thejdizzler
4hr ago
I'm so sorry to hear this!
thejdizzler
4hr ago
At least at Hopkins (where I am), it's woke all the way down.
thejdizzler
3d ago
- 40 minute walk, 15 minute drive with usual traffic
- 40 minute walk, 20 minute bus ride
- 30 minute drive. Fruit, berries.
- 20 min walk 5 minute drive
- Looks like 22 minute drive
- 40 minute drive or 15 minute train from station that is about ~20 minutes away from where I live.
thejdizzler
5d ago
It's also quite difficult to use TheMotte in a way that encourages low effort. My best performing posts are ones I spend time on, which is usually a form of deep work. There really isn't enough content on here to doomscroll, and reading comments is actually usually pretty high energy.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Great observations. I wish there were tools that could do this. Cold Turkey sort of approximately gets close to this, but it's very very crude and requires a lot of upfront effort/willpower.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Yea I agree with this sentiment. There are all these studies (mainly to do with reading) that gamification actually backfires. If you give a kid money or some other external reward for reading that actually is a pretty surefire way to avoid that kid developing a real love for reading. And so too with any other hobby you might be able to think of.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Good observation. I also agree that the hustle-culture memes aren't reflective of how people's efforts can actually be allocated. A common failure mode I see in myself is over-scheduling things in my down-time and not doing any of them and gaming/scrolling instead. I really should be resting during that time.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Maybe better suited to a Wellness Wednesday post, but I think there's a significant culture war angle here too.
To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work? I've lamented in the past the decline in the social landscape, at least in the United States, but among the social environments that I have been finding recently in Baltimore, there seems to be almost a pathological fear of spending time alone in order to put in the work to actually improve at the thing that we're supposed to be doing together. For example, I've recently been going to a Spanish Happy Hour group at a brewery Thursday evenings after work. There are usually at least a few native speakers there, but aside from them, most people are at a quite elementary stage with the language, and aren't doing anything outside of the happy hour to improve. For some people this makes sense: they're mainly there to socialize not to learn, but for others, like the guy who organizes the group (Alex), the lack of progress is baffling to me. Alex started the group to improve his Spanish so he could communicate better with his girlfriend's family. And yet he seems unable to find the time to practice outside of happy hour (with reading/TV/shows/flashcards). I see the same thing with my new roommate, who is absolutely in love with the country and culture of Spain, and goes to happy hour with me, but won't put in the solitary effort to actually improve at the language. I see the same thing with running: people only going to run clubs to socialize and then expecting to run fast when they don't put in outside mileage on their own time, and even within the philosophy book club that I run where people seem unable to do the 30 pages of reading we discuss every other week.
I see this with myself as well, especially in my PhD. I know what I need to do to be successful: read the papers and do the experiments I have planned, but instead I find myself goofing off with labmates, texting/calling friends while I do busywork, or on this forum posting. Phones may have isolated in some ways, but at the same time, the current media environment seems to have created a constant yearning for companionship that I don't think is conducive to actually growing in competence and skill in areas outside of socialization.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Looks like Russians have just stormed into the center of both Pokrovsk and Kupyansk. Maybe the Ukrainian collapse has actually begun?
The one-state solution with enfranchised Palestinians is my preferred solution, and when I lived there I saw some moves towards this, especially in the West Bank (particularly in East Jerusalem). Unfortunately I don’t think that’s palatable to the Israeli electorate any more after 10/7.
When I refer to Israel I’m referring to the parts of the country that are broadly recognized. Not West Bank, Gaza, or the Golan Heights. In these territories, Arabs have full citizenship and can vote and have elected many people to the Knesset. They definitely are still discriminated against, but in a manner much more similar to American racial politics vs. the apartheid. It’s also not like there’s no intra-Jewish tension either. Lots of Sephardic/Ashkenazi conflict along racial lines.
What I find frustrating is the equating of these two groups of Arabs. Those who live in Israel have relatively normal lives, probably better than they would have in their neighboring countries. Those in the West Bank/gaza are living in occupied territory.
In terms of jew hating, I'm not responding to this comment in particular but further up thread where he said things like
There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years and having them quoting biblical genocides while massacring starving Christians is an excellent way to bring back the west to our historical view of them.
thejdizzler
6d ago
What? The Arabs living in actual Israel have full citizenship and famously have representation in the Israel parliament. If you're going to be a jew-hater at least get the facts right.
thejdizzler
7d ago
Biggest tip I have for running is to slow down unless you're deliberately trying to do a workout session. This will allow you to burn more fat from cardio, enjoy the run more, and is easier on your bones and joints.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Especially since according to woke we also have to spend inordinate amounts of time on slavery and the wrongs done to minorities and other minorities. There isn't enough time for that and 155 hours of Hitler.
We did spend a lot of time on Hitler relatively speaking, but I also remember reading animal farm in history class and spending almost equally large amounts of time on the evils of communism.
thejdizzler
8d ago
This again assumes humans are rational actors, and fails to adequately capture the reasons for an economic booms and busts in a capitalist system and the kind of behavior you see from the ultra-rich.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Have to agree with this. Marx's central argument is that focusing on pure production is confusing use-value for monetary value. Capitalist focus on production above all else results in commodity fetishism and the misallocation of labor and resources to goods that don't provide much use value to members of society.
thejdizzler
8d ago
But both Maoism and the initial Soviet attempts to produce goods were commodity fetishism. Especially in Maoism there was this obsession with quantities of goods produced rather than with satisfying individual's use values. Even after NEP and in Dengism there were/are heavy amounts of commodity fetishism: focusing on raw quantities of goods produced rather than thinking about what the population actually needs
People love to dismiss the soviet system, and undoubtedly there were serious problems, but in some ways it was very impressive. The soviets took a country that was ravaged by civil war and by the after effects of WW1 that had never been fully industrialized and within 20 years managed to largely self-sufficiently outproduce the Nazis and win the Second World War. Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
After the war, it looked like things like linear algebra might help better calculate production quotas, but a combination of corruption, lack of compute power, and excessive focus on military spending made it impossible for the soviet standard of living to keep up with the West.
Can you explain the Rothbard quote a bit more? I feel like the easy explanation for that from within the LTV is that the labor equivalence ratios between different goods aren't calculated correctly. Although that kind of argument can quickly get into dogma territory, so maybe you're right.
thejdizzler
8d ago
This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
thejdizzler
8d ago
A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
thejdizzler
9d ago
Yep, CIV is especially dangerous in this regard.
Yea civ 6. 5 is a lot better in some ways, but playing tall in civ is far better than wide, which makes the game not quite as fun as civ 6 where you can constantly be expanding.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Maori on the classic Terra map. Got the whole continent to myself and got to play a nice relaxing dev game.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Just had a random thought. Arguing on TheMotte about politics is kind of like stepping back in time to the 1800s before radio and TV. This is an era of politics that people like Postman like to idealize, and I see why. You come to admire and/or believe in other posters because of their arguments/style rather than good looks. At the same time, it's not like this place is a beacon of rationality (despite being better than most of the rest of the internet) at all times, which I think highlights the rose-tinted glasses nature of this kind of thinking. That said, I've enjoyed getting to know users here by the way they write, rather than how they look.
thejdizzler
12d ago
You ever flip a coin to help you make a decision and end up figuring out the choice you wanted to make independent of the outcome? Tarot is basically like that. It helps me figure out what I'm subconsciously thinking about a certain problem.
I seem to have lost the ability to focus on a book for more than 30 minutes in the last month, which is concerning. Maybe this is just an ebb in the tidal process that is my relationship with reading, but this time it feels different. It's not so much a lack of time, but feeling like I should be doing something else (working, running, or texting mainly). Sometimes this feeling is valid, but mainly reading is for time when I don't have the energy to do these things (run, work, or be social).
What can I do about this? Or do I just need to chill?
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