JulianRota
1yr ago
It seems like just about everything does that now. At least the prompts to enable notifications seem to have gone away, but for a while, basically every website would nag you to subscribe by email, turn on notifications, and watch a related video before you could even start reading the actual article that you clicked on.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Is it just me, or is Substack's UI incredibly annoying?
Apparently Substack desperately wants me to read every post in my email inbox. I do not want to read posts in my email inbox. I want to read them on the website. Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it. Doesn't seem to matter if I've logged in or do give the email address, it still prompts me every time. Naturally, every search result about this on every search engine I've tried is about blocking the emails or users.
What I'd like it to do is, let me log in to an account on their site, then see an RSS-reader-like list of recent posts by every writer I follow in time order. Then, if I'm logged in, let me read a post with no popups or distractions, and if I open a post from somewhere else from a writer I don't follow, give me a button or something to click to follow them too. It actually appears that it's supposed to work like that, but it doesn't.
Instead, when I log in by email, as it seems to want you to do, and follow several writers, there doesn't seem to be a way to see things they've recently written. There's a page for that, called "inbox" for some reason, but it only shows content from one writer. "Home" mostly shows recent short posts by people I don't follow and don't care about, and I have no idea by what criteria it selects them. There's also a "reads" section in "profile" but it claims I'm not subscribed to anything. I can't find anything that even lists what I've subscribed to, but there's like 3 places where it tries to get me to read random content by people I haven't subscribed to. How is it this terrible? Has Substack also been taken over by the enshittification trend before it even really got going? I just want to read interesting effortposts in peace.
JulianRota
1yr ago
If I'm watching at home by myself, I'll usually watch a movie in 2 or 3 sittings. I don't have a problem watching a whole movie at once in a theater though. I suppose that's more likely to be planned out or going with other people though.
I suppose I'm more likely to watch in 1 sitting or make the breaks short if the movie is actually really good, which not that many are. Or, another way to look at things could be that I watch more movies than otherwise because it's acceptable to watch in multiple sittings rather than having to wait until I am ready to devote a solid 2h+ block to it. Which also means that I'm more willing to take a chance on something that I don't know much about and might not be that good, rather than only watching things I have high confidence that I'll enjoy. If it's really awesome and would actually benefit from watching the whole way through in one sitting, I can always watch it again when I am prepared to do that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Interesting post! I have several of those on my shelves and in my Kindle already. I actually just finished reading Turner Diaries - quick summary, it's fun as an action-adventure story, but the politics are pretty unsophisticated and not discussed in much detail. I've been trying to find more books on Irish Loyalism as well, maybe I'll try and find a copy of Paisley's book next (though I have read from some Loyalist militiamen post-Troubles that they were rather annoyed at his tendency to swoop in to a volatile situation, stir everyone up with a firebrand speech, then be whisked away before any actual violence happens).
The meta questions are what this really gets into though. All regimes in history have banned books that they considered threatening to the Powers That Be. What's curious is how the current regime is obsessed with promoting the reading of "banned" books while simultaneously actually banning other books. It seems critical to the identify of the current power structure that they were formerly out of power and had their core ideologies banned, so it's both a dunk on the former Powers That Be which they overcame and a sop to the idea of Free Speech to promote them, but they're at least as totalitarian as those former powers, so of course they continue to ban things that threaten their new ideology, while of course paying no attention to the contradiction.
It's also interesting how we all seem to seek the authenticity of these types of books. Whatever they think, at least they actually meant it! Even the wildest-eyed radicals tend to become dull if they ever do manage to become the Powers That Be, only sometimes returning to authenticity once they're out of power but still alive and not in some terrible prison, and inclined to write more about what they really did and why.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.
Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.
I think I would at least partly disagree with this. In my view, the best description of the role of slavery in the Confederacy's secession is that it was the lynchpin that made the secession and war possible and dictated the way it would be fought. I don't think most of the people actually fighting would describe their cause as fighting for the right to own slaves, and I don't think it's the true cause of the war. I think the real cause is the cultural split that goes back before the founding of the country, as described by Abilon's Seed and Scott's piece on it. I've been meaning to write a longer piece on this idea, but consider - why were the borders of the Confederacy what they were? Why did these people decide to embrace a plantation slavery economy while those other people rejected it in favor of industrialization?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Why can't both be true? It's both an objectively pretty reasonable set of conditions for secession and also a piece of propaganda for a particular side of a war that could plausibly be argued to be stretching the truth a bit. In fact, it's decently effective propaganda specifically because many people would consider it reasonable.
It's probably also worth considering that, at the time, basically every country in the world was a monarchy. So if you ever want any allies for a cause like theirs, it's very much in your interest to paint yourselves as having very reasonable objections to your specific king and definitely not any kind of general objection to the concept of monarchy. This is very much in contrast to the Marxist cause later on, which paints themselves as a danger to any regime that doesn't follow their ideology.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Looks like a good post that would lead to interesting discussion to me. I'd welcome it being reposted as a top-level in a current main thread.
I'm inclined to be reluctant to self-promote as well. But it's usually really obvious when the situation is somebody writes low-quality posts that were properly exposed and got low engagement because they were low quality, then aggressively self-promotes them to try and compensate, versus a high-quality post that just went up at the wrong time.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I finished Termination Shock, a few weeks ago actually.
The part about the Queen of Denmark's sex life was a little weird, but I didn't find it too off-putting. It feels like a case of, all such action/adventure novels are obligated to stuff some sex and love into them somewhere, regardless of whether it really makes sense. The whole concept of livestreamed hand-to-hand combat by volunteers at the China-India Line Of Actual Control is pretty bizarre too.
It also felt like there's some obligatory wokeness jammed in. This character is gay, this other one is native american, or black/african, or something else, even though it doesn't really add anything to the plot. But it's more of a mention than a focus. Almost like somebody convinced him to add some of that stuff into his next novel and he did it kind of half-heartedly.
I did find interesting the concept that some random rich guy and/or small nation could just start doing some geoengineering on their own that technically doesn't violate any laws. What would anyone do about it? Surely some nation would feel, justifiably or not, that some bad weather issue was caused by it.
The eagles fighting drones concept was pretty cool too.
Also, I'm fairly sure that EMPs cannot actually do what they were portrayed as doing. From what I've read, EMPs are hardest on very long conductors, like power transmission lines and copper communication cables, and anything connected to them without the right protection. They most likely won't have any effect on handheld electronics or vehicles, including drones. But hey, plot device I guess?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've enjoyed Extra History. They're mostly good, though to be taken with a grain of salt on anything too close to the culture way.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've experienced kind of a similar thing on a completely different subject.
One of my other interests is firearms and self-defense. On every controversial shooting incident where somebody gets killed, somebody always chimes in with something to the effect of, they should have shot them in the leg instead. I've used to respond with the conventional gun culture version of the argument against that, which is that it's wrong to think of a firearm as a non-lethal weapon, if you're ever justified at shooting at somebody you should be shooting center mass to stop the threat, and also that virtually nobody is accurate enough in an actual life-threatening situation to reliably hit somebody's leg. These arguments mostly don't seem to have much effect on people though. I started trying another argument, which is that leg shots are not at all less lethal - the thigh has some of the biggest arteries in the body, feeding the biggest muscles in the body and attached to the thickest bones in the body, and sending bullets into that is likely to cause severe enough bleeding to lead to death in minutes, if not life-changing injuries that they will never fully recover from. That argument seems to be much more effective at convincing people that attempting to shoot people who are a deadly danger in the leg or other extremity is not a good idea.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I live in NYC now, and mostly lived along the gulf coast before I moved here. One thing I have discovered is that there is a big difference between 30F and 10F. I've been told and am willing to believe there is an equally big difference between that and -10F. At 30F, you're okay with regular decent shoes, a set of long johns, a good basic jacket and a light hat. At 10F, you need (well, at least I need) insulated boots, heavy or double long johns, a heavy parka, hat, scarf unless your parka has a good hood, and mittens, and any skin exposed to the air for even a few seconds is actively painful. It's that cold here for maybe a couple of days to a week total over the course of a winter, and it's reasonable to avoid going outside during those times. At -10F I'm told you need petroleum jelly covering your face to avoid frostnip. I'm told in many places in the center of large continental areas, including the US, it's that cold or worse for multiple continuous weeks every winter. So I can totally see how many people, especially those who aren't in prime physical shape for any number of reasons, aren't eager to embrace needing to physically carry every crumb of food they eat home by hand.
I've lived in fairly hot places too, but never Phoenix. I've been told that in Phoenix, it's routinely hot enough that you are at serious risk of heat stroke if you walk outside in the sun for 20 minutes without carrying water. That's probably also worse if you need to carry moderate loads or aren't in great physical shape.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I did learn, or at least learn to pay more attention to, one interesting fact on the last Motte pro/anti car argument I was involved in - substantial parts of the world routinely experience weather for extended periods that precludes all but the most hardy people around from doing extended outdoors work, like walking for 20 minutes while carrying a few days worth of groceries.
JulianRota
1yr ago
democracies don't put election losers in jail, because that disincentivises all politicians from respecting the results of future elections.
The trouble we've realized with this ideal is that it also presumes that politicians refrain from doing obviously blatantly illegal things.
In my opinion, this was first realized with respect to Hillary, who faced effectively no consequences from breaking a bunch of laws (besides whatever effect it had on her losing the election). In her case, it was terrible for democracy for her to face any serious legal consequences.
I'm not about to claim Trump has perfectly abided by the law either. It's rather academic though exactly which laws he may or may not have broken and whether anything he did is or is not worse than what Hillary and other prominent Democrats have done. But it sure smells bad that he gets aggressively prosecuted all over the nation, taken off of ballots, etc, and nothing at all happens to any Democrats.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Thanks for doing this and posting about it, very interesting. The results are roughly what I presumed - these LLM-based "AI"s are pretty good at regurgitating and mixing and matching things it's already seen, but have no real ability to reason and fall flat fast when asked to do anything unusual or unexpected.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I prefer name-brands over generics for several categories in which I've tried the generics and they are definitely worse quality for not much less money. I don't have particularly great taste, so it has to be pretty significantly worse for me to notice and care. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you are. I don't see anybody trying to prove that the specific products I'm comparing here are actually identical.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm actually not sure that's the important point here. There was infact sufficient WMD materials to make the claim that, yep, we did in fact find WMDs (links: 550 metric tons of Yellowcake Uranium, thousands of US troops injured from chemical weapon cleanup, weapons captured by ISIS, as referenced in this Reddit comment). Granted, it wasn't a pile of shiny, new, ready to fire gas shells and bombs, but it seems to me it was enough to support a claim. So the question becomes, why did the media narrative become "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever"? Perhaps the CIA etc could have faked more evidence, but exactly what evidence could they have faked that would plausibly change the narrative? It would certainly have to be at least better than what they actually did find. Or did the Mainstream Media decide in advance on the "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever" narrative and interpret all evidence in favor of reporting that line.
I also think the lack of enthusiasm for future such adventures are more down to how totally bungled the aftermath was. The administration narrative pre-war was that the Iraqis all couldn't wait to be a peaceful stable Democracy, all we had to do was bump off Saddam's regime. If that had turned out to be actually true and Iraq was a nice stable democracy in 2004, I don't think anybody would care much to what extent the WMDs claim was actually true or reasonable believable at the time. The reluctance now is IMO more due to the fact that Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a bunch of millennia-old religious and tribal beefs that promptly blew up in our faces and we didn't have the slightest clue how to handle, and it took a decade and tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to get things sort of kind of stable. Who wants to repeat that?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think China's treatment of the Uyghurs is an example of successfully suppressing Islamists. It's not exactly pretty, but it seems to work fairly well for them, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Western powers. They do seem to have the will to put boots firmly on their necks and keep them there for decades; perhaps that's what it takes.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Curiously, before I went on Keto, I noticed I would get some pretty nasty acid reflux for a few minutes at a time when I ate unusually high-carb meals. When I went on pretty strict Keto, that vanished entirely. I'm now on what I consider "lazy keto", where all the meals I make at home are pretty strict keto, but I don't sweat eating Keto much when I go out to eat, which is a few times a week, and drink beer when I do. It seems to do the job fairly well as far as keeping my weight from going up much but not being too much of a pain in the ass to stick to. The acid reflux is still gone though.
JulianRota
1yr ago
My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?
I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm thinking the IRS probably operates more like a business than most parts of the Federal Government. For any possible enforcement action, they're going to be looking at how much money they put into it versus how much they'd recover, and they'll stick with the things that bring in the most money for the least effort.
Are they going to send a SWAT team to raid your house and drag you off to jail for 20 years? Probably not. All of that is super expensive (dozens of agents tied up all day, plus vehicles and gear etc) and not likely to lead to recovering much money.
If you're living a normal upper-middle-class lifestyle, they're going to write a letter to your payroll processor telling them to fix your withholding and garnish your wages, and they will. Then they'll write a letter to your bank telling them to hand over $x from your account, and they will. That takes 10 minutes of work for one guy at a desk and will probably recover whatever they want. If you think they took too much, well sucks to be you, you can spend your own $$$ and hire a lawyer to sue them, and good luck winning anything back. Maybe they'd let it slide for a few years until the amount owed goes over $100k, but no reason to think they'd forget about it entirely when they can still collect easily.
If you're a weird hippie who went to the trouble to have hard to track income and savings, maybe they'll just ignore it because it's too much work to track down and probably not all that much money anyways. Why bother, when writing letters to compliant corporations regarding normal upper-middle-class people is much faster and easier and yields much more money.
For a Donald Trump level figure (let's say pre-Presidency, so kind of a stand-in for any super-rich cantankerous person with weird complex finances), they can assume it'll take tons of their resources to really audit what's going on with him, and he's going to throw a dozen of his own high-priced lawyers and accountants at you, so maybe they'll just leave it alone unless they think they have a rock-solid case that you owe big bucks that they can actually collect.
I actually read some of the "War Tax Resistance" people's website. They don't seem to have much better advice for avoiding enforcement action. Basically, don't work for people who will report to the IRS and obey their garnishment letters, and don't hold money in banks they can track easily.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think I'll take a pass on discussing the morality of it. I'd question the practicality though. Let's think here.
So it seems the primary mechanisms of enforcement against most people are through other institutions - they tell W2 employers to knock it off on bad withholding filings, and they do, they tell banks and investment institutions to hand over owed money, and they will. They know about all your bank accounts because the banks report to the IRS too. I am willing to believe that the IRS's most-feared punitive measures are actually pretty rare to come into contact with as the LW OP describes, but what is the plan for dealing with such institutional enforcement? You can choose to not actually write a check to the IRS when they come knocking, but your payroll processor and bank won't.
So then plans for refusing to pay taxes are mostly about living a lifestyle that avoids all such institutions. The low-end one is a pretty obvious option - take a job that pays cash under the table, seek living arrangement that accept cash, never use a bank. Certainly possible to do, but that's pretty low-end living, you'd have to be really determined to do that.
Maybe there's a Bitcoin variety of this? If you can take a job that pays in Bitcoin and doesn't pay attention to taxes, it might be possible to make pretty good money like that. Maybe you could convert that directly to cash by various means, buy prepaid cards and such, and consume luxury goods at a normal rate. Not sure about living space though, I don't think you can buy with crypto or any landlords would accept it, but maybe a roommate will, or would accept converted cash? Or maybe in a super-techy space like SV you could infact rent or buy with crypto. Though if you buy, you'll owe property taxes, which I'm not sure if we're also objecting to here. So maybe this is a practical way to avoid paying income taxes entirely while not living a minimum-wage lifestyle?
But then, the crypto world is not exactly a bastion of honest dealing and fiscal responsibility. What are the odds your crypto employer will pay the correct amount on time every time? How about the people trading crypto for physical goods? The failure rate for bank-like institutions working with crypto is not great either. I'm not even saying the scam and fraud rate is super-high, but if you're relying on it for your primary financial dealings, just one serious mishap could be a huge deal, even if it only happens once every few years. And where's the recourse on any of that? Think the police or courts will give a crap? I doubt it. Hey, organizations that are built around avoiding all taxes and regulation are rather less honest than the "legit" world, who would have guessed? If they're willing to screw over the Feds for more cash, why wouldn't they screw you over too - you're much easier and less dangerous to screw than the Federal Government. Maybe living and working in the normal regulated world isn't so bad after all, even if the Federal Government is not exactly great. Also, it seems kinda lame to be like, I hate the government so much that I refuse to pay any taxes ever, but then go crying to them for help when some third-party scams you.
Along the lines of there being other risks and dangers than the Government, if you live the all-cash or all-crypto no-taxes lifestyle, and you are anything but dirt poor, then you will probably have substantial cash/crypto lying around somewhere. This makes you an attractive robbery target. If you have any social life at all, people will figure this out eventually. You will be targeted. I've known people this has happened to, despite not being as obvious as guy who pays cash for everything because he wants to pay no taxes ever. Organized multi-person burglary schemes can very much happen to you if word gets around that you have 5-figures of cash lying around. Think the cops are gonna help? Unlikely. If you go crying to them that you got ripped off for $50k cash, they're probably going to be a lot more interested in why you had that much cash around than busting whoever did it. Also falls under the theme of, how you gonna refuse to pay taxes because you hate the government so much, then cry to them for help when somebody else screws you over.
I guess the independent community life might be an option. Can be called a "commune" or a "compound" depending on your politics. It can be a viable way to pay little to no taxes without living a completely shitty life. But it's definitely a very different lifestyle. If you dig that, well more power to you I guess, but I don't think it's worth going to that much trouble just for the specific reason of avoiding paying taxes.
So yeah, I don't have a strong moral objection to it, but show me a way to live a no-tax life that's not completely shitty and doesn't expose me to much more likely dangers than whatever the Federal Government is doing, and maybe I'd be into it. If it exists.
JulianRota
1yr ago
His popularity is interesting, but we've all been on this ride (of third party Presidential candidacies) before, and it doesn't end well. The system isn't structured for it. At best, all they accomplish is to take votes away from the main party candidate that's closest to their views, thus ensuring that the one further from their views wins. See Ross Perot. If you want to seriously argue for it, you need a reason why this time might be different.
JulianRota
1yr ago
To fill in some more details, I'm working in tech too, at a medium-large company. Not super hip and not one of the tech majors, but in the business, maybe like 1-1.5k developers total. The department I'm in has maybe like 10 or so female engineers, i.e. whose job is primarily writing code, and another few dozen in testing, product, and project management roles. Near as I can tell, all of them are ordinary straight biological women. I mean, I haven't like had sex with any of them or done medical exams or whatever, but all the ones I've seen certainly look like ordinary women, and most of them have normal-looking husbands or boyfriends and quite a few have been pregnant at some point. If any are secretly trans, I would be quite surprised. We have had a few gay men, but not any gay women that I know of.
There is exactly one person total at the company I am aware of who I suspect might be a trans woman. This person works in a completely different department and lives in another state, and I have never seen her in person or had any professional contact with her. I'm only guessing due to her face looking kind of masculine in a Slack profile pic and being oddly interested in pronoun declarations and other such woke things.
It's true that the majority of these books aren't really all that banned, at least in the US. It's hard to consider something to be banned when you can mail-order a copy off of Amazon. The Turner Diaries is a pretty good case for about as banned as you can effectively get though.
In the way of modern cancel culture, it's not technically banned in the sense that the Government will explicitly send you to jail specifically for possessing it. But Amazon and GoodReads removed the page for it entirely. I don't see it on any other online book sellers. I actually found a few paper copies on eBay, running around $100, apparently published by a Barricade Books, which according to Wikipedia went bankrupt in 1997. I would expect dire consequences if any publisher dared to do a new run now - in the form of every other author refusing to do business with them, credit card processors, shippers, and banks dropping them, etc. If you wanted a paper copy, something like printing it at home would in fact be pretty reasonable. PDFs over the internet are easier though - a DuckDuckGo search for it finds a downloadable PDF on the first page, so you don't have to work too super hard to find a free copy if you really want it.
While it's not explicitly illegal to have it, if it ever comes to the attention of the wrong people that you do, I would expect you risk getting busted for something made up or trivial that everyone else normally wouldn't be prosecuted for and some kind of sentencing enhancement citing the fact that you possessed it to document how dangerous you are.
The hell of it is, I don't see it being that great or dangerous. The ideology is pretty racist and anti-Semitic, but no part of the book actually advocates for it, it's just taken as a given that it's correct. The terrorism tactics seems to me like grade-school level stuff, the kind of thing where if you couldn't figure that out already, you really have no business conducting any sort of insurgent activity. It's kind of fun as an adventure story, and a circle-jerk if you actually believe in that ideology, but otherwise pretty meaningless.
I pretty much agree. I don't really follow social sciences much though, it seems pretty remarkable if they actually pay no attention to left-wing authoritarianism.
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