JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
I've been to Europe many times, and also regularly speak to Europeans and I haven't noticed any change to the hostility. Of course, people have different opinions about things going on in the US (just as Americans have opinions about things going on in Europe) but I didn't notice anything generalizable. That said, I try to associate with people who generally would do such sort of thing (even among the left there are people who know how to behave properly), and if someone random hated me I probably didn't even notice it.
JarJarJedi
22hr ago
One may resent a loud, obnoxious, crass person who is sure the whole world was created for them. But one surely would never respect a person who apologizes for their own identity and existence, and tries their best to pass as somebody they are not.
JarJarJedi
22hr ago
That's nonsense, Europeans sneered at Americans when Trump was a TV personality, sneer at Americans now and will sneer at Americans when only historians would remember who Trump was. That's just the way of things.
JarJarJedi
22hr ago
The homeless psycho monster problem in America is visible even in the richest parts of rich cities like NYC and Miami.
"Even"? The highly compactized urban congregations pretty much the only place where that problem existed. I mean, sure, you can be homeless in rural Idaho, if you really try. But I don't think you'll find an establishment like Skid Row there. Megapolises are "rich" because they are concentrated, and they have burgeoning homeless population because that's where the feeding grounds are (for every possible value of "feeding").
You go to America on business or for tourism, stay in a $800 a night hotel in San Francisco or NYC or LA,
That's a relatively recent phenomenon. 20 years ago SF was very tourist-friendly and NYC had Giuliani clean it up and LA was pretty decent too. Then the Long March came to its conclusion, the wokes took power and implemented their compassionate policies. Now there's literal shit on the streets. Sigh.
JarJarJedi
23hr ago
Britain has lost an awful lot of its Britishness
In Britain, raising a national flag is a subversive act. In the US, it is still largely not so, though in certain places it already is.
JarJarJedi
23hr ago
America no longer seems confident enough to assimilate people
That's not about confidence, that's a deliberate act. Woke ideology rejects assimilation and considers it essentially soft genocide. Thus, saying "American no longer seems confident to assimilate" is like describing a mugging as "This guy no longer felt confident in keeping his wallet".
JarJarJedi
23hr ago
I am Jewish, so, you know... But in general, I find normal people very rarely have adverse reaction to admitting one is American, or even Jewish or Israeli. Obvious exception are obvious, but in general case if I feel there could be such a reaction, it probably means I am in a wrong place and need to minimize my presence there.
JarJarJedi
23hr ago
If you need basic stuff, and are comfortable with paying whatever Antropic is charging (or somebody else pays it for you) just using Claude code would probably be enough for you, it'll take you 80% there. At least that's how it feels right now. There are plugins and skills you can use for the rest, those are highly dependent on your specific usage. Cursor is basically VSCode, that would work too. The rest is just optimization IMHO - i.e. you may squeeze another 10% of productivity by choosing optimized harnesses, and reduce costs by using all kinds of plugins that compress contexts and modify tools to be more LLM-friendly, but this is mostly marginal and TBH I am not 100% sure I know which works better even in my niche, let alone generally. It's too fluid right now to identify any clear winners.
If you are cost conscious or want to use open models or want to dig into highly specialized niche use case which is not covered by generic model, then it's more complicated. pi would probably work as generic harness, I heard decent reviews about it. And I heard people saying good things about Grok Code's free tier, but haven't used it myself yet.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
The existentialists are the worst!
JarJarJedi
8d ago
There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first
Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".
Other countries are in fact poorer than America
Assuming they are (though that would be highly dependent on definition of "poorer" - by GDP per capita both Norway and Switzerland beat the US) I am not sure what this has to do with anything. Rugby is not much cheaper to play than football (if you don't count medical bills of course).
You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.
No, not reasonably, Vast majority of players do not play it as high-stakes competition, any they very well can afford the basic equipment and training, They just don't seem to want to. Netherlands may be slightly below US by the GDP per capita, but it doesn't mean they can't afford a baseball bat or an egg-shaped ball. So no, it's not popular because they don't want to play it, not because they can't afford to.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
they would have to pay fees and potentially lose their home.
I haven't heard of any case that HOA evicted someone from their house for unpaid fines. In any case, that would likely be a multi-year very expensive lawsuit. And the students would likely be renters, so they couldn't care less about that. Given that renter evictions in places where there are a lot of students usually are also a long and expensive process, the only real threat to the noise makers would be not extending their lease at the end of it - which may be up to a year ahead - and police arresting them (which probably wouldn't happen but at least they could threaten and intimidate them - if they show up at all).
JarJarJedi
9d ago
That's by design. High-trust society does not need overlords. Low-trust society does, because it's the only hope peaceful people have against random violence and petty warlords. It all works towards the same goal.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them
Now you're realizing there will be no fight. Good and kind citizens would just vote everything in, to protect the children, preserve the peace and fight the terrorists. And people who warn about the dangers are just insane fearmongering extremists. Who you're going to fight - a concerned father that thinks his teenage daughter spends too much time on tiktok? How are you going to fight him? And when he votes in the regime that can disconnect you from the internet if they don't like what you say, how your fight is going to look then? Are you going to murder all those kindly cat ladies from Kids Guardianship Bureau that would disconnect your account for exposing children to dangerous ideas? Reading 1984 as an adult is much more scarier, when you understand how this actually works...
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Power of HOA is not inherent - it usually resides on city codes, state laws and such. It is not weird to argue for changing those to curtail powers that can be given to HOA. Regulations that make certain contract provisions - either inherent or implied - void by law are not unheard of. And most HOAs use template contracts, so arguing for changing those is valid too. I had an HOA and I didn't feel its power is too big, but I also heard horror stories too, so I think one can't just dismiss it so easily.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
Noise ordnances can only be enforces after the noise is made. And, to be honest, what the enforcement can do? In the best case, police would come and tell them to shut it down. For today. And they'll also hate you forever if they learn who called it. And will repeat the same next week. More likely though, police wouldn't even come because they have better things to do (and if it's a university city, as likely as not they voted to give them as little funding as possible anyway) so they'd just register the complaint and be done with it.
JarJarJedi
9d ago
lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students.
Remembering myself as a student, I am thinking maybe that's exactly the point. I mean, I wasn't particularly wild and rowdy, but there was certain amounts or drinking, listening to loud musing and various behaviors that could be considered obnoxious by 50+ year old me involved. If you want peaceful, quiet, respectful neighbors, the students kinda carry a high risk profile on this one. I know not students are like that, and not all the time, but why take the chance?
JarJarJedi
10d ago
it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.
Somehow when people imagine going back in time to middle ages, they always imagine themselves as a knight or noble, and never as a peasant who works 18 hours per day. Despite the latter being vast majority.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I thought degrowth people are just Gaia worshippers that think humans need to be punished for their sins against the Goddess.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
There are much more efficient way to sneer at people. For example, full citizens can sneer at latini, latini can sneer at socii, socii can sneer at provinciales, and all of them could sneer at barbarians. All of it could be done without enslaving anyone. People are very good at constructing hierarchies, there are so many ways. Even if post-basic-material-scarcity society there would be some scarcities, not everybody can command a space ship or be the best Klingon opera singer of the galaxy.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Well, that's like when archeologists find some artifact they don't understand, they classify it as "religious", because anything can be classified this way and it doesn't have to make any sense. Who knows what kind of weird religion those people had, right? But that's not good writing, that's almost literally deus ex machina. Proper worldbuilders don't just push weird stuff into religion.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
As much as I try, I still can't get my head around the mindset of people that insist the government absolutely must prohibit them from filling their own car with gas, and only permit it to highly trained professionals (because all available evidence suggests filling up a car carries a deathly risk and requires very extensive professional expertise to accomplish).
JarJarJedi
12d ago
TBH this all "slave labor" always sounded ridiculous. I mean, you have interstellar technology and energy appliances that can evaporate stars, and yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you? I can see it as a punishment method, but as an economic model? Never made any sense.
It is and it isn't. I mean, in some sense it most certainly is, but it's more than that. For one, it doesn't even mention Christ anywhere so far (I'm about half through, and not once), and neither does it discuss any specifics of the religion. It could be as well applied to any deistic religion (and if it didn't personalize God, some non-deistic ones too). I'm not writing it as a criticism, but rather to say the bucket of "Christian apologetic" is way too small for it, it's like saying Hamlet is a "murder mystery". Technically, yes, but...
I don't know about every place, but there are certainly places where you still can get that. Maybe not spurs, but otherwise I think it's still around.
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