Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Nordstream was a Ukrainian op
Titus_1_16
15d ago
Well look, you used it naturally enough that I couldn't have told the difference
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Why do you think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals?
That's a pretty unusual viewpoint for a modern westerner to espouse (though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common). Christian background, Cartesian background, contrarianism, Chinese background.... how come?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically.
That's a pretty contentious assertion to just plop down. I think you're mistaken, and my guess is that the source of the error is you considering people's "interests" quite narrowly. Are you following a logic of "decarbonisation will make many/most things more expensive while delivering equivalent/worse service, therefore it's against most people's interests?"
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
For sure the main focus in a market as saturated as that for soft drinks in the US is more focused on expanding a slice than growing the pie, but both effects are there.
Coke still spends $x to shift y units of Coke; it's largely immaterial to them whether those concumers would otherwise drink Dr Brown or nothing.
If there were no advertising for soft drinks in the US, what do you think the effect on overall consumption would be?
Titus_1_16
9d ago
Listening and very much enjoying, nice job
Titus_1_16
15d ago
one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens
Really nice turn of phrase
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?
The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Yes, this is exactly the sort of "context" I was gesturing at (but failed to actually write) in my comment.
Strictly speaking, in the 1840s, the median Irishman was undoubtedly at a lower "civilisational level" than the median Anglo - but there are truer explanations for this than "the Irish are eternal untermenschen".
For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain, which is at odds with the eternal untermenschen hypothesis.
For that matter, the median Irishman today is a little bit higher in a material/human capital sense than the median Englishman (though this is only a development of the past 20 years or so)
Titus_1_16
4mo ago
Does anyone really have anything against actual Romanians? I don't think so. It's almost always the latter, and the difficulty is compounded by the High Wokish word for "Gypsy" (that is, "Romani") sounding so like "Romanian"
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Sorry, that was a failure to convey tone correctly on my part - I agree with the busywork proposal, I wasn't being facetious. Perhaps some holy commandments like an obligation to pray x number of times per day etc
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Being a Mediterranean is even worse than being a chihuahua.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.
There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.
The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).
I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Interesting, I did not know at all that "Paki" is as grave an insult as that in the UK.
Here's a follow-up question: is it used to insult people of Indian background as well?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Coke isn't taking anything out of society, coke isn't making "society" drink 6 cans of coke in a day
This is exactly what advertising is; their billion-dollar marketing team would be very disappointed to hear that they're all, what, playing make-believe? The entirety of marketing and advertising is just a big ineffective scam, and no-one has ever noticed?
Coke might not be "making" people do something by putting a gun to their head, but it spends over a billion dollars to get a certain social outcome, and then every year that outcome happens. I don't know what else you'd call that, David Hume
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
The Rest Is History podcast is really excellent, wide-ranging and not super ideological
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
As an experienced pedatn, I enjoyed the fact that the line morphed from the grammatically correct "How would you feel now if you hadn't eaten breakfast?" to the strictly incorrect "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast?"
Obviously look it's variation in dialect, blah blah prescriptivism, but I still found it funny
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
That's super interesting, have you ever been to Europe? There's a lot that's distinct about White Americans (the capitalisation makes sense here to draw attention to the group, they're not just Americans who happen to be white) compared to other Euro nations. If I'm to trade in unkind European characterisations, White Americans can be a bit insincere, plastic and not-quite-there. Maybe "hollow" would be a better term than "plastic", actually.
I wonder if these traits are what you noticed; "automaton-like" is not a bad match for this set of traits
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
Poland in full war mode would likely crush Russia.
What on Earth makes you think that? Is this a typo?
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Fair play
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Can i just say, absolute banger of a reply (and definitely better than chatGPT, to whose writing I've been comparing literally everything else today)
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's age dependent. At 35 that's crazy high, at 15 it's not really unusual
Id rather get wet a few mornings a week than deal with obesity and heart disease from physical inactivity. I charitably attribute Americans' fatness to your car-centricity: if you think it's actually just pure moral torpor, and the cars are an unrelated co-incidence, then fair play to you.
Car-development gives diffuse malus and discrete bonus (ie a dry and comfortable commute), whereas walking is the inverse
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