JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
All existing juggling guides for me look like the infamous "how to draw an owl" guide. The first steps are like "yeah ok I can do that" and then there comes the step when they say "after you have learned that, you can easily do this" and no, I totally can't.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Yeah sure, that's like the joke goes: "Can a woman make a man a millionaire? - Sure, if he's a billionaire!".
JarJarJedi
3d ago
O.C. Bible: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
JarJarJedi
3d ago
No. Bernie Sanders wants Soviet Union. El-Sayed wants Iran, and his friends who don't have to be polite because they're not in the spotlight want Afghanistan. Soviet Union is not nice, but Iran is worse, and Afghanistan is worse still.
OK I admit I have followed Ireland much less close than Canada or Australia, so it may be the news bias - I just hear something when something bad is happening.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Ok, yes, for small-time stuff there is. For something like surgery or long-term treatment or complicated condition there's only one system. Sure, you can pay out of pocket for everything and deal with all the billing systems by yourself, but the doctors and the hospitals and the pharmacies will still be part of the same system.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I feel like everyone here just has employer insurance and doesn't feel the pain.
That is indeed the preferred mode. Obamacare plans were bolted on existing system for people that can not afford paying insurance, so "unsubsidized Obamacare plan" is a red-headed child of the system, nobody really is trying to make it workable because most people go either employer or subsidized.
At what price would you argue that someone shouldn't buy it?
There's certainly a point, which depends on your private risk assessment and risk tolerance. I have employer's insurance, and it's the best deal available for me, it'd be stupid not to use it. But if I couldn't use it I would have quite shitty options indeed before me.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
It won't go on your credit.
If it goes to collections and is substantial (over $500), it will. There are grace periods but eventually, if you don't pay, it will end up in collections, and on your credit report - unless you convince the owner to drop it (which they have no incentive to do unless you pay at least part of it). Once it's there, it stays there for 7 years (or until you pay).
JarJarJedi
3d ago
If you have 450k and dropping 450k is financially survivable for you, then fine, roll the dice. Note though they have literally hundreds if not thousands of people that make a living on getting maximum amount of money from people like you, and they have decades of experience and they paid for all the laws and procedures to be arranged to maximize their gain. They probably won't be able to take your home if you own it, and 100% of your income, but they have a lot of experience of making the lives of people like you unpleasant. Unless you have a lot of experience waging war on the other side, it may not go well for you. There are people who are good at handling such things, and milk the system for years while getting away with outrageous behavior - the question is whether you think you can be one of those people.
Mostly I don’t want to participate in a corrupt system.
There's no other system. Unless you forgo the medical care completely, your only choice is how, not whether you will participate.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Why are people still buying insurance?
Hospital stays are hugely expensive. Some drugs are ruinously expensive (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per month, at least at the official price). If you got a condition where you need one of those to survive, you have no choice. If you're healthy and foresee staying healthy for a year, and don't do any risky activities - like skiing, hiking, running, driving, etc. - sure, play that game. As your odometer picks up miles, this becomes more and more risky game.
Yes, the whole system is horrendously broken and becomes more broken each year. Nobody is capable of fixing it, and every half-assed attempt to do it makes it much worse. A lot of people make money on the chaos in the meantime though. So it's going to continue this way.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I'm not sure you'd be in a mood for negotiation arriving at emergency room at 3am with an acute condition. You'll probably go to the closest hospital and sign everything they ask you to. And then the bills will come. If you are judgment proof, you're in luck. If you have a comfortable middle-class life, which means having assets that can be targeted, there's a whole industry aimed at of separating you from those assets. Very big risk, IMHO.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I don't think you can prohibit translating. You can certainly, as a copyright owner, prohibit publishing the translation. It doesn't seem entirely accurate though - she had two of her novels published in Israel in Hebrew, but did not sign up the with the same publisher for the third, so it wasn't published there for five years. From quick research, she eventually found sufficiently ideologically pure, BDS-compliant self-hating Jews to sign up for publishing the third too, so as I understand, it is published in Hebrew in Israel too in 2026. I won't publish links because interacting with this kind of content makes me feel dirty, and not in a good way, but it's very easy to find, if you're into that kind of thing.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Unless you for some reason live in an insanely expensive area or have to maintain extremely luxurious lifestyle, $5M+ is "never have to work again unless you want to" kind of money even in the US now. Of course, it's not "never can't spend it all" money - if you live too large, it's pretty easy to get through it, but if you lead a modest middle class lifetime, it should be enough.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
You got lucky. Enjoy it. Nothing to feel guilty about. You owe "tons of people" nothing, take care of your family and let everybody else take care of their own business. Give to some charity if you are so inclined (but you don't owe that too, it's just what some people feel good about doing).
JarJarJedi
4d ago
It's not about stories, it's about who is allowed to share their stories and whose stories are allowed to become narratives, and whose narratives are allowed to become policies. A lot of people have stories, but not every story gets to become The Story. If you need a policy that allows unlimited immigration, you know which stories are going to be shared and which are going to be suppressed. If you need a policy that promotes misandry and enables destroying frats, you know which stories are going to be shared and which are going to be suppressed. And so on.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Essentially, I've developed a belief that everyone is going to be surveilled to the maximum extent possible, and that surveillance is going to be used in all the conventionally dystopian ways
Yes, but... we're talking about surveillance used for ads for three decades now, and the ads targeting is still utter crap. I mean, they are threatening me with personally targeted ads for all this time, and I am sure by now they must have all the most intimate data about me, but do I ever get even remotely relevant ads? Heck no. I get the same liberty-biberty utter crap as everybody else. I don't know what they are using all that info for, really. Maybe it's for thought police (I must have a real fat file there if so...)
JarJarJedi
4d ago
They have a slogan in Spanish, so it's ok.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Butlerian Jihad anyone?
JarJarJedi
4d ago
I've been there and to the sixth floor museum, and the shot itself doesn't seem impossible, however I have no idea how hard it is with the rifle and optics that he used. There's a lot of stuff in that museum there though that makes you go "hmmmm". I have no way to say one way or the other, but it certainly looks like something fishy. In either case, it's a pretty interesting museum there, if you ever in Dallas I recommend visiting.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
I have mixed feelings about this. On principle, I am opposed to any speech restrictions outside of very narrow "clear and present danger" boundaries. 99.99% of what is published is garbage anyway, so if somebody wants that garbage, let them have it. However, since we live in a clown world, and UK is one of the most retarded clownships in existence, beaten only by its Anglosphere satellites (Ireland, Australia, Canada - all in a race to out-clown each other), I can't but feel some pleasure when something bad happens to very bad and extremely retarded people. There's no chance UK anytime soon becomes anything resembling a proper country, so at least once in a while people who deserve it suffer from it.
You may be familiar with the Irish Millennial novelist Sally Rooney.
Now that hurt....
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Finished Monster Hunter International. It's a fun story, though the protagonist is a bit too much of Mary Sue to my taste, but I think that comes with the genre. Still, I can't avoid comparison with Butcher's Dresden series, and the comparison is not to the Monster's advantage. So far, the gist of what happens there is, without spoiling much, "MORE DAKKA!". I mean, I enjoy some good loud action, but at some point it starts to feel a bit one-dimensional. Maybe we'll get more in the next books, but in Dresden we had pretty complex magic system, leveling up Dresden himself and his sidekicks and his challenges, moral development, choices and consequences, all that stuff. Monster's world feels under-developed - for one, the hunters, despite hundreds of years of experience and lore, seem to know preciously little about the monsters they are dealing with, and seem to not be very interested in any study, because why bother if "MORE DAKKA!" always solves the problem?
The core problem of the action genre is that the protagonist should win, but he can't win easily, because it would be boring. On the other hand, he has to win convincingly, otherwise it would be unsatisfactory. So the challenge is how to compose the situation so that the villains are both scary and beatable, and the protagonist is both powerful and challenged, without forcing either to randomly make blunders and look like an idiot, because the plot demanded it. In Monster it didn't always work this way - for example,
But in general, it's not bad, hopefully next ones would be better in literary craft.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
They definitely are. They are openly talking about prosecuting everybody who worked for Trump, and from the Biden administration we know it's not an empty talk. We had AGs explicitly running on the platform of "I will get Trump convicted, no matter what" - and being elected for that, and fulfilling their promise. We have many other examples of partisan prosecutions of Republicans. And now we have Democratic politicians openly explaining - in case somebody is so dumb they didn't get the implicit message - that these prosecutions will continue, and that their goal is to deter people from associating with Republican politics.
Now, it is true that Democrats probably not are going to ban other parties, at least not in 2028, maybe not ever. After all, even in Putin's Russia there are toy parties that provide a fig leaf of "alternative" even though everybody knows in advance who's going to win and by how much. That's the deal Democrats are going to set up. Just like in deep-blue states, Republicans would exist and would be allowed on the ballot occasionally, but would never have any chance of winning or effecting any policy - because the system would be set up to make it impossible. It wouldn't be one ban - it will be ten thousands of rules, regulations, subsidies, restrictions, laws, licenses, whatever is necessary - to ensure Republicans never get any representation. If the judges lean Republican - they will be replaced or supplanted. If academics lean Republican - they will be boycotted and defunded, while their opponents will be lavished with funds and publicity. If a press organization leans Republican - it will be denied access, declared "disinformation" and deplatformed. If a business leans Republican - it will be debanked, denied access to contracts and harassed by regulators, while their competitors with the correct politics will be subsidized and provided priority access. And so on and so forth - there would not be any ban, there would be a combination of million facets that together establishes the state where you can only prosper if you are loyal to the Party.
I think once we get the robots driving for us, the accidents will plummet dramatically, to the point where an occasional collision will be reported by the news as a sensational event revealing the dangers of modern technology the wider public is blissfully unaware of. I don't have hard data on hand, but my conviction is the large majority of accidents is caused by someone being stupid on the road.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
my question is would you trade your intelligence for getting to have that athletic ability
Never. I mean, the idea of becoming a multimillionaire by 35 and then retiring and doing whatever the heck I want is certainly appealing (way too late for me but assuming it were possible) but I don't really want to do what they do, and I like doing what my intellect allows me to do. If anything, I'd like to be way smarter - if it's possible without giving up on social skills and part of one's humanity - appears to happen way more often than I'd like.
OK could anybody explain to me WTF is going on in Poland?
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