sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
28m ago
And of course, straightforward murder is always an option.
There's no need to be in power for that.
sarker
competency crisis actor
30m ago
Indeed. Of course, SpaceX's tonnage delivered to the moon to date is 0, lagging the space programs mentioned above.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1hr ago
I could believe that SpaceX will be the most cost effective way to the moon. However, national space programs do not operate in a free market and it's a mistake to think that SpaceX could drive the Chinese or Indian space programs "out of business" any more than the East India Company drove the Portuguese navy out of business. To extend the metaphor, the only way SpaceX could monopolize the moon a la the EIC would be to shoot down any other rockets that try to land. Perhaps you believe this will happen, but let's say I am skeptical that it will pan out this way.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1hr ago
Difficult to see how that happens for the moon given that at this point China, India, and Japan have landed on the moon.
sarker
competency crisis actor
21hr ago
I suppose they might be useful for the history of philosophy, though I suspect that we are already indirectly aware of the philosophical hits of the era via citations in works that have come down to us. Would we benefit from having the full text of some lost work? I suspect not.
At least historical records have the advantage of being factually related to the world we live in. I agree that linguistics will not be upset by an Etruscan treatise but I think it would be cool if we can read the Etruscan texts, and it might provide some more insights on the Tyrrhenian languages which I think would be cool.
Basically, I would be much more interested in discovering new true facts than what is basically a fanfiction collection.
sarker
competency crisis actor
21hr ago
It's a great achievement and I'm looking forward to more scrolls but it will be a tremendous disappointment if it's just philosophical or scientific scrolls. As far as I am concerned, philosophy has made almost no progress on the central question of human life (how does one live a good life?) since the ancient greeks and I doubt that uncovering some minor scribblers' writings will suddenly reveal the answer to that. As for science, the ancients were basically wrong about everything (see Aristotle on the number of teeth in humans) except for the things in which we've long far exceeded them.
Fingers crossed for something actually useful like missing history or literature or a treatise on Etruscan.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I don't know anything about guitars so I'll have to take your word for it. But ultimately if there's so many companies to acquire and they still are being undercut it seems like the cost to entry to this field are not exactly massive and the bigger concern is regulation making stratocaster shaped guitars illegal rather than Fender somehow buying out all the competition. A fat monopolist with no moat is extremely attractive prey.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
This seems like a strange conclusion when above you write that Fender can't whack all the moles undercutting them from the bottom and is powerless to do anything about those taking over the top of the market. It's difficult to say how profitable Fender is since it's private but given that it keeps changing hands it's hard to imagine it's a flourishing business. Seems like the market is giving them their just desserts, and hopefully this copyright thing won't undermine that. What's the problem here?
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I don't know that it's "surprising" per se. But I think that the rationalists would say that nootropics and the things you listed are not woo, so it's just rational to be into them, while they would readily admit that crystals are woo so it's irrational to be into them. In other words, the rationalists are being irrational by their own standards and are susceptible to the same things they claim to not be susceptible to. Everyone, rationalist or not, can agree on these facts.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
Let's start over. You initially complained that tech was 10% white. Looks like you retreated from that, now your new claim is that tech is <20% white Americans. But you can't tell how long someone, or someone's family, has been in the country by looking at their name, which is presumably how you got your initial 10% count. So I'm confused what the evidence is here besides "trust me bro", or what there even is to discuss.
I work in big tech and teams that are 30%-40% white American born are quite normal. I've never seen a big company that's 10% white, but maybe that's what's happening in WITCH. Can't speak to that.
I've also not faced obstacles to advancement despite being a white man. In fact, when I had an Indian boss (a naturalized citizen) he was very eager to push me for promotion and did so successfully.
As I would tell a progressive, have you considered that your lack of professional success is not due to discrimination? I wish Hlynka was here, he really was basically right about everything.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
They count hispanics, semites, and slavs in that.
Latinos are separately listed at 7.5% overall so even if every Latino is also white we're still at just under 40% white.
Slavs are actually white, if you feel that you are being replaced by Slavs I can't really help you.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
There's a lot to unpack here. But what strikes me is that so many "rationalists" turn out to be susceptible to basic bitch woo tactics.
Around this time, James recalls, another bodyworker visited Leverage to give them advice, and “brought crystals and herbs and stuff like that, and arranged them in the room. It actually seemed to make a difference.” They kept the crystals.
You would expect a hard core of rationalist autists who wouldn't fall for this, but it seems hard to decide a priori who they are, and certainly many of the characters here would seem to fit the bill. It's unclear to me to what extent rationalism is even protective against this stuff, certainly many people in the genpop would head for the door once the crystals come out.
If you can fool rationalists with the usual bag of tricks, that seems pretty bad for the "rationalists should win" project.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
What some societies do to 25 year olds that have a 17 year old girlfriend is like a bully killing his victim, not a victim punching his bully.
Well, that's because they go behind the families' backs behind society's back!
ignorant understanding of how human romance actually works all the way down.
Really? Because fucking 17 year olds has not been the norm in western Europe basically ever.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
This is the best solution to childhood bullies actually.
In that case you shouldn't be surprised when people tell you that you can't have sex with underage girls and they'll put you in prison if you try. After all, it will be your fault!
Nice try, but you said she was.
Hardly. I said two consenting adults getting married should not be an issue, and 13 is obviously not an adult. Not that the events of the play would have been any different had she been 23 or even 33 of course, her age is not why people are upset.
Are you so racist that you think their above replacement TFR is a terrible outcome?
To the extent that the Arab world has an above replacement TFR, it's mostly thanks to shithole countries like Somalia and Sudan. Once they reach even moderate levels of development (e.g. Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia) they no longer have above replacement TFR.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
No they turned out deadly because they went behind the families' backs.
This is like someone punching you in the face and saying you made them do it because you called them a mean name.
13 year old Juliet is a consenting adult to you? I guess I took you for more of a normie. Nevermind then.
She isn't, which is why she shouldn't have been allowed to marry and her family shouldn't have been plotting a marriage for her.
The "deadly" situation in the play is a mixture of tribal honor culture and child marriage which results in terrible outcomes everywhere it's tried (see e.g. the Arab world). It's a total nonsequitur to pretend that this is an argument against limiting marriage to consenting adults.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
So no daughter after all?
Excellent example - Romeo and Juliet turned out deadly because of the meddling of the families. Two consenting adults getting married would be a non-issue if those honor culture goons hadn't been obsessed with their blood feud to the detriment of everything else.
Almost done with The Worm Ouroboros. I think it is quite good overall despite its shortcomings. It's an interesting counterpoint to Tolkien's world - there's no guarantee that good will ultimately triumph and it's up to the characters to actually change the course of events, although there's a light smattering of prophecy.
I think its weakest point is the poor characterization of the good guys. Juss, Spitfire, Brandoch Daha, Goldry Bluzsco - I can't really tell you anything that distinguishes one from the other. The illustrations in the book give them all the same face, like tetrarchs (is this the point?). Maybe one is a little more impatient and another a little less. The bad guys are actually quite well characterized:
- Corinius, the swaggering womanizer who backs down from a duel
- Corsus, the drunk, somewhat over the hump, who sends his daughter Sriva (wily, coquettish, scheming) to seduce the king to advance his career
- Corund, the honorable (to a fault) man who raised honorable sons (I admit I keep confusing him with Corsus due to their names)
- Prezmyra, Corund's wife, torn between her brother who sympathizes with the Demons and her husband who will never go against the king
- Gro, perhaps the most interesting character, also Tolkein's favorite, who constantly shifts allegiances and suggests killing the enemy through treachery at every turn, yet always manages to find a home
I guess it's a common trope that bad guys are harder to write than the good guys, but I think Tolkien managed this pretty well.
“But because day at her dawning hours hath so bewitched me, must I yet love her when glutted with triumph she settles to garish noon? Rather turn as now I turn to Demonland, in the sad sunset of her pride. And who dares call me turncoat, who do but follow now as I have followed this rare wisdom all my days: to love the sunrise and the sundown and the morning and the evening star? since there only abideth the soul of nobility, true love, and wonder, and the glory of hope and fear.”
[...]
It was now high noon. The horse and his rider were come to a little dell of green grass with a beck winding in the midst with cool water flowing over a bed of shingle. About the dell grew many trees both tall and straight. Above the trees high mountain crags a-bake in the sun showed ethereal through the shimmering heat. A murmur of waters, a hum of tiny wings flitting from flower to flower, the sound of the horse grazing on the lush pasture: there was nought else to hear. Not a leaf moved, not a bird. The hush of the summer noon-day, breathless, burnt through with the sun, more awful than any shape of night, paused above that lonely dell.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
I actually don't, though.
So you think that parents should be allowed to prostitute their children?
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
You don't know anything about me.
So, do you have a daughter?
A romantic relationship involving two families is not sarker's business at all.
A romantic relationship involves two individuals, not families.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
You've got it backwards. As long as you agree that there is at least one thing that we shouldn't allow parents to do, then the argument of "it's none of society's business what parents let their kids do" is bogus.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
Also it's not without limits since the parents can only veto the relationship, not compel it.
There's plenty of things that we don't allow people to let their kids do.
Also what is even less convincing is that my daughter's genitals are your business at all. A pretty weird notion if you ask me.
Pal, you don't have a daughter. This whole post is about how you want to coom in underage pussy. Let's drop the "no, you're weird!" act.
I mean, it landed, but I thought we were discussing soft landings rather than impacting the surface at a high rate of speed.
Same deal.
I admit I was mistaken about 0, but copy pasting AI slop in response doesn't inspire confidence.
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