JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
I don't think among the superheroes Trump is a Superman. Superman is a Lawful Good with both qualities dialed to 11. Trump is more like Chaotic Good.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
I don't watch too much of the election stuff, but when I see clips of Trump doing the speeches or interviews, I always notice this - he's loving what he's doing. He likes to speak to the audience, he has a good time doing it, and it can be seen. He can shoot breeze for 3 hours and he's enjoying it. Politicians are professional bloviators, but I haven't seen many of them that have the same quality. It looks effortless when he's doing it. I don't think Harris has this quality.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
A tiny vibe shift I'd say. It'd be a big vibe shift when Congress candidates would dare to speak the name again, this is not happening yet. And given how overregulated everything is, building anything will be prohibitively expensive unless regulators are told to stop their shit. And only lawmakers can do that, and to make them to do that they shouldn't be afraid that they will be blamed for giving us all cancer through bad juju. That part didn't happen yet. So some guys like Microsoft can afford to have private nuclear plants, because they play by different rules anyway, but the rules for normal people so far are the same.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
I use it with Dropbox (I use Dropbox anyway for other stuff so no additional investment needed) and it works just fine for me. There are plugins for encrypting stuff too.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
Batteries may be plausible. Energy is iffy - what if it turns it's actually has to be nuclear? You may be IQ400, but other people still aren't and they are afraid of bad nukular juju, and your IQ400 arguments do not convince them because they can't understand most of it and hate you for that too. A lot of people would hate you - from traditional energy producers all around the world to the woke ecologists that wouldn't be happy with the idea that the solution for everything they thought as a problem is not worshipping Mother Gaia but more technology. I'm not even sure about social things - so far success in doing anything social is correlated negatively if anything with the IQ...
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
5 lux out to a distance of 100 meters, while the Fit's headlights achieved that illumination only out to 72.4 meters
How much does it really matter? I personally rarely drive in places where I have 70+ meters of unlighted space in front of me, and I'm not sure how much going from 72 to 100 (or the reverse) going to change things.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
I remember reading in the books that there were public religious disputes then. Maybe they were rigged, and maybe the outcome was sometimes pre-determined, and maybe the king could execute a debater if they said something the king didn't like... but still, it was a thing. Now talking to somebody with different point of view is "platforming" and is considered violent attack on vulnerable people. I think we've gone backwards in that regard.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
Note that this weaponization works only in one direction. The oppressed masses get a complete pass to be violent (up to and including mass murder) and it's of for the left to be completely uncivil towards the deplorables. But if you dare to disagree with somebody who is higher than you on the oppression ladder, you are the worst criminal possible. It has nothing to do with civility, it's enforced power structure where the left usurps the right to designate who is going to be in power, and who is allowed to discuss questions of power. They just use the pretense of civility in an attempt to hide this blatant power grab.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
And why should anyone participate in politics unless and until we establish a baseline?
You may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. If you ignore the politicians completely, you still will very much have to deal with consequences of their actions, and these consequences, with our currently insanely regulated and government-infested world, would still define huge part of your life. If you don't participate at all, they'd just be freer to do whatever they want, without even the microscopic hypocritical lip service to your interests they have to pay now.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
Confirming on American Fiction. The race farce kinda drives the plot, but the point of the movie is not that, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I probably would spend less time reading the news than usual, until the election. I don't believe anything short of super-dramatic things is going to happen to change anything - there's probably no dirt on Trump left that could be discovered (if it were possible, they'd do it in the last 8 years), no dirt on Harris, even if discovered (which is unlikely), will be published anyway widely enough to make any effect, and if something like somebody dying happens, I'd hear about it somehow. So, reading any news from now till the election is completely pointless.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
About 95% of programmers never use math beyond basic arithmetics. Exception is when you have to deal with physics and such (games, simulations, etc.) and crypto (but regular programmer would never ever roll their own crypto, they'd use a pre-made library), or maybe financial calculations. Of course, if you consider algorithms, computation theory and things like graph theory "advanced math", it's different but it's not the same kind of math as calculus or linear algebra are, I think.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
It's usually mutual agreement from both sides. NYT would not explicitly produce fakes by themselves, but if they want fakes, they know where to find them, and they know which fakes are to be approached critically and which to be taken at the face value, and the sides play a huge role here of course. This mutually beneficial cooperation gives NYT a plausible deniability - they never deceive by themselves, in worth case they are just a bit too "naive", and the other side of the deal gets to benefit from the seeming reputation that a lot of people, for reasons unclear to me, still attribute to NYT.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to
No, the most likely answer is that this time, as many, many times before that, NYT was taken for a wild ride. Nothing like that happened at all, and the pictures they provided is a perfect proof of it - whatever is on them, it's not a person shot in the head by a military weapon.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Israeli soldiers on field training for a command course noticed some suspicious movement and called reinforcements. Once the forces were gathered, they engaged the terrorists (without knowing who that was) and reportedly wounded Sinwar. He was hiding on the second store of the building (there's a video clip of him trying to fight off IDF drone with a stick) and the IDF soldiers called in tank support (also a trainee on a tank commander course), still without knowing who exactly is there, the tank fired on the building and the building collapsed, taking three terrorists inside with it. During the cleanup, the soldiers noticed that one of the corpses in the rubble looks very familiar.
So yes, it was random, but also not so random - IDF established control over the area and methodically surveyed it and engaged enemy forces wherever they showed up. It's not random occurrence, it's the result of long and methodical work done by many people day to day, and that's exactly why forces on the ground in Rafah were necessary. The time and the numbers were on their side - Sinwar had to get less then perfectly lucky just once, and that's what happened today. Of course, the fact that if were not some elite force but regular bunch of trainees doing regular patrol, adds some pungency to the story.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Not only has he been released, before that, while in jail, he was cured of brain cancer in Israeli hospital.
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is nice I guess, though experience shows me that "fixing" other civilization often results in the death of the one being fixed, or in making it much, much worse.
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You imply Earth is their garden? How comes if they never been here before?
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Only if you happen to be very close exactly at the time it's tested, and open tests have been banned a while ago, very unlikely
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That would be weird. It doesn't allow one to neither physically join any galactic communities nor even communicate with them meaningfully, why would that be a threshold? I'd expect if not FTL transport/communication than at least Expanse-style long range propulsion that makes at least populating the Solar system possible. Without it, the only think nukes allow us is hurt ourselves really badly. That's not a good criteria to join anything but an extreme introvert BSDM club.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
OK got it but how do they explain it? I mean, ok, they did not contact us because we didn't have nukes, and now they contacted us because we do have nukes. But why? Why nukes are so important? Civilization that can travel interstellar distances should have stuff that is to our nukes like our nukes are to a bronze spear.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I'd expect anybody who mastered FTL travel also master FTL messaging. Though indeed it's not a given (I think Bujold universe had FTL travel but no FTL messaging, leading to passing messages with couriers). Without FTL, there's no point to even bother to send probes out.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
If you talk about regular Earth scientists, then a reasonable way would be sending a person or two in a single boat to land on the beach, or just walk up to them on foot, let be observed and leave some easily recognizable usable things for them. Then if they pick it up, see what they do, maybe leave some more. Maybe they would bring some of their own to do a trade (even monkeys trade, it's basically built in). Once some trust is established, attempt personal contact. One may wear some analogue of a flack jacket, and in case things go really south have some snipers not too far but out of sight. But usually if initial contact was established the chance it will lead to immediate attack on contact in person is very low - if they were reluctant to contact, they'd just ignore your initial attempts.
Silent trade worked like that between peoples for a long time in history.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I'm not sure, what nuclear weapons are meant to explain?
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
It just seems very unbelievable that beings that master energies enough to make to Earth from where-ever they came - and it can't be close because we'd notice them somehow already - get here, leave no footprint except some weird artifacts in US govt secret storage and then never show up again in any way. You mean if you look at human exploration, it's not really how it worked, is it? If somebody found some new land, soon tenfold of people would show up, then twentyfold, then hundredfold. Even if the original explorer died without relaying any message, soon somebody would follow their path, and then another somebody, and so on. I could find only two situations compatible with government holding any alien artifacts - a) aliens are very rare and very very far away, and they are essentially launching expendable exploratory probes (biorobots maybe?) at random directions, and one of the random directions intersected Earth but by some malfunction failed to call back so this direction is considered empty for the next N thousands of years until the next random probe arrives; and b) our vicinity is somehow marked in Common Galactese as "exclusion area, do not approach!" - either because we are under-developed, or too weird, or too dangerous, or any other reason - and would remain so basically until the aliens decide otherwise or we develop independent means of discovering them.
The situation even worse for the scenario where they show up, but only as vague images in blurry photos. I mean, a civilization which uses energies several orders of magnitude stronger than we do, dances around among us, and we notice nothing? It's like ants not noticing somebody trying to build a residential neighborhood on top of their ant pile. I think they'd notice pretty soon. They might not understand what is going on but they'd notice.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
I personally find it very unfortunate that it seems like in US political language, there's no way to express what you want to express except by using racial language, even when it's perfectly clear it's not about race but about culture and ideals. And using the racial language presents obvious problems - if Clarence Thomas is "white", while he's also visibly "black", it is easy to accuse him of being un-genuine or "traitor" or somehow abnormal.
You combine two things "lose money just to piss off people you hate" but this is wrong. Their intent wasn't to lose money. Their intent was to piss of the deplorables. Logically, they should have known by now it'll lose them money, because it already happened many times, but that's me trying to model what they should be thinking and not actually their thinking. They might have thought it'll be ok or that the "modern audience" will finally show up with piles of cash, or that their marketing is all-powerful, or they just didn't care and lived in denial. The point is they didn't have to have explicit intent to lose the money in order for their actions to lead to that. You can call it "bad bet", sure, but I think it's clear their primary motivations can be found elsewhere.
Yes, she can prepare the word salad and serve it, but you can't survive 3 hours on that. You can't survive any serious amount of time, and not with a counterparty that might call you on that. And she seems to be either incapable or under severe prohibition from talking about anything genuinely and on substance.
As for what happened to her - maybe deep inside she realizes the same thing many of us realize - she has no business being where she is, and it wasn't her decision to be there, she didn't earn any of it and she's there only because some other people are using her, blowing her up like a frog with a straw. That can't be a comfortable feeling. People may hate Trump as much as they want, but I think even his enemies believe Trump does things that Trump wants to do. Even for his enemies - you can't think he's a future Hitler and also think he's a nobody that has nothing of his own. He's a figure. Harris isn't. She never won anything on strength of her achievements, and without the vast party machine she's nobody. I can't know if she realizes it, but if she does, that certainly can't be comforting.
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