omfalos
Nonexistent good post history.
User ID: 222
omfalos
29d ago
I have read Sadly, Porn. The book is composed of meandering parables. They revolve around a central argument reiterated repeatedly in riddle form but never stated explicitly. Footnotes make up 50% of the book's total word count. Each footnote is an essay, mostly book reviews and movie reviews. I would maybe recommend reading the footnote essays for starters and circling back to reading main text of the book afterwards.
conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe
The expansion of the universe violates conservation of energy. Think of all that CMB radiation that has been redshifted by the expansion of space, thereby losing energy over time.
Relativistic effects may explain why CICO doesn't work for people with high mass.
omfalos
6mo ago
Some may ask why we aren't building cities in Antarctica now before going to Mars. Building life support systems and growing food is easier there than it will be on Mars. Mars will be colonized first, though, and Antarctica may never be colonized. The reason is because international treaties prevent Antarctica from having sovereignty. But sovereignty can be attainable on Mars. The pursuit of sovereignty is what makes space exploration worthwhile. Sovereignty is unobtainium—the resource more abundant in space than on Earth. Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations.
Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance fits the bill. Cugel the Clever is a smarmy conman antihero who commits felonious crimes and treats women badly. The reader sympathizes with Cugel because he strives valiantly to survive in a hostile world. Cugel's Saga is set in the Dying Earth: a far-future setting where the Sun flickers weak and red, and the Earth is scarred with the ruins of millions of dead civilizations. The world is polluted with cursed artifacts and monsters. The powers-that-be are insane, malevolent wizards. It is a despondent, hopeless world inhabited by selfish, cynical people. Cugel victimizes many innocent people, but most of the people he tries to con are even worse than he is, and they usually get the better of him. After endless setbacks and frustrations, the novel ends in a hard-earned triumph for Cugel the Clever.
Matthew Colville dislikes Cugel's Saga because he thinks it is too mean-spirited. That's as good of an endorsement as you could ask for.
omfalos
10mo ago
The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.
omfalos
5mo ago
The president is obligated to spend money appropriated by Congress. If Congress appropriates $1000 to buy a gay wedding cake, president Trump must go to the nearest bakery and buy a gay wedding cake.
omfalos
5mo ago
Historically, the check on monarchs' power was the need to convene parliament to raise new taxes. Now, the president must convene congress to beg permission to spend less money. Is it tyrannical for the executive branch to not spend money raised by congress? Is president Trump ushering in a Daoist dictatorship through unilateral inaction?
Every prime number president has been a Republican since the inception of the party:
17 - Johnson*
19 - Hayes
23 - Harrison
29 - Harding
31 - Hoover
37 - Nixon
41 - Bush
43 - Bush
47 - Trump
*Johnson ran as Lincoln's vice president on the ticket of the short-lived National Union Party.
But Native Americans seized land and ethnically cleansed each other. Any surviving Native Americans are descended from the victors of these myriad wars. The email sender referenced being haunted by spirits because only extinct bloodlines are innocent. The only way to be good is to go extinct in this doggy dog world.
omfalos
6mo ago
What makes US customary units human-centric is mostly the fact that they are base-2 instead of base-10. Base-2 gives you an assortment of related units that are close to human scale.
For example, there are two tablespoons in a fluid ounce. Eight fluid ounces in a cup. Two cups in a pint. two pints in a quart. Two quarts in a half-gallon. Two half-gallons in a gallon.
Inches are also used in what amounts to a base-2 system, since they are broken down into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths. Foreigners may find it a bit ridiculous that Americans have sockets and wrenches with sizes like 5/8" and 1-7/16". I would say it is worse than metric overall, but the use of fractions does have certain advantages.
omfalos
1yr ago
This is a troll post where you pretend to make an argument that 38% property ownership is not high enough to justify discrimination against Jews, while intending for the reader to ignore your argument and just react to the 38% figure as being too high.
omfalos
5mo ago
omfalos
8mo ago
I tried to insert a blank paper ballot into the voting machine without coloring in any circles. The machine displayed a "blank ballot" error message and spat it out. I told a poll worker what I was attempting to do, and she made a phone call to ask whether my blank ballot could be accepted and counted. After waiting for five minutes, she got off the phone and informed me that I was obligated to color in at least one circle in order for my ballot to be counted. So I ended up voting to legalize abortion in Missouri.
omfalos
1yr ago
What if NASA functioned like the ADA? Every company with more than 50 employees could be made legally liable for failure to launch probes into space to explore the Solar System. The law could be enforced by lawsuits against companies that have "workplaces hostile to space exploration" because they skimp on how many probes they launch.
omfalos
6mo ago
Having time zones follow state borders is very aesthetic, but you will have to make an exception for Kansas City. The time zone boundary should be diverted to pass through Kansas between Topeka and Lawrence.
omfalos
8mo ago
According to the SSA Actuarial Life Table, a seventy-eight-year-old American male has a twenty-five percent chance of dying in the next four years. However, the fact that Donald Trump has no chronic health conditions means his actual chance of dying may be lower than that.
omfalos
5mo ago
Most people don't know that Braxton Bragg was a bad general. The default assumption of an uninformed person is that Fort Bragg must have been named after somebody cool. But a little digging reveals the man wasn't cool, not even by the standards of a Southern sympathizer.
omfalos
10mo ago
"HAITIANS in SPRINGFIELD were caught eating CATS"
is a factually incorrect statement, but there are multiple factually correct permutations which can made by swapping out the nouns. A nimble orator can insinuate that Haitians in Springfield eat cats—without saying it directly—by stringing together all the factually correct permutations. Donald Trump is a talented orator, and I think he could have figured out the right way to present the argument given enough time. I think he faceplanted because he only learned about the story literally the day of the debate and didn't have time to process it.
omfalos
10mo ago
My attention while watching the debate was focused on how Trump would talk about Springfield, Ohio. He mixed up his words and messed up badly. It was his worst gaffe of the debate. It was a mistake to mention Springfield at all, though it could have been done better. I was focused on Springfield because it went viral on X only a couple days ago. Trump didn't learn about the viral story out of Springfield until less than a day before the debate. This was not enough time, obviously, for him to process the information and formulate a plan to exploit it. I was curious to see if Kamala knew about the Springfield "cat hoax", but she never had to respond because the moderator gave a thorough rebuttal to Donald Trump in her stead.
omfalos
8mo ago
They should have waited until after the election to seize Peanut the Squirrel. Why don't government agencies have informal rules in place to prevent themselves from making controversial decisions during presidential elections?
omfalos
1yr ago
Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.
That is one of the reasons I wanted Donald Trump to be president in the 2016 election. I wanted to see if the government would keep running if a person with no political experience occupied the White House.
An analogy to which I often compared it was the TV show "LOST". There is a character named Desmond who lives alone in a bunker with a computer terminal. He believes it is his job to type a specific sequence of numbers into the computer every 108 minutes or else the world will be destroyed. Quoting from the LOST wiki:
Occupants of the Swan station followed a protocol in which they typed a sequence into a computer every 108 minutes. Typing these numbers and pressing "execute" (a.k.a. pushing the button) on the keyboard discharged an electromagnetic buildup, continually averting worldwide catastrophe.
My fear about Donald Trump becoming president was that there would be some kind of highly technical task which the president was obligated to perform—analogous to typing a specific sequence of numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes—but which could only be figured out by somebody who had held another political office or who had graduated from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School.
When Donald Trump became president, his lack of political experience and legal knowledge did inhibit him from certain things. He signed executive orders that were dead-on-arrival because he failed to write them in a lawyerly fashion with t's crossed and i's dotted. Some of his appointments and nominations were hamstrung by procedural errors. But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST, which I consider to be a positive endorsement of the idea that random civilians with no political experience can become president.
omfalos
7mo ago
What matters is ugliness, in architecture, in obesity, in fonts, in advertising, in fashion.
omfalos
1yr ago
Sounds like Harvard and Yale needs to put together a "presidential science" master's program. People in the future will be horrified that politicians without presidential science degrees were allowed to be president.
omfalos
1yr ago
Every presidential debate in history has been held in September or October. Who's idea was it to depart from precedent? Donald Trump seems eager to debate any time any place, so the choice was up to Joe Biden and his team. Did the Democratic Party leadership pressure Biden into this unique arrangement as a final test to see whether he will become the Democratic presidential nominee?
The general thrust is similar to his blog but with a focus on relationships. It centers around themes of self-deception, narcissism, performative virtue, revealed preference, cowardice, selfishness, and ultimately, dereliction of duty and the failure to be a good person. A book of cynicism in diametric opposition to nihilism.
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