official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
By the way:
One and one half millennia later, Sir Thomas Browne noticed those questions in his essay Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, remarking that they, "though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture." It is notable that he did not mention the first of the questions, confining his reference to the latter two, and resisted himself the urge to answer any of them, if only by conjecture. Herewith. we attempt what he would not.
Check this out too: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/02/09/urne-buriall-in-tlon/
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The linked essay makes a convincing argument for what it is.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
how did you find this website?
By googling "secret name of rome".
The author has made a whole book apparently
That's another enigma (within an enigma): if you google Horace W. LaBadie, you find his books on technical subjects such as building a laser printer from scratch, but no "On the Roman Religion", which, it seems, exists only as a (partial?) transcription on that website. Maybe it's not a real book at all.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The USA and the UK are not real countries I guess. I mean, I'm firmly on the Ukraine side as far as self-determination goes, but this now twice-removed linguistic bullshit is just ridiculous.
Do we think worse of the Slavs whose name comes from Slave?
It's the other way around, technically. Slavs is a self-name coming from the words "word"/"glory", which then gave Romans the word for slave because they kept importing those peoples as slaves.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
It's Kisilev btw, you keep misspelling his surname.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Muphry's Law strikes again LOL.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Objective truth does not require that people accept it; it is enough to be correct. "I am correct and you must admit it" is the ego speaking.
Not really. In a democracy other people's opinions directly affect you and yours. In a forum that aspires to implement the "better" parts of democracy the same applies, as far as not having your opinions silenced in various ways goes.
So if there's a substantial number of people who'd rather argue that grass isn't green than admit that they were wrong, your options are a) use democratic means to crush them, b) switch to a less democratic political system where their wrong opinions don't matter, or c) vote with your feet towards a community that's more amenable to a or b.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Pretty cool video of a guy falling off a stairs onto a trampoline and then eerily being thrown back up, as if in reverse: https://twitter.com/i/status/1615509243410391040
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Baba is You in the puzzle category, no contest.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.
I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.
New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!
I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):
The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.
... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.
And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?
Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:
On the 'disinformation vs. establishment bot' question, check out bots interacting with climate change: 83.1% of bot tweets support activism, 16.9% skepticism according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927821001490 .
The abstract ends with:
Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
One thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that Russian Bots are a paper tiger, probably.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that "urgency" is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of "white culture" specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist's arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of "perpetuating racism", but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.
There's a certain obvious and probably inevitable professional deformation that occurs in people in Academia (some fields more than other). Consider, for example, a philosopher. His career trajectory, his current social status and salary, are pretty much entirely determined by the opinions of his peers and superiors. If they think that he's cool, his salary will increase. Then he goes and spends his paycheck buying food and stuff, and is upset that he can't buy everything he wants.
Now, in theory, if asked, he probably could explain that the food he buys is produced by real people, delivered to the supermarket by the real people, there's a lot of effort required for all that, there's a limited amount of effort available to the society, so you can't just set everyone's salary at a million dollars per month and let them have anything they want. But his world--all his lived experiences--scream at him that you definitely could, his paycheck is a meaningless number not connected to anything in reality and set by other people who could just as well double it if they wanted, and the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.
This has obvious consequences. For example, his gut tells him that communism is totally viable and money was invented by evil people for the sole purpose of causing suffering in their lessers. His mind knows about supply-demand curves (hopefully) but in his gut he knows that it's bullshit invented by evil people, look, you take a piece of cheese from the supermarket shelf and tomorrow there's another piece of cheese there, what supply and demand? It's like when you scoop some water from a river with a bucket and it's immediately replaced with more water, sure, someone might try to charge your for that, and you might yield due to the social pressure, but in your gut you know that it's unnecessary and unfair.
Similarly, in this case Tema Okun probably lives in an academic bubble detached from the reality where stuff is made by someone, and where if all those someones suddenly decide that urgency is a useless value, she will discover that supermarket shelves stay empty and starve to death.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
First ask how much wood to cremate a body. Then ask how much wood to cremate 5,000 bodies - i.e. "hundreds of cords of wood."
"When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel." (I recommend reading https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/holocaust-nazi-perspective/)
As far as I understand, burning a human body is an energy-positive process (quick googling: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water), so you only need extra fuel to start the fire and due to inefficiencies. Once you figure out how to cremate 5000 bodies at a time you definitely don't get the naive answer to the question you proposed.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
O hai, that's my comment =)
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
You are not just burning the meat, you are trying to cremate the skeleton to ashes. Cremation is not an energy-positive process.
That's a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" kind of argument. I'm pretty sure that turning bones to ashes only requires a certain temperature and is also an energy positive process by itself, or if not then a rounding error compared to the heat required to evaporate the water. You're welcome to look up the chemical processes involved, for me my back of the envelope calculations and some physics-related common sense provide convincing enough proof that cremation is in fact an energy-positive process, so your "multiply the wood amount by 5000" argument is nonsense.
But you can notice there is already a contradiction in the witness testimony.
I'm OK with assuming that the Nazi judge did not relay the boasting about the cremation process by the guy who he had shot in precise enough detail.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
That's definitely a position.
There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.
There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
You are literally arguing against physics. Again, quick googling told me that: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water. I don't account for bones but I also don't account for fat and brains. Can you do basic math?
Your argument is that since a proper cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy, a mass cremation of 5000 bodies requires a proportionally prohibitive amount of energy. When I point out that it doesn't scale like that at all because of physics (not to mention that Nazis weren't interested in proper cremations), you make more arguments supporting that cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy.
If the cremation of a single body requires a lot of external energy, then why wouldn't that scale with the cremation of 5000 bodies? It absolutely would. The external energy must have a source to sustain hours of cremation.
Have you considered leaving arguing your points to someone better intellectually equipped for that? Because the only thing you have achieved here was making me more sympathetic to SJWs who say that holocaust denialists are too stupid and impervious to logical arguments so instead of engaging them in a marketplace of ideas we should silence them lest they spread their nonsense to other very stupid people. I'm not trying to offend you, I'm honestly informing you about the result your arguments here have achieved.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!
How did you find it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
A 200-meter pyre for 1,200 sheep doesn't stand against the magical pyres at Treblinka that could cremate 7,000 people using a "few dry branches" or no fuel at all! So it goes.
It is a physical fact that a human body releases several times more heat when burned that is required to evaporate all the water it contains (the main heat sink, everything else is a rounding error). This means that the more bodies you burn at once, the less extra fuel you need per body, on the margin. You have not disputed this claim at all, except by asking GPT if a single body can be burned with minimal extra fuel.
And then there's the issue of comparing apples to oranges: how much more efficient the Germans became after tons of trial and error (as mentioned in your own sources) and how much lower were their standards for the acceptable result of cremation compared to the USDA (not to mention human crematoriums).
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
You are just speaking pure nonsense
I'm speaking elementary school math.
but I'll point out that the standard of cremation for hiding the evidence of a crime
Why would the Nazis want to hide the evidence of something they did not consider a crime? You sound like you're brainwashed by the Jewish propaganda saying that WW2 was about the Holocaust. It was not, not at all whatsoever. I repeat, reading "The Holocaust: a Nazi Perspective" might do you some good. Or not, if you are genuinely not capable of doing elementary school math among other things.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I noticed it myself though. Like, browse the webs on the toilet, make a mental note to look up something when back at the computer, completely forget because of the doorway on the way.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I am of the same tribe as those Russians, and they're calling to commit murder in my name too – in a certain twisted and misguided sense; in the name of the glory of the Empire that stubbornly sings in my blood. Leonard Cohen sang: «I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons» (obligatory Scott) and I see where he was coming from.
Pls differentiate between the glory of having your (probably vicariously) Empire step on the faces of lesser surrounding nations as a terminal goal, and the aesthetics of deadly weapons, high morale, all that.
I discovered a fascinating thing.
There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.
Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?
But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm
How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.
Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.
More options
Context Copy link