SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
The 'catering' we do for the bottom is caused by the meritocratic view, however. Believing that every ghetto-denizen and backwoods hick is just a temporarily-embarrassed email worker is a direct result of ignoring the fundamental differences between people. Our current system is built around trying to pretend the bottom is "really" just like the top, while shunning anything that's actually 'bottom-ish.' Proper recognition of natural differences means that we can accept that no, most of the bottom has very different ways of thinking than those at the top, and will never be the same.
The same goes with cry bullying. It only works because privileged people are able to pretend that they're not. Proper noblesse oblige means that the privileged are held to higher standards.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
To take it a step further: I happen to know someone who is either a billionaire or quite close to it (I believe he recently complained that his net worth had fallen just under the billion mark due to some supply chain issue) and is still absolutely not elite in any way. His money is in agriculture, and he is very 'country' in his mannerisms. I do think a world where he'd get to be 'in the room where it happens' would be a better one, but he doesn't act the part of the right sort of person, so he's just wealthy and subject to the whims of the worthless social-gamers.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1yr ago
More of a Friday Fun post, aside from my minor questions, but here are some updates on the mining:
Winter slowed things down, but I now have a shaker table, a jaw crusher, a propane furnace, a non-functional ball-mill, a 55-gallon drum of sulfuric acid, and a ramshackle shack.
First concentration runs with the table were interesting, but not particularly good. Managing angle and flow across the table is harder than I expected, and I seem to have lost about as much good material as I got. Regardless, I ended up with some buckets of concentrates to play with which will hopefully inform me what's in the rock or extractable.
Acid leaching is honestly shockingly simple and easy. I've got blue crystals containing copper and other metals now, and was able to melt them into small nuggets of a pinkish copper/silver/gold mix, with swirls of color throughout. Biggest issue would be scale. Doing it in small trays is easy, but IDK if I'd want to deal with larger amounts of acid. Does anyone know if there's a market for small irregularly shaped blobs of metal, maybe as a craft thing?
As I progress, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the daunting task of metal extraction that's coming up. I can get some basic amount of mixed metal blocks by furnacing, but actually separating the different metals is much more chemistry than I'd like to have on my hands. Which brings me to my main question: does anyone here have knowledge or experience shipping concentrates to a refinery? If I could simply do the concentration as I have been, either through acid or crushing and tabling, and then sell it to the professionals, I'd be sitting pretty. I've been away from polite society for a good while, so I've been putting off sending emails. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
Yes, all candidates have a portion of the base who is insufficiently motivated to get to the polls but can be convinced to do so.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
As mentioned in my other comment, the problem is that food, while a comparatively small portion of the budget, is one of the only parts that is highly flexible. This means that food, and a few other flexible spends, bear all the weight of the lost money from the inflexible spends increasing in price. This adds a sort of salt-in-the-wound effect when the food is more expensive as well. I think this is a big part of why people fixate on food prices in particular.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
So maybe I just don't understand what people have been meaning by having a Bronze Age Mindset, because to be BAP's position seems perfectly ideologically consistent. Them raping and pillaging is bad, us raping and pillaging is good. What's more Bronze Age than that? For anyone reading this forum, the Palestinians are not your allies and never will be, so it seems only natural the Bronze Age response is "slaughter them and salt the earth"
SophisticatedHillbilly
5mo ago
From what I can find, tranq pistols can have an effective range up to 40 meters. That's firing an entire syringe. I wouldn't be surprised at being able to achieve 100 meters with a much, much smaller dart.
Also worth considering that range would likely be an engineering goal for a CIA heart attack gun. They aren't really focused on achieving range in typical dart pistols, because that would never be needed.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
It couldn't have been more then one or two thousand
My intuition was honestly the exact opposite, and I figured there'd be at least 10-20k of them. Basically every non-major-city settlement was centered around 1 or more plantations. Where in the north the town was the basic unit of settlement, in the south this was the plantation. It wasn't just the owners and slaves that lived on the plantations, it was a majority of the population. Seems you'd end up with a lot of plantations and plantation owners.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
I think this is where the class/income distinction is important. We need highly intelligent lower-class people, because we need highly intelligent people running industries like resource extraction which will never be high class. A role being difficult doesn't make it classy, and a society that siphons off its best production plant operators and logging magnates to become ad-revenue optimizers and theoretical history researchers isn't on a good path long-term.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
Consider two identical twins. The parents force one twin to get good grades, play sports, practice piano, etc. The other twin is completely ignored and follows his base instincts (video games, probably). Unsurprisingly the first twin ends up with better life outcomes,
So I don't disagree with your actual point, but twin studies tend to converge on the idea that these twins will actually have roughly the same life outcomes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
When you face something ‘systemic’, you need the strong and long reach of the arm of government to be able implement solutions that are 1) unprofitable to do, 2) can’t rely on community consensus to generate the will and 3) need nation state backing - all of which are unworkable on a local level.
Which issues does the US currently face that require a government to have the level of power that the US currently wields that could not be better solved by simply allowing people to act freely?
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
Nobel prize winning scientists can't exactly imbue intelligence, which SATs generally measure, nor was he likely taking the time to instill test-taking skills. I don't see why it would.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
But the promiscuity is a direct result of the homosexuality no?Heterosexual sex is less promiscuous solely because it involves women. And then the community effects are a direct result of that promiscuity.
In a hypothetical world where homosexuality is just "heterosexual relationship and sexual norms, but with 2 men" then sure, it would be not unhealthy, but that world fundamentally cannot exist as long as men have a higher sex drive than women and are willing to take greater risks in sex, which I can think of no way of changing.
In this sense, the pickup truck analogy doesn't work, because pickup trucks don't make people rural, or male. Homosexuality does make people more promiscuous, because it increases access to high-sex-drive partners.
SophisticatedHillbilly
6mo ago
The other problem is that the job got a lot harder. We have basically invented entire new classes of food since then, and more importantly there's been a lot of population mixing. Given that the optimal diet for one group (not even race, much narrower genetic groups than that) can be completely opposite that of another, it's a damn hard nut to crack now.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
To many, the fact the problem is happening is proof enough of that. If preventing rape at a societal level is a responsibility of the police, then rape increasing at a societal level is evidence of the police not solving it
The usual point of disagreement is, I expect, at the very start of that chain of logic.
What percentage of the revolutionary militia were we expecting to be habitual wife beaters, exactly? I think we'll be ok without them.
Approximately all of them, based on current standards of domestic violence. Minor physical punishments (slaps, spanking etc.) were common for men to apply to their wives if they misbehaved, just as they were applied to children. You'll have to cast aside more than just the militiamen.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
I don't follow. What exactly is that no-cost intervention? Or is the point just that the question is: "Would he still hate black people if they are productive members of society?"
Honestly asking. I don't get what you're saying.
Edit: never mind, I get it now upon re-reading. Leaving this to mark my shame.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
This is extra true of those murders which, especially in the southeastern US, have little connection to other crime. Most murders there are a personal feud sort of thing, or a "you fucked my girlfriend" sort of thing. Totally expected and seen as very reasonable in local circles. Very different than gang activity, robberies that go wrong, etc.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
I just want to say thank you for doing this. Efforts like yours are the sort of thing that creates meaningful, appreciable change in the world that talking about problems on a forum does not.
The only time I've ever had community was when I did something similar, and it seems that most people are just waiting for someone to reach out. They aren't antisocial, just non-agentic. To everyone reading this who wants community: try and do the same. Report back on how it goes!
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
So do all the people screaming absolute bloody murder about the fact that their mail-in-ballot was filled out and submitted without their knowledge (until they checked) count?
Now I have to admit that my experience may be somewhat unusual: I worked as an on-the-ground political activist for about a year during 2020, and was simultaneously working for a tier 2 news organization.
What this means is that I talked to a LOT of people (>10,000) about politics during that period spread over a very wide area of a purple state. For many, I was the only target they had to complain or yell about what was upsetting them, so they did.
Most common fraudish complaints I heard were:
- People going to sign up for a mail-in ballot and discovering that their ballot had already been submitted.
- Sending in a ballot early, but it never being received, and then having to vote in person anyway.
- Ballot harvesters asking who they voted for before collecting ballots. (They would offer to collect them regardless. The fear is that they would put disliked votes into a "do not send" pile.)
Such complaints were primarily, though not exclusively, from Republicans, and almost exclusively those in and around Republican stronghold areas.
I heard these things many, many times, at least a couple hundred each. This combined with my own experience with activism (we were actively told to lie and commit crimes to convince people, though I did not ever do so) makes me extra suspicious of the more partisan campaigns.
There were only 2 cases where someone said they were pressured by their partner into voting for someone they didn't want to. Both seemed somewhat politically disengaged, and I discovered this only because I was like "oh, did you vote for Biden/Trump?" and they responded with "yeah, but not because I wanted to" and explained. They didn't seem particularly upset about it.
So, is that evidence, or does the hysterical screaming only count if it's for the exact reason you wanted?
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
Exactly. It's bad any way you slice it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
Literally every single person I have ever taken shooting has gone at least 30% up the Overton Window towards gun rights after shooting them. Even the "guns should literally be forcibly confiscated from the entire populace" person moved up to "these are probably fine if reasonable checks are in place on issuing them".
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.
The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."
But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.
I've always seen it more as "accept that water runs downhill." Yes, you can pump water uphill, but there is a cost, and it must be done intentionally. Try as you might, you will never be able to get the universe into a state where "water runs uphill or downhill as needed at no cost" is a fundamental law.
People who successfully change things for the better tend to have internalized this. They understand that their actions have tradeoffs, opportunity costs, and that some things, like the past, are unchangeable. Others beat their heads against the brick wall that is reality.
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