least not bad, which is nice). Also the small talk aspect, one can share recipes and cooking tricks.
Blueberry
7mo ago
There are 3 million people in the west bank and 2 million people in the gaza strip.
5 trillion Dollars to buy a solution to the middle east conflict is not impossible, but pretty steep.
Though the problem only compounds over time: Fertility rate is 3.2 and even 3.97 in Gaza. Look at this population pyramid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_Palestine
Blueberry
7mo ago
Caesar’s final breath – exhaled as he was stabbed to death in the senate – would have contained about a litre of air made up of about 25 thousand million million million molecules. At the same time, a litre of air represents 0.000000000000000000001% of all the air on Earth. When you crunch these numbers, says Kean, you will find that roughly one particle of the last air that was breathed out by Caesar more than 2,000 years ago will appear in your next breath. “Across all that distance of time and space, a few of the molecules that danced inside his lungs are dancing inside yours right now.”
Blueberry
8mo ago
what they do to celebrate getting to Hawaii I will not spoil for those who haven't read.
Is it human sacrifices?
Blueberry
9mo ago
Elon also has to partner with Uber/Lyft/PayPal/Venmo/Amazon/Ebay/booking/Ticketmaster etc. I am sceptic that he will be good in that. Maybe a boring uncontroversial person could pull it of.
For Twitter to tacking a payment option onto itself is a monumental task. How many years would they need to be feature competitive with PayPal?
From a software-philosophical point of view my guess is that it will just bloat the X-Twitter app.
Hardware Stores / Home Improvement Centers are very popular in Germany and being able to build (or extend) your own home gives bragging rights. The slogan of one of the larger chains is "There is always something to do" and a competitor has "respect for making it yourself".
Ads:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg3BCRH0Nw
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AKdc6xdNu_0
One celebrity, a sport athlete who won the world cup, made with his wife home improvement ads, eg doing their own gardening. I just now realize how strange that is, as in other countries such super rich stars would instead advertise that they have servants for everything.
Part of it is the traditional image that a "real man" should be skilled in using power tools and be industrious (and the feminist idea that women should be too). And also because manual labor is very expensive, it is cheaper to do it yourself "as a hobby".
Blueberry
1yr ago
How does Sweden compare to Denmark/Norway/Finland in vaccination percentage? I thought all Scandinavia/western Europe were good in that.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Though Scott stresses repeatedly, that anorexia or anything else is not "less real" even if the underlying cause is 100% social and 0% biological. Do you think mass shootings don't exist? Of course not. An anorexic girl will still be anorexic and is in danger to hunger herself to death.
This is a bit weird to truly wrap ones head around. Lets take demonic possession. Deciding that there are no demons (or maybe very few) is a valid position. But there is a difference between A) this isn't real, possessed people are faking it, and B) the brains predictive engine is very good in simulating, and the individual experience/qualia is suffering under demonic influence.
Blueberry
11mo ago
Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter
Harry is totally average, aside that he has -accidentally- a piece of Voldemorts soul. But he is not the best wizard in the world or is the coolest guy ever. It is Longbottom in the end who wielded the sword of Gryffindor, it is Hermione who is most clever, the Weasley family who harbors the resistance.
The hardest flex of him is in the comments:
I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue.
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why."
A dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables.
Blueberry
6mo ago
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe?
The paragliders were like out of Mad Max. Like the cheap NOD buggies from command & conquer.
But:
I can't find the source video on Youtube, so sorry for the Twitter links. This is the fast-paced propaganda video from Hamas "rehearsing their deadly Israel attack". This is how they want to be seen:
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1710846439776297120
And from the ground it looked like this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_UPSU2dEJbM https://twitter.com/OSINTNic/status/1712058746266849658
It is terrifying, but only if you don't have a gun. The gliders are slow moving, they are loud, they have zero cover. It is like shooting ducks. If you have a gun, which the festival people didn't.
One hot take a few days ago by Eetan was that the Israelis need gun rights:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
I wouldn't be so quick for this American solution. But I don't expect to see glider soldiers in the heavily armed Ukraine war and in principle it should be easy for the IDF to detect and defend against them.
Much of the show is about competition and dislike and hatred and other reality tv show drama created between the male contestants.
In Germany the social dynamic is that at the Bachelor the women contestants are forming cliques, gossiping and intriguing against women outside but giving support inside their group, but that the Bachelorette is way more boring. Every bit of drama has to be inflated 10x by production as the men contestants are just partying as bros.
Last year secular Jews fertility rate in Israel declined for the first time below replacement level (slightly under 2.0). They still do get more kids then their peers in the west, but conservative/traditional families still get more.
Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.
Blueberry
18d ago
It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
Blueberry
1mo ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
In the India Subreddit they take that as proof that Sikhs infiltrated the Canadian intelligence agencies:
hundreds of wiretaps of the suspects and other informants were destroyed.[140][141] Of the 210 wiretaps that were recorded during the months before and after the bombing, 156 were erased. These tapes continued to be erased even after the terrorists had become the primary suspects in the bombing
A witness was also murdered and „ a consequence of his murder, the affidavit was inadmissible as evidence.[149] This was later cited as a reason why the suspects in the bombing were eventually acquitted in 2005“.
A Security Intelligence Review Committee cleared CSIS of any wrongdoing. However, that report remains secret to this day. As of June 2003, the Canadian government continued to insist that there was no mole involved
Juicy fodder for conspiracy theorists!
Blueberry
1yr ago
I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years. If not sooner. The question becomes - what do we do about it?
30 hour work week like Keynes intended.
Blueberry
6mo ago
Paul Morphy, the best player ever, has said:
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Blueberry
4mo ago
Websites such as Pornhub, which is less targeted to specific sexual attitudes and is more a repository for a wide array of content, are designed to "push the envelope" with straight users by suggesting gay and transgender videos to them, Rice explained.
I noticed that. Pornhub is showing more gay/trans/kink into the little thumbnails. I dismissed that as changing mores, a neutral algorithm just showing what is popular. But now I wonder how much ideology is behind that? If one registers a PH account (shock!) instead of incognito browsing, is there a way to set preferences and filter effectively?
Blueberry
1yr ago
I feel like the Internet is losing its collective mind about that. It is not even a scissor statement, but everyone is aghast: The Buddhism subreddit has threads about people having a religious crisis. The Twitter hashtag is atheists being giddy taking a religious icon down, wokes grandstanding about abusive childhood trauma, evangelicals gladly attacking a trendy competing religion, rightwingers posting old memes of Biden and trying to smear any Democrat as a pedo if they had a photo together with the Dalai Llama…
I am not saying it is ok or appropriate or that his goofing around wasn’t icky. But sexual predator? A pedophile? I am baffled. My model of the Llama is that of a jester and he is someone who doesn’t have much experience with children. Also he is superold, and old people can be sometimes strange and weird. Doesn’t that suffice in explanation?
It is noteworthy that a private military company (Wagner) is doing a lot of the difficult front fighting, and the normal Russian army is just following later.
https://twitter.com/MihajlovicMike/status/1612936331587649537
Is the private sector also in war more efficient than state bureaucratic militaries?
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