ajuuiomml
5d ago
Concealed carry comes with the burden to lose every argument and to walk away.
ajuuiomml
5d ago
that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad.
That is most charitable of you! The dad had a chainsaw, was on meth, and had entered the fenced in yard of his neighbor who told him to leave. Regardless of property lines - claiming a de facto easement through your neighbors fenced in yard while high with a chainsaw in Florida is asking for trouble.
As ever, Scott’s take was fair as far as it goes, but the entire discussion of when is the right time to start murdering your political adversaries in the concrete gives me pause. It’s impossible to broach that topic and not tacitly endorse murder. The conversation is definitely more murdery than the post itself, including his own replies in which he suggests coordinated ???
ajuuiomml
28d ago
There isn’t a there in the article. It mentions podcasts, the price of beer, and ads, including a new one about republicans literally abducting your immigrant girlfriend… but not changes in policy, just different messaging. This is the problem, right?
Can I ask where you live and your cultural background? Food is perhaps the great cultural ambassador while simultaneously many Americans are divorced from food as culture. This is why veganism and Soylent can both thrive here. Imagine trying to integrate either one into family meals with three generations at the table. Nonna/yiayia/abuela poors everyone a glass? Soylent is not just a replacement for food, but for the meal itself. This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Many Americans in my experience also lack awareness of food as culture or that they are missing something (exactly like the people who are blind but don’t know it, and whose family doesn’t know it either). See the Midwest at large, and to a lesser extent, generic white people elsewhere.
It makes sense to me that we first consider food as culture, particularly amongst the coastal liberals, who have already personally abandoned religion en bloc - we can’t say much about the culture salience of something that is at best, invisible to them. What other lens would they use at that point?
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
I have read the decline in the homicide rate is dominated by better medical care.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
Veganism is a product of modernity that I imagine only exists due to industrial petro farming. The Jain are the closest I can think of, but they do dairy. Veganism is an impoverishing luxury diet.
ajuuiomml
3mo ago
Blockbuster movies make half their money or more in the foreign market. They are designed to be easily digestible and offend not the sensibilities of the foreign market. That only leaves room for action sequences for some reason. It’s just dollars at the end of the day.
The take on “modern art” isn’t great. The impressionists were the first to engage with photography, and everyone loves those haystacks, water lilies, and ballerinas. In its day, the work was criticized for being sloppy, unprofessional , vulgar in technique with visible strokes, not much mixing of color, chaotic, lacking craft, etc, which may as well be Luke’s objections to “modern art”. Photography itself would take a while to be accepted as fine art. All the while the two continued to influence each other. Consider that photorealism was a post war counter movement to abstract art, but that it wouldn’t exist without either the embrace of abstraction or the widespread diffusion of photography and its idioms in society. Or think about Andy Warhol reproducing the objects of mass production in the setting of fine art. Such work only makes sense in a society that can print at will. This is Art having a conversation with the consequences of mass printing and the quotidian. Consider the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the techniques used by comic books, but blew them up and put the ben-day dots in the foreground, as if they are the subject. They are striking in person.
I seriously wonder if the author, or the people who levy these criticisms in general, have ever been to a museum. Liechtenstein’s pieces are big and experiencing them is different in person. Clifford Still made huge, abstract, minimal pieces that can only be appreciated in person (20’ wide). Pollock’s paintings are 10’ wide. Reproduction on a phone screen loses something as a medium. It’s not just the form factor, a work taking up your entire field of view, the setting, the loss of texture, etc, but our relationship to our phones themselves. In a museum, when forced to confront a work of art, you have an actual thing in front of you - it obviously took effort and other people value it and think you should value it too. They chose to show it to you and you implicitly accepted a contract when you entered to attempt to engage with it. A phone is just the opposite. Every image on a phone is disposable and ephemeral, and asks nothing of us.
Phones serve us pablum or turn everything else into it. So anyway, go to a museum. As your parents might say, eat your broccoli, you may like it.
ajuuiomml
6mo ago
Depending on your odds I’d take the counter bet. Sorting out the shocks in the supply chain will be really messy. 35% on some random country is a great way to determine what it actually does! Lack of certainty that any position will last through next week is a killer.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
Yes, our expectation should be a global recession/depression with lots of international supply chain snafus. The market is currently saying surely Trump isn’t that reckless
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
It wouldn’t take many - I have to imagine a few good men exist in the house and senate who care for country first. The perhaps bigger problem is that the current Democratic leadership is content to watch the world burn to pick up seats in the midterms.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
If you work for someone else, you will make less money. On the flip side, I’ve dealt with people putting up fences at over $100/hr because they showed up and cut straight lines. I’m not exaggerating, the bar is that low. The default fence contractor is someone who speaks literally no English, using a skill saw to cut hundreds of pickets, measuring every one by hand to the same length on site.
You don’t want to be a contractor, you want to run a business.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
The trades are the way to go and making money isn’t a problem for the same person who could write software. My personal dealings with the trades goes like this: I make a meeting for a bid. They don’t show up. They show up but never give a bid. They don’t show up for the job. They do absolute shit work and I make them do it again. I’ve picked up quite a few skills having been forced to do stuff myself when contractors didn’t show up.
If I would do it over again, I’d be a GC and I would make way more money than a software engineer. Clear and frequent communication, keeping appointments, and honest work lets you charge a 50-100% premium in any trade.
These jobs will be the last to be automated away.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
Would you enumerate the core tenants of Hlyknaism, confused as they are?
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
xAI acquires X…
in an all stock transaction valuing xAI at 80 billion. This isn’t the first time Musk has bailed out one of his companies with another (Solar City -> Tesla) in 2016. That decision was upheld by Delaware courts and it’s hard to imagine this won’t end up in the (Nevada) courts again. Given xAI has raised at least 12 billion and put in an offer for OpenAI at 97, the valuation isn’t ridiculous on its face. It’s also hard to imagine this will do anything to buoy his rapidly declining public image.
So, what’s the play for the new XxAI? Presumably, xAI was already training on twitter data. Terrifying! Is this anything more than a self bailout to avoid margin calls on Tesla stock that leveraged the purchase of Twitter?
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
because they have somehow managed to take pride in avoiding anything to do with physical fitness
The more charitable explanation is that women and men never compete in sports directly past puberty . In the sports with comparable outcomes, it’s not clear if women do worse because there are so few of them or they are less competitive generally. Basically, anyone who grew up without a brother has no way of naturally disabusing themself of the notion that women are just as strong as men.
Of course not in the legal sense. In terms of moral culpability, it’s better to plan to lose every argument than to plan to enter gunfights.
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