JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
The Good Soldier Svejk, which is good but I got bored of
One of my favoritest books, but I wonder if it survives the English translation (if that's what you read). The original is written in Czech, but not just any Czech but Czech-German jargon with ample addition of obscene vocabulary from other Slavic languages, Hungarian, etc. I read it in Russian translation though one day I hope maybe to be able to read the original.
I’m not Russian and I don’t find gross-out gore or porn interesting.
I think the point of those books (and many of Sorokin writings in general) is how well all that gross gore is mapping to what have actually happened and happening in Russia. But it's quite hard to understand without experiencing that life and culture for a long time. He's also a masterful stylist and often imitates some literary and cultural aspects of existing works, which is hard to appreciate I guess in translation and not being part of the culture.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
There's an important difference here. Religion is about Absolute Truth. Politics is about governing and getting things done (or, if libertarians prefer, not done). The amount of compromise and practicality to be expected from those differ substantially.
But it is overwhelmingly likely that such a move by Rome's Christians would have precluded the future Constantine, and the empire would never have been converted to Christianity.
Somehow I doubt supporting Oliver or Jorgensen or any of the latest LP nominees would get us even a step closer to the Libertarian Emperor of the US. Of course, LP can prove me wrong, but unless they discover immortality pretty damn soon I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. Especially not when consistently nominating woke candidates. Woke voters already have a party to vote for.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Students are something else. I am still ashamed of some of the shenanigans I did as a student, especially after eventually finding myself on the other side (not in an university, thankfully). It's a tough job to run IT in such places.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Yeah I think it was some kind of "smart" home solution when not everybody had routers on home network. A bit fuzzy on details now but that might be the idea at least. It had a normal "play nice" mode too, just for some reason it wasn't enabled by default... or maybe somebody switched it for some reason, impossible to know now.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
To be honest, I consider myself a libertarian, but never had any desire to support any of the LP candidates. Oliver personally checks too many woke boxes for me (no, it's not about him being gay, that part doesn't bother me at all). And in practical terms, between woke takeover and compromising on some libertarian principles to stop the woke takeover, I think it is prudent to choose the latter. When the choice is between Hamas-supporting racist trantifa totalitarian marxists and somewhat-bigger-government conservatives, I think a practical thing for a libertarian would be to vote for the lesser evil. If the woke threat ever goes away, we can go back to the discussion about making somewhat-bigger-government into smaller-government, but I personally think positioning it as "both are equally impure and there's no difference" to me is childish and silly.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Yeah that was my question exactly when I finally discovered what happened - who even thought it was a good idea to do this? Thankfully, haven't heard about someone doing that for a long while now.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
DHCP server restarts can cause IP conflicts pretty often, especially if you're running the DHCP server on a small home/office router that doesn't persist state
More fun can be had if there's a rogue DHCP server on the network. Back in the days I did network admining work (a long time ago) I had to deal with such a case - turned out to be a new printer with helpful on-by-default DHCP server, but it took me a lot of frustration to figure it out because I never thought before a printer could do that to me.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Ubuntu & Linux Mint are the most frequently mentioned as newbie-friendly. Hardware is important - choose hardware config that is reported to work with Linux. Otherwise there might be a lot on non-newbie-friendly dances involved to get things to work. If that's not a problem I found modern Linuxes to be pretty newbie-friendly to the point you don't really need to even touch command-line for most common tasks (I love command line, but I am speaking from a newbie perspective).
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
though it's increasingly been discredited for that purpose by Mises-Caucus types
What are "Mises-Caucus types"?
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
How does the switch/AP know it should send the request to the wired router and not to one of its other LAN ports?
There are two kinds of network switches/hubs (well, there are more, but at least two). The dumb one just essentially pretend everybody is on the same bus, and so every port gets all the traffic from other ports. This of course is only good for very simple small networks. Smarter switch would remember which IPs and MAC addresses live on which ports and forward the packets accordingly. Of course, smarter switches are more expensive than the dumb ones. For bigger networks you'd have configuration capacity in the switch to tell it which networks live on which ports.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
I'm not certain about what happens when two machines claim to have the same IP, actually
Depends on the IP. If it's so called "local" IP (starts with 10., 192.168 or 172.16.) and they are not on the same local network, then nothing bad, since these addresses specifically designed for such use. If they are on the same local network, there would be trouble, not sure about the exact nature but likely both computers sharing an IP won't be able to properly use it. Usually your OS would scream at you in some way when such thing is detected. Using DHCP server is one of the ways to ensure this thing never happens.
If you have two hosts that have same IP and those are not local IPs then weird things would happen. In general, if you have NAT (which most home users for now should and would have) then outgoing connections should work fine (then again, there's no real reason for a machine used by home user to even have a non-local IP at all) but it's better to avoid that situation completely because things get weird. There are special organizations and protocols aimed at segregating IP space so nobody steps on each other's toes there. As a home user, you probably don't need any of that as the standard setup is to use local IPs for everything inside the home network and only use non-local IP for the main router egress address.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month
If you live in a relatively new house which has been hooked up to cable/fiber it's $70-90 now for gigabit. And Starlink is $120/m, which gives you less than a gig but you can have it practically anywhere.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
They are legal tender, and if anyone is insane as to pay your taxes in gold dollars by nominal value, I'm sure the IRS would be fine with that. In fact, if you want to do that, I am sure there would be thousands of people who would be willing to facilitate such transaction. I certainly would - not everyday you can make 200x+ immediate profit.
A modern US coin could become valuable and trigger the same issue, gold standard or no.
There are collector coins, for sure. And I am pretty sure if you buy one and sell it at profit, you'd owe income taxes.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
The argument is that Gold and Silver are the only units of account specified in the constitution.
So what? Again, I do not see how anything useful follows from that fact. Here's the only mention of gold in the Constitution:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
We can immediately notice several things: a) it never says gold and silver are "units of account", it just bans states from introducing legal tenders that aren't gold and silver b) it actually contains no limits on the action of the Federal Government. Beyond that, however, the line from "states can only declare gold as legal tender" and "investment in gold can not be taxed" is not at all clear to me. It's like saying "English is an official language of the US government, therefore any university course taught in English should be free". Like what's the fricking connection between the one and the other?! Those are different things!
And BTW it is obvious this section only limits the States and not the Feds because Feds can enter into Treaties and Alliances, or coin money, of course. And when something that is prohibited overall is concerned (like Nobility) it is mentioned twice - once here and once in limitations on Congress.
And ever since we went off the gold standard, or probably when FDR confiscated all the gold, this part of the constitution quietly became obsolete.
But it did not. States still didn't make anything to be legal tender. Federal government made the paper dollar legal tender, but the Constitution contains no limitations on the action of the Feds in that regard. You may argue that was a stupid move economically or abhorrent morally (I agree gold confiscation definitely was), but there's nothing the Constitution can help you with here. And not by omission - there's a big part that contains things that the Congress can't do - just making paper money legal tender is not in the list.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
I'd think by now Trump got so many messages his inbox is permanently full. They already tried to smear him, jail him, bankrupt him, murder him... I don't think he needs any more messages to get the idea there are some people that aren't exactly in love with him.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
There is likely to be a far greater actual number of deaths than what's reported
That would be true if "reported" number were the number that matches the known casualties. Nobody in Hamas is interested in reporting anything like that. Thus, actual numbers bear no relation to what Hamas is reporting - it could be much less, it could be much more, Hamas reported numbers are just propagandist exercises. Sure, they can't report 1 millions people died from an airstrike on a single house, so they have some constraints on their reporting, but if they say 47 people died, nobody is going to contradict them. "Actual" isn't even seen in the vicinity of it.
as well as a huge number of civilian deaths relative to combatant, perhaps in the area of 2:1 at best, in all likelihood far worse.
This is a completely baseless assumption. IDF takes a lot of precautions to allow civilians to evacuate before engaging in certain areas. These efforts are well documented. They do not avoid casualties completely, and sometimes there's just no possibility of it - like having an active fight with Hamas striking from the midst of civilian population (there are numerous instances of rocket launches from "humanitarian zones" - it makes sense, if IDF says they won't strike certain area, that's exactly where you want to deploy your most precious resources, doing otherwise would be stupid) or high-value target is located in the presence of their family, etc. So yes, of course there are civilian casualties, and a lot of casualties (since Hamas is an irregular military) for which their status is impossible to determine, but numbers like "far worse than 2:1" are completely baseless. US army btw is much less sensitive to civilian casualties in overseas conflicts than the IDF - for the simple reason they can pretty much always get away with it.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Thanks for the quote!
“If they’re indeed U.S. money, it seems there should be no taxes on them at all
My paystub would like to be the witness of the opposite. It's full of money, and so much of that money is so much taxes. My savings account - which also is entirely composed of money - is taxed on the capital gains also. And, of course, none of the investment bullion coins are ever used as money, this is plain bullshit - nobody is using gold dollars, which could cost from $400 to $200k or above, depending on particular coin, as a legal tender, even if in theory one could. One has to be a complete idiot to do so. But if such an idiot exists, and buys a gold dollar for say $400 and then uses it as legal tender at its $1 book value, I do not think the IRS is going to charge any capital gains taxes there - moreover, one could likely claim a $399 tax loss here and the IRS would likely accept that.
I'd say it is surprising how such weak bullshit appears in official Congressional record and is discussed and not laughed at derisively, but unfortunately it's not surprising at all and I have to admit I've seen worse than that. Still, very weak water. No surprise at all it's not successful.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.
I weep for those hydrogen atoms that were forced to combine into helium, probably without their consent, and for that mass that were converted to energy to provide me with my civilized existence. Let this be an acknowledgment we all live from the energy that once was the mass belonging to those native hydrogen atoms.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
However, capital gains on bullion remain taxable by both state and federal governments
What's the argument for treating this specific investment differently from all other investments?
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
You suggested that this number is untrustworthy,
It is. Its only source is a terrorist organization known for lying about casualties many, many times.
and countered by citing Israeli statements that it killed 17k Hamas operatives
I didn't "counter" anything, I just provided a source of information. Whether or not you believe these numbers (about 10k of which are validated with names and identification, but the rest is an estimate) does not change the fact that presenting unverifiable numbers from extremely untrustworthy source as a fact is misleading and wrong.
but on the face of it this is not a refutation of the 40k figure.
It was not intended as "refutation" of anything. I do not have the exact numbers, but there is a lot of research - including one that I quoted - that indicates Hamas numbers are bullshit. I do not have better numbers, and I think nobody does, but it is not the reason to treat numbers which are bullshit as if they were factual.
or this represents the best effort at a refutation that can be made with Israeli numbers
It is neither "refutation" nor "best effort" - again, for best effort see the actual research (some of which I quoted, but more available) on the actual numbers. Simply parroting Hamas is not research. Even with this research, probably nobody has any figures that aren't an extremely rough estimate - and people who could improve it are very, very invested in keeping the numbers as dirty as possible, because it serves them much better to inflate the numbers.
and found a UN one saying
"UN" here likely means Hamas again - the only UN organization on the ground is UNRWA, and UNRWA is a) using data provided by Hamas sources (the report quotes "Gaza ministry of Health", which is Hamas structure) and b) is thoroughly structurally infiltrated by Hamas by itself - by which I mean, very many UNRWA workers are themselves, personally, Hamas operatives, and enough of them directly participated in October 7 atrocities that UN requested US courts to provide immunity to them for those crimes. That is going beyond the obvious fact that UN and especially "human rights" branches of UN vehemently hate Israel and regularly single it out for false accusations of atrocities, while ignoring much worse events happening anywhere else.
I assume they were not 17 year old children-on-paper but phenotypically obvious younger children?
And why exactly do you assume that? UN traditionally counts everybody under the age of majority, even if killed on the battlefield with weapons in hand, as "children". And Hamas gets them very young - by 17, they can operate a Kalashnikov, an RPG and an IED quite well. There's no indication in the paper that "children" means anything but "anybody under 18". I do not make any specific claim on the age distribution of those you are mentioning, but just "assuming" out of the blue that it means what you want to mean is completely unfounded.
around unless one is positing Hamas was holding bring-your-kids-to-work day.
Which is exactly that they are doing, only it's not only a "day", it's everywhere and all the time. We're talking about irregular military, with no identification, using blending into the population and hiding in (and under) high-resonance civilian structures (schools, hospitals, mosques) as the primary military tactics. This is not just "bring your kids to work", this is "being surrounded by your - and others - kids at work is your work, because they are the reason you're still alive". Given the relative power balance, Hamas quickly loses any direct soldier-to-soldier engagement with the IDF. They can only do two things - hide and ambush - which becomes harder and harder as IDF controls more territory, since you have to get out periodically to eat and bring supplies, and territorial control means you get caught eventually, just ask Sinwar - or blend into the civilian population and attack from the midst of "bring-your-kids-to-work". That's the only way they can fight, so no wonder this is exactly the way they are fighting.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Please explain which word in the description "Hamas operatives" that I used is giving you the trouble?
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
Another hint is the recent declaration of a famine by FEWS
Gaza gets more than enough aid to feed the people there. Of course, the distribution is challenging, with Hamas still being on the ground, still being very interested in presenting the picture of mass starvation, and also of course the whole process is grotesquely corrupt, with the aid which is supposed to be free being sold, etc. But even given that, there's no mass starvation is Gaza. There might be some nutritional imbalances and food quality issues, I mean living for an extended time on basic foods probably not a lot of fun, but that's a different picture.
and I can see the argument where if your enemy is taking refuge in a hospital, then destroy the hospital
But that's not what happens. I mean, "if" here is redundant - every single hospital in Gaza is used by Hamas as a base, it is a fact. There's absolutely no question about it, and the same of course is true for every school, mosque and other building with lower probability of IDF just blowing it out from the sky. But hospitals are not just destroyed with everybody in it. What is done about it is the hospital is surrounded, and then evacuated, and then it is searched (with multiple Hamas tunnels, weapons caches and often explosive traps inevitable discovered). Of course, this does not always goes smoothly - Hamas operatives sitting inside the hospital sometimes get ideas that shooting at IDF may be fun, and get the return fire, and so on. That stage is usually when civilians get hurt, but it doesn't usually take long to eliminate all active resistance. During the evacuation, of course Hamas operatives will pretend to be the sickest patients in urgent need to be in another hospital - e.g., in Kamal Adwan the first evacuating ambulance had 21 people inside, out of which 13 were completely healthy Hamas operatives (IDF has pretty good face recognition and by now very extensive lists of Hamas members, so it's not as easy as saying "I'm a sick civilian, please let me go"). The civilians that aren't identified as Hamas are provided with tents, generators, food and field medical facilities. Do civilians get hurt in the process? Yes, they do, but it's not like the whole thing is destroyed and everybody inside is instantly dead (though this is exactly the story that was told when Islamic Jihad hit another hospital with it's rocket and they tried to sell it as IDF attack - they counted 500 or so casualties within minutes, they're good like that, and nobody in the press cared to doubt it). Does replacing proper hospital facilities with whatever field medicine can be provided lead to some additional casualties? It probably does, but I don't think anyone has any accurate count of it.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
the nice bits where people want to live are often much smaller
"Nice bits" are much more defined by neighbors than anything else. I mean, there's not a lot of people living in, say, Montana (compared to the area). Maybe it's because it's cold in winter? But how people live in Alberta, Canada then which would have even harsher winter? I think given enough infrastructure (which is downstream from people paying for establishing it) a lot of places would be fine for people to live in. Maybe not everybody gets to live in places with 100% optimal climate - even then people live both in Florida and in Alaska, so obviously not everybody has the same understanding of the optimal climate - but there are a lot of places with perfectly livable climate (given modern infrastructure) and a lot of them right now is completely empty. Like, not "rural" but just nothing at all for miles and miles. I personally enjoy having some empty spaces and don't really want to convert 100% of Earth surface to human habitat, but I can't help noticing there's a real lot of capacity out there, much more than needed to accommodate another billion. How to do it properly is a tough question, but livable space doesn't seem to be a major issue here.
JarJarJedi
5mo ago
America might be a country of immigrants, but tell that to the Pequots.
Native American cultures indeed has been largely wiped out by European settlement. But America hasn't ceased to be the country of immigrants since the Piligrims arrived, and there were many other ethnic groups that came later. Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans... and many others. And yet, it did not destroy the Protestant culture in America - at least not in the way that the Europeans destroyed the Native American ones. It looks like America can deal with the permanent immigration just fine, under some conditions: a) immigration is limited to the numbers that could be successfully assimilated within reasonable time b) the immigrants actually see the host culture as human culture they have to at least coexist with, yet better - accept and c) the host culture itself is strong and independent enough to provide the immigrants with some framework to which they have to adhere - if there's just "diversity is our strength" and nothing else, then there's nothing to assimilate and everybody just keeps whatever they got, without forming a joint culture. I think, in keeping with these conditions America can welcome Indians just fine (and people like Vivek, for example, are a decent example of that) - but I don't think open borders would preserve these conditions.
No. A lot of people managed to live decent lives under communism, but not because of it but despite it. A lot of people - millions of them - did not survive it though, and that was definitely without doubt because of it.
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