sansampersamp
No bio...
User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
apologies for misreading your reddit post then
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Honestly thinking you can opt out of status games, or that obstinate refusal to 'play' doesn't impact how you and your arguments are perceived, is just cope. There's an autistic tendency to conflate a social illiteracy with the kind of practiced sprezzatura that seems effortless on the surface level, or writing off deviations from the norm (a real and valuable thing -- see the 'basic' sneer) as essentially the same.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
openmeteo has good keyless apis for such things
https://open-meteo.com/en/docs#latitude=44.0029&longitude=-69.6656&hourly=temperature_2m,dewpoint_2m
sansampersamp
1yr ago
To put some numbers around it:
The internal cross-section of the pipe is approximately 1m2, so each bar of pressure differential will push a plug with 100kN of force. That's enough to shoot 10 tons of hydrate at g-like acceleration. Sounds difficult at the best of times.
Also the plug is stuck until it isn't. When you depressurise you move back across that phase diagram until the solid sublimates, which happens radially from the outside, in. The plug is stuck until it shrinks from the walls enough to move (upon which you don't want it to move) and can be melted and cleaned up with pigging and glycol.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
midterms, not presidential
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.
We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Why is the assumption that Germany was taken by surprise, conditional on the US being responsible?
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Straightforwardly expressed by Weber, a basic necessity for a state:
A compulsory political association with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [Zwanges] in the enforcement of its order. Social action, especially the actions of an association [organized action; Verbandshandeln], will be spoken of as ‘politically oriented’ to the extent in which [if; dann und insoweit] it aims at exerting influence on the leadership [government; Leitung] of a political association [organization; Verbandes]; especially at the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government [Regierungsgewalten].
I've always found these kind of myth inversions (with respect to the traditional Christian Eden myth) compelling, particularly when they tie a liberatory progressiveness to the gain of knowledge. Stealing forbidden knowledge from the gods and paying an inordinate price for doing so -- that is real sacrifice. The self-sacrifice at the core of the Christian tradition has always felt a little insincere by comparison -- as if one is not really sacrificing, just placing downpayment on their eternal reward. What kind of real sacrifice is positive sum for the sacrificed?
Eve's choice to steal knowledge from the gods can easily be recast as a Promethean act along these lines -- to make away with the fire and to bear whatever punishment comes. To take pride in what could be built with one's own hands, instead of resigning oneself to an easy half-life of providence. The Romanticists felt this keenly (though they often cast Satan as the Promethean rebel instead). Goethe:
Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks;
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage, too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.
It's fairly natural for feminists to pick up the thread of this kind of myth revisionism, which I find similarly compelling, e.g. Vashti or Jezebel, or the Atwood or Emily Wilson take on the Odyssey.
Despite its overwhelming pessimism in other respects, I thought the lone triumphant spark flickering in the heart of Three-Body Problem trilogy was similar -- humanity is comically outmatched by the Gods, but we're stupid or naive or brave enough to spit in their face anyway and to hell with the consequences. I have a lot more respect for an Abraham, who, knowing that God is real and all-powerful, and against whom resistance is truly utterly futile, refuses to kill his son.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
The faster-paced discursive soul of the sub is in the daily discussion threads: https://neoliber.al/dt
Last I checked NL's daily discussion threads were actually by an order of magnitude the most active on all of reddit. The ping groups for special interests are part of that.
If your post wasn't posted to a ping group it'd be easy for it to get lost.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
So far I've used it for:
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Lesson plans (mock trial of Odysseus)
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Supplying grant application filler
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Automate some accounting forensic tasks (what is this transaction)
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Poking around some quantum physics concepts for hard sci-fi worldbuilding
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not sure what the import of what felons were historically able to do is -- historically most of any kind of person would not be able to vote, if anyone could vote at all.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.
Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I agree that it didn't come out of the blue on 2016, though I'd consider the view that it is largely a reaction to 2012 to be an agreement that it is actually quite recent.
For all the hay made of The Party Decides that became fodder for Getting It Wrong come 2016, to actually drop the conspiratorial lens on all the DNC leaks paints a picture of an astoundingly ineffectual institution.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
On what point? That 2016 was a significant inflection point or that centralised control under the dems were not also weak (but perhaps stronger than today). Your linked post largely agrees on the importance of 2016 (even if painting it as the apotheosis of an ongoing trend) and doesn't address symmetries or lack thereof.
As a mod there -- some would? I think most would reject the dichotomy. Being against a corporate tax and for a land tax or carbon dividend, against most land use regulation, for some form of distribution and universal healthcare, against student loan forgiveness -- you'd lose a bit too much information to sum it up that pithily.
(referring here to the ideological core of the sub, i.e. the flaired DT regs -- the drift-in commenters commenting on random posts are obviously more diverse)
Pinochet support was a bannable offense on day 3 of the sub going live, if I recall correctly. To the extent the subreddit polarised against republicans since 2016 (which is true, and justifiable), that particular stance fell outside the sub's overton window from the start.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
/u/orthoxerox conflates the Campbell monomyth with the originally Aristotle-inspired idea of a flawed character arc (particularly for tragedies, cf. hamartia).
There is something of a "Heroine's Journey" per Murdock (one of Campbell's students) which mainly differs in the emphasis of returning balance and harmony rather than manichean domination. Leaving that aside, the myths Campbell cites in Hero with a Thousand Faces are, well, the myths: Osiris, the Gautama Buddha, Jesus, etc. The Aztec's Tezcatlipoca, Prince Kamar al-Zaman, Jason, Herakles, and so on. The hero is heroic, if they even have flaws they are not particularly relevant to the plot. Similarly, Campbell-inspired fiction hardly has the character flaw as a central pivot. Luke Skywalker doesn't have any plot-relevant character flaws -- he's a bit whiny and grows up, but he doesn't suffer because of his immaturity. It's only until later in the series that an added dimension about overcoming cyclic revenge is thrown in.
The idea that compelling protagonists absolutely must overcome a personal flaw to succeed in their larger struggle (i.e. have a 'character arc') is a more modern thing. It is particularly ironic to criticise contemporary media for having insufficiently flawed protagonists compared to monomythic heroes, accordingly. Overpowered, morally simple protagonists are hardly a new invention. Stuff like the "hero must have a tragic backstory" is not monomythic or Campbellian.
With that out of the way, it's not clear to me that many of the new female-led disney/pixar princess fare (e.g. Frozen, Inside Out) lacks this typical character arc:
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Frozen has a strong character arc for Anna, whose childish infatuations sets up the nation for betrayal. Elsa's 'let it go' moment isn't emancipatory an exhibition of selfishness, and her abdication damns her nation to endless winter. The resolution of the plot is tied to overcoming these flaws.
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In Inside Out, Riley isn't the protagonist. Joy is, and she's an insecure control freak whose insistence that everything reflects her preferences precipitates the slide into depression.
But even if they lack plot-relevant flaws, then that doesn't necessarily mean they are narratively not worthwhile. Moana is much more of a Campbell hero because she isn't really that flawed. Would the Lord of the Rings be better if Frodo's struggle with the influence of the ring was intertwined with being bullied or something, and his narrative success was dependent on reconciling himself with that?
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Contrapoints is an odd example for trying to paint online left content creators as mainly serving vacant, vibes-based parasocialism. There's a lot of argument construction in her vids, and she posts far too infrequently compared to the people you usually think of as living or dying off of relationship simulacra.
sansampersamp
3mo ago
Just preregistering their trades a week or so in advance would probably be sufficient.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm in one such 'comparable' country, Australia, and voter ID is not mandatory (you don't need an ID to board a domestic flight either, which is nice).
One aspect in which the Australian political system is more unique, however, is the fact that everyone is obliged to vote in each federal, state, and local election. There are many benefits to this (overall it lowers the temperature and mitigates extremism while making mandates meaningful), but institutionally, one of the biggest is that the corrosive debate over who should be 'entitled' to vote does not exist. The vote should be sacralised to be beyond base, Machiavellian partisan machinations.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Once immigration from the subcontinent reaches a critical point, hopefully you'd start seeing cricket become the new sport du jour. Where the gentlemanly pace of the traditional formats might be offputting, the T20 format is more amphetemised than baseball.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
This may have been the case a decade ago, but I'd be interested in anything showing that it still holds empirically with increasing polarisation on density and education, and decreasing polarisation on race.
Of course, I'd expect anyone cheerleading about voting for the sake of voting to benefit their own politics on average, because people cheerlead to their own social networks which usually are in political alignment with them.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
And more flexible setbacks, and mixed-use, and less arduous parking minimums, etc etc. Even if you think the position is too minimal or cynical, the net result is certainly not an expansion of state power.
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
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