JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I think what the first author meant was that the increase in prices would be compensated by the potential savings from using electric cars, since - by their opinion - the TCO of the electric car is lower than the TCO of the gas car. I'm not sure it's true (I guess with enough taxation is could be made so) but at least it doesn't sound insane. The second claim about the grid I have no idea what could be meant.
As for AC, technically it is true - any AC would waste energy as heat (thermodynamics commands us so) and thus, inevitably, heat up the city. I am very much in doubt that heating would be noticeable though - and basically any activity, from breathing to walking, also produces heat, so short of total death of all living things, this is unavoidable. The addition there "is being pumped back out into the city, which is already hotter than surrounding areas" is a kind of dirty trick though - cities are hotter, but AC has nothing to do with it. Removing all AC would not do a thing to change that.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
as an aside, a Palestinian woman once told me that people joked the Israeli Palestinian refugee camps
"Refugee camps" is such an abused phrase. One can not seriously be a "refugee" for three generations. These are what in the whole other world called towns, or villages, but since certain political forces don't want to recognize Israel exists and is not going away, they still pretend people that fled from there in 1940s-50s are just temporary "refugees" and are about to return there any minute. And of course, people in those "refugee camps" try to live their lives just as they do in any other place. In Lebanon it's probably tougher, because it's a place of constant warfare and also because nobody really is interested in Palestinians setting there permanently (especially given the history of how that worked so far) - but in West Bank there are much better conditions for permanent living.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Last time I remember they didn't even light the tiki torches up, and they weren't even the deplorables but the Trump-haters - and the right still got criticized for that happening.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I think it's a good thing (probably being an immigrant skews my perspective, but still I think it's an objectively good thing). I understand the fears about importing cheap labor worsening conditions of current workers, and maybe sometimes it is true. But I don't think academia is the place where it is true. I didn't spend much time in academia to have relevant experience but in general that seems to be the case.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
The usual pattern is that it starts hurting when I put force on it in some particular way.
I have some similar weird ones... Like some tendon under my left knee (only the left!) randomly starts hurting like hell when just walking. No strain, no exercise, nothing. And then if I work it a bit and put some light weight on it, some squats, etc. - the pain disappears. If I just rest it, it also comes away in a while, but takes much longer, like hours or even a day. And it could be gone for weeks and then return randomly again. I mentioned it to several specialists and they're mostly "huh, yeah, it's weird :shrug:".
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Yes, I assumed it was more likely to be one of those.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Not too long ago - and Putin thinks himself to be their rightful heir and the person whose destiny is to restore it. Yes, East Germany was part of the Soviet block too, but the historical links to that territory for Russia is virtually non-existant, so right now nobody cares about it and nobody has any designs on it.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Well, not as much as Africa, of course, but it was in a subservient position and it was a huge hit to the national pride. Of course it's different, but I think there are also a lot of similarities.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I view Putin as a rational actor with his own motivations and goals, and you seem to view him as a cartoon dictator who walked straight out of Inspector Gadget.
No, that's not true at all. Of course he has his own motivations and goals. And these motivations and goals can be easily seen from his speeches, his state propaganda and his actions. I mentioned some of them (though yes, the long comment was long, so maybe you TLDR it) - for example, his desire to restore the Russian Empire with him at the helm, and his view that he is in the existential struggle with the West. Once thing that is needed to consider them rationally though is not taking them as true factual statements. When he's saying his goal is to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis - it reveals a lot about his motivations and goals, but it does not mean he actually thinks Zelenskiy is a Nazi and he wants to liberate anybody.
to be annoying enough that I just do not think continuing to engage with you on this topic is worth my time
Always your choice. For me, it is equally annoying to be confronted again and again by Russian propaganda templates taken at face value and presented as facts, even when it can be easily seen they have nothing in common with easily observed realities. It is equally annoying to encounter again and again a myopic worldview where everything is blamed on "meddling" and no critical analysis is even attempted. I guess each person has their own pet annoyances. Yet I took the time to explain where, in my opinion, you went wrong. Of course, you don't owe me anything here. Good luck.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Our machines can't do FTL. Machines of the civilization that can do FTL probably would be just as far ahead of ours as a ballistic missile is ahead of a spear. With similar chances of mounting a resistance.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
The MIC really wants war, and their influence over the US government is strong enough that it reaches beyond partisan affiliation
That may be true, but the war they want is not destruction of Putin's regime. What they want is something like the current war in Ukraine - remote, long, expensive in money but not in American casualties, low-stakes as to anything pertaining to the US, and prolonged as far as possible to ensure return business, preferably without generating too many headlines that would promote changing anything. This has nothing to do with "Putin's skull" - if fact, if anything, that requires Putin to be in power, otherwise who'd the war be with?
That's why I object to the premise she wanted Putin's skull on the wall - Putin is a business partner for her, not a mortal enemy. True, in these spheres there are no friends and sometimes competition is very vigorous, but until Feb 2022, Dems did not even see Russia as a real opponent (the 80s called, remember?). And Clinton saw it as a regular business partner, among others. The war does not prevent that too - war is business too. Maybe not for Ukrainians (though for some there it is, unfortunately), but for Clintons it would be. And that's why it emboldens Putin - he knows that for the right prices, he can have Ukraine or almost anything else he wants - because it's just the question of finding the right deal. And he thinks he can afford the price of some hundreds of thousands of Russians being dead and some oil money spent - if that gives him what he wants.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Audience measuring is a tricky business. Justin Bieber probably has much bigger audience than Marcel Proust. But if we measure by audience, there are millions upon millions of people spending billions of dollars on cultural products made by thousands upon thousands of producers. Again, "vanishingly few" does not agree with that.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
I read the story and still not getting it. OK, so she used to own a restaurant called "Chris Steak House". For some weird reason, after the original location burned down, she couldn't name the new location "Chris Steak House", but she didn't opt for "Ruth's Steak House" and for some reason, while "Chris Steak House" was verboten, "Ruth's Chris Steak House" was ok. That sounds like me not being able to open a restaurant under "McDonalds", but "J's McDonalds" being OK. I don't think that'd work.
Also, on their site, it says:
In 1965, a time when most women couldn’t even apply for a bank card without their husband’s signature, our founder Ruth Fertel risked it all and mortgaged her home to buy a small steak house in New Orleans.
Is that actually true that most women couldn't apply for a bank card without their husband’s signature? Was that true for women that actually had their own (as opposed to joint with the husband, at which case obviously both owners would need to sign for credit) account, and how hard it was for a woman with independent means to get her own account? Also, if that was the case, how comes Ruth Fertel had "her home" and was able to "mortgage" it - if the banks were as sexist as the sentence above implies, how comes they made an exception for her? Wikipedia says:
Ignoring the advice of her banker, lawyer, and friends, she mortgaged her house to purchase the restaurant, even though the business had previously failed six times under the previous owner
So, she had "her banker" and "her lawyer" - while not being particularly rich, working as a lab technician. Again, if most women didn't have access to credit for sexist reasons, how come the bank gave a credit for a single woman with a low-paying job to develop what looks like an impossible business? Wouldn't that kind of deal be called "predatory loan" nowdays?
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Oh, I confused them. Not that there's any substantial difference... Yes, Jared Harris' performance was one of the bright spots, but not enough to make the whole thing worth it.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Probably more like 10 years, but it's definitely going to happen. Probably admissibility of chatbot logs into evidence would be problematic, at least at first, but once they get the mark roped in, they'd be able to manufacture plenty of admissible evidence.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Oh, sorry, you're right, I was thinking about other much discussed SCOTUS rulings and kinda mixed it up. But since it's an injunction against Federal Government, the other courts don't have much space to intervene then? I mean, they can refuse to do the same, but as I understand, one federal judge is enough.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Can you just "reject" a SCOTUS ruling? I was under impression that's not how things are usually done in the common law system, but who knows, these days...
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
It's like taking drugs - sure, some drugs can inspire creative breakthroughs, if you also do a lot of creative work. But if all you do is taking drugs and looking for drugs and talk about which drugs to take - there would be no creativity coming out there. I think you need a solid foundation and maybe a little crazy to make it not boring. But if you have 100% crazy and none of the foundation - then it's just chaos.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
"In your interest" is very vaguely defined. Is being perceived as a cool dude in your interest? For myself, I don't really care for it, but many other people behave, like they do. Can I deny them their agency and claim that their true interests lie elsewhere? I think it's be presumptuous. If they say they want to be cool, then they want to be cool. And then consuming brands that are perceived as "cool" would be in their interests.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Now, would you expect to gain insights on the complications and intricacies of their politics by reading western media?
By reading only Western media, you can't. By reading all kinds of media - including, but not only, Western - you can make some progress towards it.
Well would you be ready to say that all the Chinese people who deny these things or find them implausible are dirty liars?
If they are in China at the moment, or their relatives or family are - no, they are probably just afraid. Justifiably, I may notice, as we have examples of people persecuted for saying things the regime does not like. I wouldn't call a dirty liar a person that says something he knows to be not true, but also knows if he says the truth he'd risk his life and maybe the lives of others. I'll rather call him a victim. If they are outside China's control - I'd have to look into them further to determine whether or not they are liars, so it'd go on case by case basis. If they say there are no human rights violations in China - they are liars for sure, as there are documented examples of them. If they say the specific violation did not happen - it may be true, or they may be mistaken, or they may be lying, again - case by case.
Thinking one can answer these questions without any sort of reliable insider information source is delusional
Answer definitely? No. Get to a high degree of certainty? Yes. Just as it is done with all other things we can not observe or perceive directly - by carefully collecting, evaluating and filtering available pieces of circumstantial evidence, until a general picture starts to become clear. And then updating this picture once new pieces of evidence come in. Current picture suggests China is under a totalitarian fascist regime which has a complete disdain for anything called "human rights" in the West (I'm not sure there's such concept in China at all?), routinely prosecutes dissidents and anybody who dares to contradict the party line, operates concentration camps and performs multiple atrocities.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Didn't see the last season yet.
JarJarJedi
10mo ago
Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
I don't think that in American society and American public discourse the question of "whether we need better regulation of live animal markets" even exists, let alone has any prominent placement. Thus, I do not think there's any discernable demand to skew any existing discourse (such as one about Covid origins) to one or other side of the question. I'm sure there are people for whom these questions are of supreme importance, but they do not have any way to influence the Covid discourse in any form.
Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China.
Statistical arguments have never worked as "get out of literally Hitler free" card when it concerns racism accusations. If drawing attention to China or Chinese wet markets as source of infection were declared racist, then it'd be racist regardless of any statistical justification you could provide.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Not immediately. It's part of the process - which involves turning more and more to outside where current citizens are unwilling to invest in supporting the empire anymore. It's not a binary switch caused by one specific decision - it's a long process and this decision just illustrates the direction.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Is is a consequence of shitty behavior no longer being unacceptable. These shows are the symptom of the enshittening of the culture. Which, I suspect, is a consequence of post-modernism, ultimately - if nothing has any meaning or value, then everything is equally shitty, so why bother not being shitty? Some people find their answers to that question, but many don't.
99.9999% of what you do in your daily life (I am not sure about the number of nines, but a bunch of them for sure) is resting on thinking done by the old dead men (and a few old dead women too, thankyouverymuch) who had no conception of what a smartphone is. Even if you are a genius far surpassing such people as Newton (who wasn't too proud to admit his debt to his predecessors, old dead men who didn't have a concept of calculus or gravity), you still could not manage to create much of what you enjoy from the first principles without relying on those dead old men's work and thought. Even if you skipped the exercise time. You could be thankful and appreciative for it, or you could throw a juvenile temper tantrum and scream "you are not the boss of me!" and slam the door to your room, it doesn't matter - your debt to those old dead men is still real, enormous and never to be overcome. Unless you renounce everything and go to the caves (to think of that, I think Rousseau already explored that too?). Given that you post here, it's probably not your cup of tea. Which is smart. Enjoying what the old dead men could give you instead of petulantly denying them would be even smarter.
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