DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
I'd say start with the simplest tool first. The most important feature of a tool is lack of friction. Tools like obsidian are great for those who perceive it as low friction or already have a developed habit of personal knowledge management.
I have personally found notion & one note to be sufficient. They are remarkably easy to use and I specifically like them because they explicitly preserve hierarchy unlike Obsidian.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
There is still a lot of common ground to be found.
Left - Black people were not allowed to own high value land in the 50s and still don't own any.
Young populist Right - We are poor doing blue collar work college educated PMC class grifters are the only ones who can afford the now-heavily inflated land.
The answer is the same for both groups. Build more ! But, their hatred for each other doesn't allow them to talk about any of the issues at all.
The point is not to find consensus, but to chip at some of the provably wrong bits of the beliefs held by either side, until we reach 2 opposing but still kinda alright solutions.
eg: There is ample evidence for the left to concede that rent control does not work. Also, Dumping all the homeless/poor/society's most desperate into 1 block will destroy that neighborhood and exacerbate all of those issues. (housing projects deep in Brooklyn). At the same time, the right could also concede that an arbitrary date in the 70s does not make sense a date to have stopped building any and all housing around the US. If the city population goes up by 20%, then the city needs 20% new housing. Mafs.
Just starting there makes for productive conversation. No holy cows need to be slain. No major minds need to changed.
Ofc, in such a world the everyone would hold hands and kiss too..........but I am a hopeless optimist, so I persevere.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Elon is the definition of low-status.
He claims to abhor woke ideals. But faces all the problems that trads claim their alternatives can fix. Elon can't hold down a stable relationship, names his children like twitter blue-checks name their mental illnesses and is estranged from multiple of his own children.
He was so insecure about his hair, that he went and got a hair transplant. He claims to be a free speech absolutist, yet censors people on twitter. He underpays and overworks his workforce. He goes on twitter tantrums like the Trigglypuff meme and lastly, he gets a LOT of things wrong. From the cringe robo-dance to "self driving is only 1 year away", Elon has gotten enough wrong that his rights can never make up for it.
This is before Elon became the internet meme of today. I presented a review paper on why hyperloop was a stupid idea in 2013. A self-driving group that I worked with in 2018 was absolutely confident that Tesla's 2d-selfdriving was going to backfire bigtime.
In comparison to Elon, Peter Thiel is a similar right-coded-anti-woke asshole, but he is far more high status. Quietly bankrupts Gawker because they outed you as gay. Builds the future of the surveillance state. Funds actually smart researchers to publish peer reviewed studies which show the ineffectiveness of woke culture. Goes full Republican and sticks with it. Still unashamedly gay.
Elon cares too much about how he is perceived. Such a man can never be seen as high status.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
far-left
I've found the far leftists to be a lot easier to engage with than the shifty trend followers. We disagree on everything, but I get along pretty well with proper communists. At least they've read their first sources and reason from a concerted set of first principles.
Jonathan Haidt and John McWhorter are idiots
Why would any of the reasonable ones hold this belief to begin with ?
best way to argue with woke leftists?
You can't. You can only properly argue with someone who engages with you in good-faith. The second you engage in wrong think, you are considered an enemy, and all avenues for a real discussion are shut down.
UNLESS...........
1.You build a mountain of good faith.
In your closest circle, there is enough good faith, that you can set yourself on (a metaphorical) fire by mentioning these names and still have enough in store to keep them listening.
they can always accuse their opponent as "lacking empathy"
The people closest to you hopefully know you well enough to not accuse you of 'lacking empathy'.
2.You play the idiot.
Keep asking questions without revealing your preferences. Defer to the person as if they are the expert and you know nothing, while ignorantly poking holes in their ideas. If they get suspicious and start asking questions, reply with something innocuous like , "idk. I just want people to be able to live their best life." If they are engaging in good faith, they should run into a logical-hurdle at some point and at least question their own belief because of it.
One good way to throw questions at them is if you have some unique cultural context that they don't. Eg: The minorities in my country are repressed, but also rich. Refugees in western nations are considered terrorists in their home nation. Or, the military imposes woke ideas in the nation through authoritarian suppression and explicit violence. They don't know enough to counter you. At the very least, they should see the core issue with the non-transferability of woke ideas across cultural contexts.
Things to never do: Don't ever play their jargon games. They will trap you in it. They are better at spouting bullshit than you are. You will only be embarrassed here by the end of it. The Chris-Rufo-esque bastardization of terms like woke/CRT still convey more specifics than a woke-leftist ever would. If you defer argue on their playing field, you will be destroyed before you even open your mouth. Yes, it means that you cannot resolve an argument amicably with someone looking for a fight. Either concede (by playing within their Jargon) or put up a proper fight with a Rufo-esque fight-fire-with-fire approach. Either ways, if you end up angry at the end of it, then might as well go down swinging.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
American buffet
American buffets are the poster child of food poisoning. Spent 23 years in India, the land of food-poisoning stereotypes without being poisoned. Went to my first Indian buffet in Boston and got the most horrifying case of violently-releasing-food-from-all-orifices.
I now refuse to eat at low-turnover buffets in the US. I only visit ones that serve so many people in 1 day that food never gets cold and a case of food poisoning would likely force them to shut down.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Slight tangent:
Aah Seattle.... my favorite city to complain about.
Seattle is one of those places, where the more you look, the weirder it gets. Nothing about the city makes sense, and it seems to find the least intuitive solution to every core problem facing it.
I'm leaving Seattle for NYC in 2 weeks, and could not be happier about it.
The 3 words that come to mind when you think of the Seattle landscape are :
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Rainy
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Hilly
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Dark
So, you'd think that the infrastructure would be built to work around these 3 traits. NOPE. If anything, the city tries to pretend as if none of those exist and gaslights you for complaining about it.
It's the rainy, so you'd want covered indoor spaces for people to socialize in for the 9 months of the year. There are none. Maybe covered outdoor spaces ? None.
It's dark, so you'd there to be well lit central walkable streets so people feel safe when it is dark at 3pm outside. There are none. But, dark places means amazing nightlife right ? Nope. Everything closes at 9.30.
It is hilly, so you'd want a street-cars/funiculars for the worst hills right ? Nope. The 2 paltry streetcars follow some of the flattest terrain in town.
Now here is the hilarious thing, this wouldn't be that big an issue. Afterall, all of America is abysmally planned and it manages to get by just fine. Thing is, all of Seattle's problems become 10x worse once you add the right variable into the mix. Yes ofc, Homelessness. (plus the dilapidation, drugs and crime resulting from it)
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Why can't we have warm-ish covered public spaces --> because homeless people.
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Why does no one want to walk in dark, badly lit, cold, rainy downtown neighborhoods unlike Northern Europe with similar weather --> because meth crazed homeless people
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Why does no one use public transit --> because drooling drugged out homeless people
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But why does driving into downtown also suck --> because property crime : homeless people
Should we do anything to solve it. Maybe start with politely asking homeless people to move or telling Mr. Felony that 22 strikes are 22 too many ? (/s)
No, we show compassion. Because there is nothing as egalitarian as allowing thousands of people to steal, stalk, harass & assault people while they waste their life away on increasingly accessible drugs.
Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals
I refuse to buy this uniquely American association of "suburbia = soft discrimination through differential access = class war = signaling". In every well-connected European & Asian city, the rich & high-status live in the middle of the city. It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.
You are correct in that discrimination is central to signaling class. But, using the world's most inefficient urban planning to facilitate this is a uniquely American (and associated fake countries that pretend they aren't vassal states).
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Because the automobile industry is in the middle of an existential disruption from new electric car manufacturers. They would rather maintain their market position than make a few extra dollars in this process. The scariest proposition is someone buying another car.
3 low margin Camrys is better than 2 high margin Camrys + 1 Tesla/Rivian/etc. sold. They want to starve out the new players.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
They are effectively doing this by only keeping top trims & high margin cars in stock.
They don't just want to make short term profits, they want to permanently change buying behaviors.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
BYU is Mormon AF and soft-republican. It has some of the best employment outcomes in the US.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
My understanding is:
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On around 5 known occasions between 2000-2010, he approached women in private
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He asked them if he could pull his dick out and masturbate in front of them. In at least 3 cases, this is after he had invited them back to his hotel room.
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Some of them were people he had indirect professional relationships with. Afaik, it was never an explicit power dynamic. (they were trying to hire him, he worked with her boyfriend, they were rising comedians in the same industry)
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The women gave him some verbal form of consent. (ofc, I dunno if it was an enthusiastic "yes" or a "do whatever you want, you creep"). Louid CK claims he got consent in every situations. Some women say that they didn't say no, not that they said yes.
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On one occasion he talked about something sexual with another woman on the phone who was the girlfriend of a coworker who was trying to book him for a show. In this case, she did not give explicit consent to talking about sexual stuff on phone with him. He also started masturbating but afaik, the exchange was purely over phone.
I mean, it is bad. But is it that bad ?
Louis CK should've probably taken his own advice.
“At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true,” C.K. wrote. “But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.”
&
If you ever ask somebody, “May I jerk off in front of you,” and they say yes, just say, “Are you sure?” That’s the first part. And then if they say yes, just don’t fuckin’ do it
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
It is a culture war issue because of the selectiveness in cancellation.
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There are rappers who have murdered people & are heroes of the music industry
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Chris Brown pummeled Rihanna to within an inch of her life
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Ezra Miller seems to be collecting a bingo card of cancellable stuff, but being they/them protects him
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Drake has been openly being creepy towards 14yr olds while topping charts
culture where it’s socially acceptable
Do you want to pretend as if the entertainment industry suddenly grew a spine ? It has been ground zero for every kind of socially unacceptable thing for decades now.
old men
If the claims are to believed this was in his 30s. He was sexually approaching his coworkers when he was out of his marriage. The question is, how cancellable would this have been if he was an attractive man instead ?
Enough to get him fired from the job. Enough for women to think he's a creep. Enough to ruin his PR.
All 3 happened at a much bigger scale for Louis CK. So, the accusation of 'he was not cancelled enough' is clearly false.
You don't have to defend his actions to also think that punishments need to be fair.
Louis CK was the biggest stand-up comedian before Chapelle came back. MSG was Louis CK's playground, with him doing sets there whenever he wished. He talks about how nervous he was about his MSG set, the amount of work that went into it and how different it felt.
For one, nothing Louis CK did was criminal. From the sounds of it, he never pulled his dick out unless the other person provided consent for it, and he was never in an explicit boss-employee relationship with women he approached. Yes, it was creepy, inept, unethical & sad. But it's amateur hour as far as showbiz goes. After Aziz, Louis CK was cancelled for the least egregious of the #metoo accusations.
Louis CK's entire persona was of a sad lonely dad in a tragic-comedy. If anything, this plays straight into it. If they/them Ezra Miller still gets to play a role model character after doing some actually criminal stuff, then CK's humble image would be expected to be resilient to accusations of being the person his comedy has portrayed him as for 30 years.
In the least woke profession, the greatest practitioner & the least egregious sexual creep, who never put himself on a pedestal can come back after a few years and have moderate success as along as he lives a now sin-free life and keeps performing at his GOAT best.
If that's the claim, then it sounds like the exception that proves the rule.
90s rappers killed people and were embraced by the institution. Now people are losing jobs over suspicions of being republican.
P.S : Just to be clear, no justifying his behavior. It was obviously degenerate. Don't idolize entertainers. IMO, his temporary banishment from institutions & public apology was appropriate punishment. It is probably fair for women actors to not want to work with him again too. It's their choice. But the global scale of bullying & still-continuing blackout are honestly a bit much.
The obvious answer is the industrial revolution.
The more nuanced answer is all the things that led to the Industrial revolution occurring in England and not anywhere else.
It was always going to be between 3 great civilizations. Europe (the west), China & India.
The key years were 1400-1600. Everything after was unsurprising.
Key events:
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Competitors fall behind due to Mongol/Islamic invaders, but the west doesn't
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The fall of the last wealthy Hindu empire - Vijayanagara to Mongols (Mughals)
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The fall of the last wealthy Han empire - Ming dynasty to Mongols (Manchus)
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Post-crusade stability allowed the space needed for the Renaissance to happen
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Sea based superiority
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India and China move to inland capitals (Delhi, Beijing) cutting their focus from the sea
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Western Europe has access to an ocean that the rest of Europe didn't have
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First contact
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First ships from Europe land in India + China. Most importantly, in fringes of the current empire
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Columbus lands in America
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Establishment of extractive colonies & economic slack
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America, Coastal India, Coastal China, Philippines are colonized
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Britain has the money to think & build
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The industrial revolution was by no means guaranteed. But, it is not surprising that it occurred in England. Best colonies, best access to the ocean, best protection from war.
It is possible for the industrial revolution to have never happened. In the case, I can see the ebb & flow of power between the various great civilizations switching hands again. But, the industrial revolution allowed England, and subsequently the west, to overshadow everyone else overnight.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Not a podcast, but you can listen to WILTY as if it was a podcast.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
what blows my mind is how perfectly calibrated it is to the platonic ideal (in western society) of a hot woman.
It's so weird, it's so potent, and this is just some amateur's work. God I am happy I won't be entering puberty in this decade. Shit's starting to get weird fast.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
You've hit the nail on the head. As much as I like B&R, Katie's comments on Rufo sounded more like jealously than disagreement. Katie has suffered some of the worst ostracization, while also having the least disagreements with her bullies on most issues. The lady was practically chased out of Seattle. It is natural for her to feel like she deserves the most credit, since she was the one who suffered most. Of course, your willingness to suffer quietly & ineffectively has nothing to do with who gets rewarded once the tide starts turning back again.
It's funny, because Katie's own co-host has written about a similar type of resentfulness from the monetary perspective. The good non-woke-liberal journalists rejected Substack to 'stick by the ingroup's rules', but were instead rewarded with paltry wages & editorial suppression at big media. On the other hand, the sub-stackers 'played dirty' by not following institutional rules, made $$$.
From the POV of on-the-ground impact, Chris Rufo is doing to the 'substack liberals', what the substack liberals did to institutional journalists from a monetary POV.
feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold
Harsh, impolite & more accusatory than was necessary....but fair.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Chris Rufo is so clearly the rising star of the new-republican party. The guy is smart, knows how to hit back against his main ideological opponent in the woke & seems to be raking in the cultural wins one-after-another. He has an elite educational background while also living around west-coast liberals. Yet somehow, De Santis and republicans seem to trust him.
I don't necessarily agree with him, but watching him navigate these seemingly unwinnable fights and come out on top is fascinating.
I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.
Like him or not, he is interesting to follow.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Yeah, that is the tentative conclusion I've reached as well.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The entire thing is so confusing. The only certain thing is that the version of the story in the media has to be false.
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Why is Paul in boxers ?
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Why are they both so happy ?
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Why is it so quiet even before the police get there ?
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Why does Paul open the door when both his hands are occupied ?
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Why does he have a drink in his hands ?
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What were they doing for 30 minutes until the police arrived ?
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How did an obese man break into fucking Nancy Pelosi's house without any alarms sounding ?
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Why does he say "It's good" when he is clearly threatened ?
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Who wears a shirt inside their house ?
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No security systems at all ?
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How did a guy hammering at a door not wake anyone up ?
The attacker:
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Illegal immigrant from Canada
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Had a Q-esque deranged manifesto that ended with American political theater.
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But was also a hipster nudist
All that being said, it looks like he is clearly attacked and got hurt in a manner that would be life-threatening to any 80 yr old. Why would an almost-retired 200 millionaire pull a stunt like this ? The alternate conspiracies also do not make any sense. I don't buy that this has anything to do with Trump or MAGA, but he does seem to be taken in with every major conspiracy theory under the sun.
Maybe reality IS stranger than fiction, and outside the media claims about the guys affiliation, the rest of the story is true. As strange as it is, that does seem like the story most likely to be true.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
At any rate, there are degrees of cancellation
and there are degrees to "cancellable comments."
Kanye has received the biggest ban hammer of them all, but he has also made the most egregious racial comments of any celebrity in the recent past. Every time I heard an absurd headline about him, I'd think he had been misquoted. Then I'd go watch the source, and it was every bit as deranged as the headline claimed. Even when around good-faith interviewers like Lex, Kanye pulled out every anti-jew stereotype in rapid-fire fashion. Almost as if to ensure the swiftest cancellation possible. When Alex Jones is the sane one in the room, you know Kanye has gone off on the deep end.
Soon after, Chapelle made some similar points about the over-representation of jews in Hollywood and Jon Stewart pretty much gave the 'go ahead' to Chapelle's statement. Now you might say that it's Jon Stewart in damage control trying to not let this thing Streisand itself. But, Chapelle is still popular as ever and untouched. Criticism of Israel is pretty common place and joking about Jewish stereotypes is pretty much permitted in the industry.
Sure, Kanye was the billionaire that got cancelled. But damn did Kanye do everything possible to get cancelled.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Ten Short Scenes from India
Top tier comedy. Love watching "white privilege" go the other way. 23 years in India, and have never had any of these happen to me. (except crying beggars, that's a daily exercise)
Varanasi is a headscratcher. Indians have millennia long memories tied to the once great place, and visit it begrudgingly. But, it makes no sense for a white person to go to Varanasi. Set on the border of Bihar and UP, you are looking at the most underdeveloped parts of the world. By the point the Ganga reaches Varanasi, it's turned into a filthy gutter. Varanasi is far from any other tourist spot, the architecture is sub-par, the important buildings have all been rebuilt recently & the large swaths of domestic tourists make it intolerably claustrophobic.
Indians have sentimental reasons to go to Varanasi, so it makes sense. Others, less so. Imagine if Indians started visiting the Memphis Bass-pro Pyramid one because it has importance to people in American South. I mean, if you find yourself in Memphis for some reason, go ahead. But, why would you go to Memphis for any reason ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
if your mother grew up in a culture where beef was not an acceptable
Yep, this was India. She also personally avoids pork & goat......but doesn't get worked up about others eating it.
Cows in India are treated pretty well, when compared to how we treat our own humans.
There is a clear association between animal intelligence and how likely we are to empathize with it. Fish & Poultry aren't smart or can't message intelligence in a manner that is easily recognizable to humans. Cows, Pigs, Goats.....different issue. I eat everything, but I draw a line at dolphin.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Yep, this was before electricity was available in these villages & when tractors were too expensive.
Socialist India was not a great place to grow up.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The worked on fields. Nothing was mechanized.
Cows had actual value. So a bull ox would juts get sold to some neighbor who needed one on his farm asap.
Fair.
What I meant was for you to identify your problem properly. Are you struggling to get started with wiki building or are you looking for the right tool to make your present wiki-building efforts better.
It will be a long time before you have sufficient content on there to need any of the advanced features offered by these platforms. The question : "which tool" is only relevant after you have been at it for a couple of years and are now looking for better organization. If you are getting started, then the answer for "which tool" is always : "whichever gets you started".
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