Corvos
5d ago
Polar bears would be Norway, but let’s say those are a marine mammal.
...makes arbitrary decisions about categories of aquatic fauna purely for convenience
...is trad Catholic
Yep, checks out ;-)
Corvos
5d ago
I’m not making a legal case. I’m observing how, in practice, events and associations change public perceptions. And of course those perceptions change most sharply in the violent and unstable.
Corvos
5d ago
I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
Sadly, no one ever does. Woke activists in the 2010s had absolutely no interest in finding out your exact views on race and sex before calling for your firing as a white man. As with Chinese Cardiologists, humans free-associate and they do it with a broad brush.
Broadly it seems that there is a cycle of persecution:
- Jews feel under threat.
- They take unusually stringent overt and covert actions to defend themselves.
- This makes them increasingly unpopular.
- Rinse and repeat.
Does the existence of Jew-punchers on the bus suggest that they need their own state and should do whatever it takes to keep it? Yes.
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
Corvos
6d ago
I liked National Brotherhood Week.
Corvos
6d ago
The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire. If anything, the latter has more professional assistance, although she’s also expected to be slightly more personable. (I don’t think Amazon was really that kind of business though.)
I don’t think many people think the wife should come away with nothing in such affairs, only that scaling it directly to the husband’s business success is pretty dubious.
Microsoft used to sell a very geeky product that was basically a camera on a pendant. It took a photo every 5 minutes to create a ‘life diary’. I quite liked the idea and it would be cool to have an updated product that could function similarly - at the moment so much of life just disappears into the fog.( What were you doing three days ago? How much do you remember?)
Obviously uploading these images to social media is where the trouble comes in IMO. It would also need a ‘do not record’ for private matters.
Corvos
7d ago
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
Just seconding this. We need some nutters around the place to keep things interesting
Conventional English strongly associates quality with clarity, for good reason IMO (see C.S. Lewis and Orwell’s critiques of bureaucratese and the superiority of clear sentences and everyday Anglo-Saxon derived words, with which I largely agree).
But I do see the force of the Continental claim that writing something is not actually the same as expressing it. It can even be the reverse - an inoculation that robs an idea of all its true interest and allows you to lock it in a mental drawer without further thought.
The problem for me is that I find all the continental attempts to circumvent this process to be tedious in the extreme :) Which is why I appreciate having you around to try and indicate why it is not so.
Corvos
7d ago
I was watching some clips from the Thick of It and it seemed slightly… off. The broad plot points and the characters seemed realistic enough but the overt and graphic threats, and the fucky fucky speaking style seemed to be very much written to pander to the audience rather than to be realistic.
(Who would be caught dead saying something like ‘fuck you very much’? It makes you sound like a five year old.)
I know some of us have experience in this environment (e.g. @SSCReader). What do you think? Which bits basically ring true and which bits don’t? Is TToI just outdated?
I have some experience but it’s all student politics on the one hand and dealing with civil service type people and procurement on the other hand.
Corvos
7d ago
The Piccadilly area is pretty nice for shopping: it’s got a couple of good, big bookshops (Hatchard’s especially), Fortnum & Mason’s for food, and Jermyn street etc. for top-end clothes, jackets etc. (I think you were quite interested in fashion but maybe not that kind?)
Very crowded and expensive obviously, but nice.
Or there’s the historical stuff: go to Bank and see the old City of London, or to Westminster/St. James’ Park.
Corvos
8d ago
It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?
the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them
Yeah, this was basically my big problem as well. I think it can work, it just needs to accept that mood management requires more than a ping and a condescending message.
Corvos
8d ago
I tried to make this, combining smartwatch data on heart rates and variability to detect energy levels and combining it with an LLM to generate useable recommendations.
It was surprisingly difficult for multiple reasons: your heart doesn’t differentiate between ‘low stress’ and ‘depressed heart rate because you’re recovering from a massive exertion’, or ‘high stress’ vs ‘happy drinking with friends’.
Then it was even harder to do anything with the data. Obviously LLMs don’t integrate with anything meaningful without lots of extra work and the moment you get into health they just start relying on the teams of feel-good bullshit in their training set. No, I would not like to do an hour of yoga followed by a gratitude exercise.
Corvos
8d ago
I want to make a todo list that automatically makes each item concrete:
You type in ‘buy flowers for anniversary’ and it whirrs for a bit, does some research and turns it into ‘buy roses from Mr. Weds’ Flower Emporium ten minutes away’.
Likewise for ‘find language Meetup’. ‘Make lamb curry’ automatically retrieves a recipe and list of ingredients.
Basically just reducing the cognitive load and bar for taking action to be as low as possible.
Corvos
8d ago
People are tired. The idea that one can put in endless effort for as long as one is awake is an idea that I slowly grew out of in my twenties. There are a few people who seem to be able to do it but I don’t think they’re physiologically or psychologically normal. The rest of us just about get by at our job and then are mostly pooped and have to slip in bits and pieces of effort where they can.
Now, I think that modern media hasn’t helped with this. I’m playing Elden Ring at the moment and I’ve noticed that it can pretty much perk me up even when I’m basically dozing off, which of course means that it’s overdrawing my reserves when I really ought to be resting. It’s also harder to focus on semi-interesting skills when very-entertaining stuff is available instead, but everyone knows that already.
Corvos
8d ago
That’s interesting, I didn’t know. Thanks :) All ancient history now but an interesting case.
Corvos
9d ago
This happened to a friend of mine. He had a very good case, and the lawyer said, "Look, you've got a 95% chance of winning this. But the other side is going to hire the very best, most expensive guys in town. There's a 5% chance you'll pay millions in damages - can you handle that?" And of course they didn't have that kind of money.
Corvos
10d ago
Avoiding the tendency of the hobby to suck you in and make you more and more devoted to the game at the expense of work or social life.
Corvos
11d ago
I was thinking of the SNP (Scottish National Party) myself. They got rid of male Salmond in favour of hip female Nicola sturgeon.
Corvos
12d ago
the Southport murders (committed by a born British citizen)
Committed by Axel Rudakubana, child of two Rwandan immigrants, picture here.
I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but frankly Mr. Rudakabana is a very non-standard 'British citizen' and that is clearly and directly relevant to both the country being on edge and the Southport riots. The brackets here strike me as deliberately burying the lede.
Corvos
13d ago
1 can chilli con carne: £3
1 can black beans: £2
Rice
Easily 2 meals for £5/2=£2.50 and you can be more strict if you want to save more money. Got me through postgrad.
I think I agree with the replies here that the broad themes are essentially correct (I liked the interview with the ‘Nicola’ politician, I think that sounds exactly right) but that the language and to a lesser extent the social dynamics that struck me as being off really are off, and a reflection of a fairly weird period in British TV writing.
Omnishambles on the other hand is a fantastic word, with such broad applicability!
More options
Context Copy link